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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#1158: Power Level

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Games, Magic The Gathering, Leisure, Game Design, Mtg, Ccg, Mark Rosewater

4.8743 Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this podcast, I examine what exactly power level is and how it impacts design.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work.

0:05.8

Okay, so today is a topic we were discussing on my blog a bit. Power level. So let me first give

0:14.0

a caveat before I get into this. Not my area of expertise. Power level is much more about play

0:19.8

design and set design. I have an understanding

0:24.2

of it. I will talk about it today. I just want to start by saying, this isn't what I do day to day.

0:29.4

And while I have a decent understanding of it just from working on magic forever, I might be

0:34.7

getting some fine-tuned things wrong as possible today, it is not what I do day-to-date.

0:40.3

Okay, that said, let me sort of talk about what is power level.

0:44.3

What exactly is it?

0:46.3

Well, there's a couple different meanings of power level, or it can be applied a couple different ways.

0:52.3

First off, it talks about you can can apply it to a format, meaning that a format has a certain power

1:03.8

level, which means cards have to be at a certain level to be powerful enough to be played

1:09.8

in that format.

1:12.6

So levels have a power format. And one of the truisms of formats is

1:16.6

the more cards that are available to the format, the higher the power level is.

1:22.6

Now, magic tends to go backwards, meaning you tend to have formats if they have more cards,

1:28.5

they go more into the past, is usually how it works.

1:31.4

Meaning there's a lot of overlap in cards between formats, but the bigger the format,

1:36.2

the farther back you go is normally how it works.

1:38.7

There's not many formats were like, I'm this stretch of time in the middle of magic, right?

1:43.6

It's usually there's a time you go back toward.

1:47.5

Anyway, power level there is talking about sort of how powerful a format is.

...

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