At MagicCon, we spoke to the head designer of Magic: The Gathering and the Director of Communications! Find out how about their designer approaches for mechanics, especially for Commander.
Fellow Steelhead Chris Sanchez and I attened MagicCon in Chicago, where we delved into the world of Magic: The Gathering. There's quite a few Magic enthusiasts at SteelSeries, so I thought it would be a fantastic idea to poke at the world of this extremely popular trading card game with blog content.
We sat down for a great conversation with Mark Rosewater, the Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering, and Blake Rasmussen, the Director of Communications for Wizards of the Coast on the game. In this two-parter, we'll delve into their design and communication principles; how do they approach certain sets? What are their favorite keywords and mechanics? How do they settle on the Universes Beyond?
Read on for this fascinating interview! Please share it amongst Magic: The Gathering communities.
Magic: The Gathering interview with Mark Rosewater and Blake Rasmussen
Mark Rosewater: This year is my 21st year as the head designer and my 29th year working for Wizards of The Coast on Magic. My team and I are in charge of taking blank pieces of paper and turning them into magic sets.
Blake Rasmussen: My name is Blake Rasmussen. I'm the director of communications for Magic. You might also see me on weekly MTG or just anywhere as the Magic communications guy.
What would be your favorite commander, or favorite card?
Mark Rosewater: I have a personal favorite and, like, as a professional player. My personal favorite is Maro, because it's named after me, and not a lot of people have a Magic card named after them, so that's pretty cool. As a player, Doubling Season. Basically what happened was I was making Ravnica, and I just wanted this card to exist. I made a lot of cards for a lot of different players. So, why not me? I'm a player! So I made the card. I just made a card that I wanted to exist. And luckily it turned out to be pretty popular; other people also like to double things.
So you love tokens?
Mark Rosewater: I love doubling things that are just one of my favorite things to do in Magic. I have some tokens now, I have more now. I have some counters now, I have more now!
Blake Rasmussen: My favorite commander's hard to choose. My favorite card is Mulldrifter. That's easy. My favorite commander is like part of me loves Rubinia Soulsinger because it was my first and then that deck has turned into a Tuvasa the Sunlit deck. But my pride and joy is probably my Azami deck. So I'm going to say Azami.
What would be your favorite color(s) to play as?
Mark Rosewater: I'm a huge fan of the color pie and I really love all the colors! They’re like my children and I love them all. I won't say I love one more than the other.
Blake Rasmussen: I will say, I do love one more than the other! I'm a blue mage through and through. Blue and whatever else!
Is there any specific color that you hate playing against?
Blake Rasmussen: Red, go.
Mark Rosewater: One of the fun things in Magic for me is the idea of variety. I like playing into different things. There's certain deck strategies I'm not super fond of: permission or discard decks that don't get you to play. I don't fault blue or black for that. I just felt like you know the contrast is exactly what I like to play.
If you could pick any dream IP that you could create a Universes Beyond set for, what would it be and why?
Mark Rosewater: I'm doing it right now!
Blake Rasmussen: That's a tough one to follow. Marvel and Assassin's Creed are two of my favorites and we’re already making them.
Mark Rosewater: When Aaron Forsythe first I first came up with the idea for Universe Beyond, and he ran it by me, the very first thing I said to him was dibs on. I'm a huge comic fan, and have been having my whole life. So one of the things that's really, really fun is when we work on Universes Beyond, we get what we call a subject matter expert to make sure that somebody that lives and breathes and really knows the IP. And we want to make sure that the fans of the IP love it and to make sure that the people making it, you know, really love it, too.
And so I'm one the subject matter experts for Marvel. I led one of the sets. I'll probably lead another set down the road, and I've worked on all of them. It's been a joy and it's really, really fun taking something you love and Magic, which I also love. And then combining that has been super fun.
So I assume you had subject matter experts like Doctor Who.
Mark Rosewater: Gavin Verhey was our subject matter for Doctor Who. One of the things that we do when we make it is we make what we call a knowledge pyramid where we gather feedback from people that just know a little bit of what they know. People that are super, super fans, what do they know? And we make sure that we provide something for everybody. But it's important to have subject matter experts, because you need the people that understand the nuance of like, oh, because you like, for example, I can't give the details on this one, but like, I've been going through some of the Marvel sets and I give notes. “Well, this character, when this happens, this isn't canonically in the comics, what's true about their powers. So we have to do that. That's how the powers work.”
What are your favorite MTG keywords?
Mark Rosewater: You want my 20 favorite keywords? I literally just did a presentation on my favorite 20 keywords! So number one was flashback.
