Stages of Design

Back in December of 2003, I became the head designer for Magic. Two years later in conjunction with the release of the first year of Magic that I'd overseen, I started writing a yearly column called "State of Design." In it, I look back at the previous year's worth of designs and give my insight into them as the head designer. This happens in August, so this year's "State of Design" article is next week.

In my very first column, I went through what I felt were the various stages of design that Magic has gone through. At the time, there were just three, and we were beginning the fourth. Each stage was connected to a different head designer. It's almost 20 years later, and this isn't a topic I've written much about, so I thought I would review the various stages, add some more context to them, and catch everyone up on what stage I feel we're in.

The First Stage of Design (Limited Edition (Alpha) through Alliances)

When looking at Magic's origins, it's important to understand that Richard Garfield wasn't designing the game for what it became. No one could have. You don't design a game expecting it to be a phenomenon that changes the landscape of gaming. He was making a game, like any other game, that you'd buy at your local game store. You'd spend what you normally spent on a game (about $20 to $30 dollars back in 1993) and play at home with your friends. If you had fun, on occasion, you might buy a booster pack to supplement what you already had.

That play experience defined how he crafted Alpha. A playgroup would have a few hundred cards in it, and the core play experience was designed to match that. Yes, there were powerful cards, but no one playgroup would have lots of them. Additionally, ante was a core part of the game, making sure that the most powerful cards shifted ownership over time.

The rules were loose because Richard assumed most rules disputes would be figured out by the players at their kitchen table. He saw arguements about what happens when two cards interact as a feature. One of the big inspirations for Magic was 1977's Cosmic Encounter, and Richard had fond memories of arguing with his friends about how different cards interacted.

There wasn't a head designer during this period of time, but the de facto leader was Richard. He realized that the most important part of design was getting people excited about the individual cards. The concept of a trading card game was new. He needed people to want to buy, collect, and trade the cards. This meant the first stage of design focused on making individual cards as exciting as possible.

The rules weren't centralized, so each card had rulings that maximized how that card worked in a vacuum. There wasn't formal templating yet, so each card was written to maximize the clarity of that card and make it shine. The five colors were mostly a means to make sure all the best cards didn't go into the same deck, but a card's color was dictated more by flavor than mechanics.

None of this was a mistake. If Magic hadn't maximized being shiny and cool in its initial outing, it might never have become the phenomenon it did. The design focus on making each individual card shine was key to creating the buzz that was Magic's entrance into the gaming world, but it did make early Magic a bit chaotic.

The Second Stage of Design (Mirage through Prophecy)

The second stage began when Joel Mick became the head designer. His number one focus was adapting the game to what it had become. That meant several things. First, there had to be a focus on consistency. Two cards that worked the same had to have the same template, work the same in the rules, and consistently line up with the color philosophies. Magic had to have a larger system that allowed players to learn things on one card that were applicable on all cards.

For the rules, Joel worked with Bill Rose to create the Sixth Edition rules. Instead of the rules system being a collection of card-by-card choices that were often wildly inconsistent, there was a framework designed to build a revamped rules system around. This was the introduction of the stack and was a huge reorgainization of how the game worked. It allowed players who learned the rules to figure out how new cards worked without needing to look anything up.

For the templating, Joel worked with editors and the Rules Committee to create templates that would be used consistently across cards. A lot of Magic's technical language was built out from here.

For the color pie, Joel worked with me, in conjunction with the designers and Creative team, to start identifying which abilities went with which colors and to start crafting strengths and weaknesses for the colors that we could consistently follow.

The second big shift under Joel's leadership was the movement toward the block structure. Rather than isolated individual sets, Magic was designed by year. Not the actual calendar, but a year starting with the fall set. There would be a large set followed by two small sets. These shared a setting and mechanical throughline. The large set would introduce mechanics, usually two, that would run through the year.

The third big shift included a move to designing all products so that they could be played in Limited formats. There was a little bit of Limited play before this stage, but it was with sets that weren't designed for Limited. Starting with Mirage, design and development actively created sets with Limited formats in mind. Commons and uncommons were more focused around the Limited environment. Organized play started pushing Limited formats as a competitive way to play.

The Third Stage of Design (Invasion through Saviors of Kamigawa)

The third stage began when Bill Rose became head designer. Bill's biggest push was to give the block more of an identity. Early blocks would have two new mechanics, usually unconnected, and a mechanical throughline. Starting with Invasion, blocks were built around a theme. The mechanics were chosen to reinforce that theme. Invasion was a multicolor block. Odyssey was a graveyard block. Onslaught was a typal block. Mirrodin was an artifact block. Champions of Kamigawa was a top-down, flavor-centric block.

