Split Decisions

One of the Perks/Curses of being a Magic celebrity is that I get interviewed a lot. Now, I’m the kind of guy who likes to talk (this shouldn’t come as a surprise), so I always enjoy participating in a good interview. My one pet peeve, though, is that I am asked the same questions again and again. In this column, I am planning to give the definitive answer to one of the most-asked questions I receive: “What’s your favorite mechanic that you’ve created?”

Of all the mechanics I’ve created, my favorite is the “split cards” from the Invasion block. They embody all the elements I value most as a designer. They’re cool, they’re elegant, they’re original, and they play well. And they have a very interesting back story. Perhaps one day I’ll dedicate a column to it. It really is quite interesting. What? You want to hear it now? Well, I guess if you’ve got some time to spare… (Imagine wavy lines appearing on your screen.)

Let’s Start at the Very Beginning

Our story begins in a meeting room here at Wizards of the Coast known as the “War Room." I had invited numerous artists and production people to a meeting because I was interested in what visual areas we had to play with in Unglued. The entire set was about breaking the rules, so I figured the look of the cards was fair game. At one point, Dan Gelon, a Magic artist who works as a graphic designer at Wizards and who was in charge of the physical design of Unglued, said that we would be able to overlap art on multiple cards as we could print them side by side on the card sheet. This opened up a world of possibilities.

Of all the ideas that rushed to my head, the most exciting one was the idea of making a giant card. A card so big that it required two physical cards to create it. Before the meeting was over, I realized that this card should be a creature. Thus was born B.F.M. (bfm left/bfm right). At 99/99, it’s the largest creature we’ve ever printed (by a rather healthy margin, I might add).

Not surprisingly, B.F.M. proved to be one of the most popular card(s) from Unglued. So when I was designing Unglued II: The Obligatory Sequel, I looked to B.F.M. for inspiration. If the players liked one card that took up two cards, perhaps they would like two cards that took up one card. After playing around with the idea, I realized that the mini-cards looked best if the whole card was turned sideways, which allowed two smaller cards of the right proportions to be created.

I ended up designing a cycle of split cards (5 cards, each allied color combination). The art had come in and we were just about to begin laying out the cards when I was called to an event I will just refer to as “The Meeting.” When you enter a meeting and the person who called it won’t make eye contact with you, you know bad things are about to happen. Anyway, the result of “The Meeting” was that Unglued II was put on hiatus.

I’m often asked (usually by Unglued fans), “What does ‘on hiatus’ actually mean?” I wish I could give you a definitive answer, but there isn’t one to give. The best answer I can give you is the one my Magic 8 Ball gave me when I asked it the same question. “Reply hazy. Ask again later.” Will Unglued II ever see the light of day? I’m an eternal optimist, so I believe yes. When? Please refer back to my 8 Ball.

It’s Not Dead Yet

One of my favorite screenwriting teachers used to sum up all movie plots as follows: “Introduce your main character. Throw your main character down a well. Throw rocks at him. Get him out of the well.” Well, the split cards were down the well and were simply waiting for the pelting to begin. It was a wacky mechanic and the only set that would even consider using it had just been stuck in expansion purgatory. Things were looking bleak.

Then came Invasion. We had known for several years that the Invasion block was going to center around a multi-color environment. I saw an opportunity. And luckily, I was on the design team, along with Bill Rose and Mike Elliott. The core of the design was done during a week offsite in the middle of winter spent at my father’s house in Tahoe. R&D likes to do design out of the office as there are fewer distractions and the atmosphere is more conductive for creativity. Plus, you can take the occasional day off to go skiing. It’s a rough job, but someone’s has to do it.

Sometime during that week, I approached Bill with my “crazy” idea. We were looking for multi-color ideas and the split cards were without a home. Maybe they could go in Invasion. Bill got a mischievous look in his eye. I knew that look; the rope had just been lowered down the well.

Not So Fast

Then came the first rock. Mike Elliott didn’t like the mechanic. It was too different. It was fine for something like Unglued, but it was a bit too radical for a “real” set. In Mike’s defense, I want to remind you all that it’s easy to judge things in hindsight, and I have a long track record of strange ideas. For example, during early Tempest design I came up with a mechanic called “triggering” where spells had an effect when drawn. In order to make this mechanic work, I suggested that triggered cards have different colored backs so everyone knew when a triggered card was drawn. Radical ideas are not good simply because they’re radical. So Mike’s reaction was perfectly understandable. But our design group had three people and two of us wanted to include them so Mike was simply outvoted.

Flash forward to several months later when design handed off the file to development. Knowledge of the split cards had drifted to several sections of the company; now the real pelting would begin. On one side we had the people in favor of the split cards:

Me
Bill Rose
Richard Garfield

On the other side were those not in favor:

Everyone else

By everyone else I’m talking about all of R&D, all of the Magic brand team… well, everyone that wasn’t me, Bill, or Richard. Suffice to say it was a lot of people.

One of the misconceptions I think players have about R&D is that we function as a single unit. (In fact, a long-running joke at Wizards is that R&D is really a giant brain called “Gleemax.”) While R&D has a unified goal, it is very much a bunch of individuals, and we enjoy arguing with one another. So, no matter what the issue, R&D will have people representing all sides of the argument. The only difference between split cards and any other mechanics was that more people shared the same opinion than normal.

But Bill and I are both pretty stubborn guys, and neither one of us was going to give up without a fight.