I have a blog on Tumblr where I answer questions about Magic. I use a lot of insider terminology, so I often get questions asking me to define commonly used words. A few months ago, someone asked me about some names I refer to in my writing: Timmy and Tammy, Johnny and Jenny, and Spike. And in response, I usually reference my articles from DailyMTG when possible.

These names refer to the Magic player psychographics, and I've discussed the topic multiple times on DailyMTG. The first article I wrote on this subject was published 23 years ago. "That's okay," I thought. "Surely I've done a more recent article on the subject." But "Timmy, Johnny, and Spike" was published nineteen years ago. I revisited the subject in 2013, but that's still a long time ago. This made me realize I needed to do another article on the topic because how I think about the psychographics has evolved a lot in the last nineteen years. Without further ado, let's talk psychographics.

What Is a Psychographic Profile?

When I went to college at Boston University many years ago, I didn't study game design. This was because I thought I was going to spend my life writing and creating television shows. Plus, game design wasn't a thing you could study back in the 1980s. Instead, I got a degree in communications, focused on broadcast and film, with an emphasis in writing.

At Boston University's College of Communications, each student had to take some classes from each major, and there were three different majors. One of those was advertising and public relations. We were required to take some classes in each major to expose ourselves to the various communications pathways. So, I had to take some advertising classes.

For one assignment, we had to choose a product for an advertising campaign. Before we started, we were introduced to a tool called a psychographic profile. The core concept of a psychographic profile is that you need to understand who is purchasing your product and why they're doing it. What is their core psychological motivation?

Good advertising convinces someone that you have a product they want and need. To do that, you have to understand what need your product fills. As my advertising professor liked to say, "You aren't selling them a product, you're selling them a solution to a problem." My mother, now retired, was a psychologist, and I always had a fascination with psychology. I even toyed with becoming a psychologist myself. As you can see, the idea of a psychographic profile had a strong impact on me.

Years later, I was working at Wizards of the Coast leading the design of Tempest. I'd put a green creature in the file called Verdant Force, and the team was arguing over whether the card should stay in the file. I adamantly felt it should, so I gave a speech about why. The crux of my argument was there was a type of player who would absolutely adore the card. I gave them a name, because I'd learned from my pitching days in Hollywood that details help sell a pitch. I chose the name Timmy out of thin air as it just felt like the right name in the moment. It was the first time that we talked about a player that wasn't a serious tournament player. Everyone seemed to agree that this type of player existed and that we should make cards for them.

A year later while working on Urza's Saga, a card we were making made me realize that there was a third type of player that we hadn't classified: me. I wasn't a serious tournament player, and I wasn't a Timmy. I gave another speech on the value of this player and named them Johnny. Everyone agreed that there were players like this, and the card stayed.

Spike wasn't named by me. The name came from the Magic Brand team. R&D had been using the terms Timmy and Johnny, but we just called the third profile the "tournament player." The Brand team liked these designations and decided the third profile deserved a name: Spike. It stuck, and R&D started using it.

It took me another year before I realized that these were psychographic profiles. I subconsciously understood that if we were designing cards for players, it was important that we understood the psychology of those players. I thought about whether other psychographic profiles existed, but each time I'd come up with what I thought was a new one, it fit inside one of the three we already had.

I think creating the names for the profiles was key. R&D quickly adopted the psychographic profiles, and they became part of our internal language. In 2002, we started DailyMTG and Making Magic. Here, I decided to introduce the terminology to the players, and the concept stuck. Many years later, I realized that I should have used gender neutral terms for the profiles. Since the names were so engrained in the Magic community, I chose similar names: Tammy and Jenny. I've known multiple Spikes of different genders, so I felt that one worked as is.

Who Are Timmy and Tammy?

I want to start each psychographic profile from a different place than I've started previous articles on the topic. Today, I'll discuss each psychographic profile in terms of why they play games (and more specifically, Magic). Some players play games for what I call "visceral opportunity." Visceral opportunity is the ability to experience something that is hard or impossible to experience in everyday life. These visceral opportunities fall into four categories:

The first category of opportunities includes things that are impossible to do. For example, you can't cast a giant fireball, summon a dragon, or walk through time in real life. But games allow you to experience those things through play. Sure, you're only pretending to summon a dragon, but the excitement you feel from casting Hellkite Tyrant is real. That's the joy of imagination.