It was also during Bill's reign that the blocks started pushing toward exploring Magic's Multiverse. Early Magic had dipped its toe into setting expansions on other planes (Arabian Nights, Homelands, Mercadian Masques), but quickly returned to Dominaria. Starting with Mirrodin, each world was a new plane, and we wouldn't return back to Dominaria until thirteen years later. This allowed the creative to lean harder into the themes Bill was putting into each block. Mirrodin, for example, was a metal world where the creatures themselves often have metal woven into their biology. It wasn't just a world about artifacts, it was a world of artifacts.

The third big thing Bill brought to the game was a rethinking of how we hired developers. The Urza's Saga block had been a huge developmental disaster, so Bill went looking for designers that had a better track record of recognizing broken cards. He would end up hiring designers from the Pro Tour, which brought in a new group that understood how to balance cards.

The fourth big thing that happened during Bill's tenure was a rethinking of how we labeled things. Mercadian Masques had two unnamed mechanics. Players felt the set didn't have any new mechanics. Bill was more aggressive in labeling things, resulting in a larger number of named mechanics showing up per year.

Finally, Bill's reign was also where we decided that it was okay to start bringing back set and block mechanics, starting with cycling in Onslaught. Up until that time, we treated mechanics in two ways. They either became evergreen and stuck around, or they went away, never to return. As we designed more sets and blocks, it became clear that having access to successful mechanics from the past was crucial to maximizing our designs.

The Fourth Stage of Design (Ravnica: City of Guilds through Rise of the Eldrazi)

The fourth stage began when I took over as head designer. My biggest focus when I took over was block planning. Up until that point, we'd make a fall set, then just let the designers of the smaller sets come up with whatever they could. This lack of planning caused several design headaches.

Often the block would run out of steam before the third set, so we had to come with new mechanics, but often without the set-up that would be needed to draft them together with the other sets. Scourge, for example, introduced storm. That didn't have much to do with the typal themes of Onslaught and Legions, while Saviors of Kamigawa had a "hand size matters" theme that didn't connect with anything before it. Sometimes, as with Fifth Dawn, balance issues would force us from using the earlier mechanics, andwe'd need to pivot.

Starting with Ravnica: City of Guilds, we designed the first large set, then mapped out what was going to happen in each of the following sets for the year. Ravnica divided the guilds between the three sets in its block. Time Spiral had a past, present, and future theme that gave each set in the block its own identity.

Starting with Lorwyn, we also began experimenting with the block structure. Lorwyn and Shadowmoor were each mini blocks, with one large set and one small set. They respectively represented light and dark versions of the same world, making use of themes that showed up in the other mini block. Shards of Alara had each set within the block explore a different kind of multicolor set. The Zendikar block started and ended with a large set, each with their own mechanics representing an upending of the world.

The Fifth Stage of Design (Scars of Mirrodin through Rivals of Ixalan)

For the rest of the stages, I remained the head designer. The Scars of Mirrodin block has remained my hardest design challenge during my time working on Magic. I was given an assignment that I couldn't complete. I was a month away from the set's design being taken away from me, and the solution to my problem was to completely overhaul how I thought about design.

In college, I studied communications alongside film and television. I had planned to be a writer for television. While I had a little bit of success, I soon found myself taking a completely different job in another state, doing something I'd formerly only done as a hobby: game design. My assumption was that I wouldn't get to use most of my college education as I was moving to a whole new field. But when I started overhauling how I thought about design, I started thinking about what I'd learned as a writer.

There's a concept in writing known as an emotional center. This is the idea that, while your characters might be doing one thing, the scene might be about something completely different. For example, you might write a scene about a couple arguing about breakfast, but the scene probably isn't about breakfast. Maybe the characters are questioning choices they made, and the breakfast talk is just a means to touch upon this larger theme without bluntly saying it.

Could we apply the idea of an emotional center to a game, to a Magic expansion? I thought we could, and my work in reinventing the Scars of Mirrodin block was an exploration of this idea. The Scars of Mirrodin block was about reintroducing the Phyrexians to the players. To do that, we had to figure out what it meant to be Phyrexian and imbue that into the game mechanics.

Mechanics and creative are not separate entities. They are two components that combine to create the larger whole of the set. Gameplay is as much a part of flavor as names, art, or flavor text. The core of any component of entertainment, be it a movie, a book, a performer, a television show, or a game is to create an emotional response. You want the audience of your creation to feel something. In gameplay terms, you want the act of playing the game to make the audience feel this emotion.

The byproduct of this idea involved rethinking how we approach mechanics. Mechanics are what we use to tell a story through gameplay. The Phyrexians are a living disease. They are adaptive, relentless, toxic, and viral. To make the best Phyrexian set, we have to bring that sense of what it feels like to fight a disease or to be the disease.

The fifth stage involved adapting this idea of evoking the emotion of playing into the act of design. In addition, it had us rethinking how we use mechanical components. We no longer made graveyard sets. We made sets where the graveyard theme was one component that we built the larger feel of the design out of. For example, Innistrad captured the feel of gothic horror through the themes of graveyard, typal, and making death matter within gameplay.

