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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#495: Vision, Set, and Play Design

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

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

4.7801 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2017

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Last year, R&D changed the structure of how we make Magic cards. In this podcast, I explain the change and introduce the three new parts of Magic design in R&D.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

0:05.8

And I dropped my daughter off her college class. Okay. So today, I'm going to talk about a big change.

0:14.0

Not something up front, but a change behind the scenes. I recently wrote an article about this, but I wanted to go in more detail,

0:22.3

and a podcast lets me talk a little more than my columns do.

0:26.8

So basically, I'm going to talk all about vision design, set design, and play design.

0:34.4

What is that, you say?

0:35.8

Well, I'm glad you joined me today. Okay, but before I talk about

0:39.6

what is, what things are becoming, let's go back, talk about what things were. So let's go back,

0:45.3

I don't know, three, four years. So here's how the system used to work. So prior to the

0:51.9

changeover, so we had metamorphosis 1.0 and Metamorphosis 2.0.

0:56.7

Metamorphosis 1.0 was the change from large, small, small, core to large, small, large, large, small.

1:02.8

So going to two worlds a year instead of one, or two blocks a year instead of one, and getting where the core set.

1:08.6

And then Metamorphosis 2.0 was going from large, small, large, large,

1:12.6

to going to a large, large, large core.

1:15.6

I'll get to that.

1:16.6

These changes have a lot to do with what's going on behind the scenes, but we'll get there.

1:20.6

But anyway, we'll start before any of those that, before Metamorphoses 1.0 happens.

1:24.6

So here's how the system used to work.

1:30.7

About three and a half years before something would see print,

1:34.6

we would spend about a year doing exploratory design.

1:37.5

So exploratory design back then was very low-key.

1:38.8

We meet once a week.

...

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