I was going to mention Flashback!
Mark Rosewater: So flashback is a mechanic I made back in Odyssey. It both does something super fun. Getting to cast a card twice is just fun. Players really like it. It's super flavorful and it's got great utility in flexibility and we've used lots and lots of sets. And in my other mechanics, I mean, there's a lot of tools and things I like that are not technically mechanics. At least I just did a part.
Blake Rasmussen: Does just “draw a card” work? because it's not any sort of mechanic.
Surveil?
Blake Rasmussen: It's my favorite thing to do.
Mark Rosewater: Draw is a keyword Action.
Blake Rasmussen: It is a keyword. Action is not exactly a mechanic.
Surveil, discover, connive, cloak, investigate.
Blake Rasmussen: I do like investigate. I'll say investigate.
I do love Mystic Retrieval, it has won me many games.
Blake Rasmussen: Yeah, I'm also a big fan of flashback, too
Were there any specific mechanics that you expected to have a major impact during design but didn’t after launch?
Mark Rosewater: I wanted to tell the story, but I will tell it again. Aaron Forsythe (Vice President, Design) made a card during Ascension and I said, “This is so amazing. This is not a card, this is a mechanic and we have to do this mechanic!” And so in Future Sight, we were hinting at future mechanics. I put the card Aaron made in there teasing this future mechanic and then in Eventide we made it. It's called Chroma, and we made the mechanic enter like he counted Mana symbols and like this was going to be the greatest thing ever.
It was a dud, people just didn't like it. I was so sure it was like the most awesome mechanic. Then years later, we're making Theros and it sort of comes up when we're trying to represent this idea of devotion to the gods and Chroma kind of does that and we go with “maybe we can fix Chroma!” So we redid it, we renamed it (as Devotion), We had instead of counting everything everywhere, it just counts things on the battlefield. And then it was a smash hit, which sort of shows you like execution matters!
It feels like control has been weaker in the past few sets, with aggro being way more optimal, with quick threats on the board. Is that the direction that's going to continue?
Mark Rosewater: So a couple of things. First off, one of our goals is we like to push the pendulum, which is, “Hey, sometimes fast is good, sometimes slow is good”, we want to mix things up. Recently in Limited, we had a run of 100% aggression, a lot of the recent limited environments have been a little faster than we wanted.
Recently, we did something really big. We moved from what we called Draft Boosters to Play Boosters. And so starting with Murders at Karlov Manor, we have a new kind of booster, it changes things. You get more rare. So like there's more threats that exist. So one of the side effects of the Play Boosters is two things. One is we're making much better common answers. So the power level, common answers is going up and giving you more things that can answer big threats against rare cards you can get. The second thing we're doing is the average mana value of cards is going up. For example, less one drops. And so the Play Boosters are pushing us to make things a little bit more expensive.
One of the side effects of this is we were trying to see if we can make really good one-drops. We succeeded a little too well and made aggression a little stronger. We recognize that we are pulling back to try to make sure that we want balance. The goal should not be aggression is all that’s ever good. We want different things to be good at different times
Blake Rasmussen: I think that's why I play a lot of limited and so I've noticed the aggression thing as well as a player. I'm not a designer, but I think Murders at Karlov Manor, is a really good example with Play Boosters as it’s a much slower format. I haven't honestly looked at the data on it to see if the average ending turn of the game is lower or higher. But I've played it a lot and if you skip turn one, you're fine. Other formats that frankly wasn't the case. Sometimes in the game you can skip turn two and be fine and then the game really starts on turn three. I found it a refreshing change of pace in Murders at Karlov Manor and so I do like when the pendulum swings back, I do like slower formats. I did enjoy Phyrexia All Will Be One knowing it was so fast.
Back in my playing days, my one Pro Tour Qualifier Top 8 was in Zendikar Rising Limited, which was also a really fast format. It was a VERY FAST format. I topped 8 that Pro Tour Qualifier that day with Cancel in my deck, which is a pretty high up accomplishment for me. On the question of standard, we changed the rotation to be three years instead of two. I do think you're going to see some of that shifting just as the format gets bigger and more powerful. And I also think there are spells like Cut Down, which when you talk about Lighting Bolt, Cut Down in terms of dealing, it's pretty close to Lightning Bolt and so those answers exist. Standard is great right now if your friend hasn't played it lately. I think it's going to shift as we get more into control.
Mark Rosewater: Control isn’t dead.
Blake Rasmussen: No, it’s definitely not dead.
Thanks for reading! Please share with your MTG community. Stay tuned for part 2, where we will talk about Universes Beyond even more and a few other fun topics.