Great Designer Search Two: Round 1 Essay Questions

Well, I don't know if my essay question answers are 'good' or not. I was busy with work and testing for States during most of the run-up, so I had to bang my answers out in ~6 hours Sunday evening. I got the final proof-reading done and the answers turned in with 25 minutes to spare, and I just found out I advanced to Round 2, so I guess I qualified as moderately competent at least. Here's my essays for those curious.

1. Introduce yourself and explain why you are a good fit for this internship.

Hi! I’m Jon Metzger, I’m 29, I’ve lived on 3 continents and I now live on the same block as the hospital I was born in. I started playing Magic when Conflux came out, and started playing competitively after Lorwyn rotated out of standard. Since then I’ve qualified for Nats and top 8ed States (yesterday), so I think I’m starting to pick up how to play the game. I am far less experienced (both in MTG and game design) than many of your entrants, but I feel that’s one of my strengths. I’m not burdened with almost two decades of expectations about how the game should be designed – I’m part of the new crop of Magic players who are part of the game’s recent success and I really like modern Magic.

I currently work as a project manager in IT for an internet bookstore, so I have several years of experience designing systems and coordinating professionally with others. I’ve never designed games professionally, but I designed my first game at age 6 or 7 (a tactical war game with my Legos and one d6), and I’ve been home-brewing board game modifications and DMing for most of my life. My favorite computer game is Planescape: Torment, my favorite board game is Game of Thrones (unbalanced but in a good way), my favorite Magic card to play is Knight of the Reliquary, my favorite food is a good steak, my favorite film is In the Mood for Love, and my second favorite dream job after game design would probably be film critic. You should make me the next Great Designer Search intern because I’m a person you’ll enjoy working with and because I will do my best to make really awesome cards that people will love playing with. (Read the rest of my answers to see if you think I’m right about that).

2. You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.

This question stumped me for a bit because of the restriction that I can’t choose an ability that has already been color shifted, since almost every ability has been splashed into a different color at least a few times, except the ones that don’t make any sense (like gaining life for red). In the end, I decided that it would be fine if the ability had been splashed a few times before as long as it hadn’t been completely shifted from one color to another.

That being said, my choice is to move the ability to gain control of permanents from blue to black. Blue is tricky and has a long history with control magic, but flat-out stealing something is less subtle than blue should be. Reaching over and grabbing someone else’s toy and taking it for yourself feels more black than blue. “What’s yours is mine” would be a good new catchphrase for black, and would help the recent struggles black has been having with power level. It does give black a good way of dealing with planeswalkers, enchantments, and other things that should give black trouble, so it would have to be handled carefully for taking control of non-creature permanents.

Blue loses some of its already limited ability to affect permanents (outside of bounce), but control magic effects have been costed so conservatively in recent times that it’s a loss blue can probably afford. Meanwhile, black gains a significant and powerful tool that fits its philosophy and helps areas where it has problems. You would probably still want to cost it conservatively, but black’s history of “alternate payment costs” introduces some fun new ways to design and implement ‘control permanent’ effects.

3. What block do you feel did the best job of integrating design with creative? What is one more thing that could have been done to make it even better?

If I could choose a single set, I would say M10 is the epitome of integrating design with creative. While it may be “simple” because it’s a core set, the set does of brilliant job of fusing design with creative. Cards do things that are flavorful and make sense and the design and the creative build off of each other to not only exemplify the basic core themes of Magic, but also in a way that shows why these things are core to Magic. For example, the symmetrical art, names, and abilities on Veteran Armorsmith and Veteran Swordsmith are not only aesthetically pleasing, they also work to together to naturally promote the classic White Weenie archetype while demonstrating why that is “white” – many parts working together create a greater whole; the smiths supporting the soldiers are as valuable as the soldiers themselves.

Since the actual question requires me to choose a block, I’ll choose Ravnica, even though I haven’t played with it outside of EDH. You can’t tell from the end product which came first, the idea of the ten guilds and the world, or the idea to explore all of the two-color pairings. The guilds feel very unique and “right” from the color pairings perspective, and the cycles of guild leaders/champions are cool and interesting cards. The specific keyword mechanics for each guild are a little hit-or-miss, but the cards themselves by and large are a very cool mix of the design philosophy of color pairings and the creative story of ten scheming guilds.

As far as what could have been done to make it better, I think a Wizards employee recently wrote this (so it’s not my original idea), but I think the Nephilim should have been eliminated. The set does a fantastic job promoting multi-color already within the two-color pairings. Four color creatures distract from the core design/creative focus instead of enhancing it, and they should have been left for implementation somewhere else.

