For some, I'm sure they're going to see some of their own view points reiterated because they had such a strong impact on me. For those folks who continue to discuss their craft, thoughts, and observations on this game and design in general, I'd like to say 'thanks'. It means a lot, and even if I don't thank you guys for including me in the discussions, I do appreciate it and try to grow as best as I can off of everything I hear. :)
- My name is Mike Rosenberg, and I've been playing trading card games since middle school back when I started playing Pokemon. I've been playing Magic the Gathering since 2003, and I have followed over five trading card games over the past decade.I feel that I would be an excellent candidate for this internship because I've been involved in nearly every aspect of TCGs over the last decade. I've been a gamer of varying degrees of seriousness (super casual, a Johnny, and a Spike at various points), a tournament judge, a coverage writer, a tournament organizer, and a play-tester/designer. Most of my involvement in TCGs was with Upper Deck Entertainment for Yu-Gi-Oh and the World of Warcraft TCG, but I've also gotten involved with Gamer Entertainment through the play-testing and development of Ascension (you'll find me in the credits for their instruction booklet).My time talking to the guys at Gamer Entertainment and R&D at Upper Deck helped me understand the different ways each designer thinks, and it has helped shape my own view-point on games from a design perspective. I have my own opinions, but continue to take in whatever people with more experience say, as there are so many aspects to game design that I will never be perfect at it. I feel that my own design skills incorporate a little bit of my own instinct, combined with what I've learned simply by talking to all the people I have about game design. I have a lot of room for growth, and look to add to my understanding of design, but I also feel like there's a lot I can contribute as well.
- The concept of drawing cards and losing life (Sign in Blood, Night's Whisper, etc.) could be moved to red from black. Although, for flavor purposes, the aspect of losing life would have to be replaced with just being dealt damage. Aside from the fact that life loss feels like something black does (you're sacrificing something for a benefit), the effect of burning yourself after getting a reward is something common to these un-red effects from the past. It covers red's flavor of impulse, recklessness, as well as its self-destructive nature.The concept of red forbids it from planning ahead of card drawing with no back-up plan, but adding the element of sacrificing something makes this work from a flavor standpoint. Red is desperately and impulsively trying to dig for a way to vanquish its foe. The drawback acts as a punishment as well for delving into a mechanic that does not feel like it is red. It is on par with effects such as Final Fortune (I get a blue effect, but I need to win next turn), as well as Gamble (I need this card, but I might lose it from the random discard). Red can bleed into other effects, but doing so needs to evoke desperation. The Night's Whisper effect is something that could easily go into red as it is a similar concept of “punishment for reward” or “I can have this as a red mage, but it doesn't come without repercussions”. It also fits well with red's allied colors of black, for its parallels to sacrifice, and green, for its parallels to recklessness.
- I feel that the block which best integrated creativity and design was Time Spiral, and I don't think any other block gets remotely close to this one in doing so.
The flavor of the block was that the plane was going through some chaotic backlash. Cards from the past, weird color shifts in the present, and cards from the future carried the theme of the block. From a gameplay standpoint, this did things like bring some very powerful cards to blue, returned popular mechanics and new ways to offer them synergy, and (perhaps a little too far) added a lot of bizarre and powerful combos to the game. This was the block of degeneracy, which from my standpoint I love since it involves all of these fun interactions that “break” the typical conventions of the game. It worked for this block. Perhaps a little too well. By the time the block was complete, there was a stasis-lockdown with Vesuvan Shapeshifter/Brine Elemental, a grudgingly slow blue control deck, a Lotus Bloom powered storm combo deck, and a creature-based infinite loop with Saffi.
While I think the block succeeded on multiple levels, as it dripped with creative flavor never before seen and featured some very popular and unforgettable cards and interactions, there were points where I feel it created a negative play experience. This wasn't a beginners block either, and was perhaps a little overwhelming in how far it went to bring back old mechanics. Had there been fewer mechanics returned from old blocks, and if there was one or two fewer infinite loops, I feel this set would have been as close to perfect as a designer can get.