The second category of opportunities includes things that are risky to do. For example, games let you perform dangerous stunts with minimal consequences. At worst, you lose the game. In real life, you might hurt yourself performing an acrobatic leap. While there are minor risks like one's sense of pride, the ramifications aren't very threatening. This empowers players to live out extraordinary experiences in fulfilling ways, like jumping out of a plane with a parachute.

The third category of opportunities encompasses things that you don't feel comfortable doing in the real world. For example, you can be aggressive in ways you normally wouldn't be in life or take on a new persona. This comes with minimal risk because games let you take this action with minimal consequences. A game involves suspension of disbelief, so players treat your actions in a different light.

The fourth category encompasses everything you can do in the real world but doing it in a game is easier. Social interactions are a good example of this. In the real world, it might be hard to start up a conversation with a stranger, but a game provides structure and rules to the interaction. It provides guidelines to an otherwise intimidating task. Particularly in a social context, it can be fun to interact with people within the context a game provides.

That is the core of what Timmy and Tammy want out of a game. They want to experience something. They want to feel something. They want to become part of something. To them, playing a game is an opportunity to do things they either normally can't do or can't do as easily. So, what does this mean for Magic design?

If you're designing for Timmy or Tammy, you want to make cards that allow them to do something they can't normally do. Maybe that's a big, powerful creature or spell that will be exciting to resolve. Maybe it's an effect that's chaotic and unpredictable. Maybe it pulls them into a setting and lets them explore something new. Maybe it allows them to connect with others in the game to create an interaction that they will get to tell stories about. The key is that it allows them to experience something.

Who Are Johnny and Jenny?

Identity is a core element of the human experience. You exist and are a person, but who exactly are you? What do you stand for? What do you care about? What do you represent? What are the qualities that define you? Much of our life is spent trying to answer the core question "Who am I?" Once you figure out who you are, you spend even more time communicating that to everyone else.

This self-expression can be done in many ways. But ultimately, you shape your definition of your identity through the decisions you make. Part of that involves the games you play. Johnny and Jenny see Magic as a way of expressing their identity through various means.

They can express identity through deck building. One of the key qualities that defines Magic is that it enables you, the player, to take control of the gameplay. Magic has almost 30,000 cards. You need 40, 60, or 100 cards to play the most popular formats. Johnny and Jenny see this as a way to express themselves through what they play.

When I started playing the game, I loved building decks, but I didn't build normal decks. My specialty included decks that won in untraditional ways. I wanted to beat you in a way you didn't see coming. Doing this said something about who I was. I was creative, clever, and untraditional. My friends would ask to borrow my decks because they were fun to play, and that brought me great joy. Magic was a means to communicate my identity for all to see.

Deck building has so many different means of expression. Some players build their deck around a theme. For example, I had a friend who loved making decks based around pop culture. Their deck based around The Wizard of Oz used Shatter. But not just any Shatter, the Ice Age one with the art that looked like the Tin Man. Whenever he cast it, he would say, "Death to the Tin Man."

Some players build their deck around a specific effect that they like. I had a different friend who loved attacking with lands, so they found all the different cards that let them do that. The only way for their deck to deal damage was with lands.

Some players like a particular deck theme. I went through a phase where all my decks were about using the opponent's resources against them. It was all copying and redirection. My opponent's downfall had to come at their own hand.

Some players are about trying to accomplish a certain task. My dad, for example, loved to find obscure combos and then build decks where he won by getting to cast them together. He particularly liked to find combinations that were more obscure. The thrill of Magic, to my dad, was having an opponent lose and then say, "Wow, that was cool." I had a coworker whose greatest joy was building decks around cards that everyone else thought were unplayable.

The interesting thing about deck building is there are so many different components that you can use as a means of self-expression. Colors, card types, subtypes, names, art, and more can all be used to express your identity. Sometimes even the absence of something, such as creatures, can be a form of expression.

You can also demonstrate identity through gameplay, or how you play. For example, I have a friend who likes aggressive gameplay. It doesn't matter what deck you give them; they will be aggressive with it. They will draft whatever color is open, then play one- and two-mana creatures to attack with, even if the archetype is more controlling.

Another way to express yourself in games is your demeanor. A big part of Magic, especially in tabletop play, is interacting with your opponents. Choosing to have a very distinctive style of interaction can be another form of self-expression. My example here was a friend who liked to show no emotion. No matter what deck or format they were playing, they were always stoic, never talking, never even cracking a smile.

