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

Okay. So today, I'm going to address a common comment I get in social media on my blog.

People who are like, stop designing for our format. Our format was better when you weren't designing for it.

So I'm going to use Commander as my through line today.

Not that people never say this but other formats,

but Commander is the one I hear most about.

That Commander was more fun when you weren't designing for our format.

So I want to talk a little bit of why. Why do we design for formats?

Why do we just make generic magic cards in a vacuum? Why do we do that? So first and foremost,

we design magic for people to play magic.

That, I mean, our goal, as simple as that is,

we are making something that has a use case that we want people to use.

In order to do that, we have to figure out how people are using it.

There's no such thing really is designing in a vacuum. Like you design, it's almost like I'm going to build a lamp, but I'm not going to build a lamp specifically for anybody. Like, well, what kind of lamp? Is it a desktop lamp? Is it a bedside lamp? Like, what's the functionality of my lamp? For those that have not listened to this podcast for a long time, designing lamps is my go-to.

I talk about designing things in general.

Like, when we design something, you have to design for the use case of what you expect it to be used for.

That is how you design things.

And a big part of that is the iterative process is we make

something, we play test with it, we get notes on it, and then we adapt it. Now there are many

different ways to play magic. And to be honest, we don't necessarily design for all of them,

only because that's an endless task. But we do design for the majority

use cases. So the big things we design for, we design with limited in mine, especially draft.

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