Last week, I started the story of my early years leading up to and after joining Wizards, from getting hired full time to becoming head designer. When I wrapped up last week's article, Bill Rose had just become the head designer and we were beginning Invasion design.

The Urza's Saga block was a bit broken, and the Mercadian Masques block, as a response to it, was watered down. Magic needed a win—a solid, crowd-pleasing block, and Bill was convinced he had the recipe. We were going to do our first multicolor-themed block.

There was an important shift going on at this time. Starting with the Mirage block, blocks were built so that the first large fall set (going off Northern Hemisphere seasons) would introduce two named mechanics. The rest of the block would evolve those mechanics. The creative connective tissue of the sets was that they were on the same plane, and the mechanical connection was that they revolved around those two named mechanics. Blocks didn't have much mechanical cohesion beyond that.

Bill's vision, and the start of what I call the third stage of Magic design (which I explain here), was the to give each block a theme. Here, blocks started embodying something mechanically. In the Invasion block's case, that thing would be multicolor cards. Bill had convinced Joel to hold back on multicolor cards to build up a demand for them. Both the Urza's Saga block and the Mercadian Masques block had zero multicolor cards in them.

Because it was important to make Invasion a solid hit, Bill took no chances. Design was made up of the three biggest Magic designers we had in R&D: himself, Mike Elliott, and me. The first week of design was done off-site at my dad's house in Tahoe. Bill made use of "Spectral Chaos," a hypothetical set designed by Barry Reich (the very first person to playtest Magic with Richard). Invasion wasn't built off of "Spectral Chaos," but we did borrow things from it that fit as it also had a multicolor theme. The biggest contribution was domain, which we referred to as "the Barry mechanic" in design.

Last week, I talked about my journey from game developer to game designer. Once I became a designer, I started working on finding my lane in design or where I could be the most helpful as a designer. I ended up focusing on three things in design. First, I latched onto the color pie. As a writer, I recognized the value of tying the underlying structure of the game to motivations. I thought it was a powerful tool and wanted to strengthen it as much as I could.

Bill spent much of his energy working with the Rules team to clean up and streamline the rules. I did the same thing but with the color pie. Part of that was figuring out where to draw the lines between colors. Sometimes that entailed shifting abilities from one color to another. I also spent a lot of time building up the color's strengths and weaknesses and working hard to keep color pie breaks from getting printed. A big part of this involved figuring out each color's philosophy and how they all interacted as allies and enemies, then writing articles helping to solidify this and explain it to the players. In the long term, this led to the Council of Colors.

My second focus in design involved maintaining a perspective of the bigger picture. I was the main person in Bill's ear stressing the need for consistency within the block. Bill and I approached the issues slightly differently, but we ended up in a similar spot. Invasion's multicolor theme was a huge step up, and I was excited to see it happen.

My third focus in design was to be the biggest champion for innovation. I was constantly looking for new ways to push Magic design. I wanted us to build new tools and new processes. For example, Henry Stern and I came up with the idea of holding the enemy-color pairs until the final set of the Invasion block to help differentiate the sets from one another. The fourth stage of design began when I became head designer and started playing around with how to design blocks better by giving each set its own role in the block structure.

The other place my push for innovation impacted Invasion was with the push to include split cards. Bill and Joel had specifically made me the design lead for Unglued because they recognized I was the most out-of-the-box designer. I used that style to push boundaries as much as I could. (Unglued is where full-art lands and printed tokens premiered, for instance.) The most popular design in Unglued was B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster) I figured if players liked seeing a card big enough to fill up two cards, they'd enjoy a card where two little cards fit on one card.

I designed split cards for "Unglued 2: The Obligatory Sequel," a set that was never made. I knew in my heart that split cards were a great idea that players would love, and they made perfect sense in a multicolor set. I pitched them to Bill, and he liked them, so he put them in the set. For a while, it was Bill and I against the rest of Wizards, but we somehow managed to get them to print, where they were adored by the audience.

Bill had me lead my second large set, Odyssey. Following in Invasion's footsteps of a singular block theme, I created a graveyard-centric block. The two main mechanics (flashback and threshold) were both about the graveyard. The entire set was structured to make you care about the graveyard in ways you hadn't.

Another interesting thing happened during the Odyssey block: the entire Creative team left. This is back in the day where it was only a handful of people, but still, it wasn't something we expected to happen. While Bill hired a new team, he asked me to oversee the creative elements of the set. I had actually been very involved in the creative when Michael Ryan and I created the Weatherlight Saga. I did all the card concepting for Urza's Legacy (I was the person who chose to put a giant squirrel on Might of Oaks), and I oversaw all the creative elements for Unglued, so I was the designer with the most experience overseeing creative elements.