The Sixth Stage of Design (Dominaria through Innistrad: Crimson Vow)

Dominaria was a confluence of a number of different factors. It was the first set after the block structure went away. We had spent years reinventing the blocks. We started with a large set followed by two small sets. We added themes and planned blocks. We tried having four sets. We tried a large set, a small set, then a large set. We tried doing mechanical restarts mid-block. We changed how we drafted the block. Eventually, we shrunk blocks down to a large set and a small set. None of it worked. Every set in the block sold worse than the one before it.

The last thing to try involved doing away with the blocks. It was a radical approach, but more than 20 years in, we needed to try something radical. We'd let each set stand alone as its own creation. If back-to-back sets need to stay on the same world, they could, but that will be decided on a set-by-set basis. This decision would lead to the greatest growth spurt in Magic's history.

Another big change with Dominaria involved how we made sets. For many years, sets had two teams, a Design team and a Development team. The Design team had the set for a year, and the Development team for about half a year. As we questioned everything about how we made Magic, we asked if there was a better way to design. We ended up changing our system from a two-part system to a three-part system. Instead of design and development, we have vision design, set design, and play design. This new system broke things up and created an overall cleaner way to design sets. It also allowed us to adapt to a system where we were making more sets than before.

The final big change involved how we approached backwards compatibility. For most of Magic's life, the focus was on Standard. The cards we made went into an environment with just a few thousand cards. The system regularly rotated, and we had a lot of tools to fine tune that environment. But the Commander format was becoming more and more popular, and older formats like Modern were picking up steam.

Magic shifted to a more eternal environment, one with not just a few thousand cards but over 20,000. Making new sets that had new themes but were still compatible with decades of cards required us to rethink how we made sets. Dominaria, for example, introduced batching with historic. This allowed us to reconfigure existing components in new ways with new themes. Using a word to define that category allowed us to add a flavor element to make it easier to grok.

The Seventh Stage of Design (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty through ???)

I started my blog, Blogatog, in 2013. In the eleven years of its existence, I've gotten over 800,000 posts (only about 150,000 of which I've answered). A big part of the blog involves players communicating what they want. One of the most frequent messages I got was "let's return to Kamigawa."

I would always answer the same way. I would tell them it was a tough sell to the people who get sign-off on new sets. The Champions of Kamigawa block was one of the worst-selling large sets of all time. It had the lowest ratings of any market research we'd done at the time. Why go back to Kamigawa when there are so many other popular planes we could visit?

We decided to make a Japanese-themed set based on pop culture, something modern with tropes that we hoped were more universal. The original plan was that it would be a new plane and not Kamigawa for all the reasons I listed above. But I remembered all the feedback from my blog, so I worked hard, along with a host of other people, to make the setting Kamigawa. Then, something interesting happened. It was a runaway homerun set. Players loved it!

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty's success made everyone sit up and think. It upended a lot of conventional wisdom. It emboldened us to be a bit more radical in our thinking. A proposal that we return to Lorwyn, which had sat collecting dust, was greenlit. We got more emboldened with complexity. We started making more mechanics deciduous. We got more comfortable bringing back old mechanics in small doses, what we call "cameos." We'd done these in Commander decks, why not at high rarities in premier sets?

This paralleled a phenomenon that was going on elsewhere in R&D. Aaron Forsythe had pitched an idea of bringing other properties to Magic, what we now call Universes Beyond. For years, we'd specifically chosen not to do that. But as our audience grew, we found ourselves pushing the boundaries of fantasy and genre. The idea of what Magic could be stretched and expanded.

The core of the current stage of design is that Magic design is questioning itself. Over 30 years in, there are a lot of things we took as a given that we're starting to reevaluate. How casual is Magic supposed to be? How does competitive play connect to the larger ecosystem? What level of complexity is correct? How many mechanics is a set supposed to have? How many sets are we supposed to make a year? How much innovation does Magic need? What role should nostalgia be playing? How backwards compatible do new themes and mechanics have to be?

A lot of where we've gone has been through inertia. This stage is about stepping back and evaluating. How do we design the best Magic sets we can? How do we create the best Magic environments or the best Magic ecosystem? Instead of just doing what we've always done, we're asking, "If we could do anything, what should we be doing?"

Exit Stage Left

That's a look at the current seven stages of Magic design. I hope it was insightful. Before I go, there's one more thing I'd like to do. A lot of people have contributed to the game's design. I wanted to post a list of all the designers to work on a Magic design team (Design, Development, Exploratory Design, Vision Design, Set Design, or Play Design) for each of the seven stages, for those of you who want to see the many people who have designed the game you love.

I'm always eager to hear your feedback on my articles, but I'm more interested than usual today, as the history of Magic design is a favorite subject of mine. You can email me or contact me through any of my social media accounts (X, Blogatog, Instagram, and TikTok) with any feedback.

Join me next week when I discuss the state of design in 2024.

Until then, I hope you enjoyed peeking behind the curtain into the making of one of your favorite games.