4. R&D has recently been looking at rules in the game that aren't pulling their weight. If you had to remove an existing rule from the game for not being worth its inclusion, what would it be?

Zvi Mowshowitz suggested on twitter removing the hand-size limit as a rule. That seems like a pretty good suggestion, but in the end I think I would keep it, since there are times when you get to discard something like a Vengevine at end of turn and you get one of those “Magic is such a cool game” moments. I’m pretty fond of most of the rules as they are at present – I briefly considered eliminating the distinction between triggered and activated abilities, as it’s a twitchy little difference that often confuses people, and the difference only really matters to cards that were specifically made to care about the difference. However, the number of cards that would have to be adjusted or invalidated made me decide against that in the end.

My actual choice would be to change a very recently created rule, the rule that you can re-direct damage from your opponent to a planeswalker they control. This results in a lot of moments that are counter-intuitive (“My Kalastria Highborn effect can’t target Elspeth?”) and also conflicts with the way combat damage is assigned (creatures attack either the player or the planeswalker).

Instead, I would say that planeswalkers should defined as players for rules purposes, and planeswalkers your opponents control should be defined as opponents. This reinforces the thematic role of planeswalkers as characters of similar power-level to players, and also opens up interesting design space in making some cards that were strictly multi-player more interesting in two player games (“Each opponent loses x life” becomes much more powerful if your opponent has 3 planeswalkers out).

5. Name a card currently in Standard that, from a design standpoint, should not have been printed. What is the card and why shouldn't we have printed it?

I would not have re-printed Mindslaver. While the card is amazingly fun from the perspective of the person using it, it is one of the least fun things to have happen to you. Your opponent getting to strip you of your ability to make decisions is a horrible thing – even when your opponent has a dominating position and has you locked out of the game, you still retain the ability to control your own actions, powerless though those actions may be at that point. Magic should strive to be fun to play for all parties win or lose – it’s a competitive game and winning and losing is the core of Magic, but since everyone has to lose once in a while, it should still be a fun and interesting experience, otherwise you risk discouraging people and eventually losing them as players.

While you certainly can do multiple things to prevent your opponent from hitting you with Mindslaver or to mitigate the result of being hit with it, in the end, slaving someone is not the type of thing that Magic should really be trying to promote. Design should be about making the game fun, awesome, and interesting for everyone to play. While the “griefer” player should have some tools to make the game fun for them, they should be tools that are limited in their scope. Mindslaver is obviously limited by the difficulty of casting/activating/recurring it, but the result when it is successful is too unpleasant.

At the Scars of Mirrodin release event, I top-decked a Mindslaver with ten mana available and used it to beat my opponent the turn before he killed me – while it was fun and exciting for me, he was visibly angered and distressed – that’s not something I want to do to someone when I play Magic.

6. What do you think design can do to best make the game accessible to newer players?

The best tools to make the game accessible to newer players are pre-constructed decks like intro packs and duel decks. I would do focus on the design of the duel decks to make the game accessible to new players.

Duel decks should be the ideal platform to present the game to a new player, as they offer a whole game in one package. There’s a deck for me, a deck for you, and a simple theme to explain why we’re battling each other. When I want to teach someone to play Magic without confusing them with my tournament deck or my crazy casual artifact deck with all of its combos, what I want is to be able to go out, grab a pair of decks off the shelf, sit down, and show them how to play Magic. Intro packs definitely can fill this purpose, but since they’re packaged and sold as single decks, they miss the interaction that’s central to the game. If my friend and I want to get into Magic, we might go buy an intro pack each, but which one should we each get? A duel deck set gives the whole game in one package and is designed from the ground up to create an instant game between two people.

However, many of the duel decks are packed full of cards that contain ‘advanced’ mechanics that make the game too complex for a brand new player. I would push for designing the duel decks to still promote the possibility of fun, deep, interactive play, while having a rule that they can only use mechanics that have been in core sets. There would still be lots of space to design interesting duel decks, but you keep the number of rules and abilities down to a manageable level for a new player.

7. What do you think design can do to best make the game attractive to experienced players?

Make good cards, good mechanics, and good blocks. Have a good mix of innovation and nostalgia. An experienced player by definition is someone who has played and enjoyed Magic – if you’ve done so, I think you have to agree that Magic is the amazing game that it is because it constantly evolves. Whether you’re a tournament player tracking last week’s changes to the metagame, or a casual player wondering if Ezuri will help your Elf deck finally beat your buddy’s mono-white control deck, the fact that the game is constantly changing and evolving is what puts Magic at a different level than most other games. So, this may be a simplistic answer, but I think the best thing design can do to keep the game appealing is to do design well.

