I'm not pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition.

So on a lot of these home ones, I like to do interviews. So I have Ben White's with me from the play design team.

Hey, Ben.

Hey, Mark. How's going?

Okay, so today's topic. There's something that I don't think players really understand well that I wanted to talk about, which is I talk a lot about very early in the process and how we change cards.

And we radically change cards early in the process because it's very early on and we'll throw a whole thing out.

But I want to talk about the end of the process where you and the play design team are the most involved, which is, okay, you're actually in play design, you know, you're actually testing, we call the Future Future League, you're actually like literally having playtest with cards.

What actually changes during this last final part of the making of magic?

And I want to talk today about sort of what play design changes the cards mean.

Yeah, and, you know, those changes can be very different from the ones you have early on in the process, like you're saying.

I think in general, we have a few different categories of changes we like to make.

So the first is like the most obvious one where play design, you know,

one of our like mandates or one of the things that we own is the balance, right?

So like exact like how strong are these cards?

You know, we want to shoot for like a particular band of power levels so that, you know, we don't, it's not an exact science.

We, cards go out the building and we don't know exactly how strong they are because if we did, the game would be too simple, right?

Like if this room of five people can accurately figure out all the parallels

of all the cards, then the, you know, millions of people who play Magic at the Gathering are going

to figure it all out, like, lickety split. So we work with a lot of uncertainty. And so we've got this,

like, particular band of power that we're aiming at. And so one of the main ways that we change cards is that, you know, we look at them and we play with them.

When we think to ourselves like, oh, like this card could be a little bit stronger.

Or, oh, this card is like too strong.

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