btinsman

The amazing thing about CCGs is that they offer so many levels of interaction with the game. You've got 1) Playing the game. 2) Thinking about how to build your deck. 3) Guessing what your opponents might be playing. 4) Collecting the cards you need to build the deck. 5) Thinking about combos to try or new interactions between cards.

There's an economic principle called diminishing marginal utility. For most goods like cars and donuts, your 13th donut has less value to you than your 2nd donut. But for items with combinatorial potential like Lego pieces and Magic cards, your 100th Magic card actually gives you more value than your 10th card since it increases the number of things you can do with your other 99 cards. This is called increasing marginal utility. That's one of the secrets!

I had the game designer's curse, which is the affliction of thinking about game design all the time. I was designing Magic cards for fun during graduate business school lectures.

When I first started at WotC I was managing marketing research and other business stuff. I decided to be bold and walk into the office of the head of design (Bill Rose) and show him the design work I'd done in my spare time. He politely waved me off and said no thanks. Here's the critical turning point in my career: I didn't walk out of there, I said "Tell me why." He later took the time to print out my work with correction in red pen all over it. I studied this feedback intently and returned with another proposal. After a few times through this routine he put me on a design team and my work turned out to be very successful. So the short answer is I was into it and I was persistent.

There are a lot of good questions here. Designing for a certain color: A lot of Magic design builds on the deep 20-year history of each of the colors. The goal is to find the right balance between new and familiar. The first stage is to put together a rough skeleton for each color, with empty slots for each color and rarity. This makes you decide how many lands, mythics, etc. your set will have. Then you decide what each color's new twist is going to be. For example, in Scars of Mirrodin, only green and black got infect, but blue got to interact with poison counters once they were on the board. Players really like seeing twists on old favorites and it's actually quite rare to come up with a mechanic that's totally new. When this happens it has to go through many layers of vetting and playtesting before it's published. WotC has a team of about a dozen Magic pros who spend 6 months or more playtesting to get it polished as much as possible.

That's a matter of opinion of course, but blue has historically been the strongest color in older formats like Legacy. I think blue's character of manipulating the meta-rules of the game like deck manipulation, card draw, and countering are the hardest parts of the game to balance and there have been more overpowered cards in those areas over time. Note that the design team has been improving this issue a lot. You tend to see really good power balance between colors these days and you don't see powerful un-fun strategies like Stasis or land destruction.

Lol, who is this? johoso is referring to an incident in WotC R&D where Magic designer and musician Ken Nagle saw that his trumpet was missing and reported the theft.

After much investigation it turned out to have been misplaced in one of our conference rooms named Ivory Tower. Thus the tradition of harassing him about the incident has now spread to the hallowed halls of Reddit.