20 Lessons from Magic: The Gathering's Head of Design

[Inatun]

Part of the reason I still follow this mod, even if I don't play it as much as I used to, is because I love hearing FlowerChild talk about game design. Since listening to interviews of him and studying some of his forum posts on his design decisions and the current state of vanilla Minecraft and the modding scene, I've found myself looking at games with a much more critical eye.

At the same time, I've gotten into Magic: The Gathering, and I've found myself absolutely immersed in the worlds that the design team creates, flavor and mechanic wise. Awhile ago, Mark Rosewater, head of Magic design, gave a talk at GDC 2016 about 20 lessons he's learned in his 20 years of working on Magic, and if anyone else here is interested in the art of game design then they'll probably find this interesting.



You don't need to be familiar with the game to understand what he's talking about. The bits where he does talk about Magic mechanics are easy to understand for non-Magic players in my opinion, but the lessons are broad enough that they can apply to any game in any medium.

In case you prefer reading over watching, he's put the entire talk into the form of a set of three articles.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

If you found it interesting, share you thoughts!

[BinoAl]

I was really into M:tG for a couple years, and Mark Rosewater talks about his views on design and his process a *lot*. There's a lot more of his material out there, if you were wanting more

[jakerman999]

As a fan of both MTG and game design in general, I really enjoyed this. I've read quite a bit of stuff from Mark, but given just how much he's written I haven't read a lot of his work!

I seem to recall lesson 19 there as why we no longer have a suggestion subforum.

[Gilberreke]

#19: "Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them"

This is the one we've talked about ad nauseam on these forums. People are very good at noticing parts of the game that aren't fun, but if you ask them how to fix it, they'll just say: "give me more power". It's why Flower went from having a suggestion forum (solving the problem), which was a baaaaad idea, to a feedback forum (recognizing the problem).

Mark Rosewater is a delight :)

[Wafflewaffle]

Really enjoyed the presentation. There is a lot of interesting stuff there and i was really amazed by the Plants vs Zombies story. Reminds me of Downwell for some reason.