The experienced players that I know who lose interest in Magic do so for three reasons – they don’t have time to play anymore, they feel like they can’t afford to play their preferred format anymore, or they don’t like the way that a specific format has currently evolved to (Standard being the usual example). Formats like EDH help the first two reasons, and for the third cause, you can’t please everyone all the time (though you obviously try to appeal to as many people as possible). Design should definitely always push to design flavorful and powerful cards at the rare level for those players for whom finances are a concern.

In the end though, I don’t see many experienced players drifting away because the game isn’t interesting anymore, which is a credit to the recent design track record.

8. Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the best designed? Explain why.

I think Landfall is far and away the best mechanic in Extended. There are many interesting and well done mechanics in Extended, but Landfall is the biggest hit.

It’s an extremely pleasing and satisfying mechanic on a play level – not only does it reward you for doing something you do naturally, as has been mentioned several times, it also adds increased awareness to one of the more mundane aspects of the game. Dropping a land into play is, on the scale of things you can do in Magic, one of the most boring (though there are certainly strategic fine points to it that can be quite nice when done right). Landfall however makes that mundane aspect of the game into an exciting moment. Staring down your opponent’s Plated Geopede, you wonder what will happen – will he miss his land this turn (hooray!), play a normal land (ouch), or, worst of all, play a fetchland (better hope you have the Doom Blade)!

In addition to being naturally rewarding and adding more drama to playing a land, it also pushes deck construction in interesting ways. A streamlined aggressive deck would usually want to play as few lands as possible in order to maximize its threats – however, with landfall creatures as your threats, you want to have more and more land in your deck. At the point that you’re running 24-25 land in an aggressive deck, do you want to start thinking about adding more expensive spells? At what point do you lose your early aggressive edge and change into a midrange deck? Landfall is on its face a simple mechanic, but it just does everything so right that I think it’s definitely the best in current Extended. I would love to see Landfall get more exploration – could landfall have been implemented to also give more of a boost to defensive decks instead of just aggressive ones, particularly for limited play?

(My second place vote would probably go to Scry, even though it’s a retread. It’s simple to understand, complex to master, flavorful, and fun.)

9. Of all the mechanics currently in Extended, which one is the worst designed? Explain why.

Infect. Poison is dumb. (Just kidding, Mr. Rosewater! Please don’t shoot!).

Seriously, I would choose Domain as the worst designed mechanic in the current extended. It’s an interesting mechanic, but I think it was poorly implemented and has an inherent flaw at its base.

Implementation first, the mechanic only made it onto ten total cards. Of all of those, none of them are appealing enough on their own to motivate most people to build a deck around them, and they also have little draw to add them to another deck. None of the cards are ‘flashy’ in the end. While obviously not every card can be flashy, a mechanic should have at least some cards that really show off what it can do.

On a more important note, I think the Domain mechanic is fundamentally flawed because it pushes players to do things that end up frustrating them. If you want to have all 5 basic land types in your deck, then you will naturally want to play spells of all five colors. However, the best lands to support a multi-colored deck are non-basic lands. By pushing players to include enough basic lands to turn their domain cards on, you end up putting them in a situation where they will often be frustrated because they’re unable to cast their spells since they didn’t draw enough lands that actually support their spells. While it has applications in limited, I feel that Domain is a bad mechanic for constructed magic, and it was poorly implemented in Conflux.

10. Choose a plane to revisit other than Dominaria or Mirrodin. What is a mechanical twist we could add if we revisit this plane?

I think it would be interesting to revisit Lorwyn/Shadowmoor now that the plane has returned to having a natural day/night cycle. All of the tribes could be fresh material, as neither the Lorwyn nor the Shadowmoor version could really exist anymore – for instance, what are the Kithkin like when they’re some sort of mix of the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor versions? It would also be fascinating to develop planeswalkers native to the plain, as the Lorwyn cycle are really more of a core set cycle – Garruk, Jace, Chandra, Liliana and Ajani never really felt like they fit in Lorwyn. The tribal theme is also a fun one that has a deeply ingrained appeal in Magic and would be worth doing again when the time is right.

Obviously you would need to introduce a new source of drama and tension to the world, which would be an exciting challenge, and introduce the possibility for a completely new mechanic (like the Phryxians in Mirrodin or the Eldrazi in Zendikar – to a certain extent, Rise of the Eldrazi almost feels like ‘revisiting’ Zendikar right within the block).

I could also see trying to emphasize how the day/night cycle is a strange phenomenon to the plane’s inhabitants. The new mechanic I would suggest would be a pair of day/night keywords on sorceries that provide additional affects if you play them in the first main phase or the second main phase – that’s an area of interaction that hasn’t seen much explicit interaction before, and I think it would be interesting to see what kind of design possibilities open up there.