The next block was the Onslaught block. Bill led the Invasion block, and I led the Odyssey block, so it was Mike Elliott's turn to lead a block. I'd been pushing Bill to make each block's mechanical elements more thematically connected, so when I was given Odyssey, I gave the block a graveyard-centric theme. Mike was less sold on the idea, so his block was a little more old school. There were two core mechanics, but they were not inherently linked to one another. Bill wasn't happy with the handoff, so he asked for my help.

To rewind things a little, Bill's first big set as head designer was Invasion, but he actually took over during the Mercadian Masques block. I believe the first set he oversaw as head designer was Prophecy. At the time, we tended to put first-time design leads on the second small set in a block, as we felt it was the easiest to do and the best on-ramp. William Jockusch had worked on Magic for a long time and wanted to try his hand at leading a team. William was the only one of the original four from back in 1995 that hadn't done it, so Joel gave him the opportunity. William designed what he knew, and Prophecy ended up being pretty "Spikey," meaning it was all about tiny optimizations. While we knew there was a small portion of Magic players that would enjoy it, we were worried it would be inaccessible to most players.

Bill asked if I could help him fix it, and Bill and I spent a few weeks creating a bunch of exciting cycles that were aimed at Timmy and Tammy or Johnny and Jenny players. I think that experience showed Bill I was good at fixing designs, so when Onslaught came in and he was concerned, I was the one he turned to.

My main issue was I wanted the block to have a cohesive theme, so I found a kernel of something Mike had done that we could blow up into a major theme. He had made a number of creatures, called Mistforms in the final set, that you could activate to change their creature type. The set didn't pay off the typal theme very much, but I felt it could have.

I was a big champion of creature types over the years. I was the one that got us to both change the rule about how many creature types a creature could have (originally, each creature could only have up to one creature type) and the rule about artifact creatures not having a creature type. I would also later work closely with the Creative team to institute the species and class model where most humanoid creatures got both a species creature type and a role creature type.

My pitch to Bill was that typal themes were pretty weak, yet they were highly played. To me, that proved this was a popular theme. People were playing the cards even though they weren't very strong. I told Bill that Timmy, Tammy, Johnny, and Jenny players enjoyed typal themes. The only reason Spike players didn't play with them was because they were weak. If we made strong typal themes, I felt Spikes would play and enjoy them. Bill signed off, and we incorporated the typal theme.

The second solution for the set came from me having a reputation of being the out-of-the-box designer. The Rules team had figured out how to make two Limited Edition (Alpha) cards (Camouflage and Illusionary Mask) by requiring you to turn a card face down. This inspired them to come up with a brand-new mechanic (which would become morph). They had pitched it to other designers, but no one seemed to be excited by it. Until they showed it to me. I saw the potential immediately. I adapted it from a two-mana 1/1 to a three-mana 2/2 and designed a bunch of cards that triggered when they were turned face up to show off the cool things we could do with the mechanic. I created a morph deck and played it with various R&D members, including Bill. Bill liked what he saw and signed off on adding it to Onslaught.

The final piece of solving Onslaught's redesign involved getting R&D to reverse a decision we had made years earlier. Back then, Magic sets would introduce new mechanics, but we would either make them evergreen or never bring them back. That seemed silly to me. We had made great mechanics, why not reuse them? Cycling was a mechanic Richard originally turned in for the Tempest block. Tempest was a bit overstuffed, so we saved cycling for the Urza's Saga block, which came out a year later.

I thought cycling was exactly what Onslaught needed as its final mechanic, but I needed Bill's approval. Bill agreed to let me do it if I could add something new to cycling. I designed two cards that would allow you to create a deck built around cycling to enable different types of cycling decks. Those two cards were Astral Slide and Lightning Rift.

Bill liked the cards, agreed they added something new, and cycling was added. The block was well received and helped cement a number of ideas in R&D: the popularity of typal, the strength of innovative mechanics like morph, and the excitement of returning mechanics.

During the Onslaught block, Bill was promoted to vice president of R&D. He divided the job of head designer into two parts, one to oversee design and the other development. Randy Buehler became head developer, but Bill chose to stay on as head designer.

The next block was the Mirrodin block. I'd been itching to do an artifact block, and Bill let me lead it. The head of the Creative team at the time was Tyler Bielman. He and I were very excited about making a brand-new artifact plane. I worked with the Creative team to help build the world of Mirrodin. While there were a lot of cool things about the block, it rivals probably only the Urza's Saga block in power-level issues. One of the biggest challenges was that so much of the set was colorless. That meant it was hard to fix problems with just a few bans. The Mirrodin block ended up having more banned cards than any other block.

