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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#738: Donald Smith Jr.

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

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

4.7802 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Donald Smith Jr. is a member of the Play Design team, and I talk with him about what Play Design does.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's my drive to work,

0:06.6

coronavirus edition. So I've been asking different people that make magic or have made magic

0:12.0

to come on my show. So today I have Donald Smith Jr. So welcome Donald.

0:18.5

Yeah, what's up? So why don't we start by telling people what you do?

0:22.3

What is your job?

0:25.1

Yeah, so I'm on play design.

0:27.8

So we do the competitive balance for limited and standard.

0:32.9

And, yeah, I mean, that's really the gist of it.

0:36.3

Okay, so let's start from the beginning.

0:38.9

How did you get into magic?

0:41.8

All right, so I was in college.

0:44.0

I actually started pretty late compared to most professional players and most Wizards employees.

0:51.5

So I started in right when Theros, the original Theros came out.

0:58.1

And I've always been like a competitive player at heart. So I got like super into the LGS

1:03.9

tournament scene, started going to Grand Prix and just kind of worked my way up the professional

1:09.6

chain and then landed at Wizards.

1:12.0

Okay, so you, what was your best performance at a ProTor?

1:16.5

Yeah, I got top four at Pro Tour Ather Revolt.

1:20.6

That was my best performance.

1:22.0

And then other than that, I don't have any huge finishes, but I chained a lot of, like,

1:26.5

top 32s and whatnot. And I actually got a World's Inv finishes, but I changed, like, a lot of, like, top 32s and whatnot.

1:28.4

And I actually got a world's invite. So that's, like, those two are my two best

...

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