Your accessories also express your identity. There are many other components to playing a game of Magic, like card sleeves, deck boxes, tokens, and counters. Part of expressing yourself can involve everything else that's part of the game. For instance, I had a friend who always used three-dimensional tokens. He would use miniature toys to represent his tokens. If he could flavorfully match what they were, he would. If he couldn't, they'd be dinosaurs.

The Johnny and Jenny players of the world want the game to be a means of showing everyone who they are. To them, games are a means of sharing their identity with all the other players. So, what does this mean through the lens of Magic design?

First, we want to make a lot of cards that represent things that other cards haven't, both mechanically and creatively. Second, we want to make cards open-ended and inspire new ideas. Third, we want to make build-around cards that open up the opportunity for new kinds of decks. And fourth, we want to make cards that present a challenge to players so that a select few will rise to that challenge. We want to make cards that let Johnny and Jenny express who they are.

Who Is Spike?

The minimal consequences of a game allows you to experiment in a safe way. For Timmy and Tammy, that means getting to do things they normally can't, but this safe space offers another valuable opportunity. It allows you to practice skills that you will need to use in real life. Games are a mental challenge where players can test their own abilities. What if you used game time to improve those skills? That's what Spike is all about. Here are some ways Spikes develop their skills through Magic.

First: analysis. Magic has almost 30,000 different cards, but not all those cards are created equal. To be a good player, you have to learn to differentiate the good from the bad. When evaluating a card, its utility can vary between formats and metagames. Expert analysis requires learning the underlying systems of the game, including mana costs, rules text, card templating, and beyond. Additionally, you'll need to develop heuristics that help you interact with cards during gameplay.

Second is memory. Magic is a complex game with a lot of depth. You start the game not knowing what your opponent has brought to the game. You have to remember what cards exist and how they interact with the cards you're playing. You have to be well versed in the current metagame and have a working knowledge of what deck archetypes you're likely going to face. There's a lot to remember.

Third is processing. There's a lot going on in a game of Magic. You have to be able to track each piece of information that comes up. What your opponent did on turn three might be the key to winning on turn seven. This requires constant attention to detail and the ability to monitor multiple things at once.

Fourth is planning. The key to a Magic game is often not what's happening this turn but what could happen on future turns. To win, you have to consider what could happen to find the best route to victory. Not only during your plays but your opponent's as well. That's even trickier because you have incomplete information about what your opponent can do. That requires mapping out even more potential outcomes.

Fifth is strategy. An important part of getting good at Magic is understanding what does and doesn't matter. Knowing when to be aggressive and when to be defensive. Understanding when you're in the "beatdown" role (the aggressive role) and when you're not. Cards matter, but what really matters is how you play them.

Sixth is interaction. What you can and can't do depends on what your opponent is doing. Hiding your own intentions while trying to read your opponent's is its own minigame. Sometimes the route to victory isn't what you draw but what you can convince your opponent that you've drawn. Reading your opponent's intentions lets you save the right resources to shut down their winning play at the exact moment they are vulnerable.

Spikes look at Magic and see all these as opportunities to learn and improve. That's the joy for them: gaining knowledge, applying that knowledge against worthy opponents, adapting, gaining new insights, and evaluating how to change their behavior to do better next time. Magic requires so many different skills, and different Spikes will focus on different ones. The one through line is that Spikes will set goals for themselves and then strive to meet those goals.

When designing cards for the Spike psychographic profile, we want to do a few things. We want to make cards where knowledge matters. The more you understand the game, the more powerful the card becomes. We want to create cards that push into new spaces, forcing Spikes to revaluate how the game works. We want to lean into synergies, creating cards that are more powerful when paired together. We want to challenge conventions so that we keep Spike players on their toes. Spike players want to be able to prove their capabilities. We have to keep innovating and pushing boundaries to allow them to do so.

Psych!

That's all the time I have for today. I hope you enjoyed this different look at the three psychographic profiles. I'm always eager for your feedback, but even more so today, as this topic is so close to my heart. You can email me or contact me through social media accounts (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok).

And for those of you who want even more information about the psychographic profiles, I recently released Drive to Work episodes on each of them, which you can find below.

Timmy and Tammy

Johnny and Jenny

Spike

Join me next week for a history of typal cards.

Until then, may you find what makes you love Magic.