Looking back, I pushed the boundaries more than I should have. My poster child for my mistakes was the artifact lands. I designed them because I thought they would create a lot of fun moments for Johnny and Jenny players where they could interact with their lands in cool and fun ways. But playtesting showed that they made cards with affinity for artifacts extra powerful because you could reduce their costs so fast. I fought to keep them in the set because I loved the potential of what they could be, but I was blinded to what they were. It doesn't matter how players could use them if how players would use them resulted in issues.

The impact of the Mirrodin block was the realization that we needed someone specifically looking over Magic design. Bill's responsibilities as vice president were not allowing him time to focus on Magic as much as he liked. Randy was promoted to director of Magic and Brian Schneider became the head developer. Bill still stayed on as head designer.

Next up was the Champions of Kamigawa block. Bill was very excited by the idea of a top-down block. We made a short list of worlds that could be inspired by real-world cultures. The top three were an Egyptian mythology world, a Greek mythology world, and a Japanese mythology world. Obviously, the Japanese mythology world won. Bill's guidance was that he wanted all the creative work done first, then we design the cards to match the world.

The problem was that we didn't have enough experience with building mechanics toward flavor (we've gotten a lot better), and the set was very ham-fisted. We chose to represent things by having every copy of that creative element have the exact same mechanic. On top of that, we made too many choices where the mechanics were all parasitic, that is, they only worked with other cards from the same set. Backward compatibility is very important with Magic sets. Players wanted to use new cards with decks they already owned, and the Champions of Kamigawa block made that hard to do.

The biggest impact of the Champions of Kamigawa block, for me at least, was that it solidified in Randy's head that Magic needed a dedicated head designer. Bill was a great head designer and a great vice president, but he couldn't do both at once. R&D needed Bill as the vice president, which meant Magic needed to find a new head designer.

Interestingly, I didn't know about that at the time. Randy didn't announce his intention to make this change. He still had to sell it to Bill, so he kept it close to his chest. I had no idea that the head designer was even about to change. So, while this story shows me working toward things, this wasn't one of them. Yes, I hoped to be head designer one day, but at the time I didn't think it was something that would happen soon.

Another interesting quirk about the Champions of Kamigawa block was that it was led by Brian Tinsman. I didn't work on the design. I hadn't yet adopted my strategy of being on all the design teams. But I worked on development for Champions of Kamigawa. I spent a lot of time in development trying to help fix the set's design. Both splice onto Arcane and flip cards came about in development, and they were both suggestions by me. Flip cards were something Richard and I had worked on together. While Randy was trying to find a new head designer, I was actively working to fix many of the problems about the Champions of Kamigawa block. To be brutally honest, while I think we made it better, we fell far short of making it what it needed to be.

Another big element of why I ended up becoming head designer was that Bill believed it was important that the new head designer could lead the Creative team. If we were going to get creative and mechanics aligned, Bill felt they should come from having a singular vision that oversaw both. I assume the failure of Champions of Kamigawa was a big factor of why Bill believed this. I was the only designer at the time who had led designs and various creative components over time. I'd done worldbuilding with Mirrodin. I'd led names and flavor text for Odyssey and Unglued. I'd done card concepting with Urza's Legacy and Unglued. I'd led the story of the Weatherlight Saga.

I would lead the Creative team for two years. One of those years was for the Ravnica: City of Guilds block, which I'm super proud of. The team just knocked that one over the fence; Ravnica is one of the best creative worlds we've ever built. Eventually, calmer heads realized that leading Magic design and creative each required a person solely dedicated to that task.

Here's how the story goes. In early December of 2003, Randy called me into his office. He explained that he convinced Bill that he couldn't be vice president and head designer, so he and Bill had picked me to be the new head designer. He also explained that I would have to lead the Creative team. He asked me if I wanted the job, and I said, "Absolutely." It truly was the thing I'd been working toward since I had been hired.

People often ask me if I ever want to move on and do something else. I say when you get your dream job, you hold it tight, and you keep doing it as long as people will let you. I still can't believe I get to wake up every day and do what I do. I hope my two-part series gave you a little insight into the path I took to get here.

23 Years and Counting

If you all enjoyed this story, I have another 23 years of stories to tell. As always, I'm eager for any feedback on this article or any of the topics I discussed. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Join me next week when previews start for Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™.

Until then, may you find your own dream job.