- I would want to remove 'beginning of end step' triggers. This is a rule that I feel is way too confusing for new players, and is another one of those rulings that leads to bad play experiences for new players. I parallel this one to damage on the stack, where if explaining the rule to a new player feels weird because it shouldn't seem like it should work, then it shouldn't be in the game any longer so as to reduce confusion in new players.Imagine a scenario where a new player is in one of their first matches. A more seasoned veteran uses an effect like Mimic Vat to put a token into play at the end of the opponent's turn. The new player is really confused, and the seasoned player explains how this works. I'm betting that the first thing a new player is going to think is, “This is stupid”, or “This doesn't make sense”. And it really doesn't, and was even worse before the M10 word clarification. I still don't like this rule and would want these things to be fixed to not using the chain and happening at the end of a player's turn. It causes less confusing tricks to exist in the game, it's easier on new players, and it thematically makes sense as things that say that they happen at the end of a turn actually will, and no technicality to prevent this would exist based on the wording. It also helps control effects that seem powerful given the mana cost (I always felt Goryo's Vengeance was giving you too much for its cost, and was my first “bad experience” when learning of this rule).
- It's easy to argue for and against big Jace for this question, but I feel All is Dust is much more problematic than the 4-cost Planeswalker.It's not that All is Dust is too powerful, or too cheap. It's expensive, and has limitations because of that. However, it's an effect that some colors just shouldn't have. This effect can be a one-sided Akroma's Vengeance that also hits planeswalkers...and green and blue can play it. Green's mana acceleration is so powerful right now that it makes All is Dust a relatively inexpensive card to play, but even that deck is often playing All is Dust in its theme of Eldrazi monsters. With Scars of Mirrodin's release, I no longer have to play this card for its theme; I can just play an artifact threat and use this as a catch-all for threats I have problems dealing with. The fact that blue can play this really bothers me, since blue's deck manipulation and acceleration are so good right now that I feel no need to splash into another color.Even other colors having this annoys me because, as more artifacts are printed in this next set, All is Dust is going to be played less with things like Eldrazi Temple and more with artifacts. It actually discourages me from playing permanents with a color, which in turn streamlines a lot more of my decks. It takes a 180 degree turn from “too many creatures with card advantage built in” to “I shouldn't play permanents unless they are colorless or truly absurd (Jace, Titans, etc.)”.
- Making streamlined, easy to understand commons and uncommons is one of the most important things design can do to make this game accessible to new players. In other words, making an card like Horizon Spellbomb a common is something I would not want to do, as it will just confuse them on whether they are supposed to draw first or search for a land first. The result is that the card will not work as they expected, and at something like a PTQ, mixing this up can and will cause a negative play experience that will not leave a good impression on that player.I think that, at the uncommon slot, it is easier to get away with more complicated effects as those cards show up a lot less often. It's the place where I would typically put equipment and more complex card effects, or anything that could raise questions from new players or cause confusion during the middle of a game. This is where more room for “out there” cards can be explored, where cards typically aren't as conventional as most standard commons seen in a booster draft.It also feels important to have commons be more streamlined even if they use new mechanics or keywords. This is because the casual player who only buys packs occasionally is going to want to play those cards in his kitchen table deck, and if they require them to build in a very specific way (such as Metalcraft in Scars of Mirrodin, which loses this crowd since a lot of cards say “I don't do much unless you play artifacts”), then they'll be far less interested in new sets which do this.
- While I think the focus for new players is that simple is better, the focus for experienced players need to be on open-ended synergy. Having simple cards is fine if they are powerful, and have some interact in cool ways with other cards is also important. Experienced players are going to be looking for anything from power to combos, fun interactions to not-fun interactions, and so on. The focus for experienced players is to give them a little bit of everything.Zendikar is a great example of giving experienced players interactive or interesting cards while keeping it simple in their commons. Steppe Lynx and Plated Geopede both do one thing (attacking) really well. For new players, they know that they want to play lands so that their creatures can attack for a lot. Experienced players will not only see this, but also how they interact with lands that fetch lands or acceleration in general, giving these otherwise simple beats a combo feel. These creatures fill the role of simple while being fun and interesting since some experienced players will want to landfall a bunch of times in one turn in order to make their attacks more significant.Experienced players will also be looking more at the rares and mythics. While it is also a marketing standpoint, it is important to design rare cards that will ensure that experienced players are getting a decent amount for their investment in the game, while at the same time not going over the top and making mythics that will over-inflate the market of rares. The rares and mythics need to have a mix of interesting to just plain powerful, so that they can hit the different audiences of experienced players who look at each new set.
- The lands matter theme from Zendikar block is the best designed mechanic in extended right now. From a casual standpoint, the mechanic is easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to see benefits from. This is seen particularly in the landfall mechanic, as well as basic land acceleration and the man-lands. However, the focus here is primarily on the landfall keyword, as even top-tier extended decks were looking to put lands into play in either fair ways (Steppe Lynx/Plated Geopede) or in ways that abuse a combo (Scapeshift with Landfall or Scapeshift with Valakut, The Molten Pinnacle).From a tournament standpoint, it is a mechanic that is powerful enough to see play in top tier decks in extended, but it's not overbearingly powerful nor does it interact in a negative way with anything much like the Punishing Fire/Grove of the Burnwillows combo. Landfall could be seen in the winning deck from Pro Tour Amsterdam with Steppe Lynx combined with Flagstones of Trokair, but even with the legendary land no longer legal, the early landfall creatures will remain solid attackers in the format.It's not just the attacking landfall creatures that make this theme the most successful. Utility landfall creatures like Lotus Cobra will remain solid in the format, as well as cards like Searing Blaze and Zektar Shrine Expedition which work off of the Zendikar block mechanic, and it even has synergy with older cards in extended (Scapeshift primarily). It is by far the most balanced, well designed, and easy to understand mechanics in the format.
- As popular of an answer this one is going to be, I would say that cascade is by far the worst designed mechanic in extended right now. There are multiple reasons why, with one of the biggest being that cascade does not work in the way that it was intended in the first place (it's a fun mechanic where sometimes you get a great spell, and sometimes you don't, and its randomness would make it fun). Instead of being fun to play with, it was either just absurd or terrible, and one player or the other was going to get burned in some way by what came off of that old Bloodbraid Elf cascade.In the extended format, Cascade goes from being a failed mechanic to purely a degenerate tool. It was the reason for the banning of Hypergenesis, which was the best thing you could do for 3 mana once the new extended format was put into place. This trend won't stop, where cascade is going to be designed around to where cards will be played just so that they can let you play a cheaper card. For some decks, this is going to be okay, since you will be making your cascades trigger things like Vengevine (ie. You build so you can only cascade into creatures). However, for decks that design themselves around playing the same effect multiple times, such as mana screw cards, cascade gets really boring really quickly. Each cascade card simply becomes a glorified version of the card you're actually trying to play, and turn after turn will feel repetitive and boring for both players.
- This is primarily based on bias, as it was one of my favorite blocks of all time, but I would love to see a return to Ravnica. Lore-wise, it would seem pretty well tied up, but Ravnica has a very vibrant world to work off of, and has one of the most well implemented multi-color themes. It also has some loose ends that never really felt like it was part of the block in the Nephilims.From a lore standpoint, a return to Ravnica could lead to many questions. What happened to the old guilds and their leaders? What is the stance on the guilds now? How does Ravnica evoke a multi-color feeling post mending? On top of this, we know Jace comes from Ravnica, and he's one of the big planeswalkers from the post-pending story. How do planeswalkers interact with Ravnica?From a mechanical standpoint, Ravnica has a more centralized theme with the guildpact. This could allow for a visit to the domain mechanic, which was present in Invasion and Shards of Alara. The tension could be that there are many on Ravnica that seek to work with the coalition of colors, while there are some who discreetly only side with their respective guilds. It would be nice to see that tension in the different cards, where the guildpact represents domain, the supporters can work with other colors in some way, and those looking to reclaim the status of their old guilds will be stronger if you only have that guild's land types or colors in play.
