Achieving Two Worlds, Every Year: How Magic the Gathering Sustainably Doubled Its Worldbuilding 

The title of this video is hilarious in hindsight considering that not even a year after this was given they gave up on the block structure entirely and switched to doing a "However many worlds we feel like" in a year approach that has left every set made with it feeling rushed and empty compared to the older stuff. Turned out to be not so sustainable after all. Worst part is, they managed to solve one of the big problems they had with three set blocks (The middle set always feeling a bit blah compared to the others) by accident when they shifted away from the block structure, since one of the main reasons middle sets always felt so underwhelming is cause they were smaller than the first sets in blocks usually. Turns out a set will feel like it has less stuff in it if it has less stuff in it.

It's sad that 3 years later there are cards released like Finale of Eternity.. which not only don't tell the story we should be getting, they tell a story that never even happened...

Great talk. I'm always astonished by how much quality content MtG puts out every year.

Jeremy Jarvis I second that comment on this being a kickass talk.

I love a lot of things about this talk. Good look at a creative process and very clearly explained.

I have zero interest in card games but Magic talks are always amazing

The worldbuilding is why I liked the Mirrodin Block the most.

Amazing talk, and also in the questions section I really like his humor ^^

This talk made me appreciate the work managers have to do a lot more.

Great questions from the audience.

Truly an industry in it's own.

It almost sounds like they're using Scrum-like methodologies to break up the tasks. Albeit the ownership is still with management, so not entirely Scrum.

GDC talk on why 2 worlds a year is a bad idea ...

Sooooo... with the 3 and 1 incoming, scale it more?

How interesting I left magic around the time they did that. :P 14:56 Where are the developpers there?

incredible! I love magic

now i want to see zombie apocalypse on kealadesh

I don't really program AI, but I love to keep characters abstract So what I would probably do is find a way to trigger an interaction event on the AI Character, this interaction event will be 99% identical to how players interact with objects, but instead of ray tracing to see if an actor is interactable I'd use a sphere trace. The AI would then have a set of goals i.e interact with door, interact with light switch, interact with player, etc... This is where the flavour depends on your project, how will your AI decide if it should interact with the door actor? Cheap way to do this for the sake of prototyping is to just indiscriminately interact with any actor it overlaps Once you know this method works, you can start adding in conditions i.e nearest door, certain door, nearest door in vision etc... After all this is done you will need ways of executing these events i.e when AI sees a player, open nearest door in vision. I haven't really programmed AI outside of a few youtube tutorials when I first started using unreal, so best I can do is throw a few concepts your way, so I hope this helped you :) Players and AI should be interchangeable, the only thing that should have some real variance are the controllers All controllers do is handle input from the user or behaviour trees and then executing code within the Character. Example, the controller registers our player pressed space, so execute the Jump() function inside the Character The controller registers our Behaviour tree requires our NPC to Jump() I like to see AI controllers and Behaviour trees are just simulating player input and pawns just being a product of those actions

One other thing - the best stories are those that have 'an end'. People love GoT because they want to find out what happens 'at the end', and they loved Harry Potter because we all knew it would be seven books then finished (until the play...) What I mean is, Story Arcs of Characters and how they grow and develop are very important, and the idea of stories ending is essential to keep people interested. If we think the Gatewatch are just going to go on and on and on then the story loses a lot of its dramatic credibility. I get that you guys are under pressure from corporate etc, and you don't have to go all George RR Martin on us, but we can't just keep going with endless Gatewatch stuff with no end in sight. Kill a beloved character, like Lilliana (Permanantly!), then watch how the fans re invest in the rest of the team when they know that everyone is vulnerable. Better to map a clear ending and then you can move on to something new. You can then learn the lessons from the Gatewatch and apply them to a new arc! (Not a Gatewatch hater at all btw, love the concept, but hate the idea of it just going on and on and on and on. MtG has moved on from stories before. No reason they can't do it again).

41:10 Mark Brown?

I thought Meld came from B.F.M. from Unglued.

well... good luck with 1 block sets

Sustainably my ass.

Two worlds a year? I bet that lasted a long time /s

Next step I'd like creative takes is to have a more distinctive direction style that could cave a stronger identity to a block. Like knowing that this or this card come from this or this block just by the artwork. As for now their is too many different styles from the same artists and Raymond Swanland style along Theriese Neilson don't match togheter and don't contribute to give a style identity to a block and sure not when you find lot of cards from these two incredible artists in Every block. Just look at Alara block, most of the art is like really detailed colored pencil done and it is specific to Alara, it gives it a style identity. They started to mess it up with Zendikar where you got Highly digital art along watercolor, old school drawings, etc and a lot of very diferent styles and techniques. I think if they had a bigger artist pool they could match a directional art style with the flavor of the block. As for an example, I think it would have been cool if Amonketh had most of it's art in the style of Frank Franzeta, Julie Bell, and Boris Valeijo (earth tone palette with vintage old school style would have match the egyptian theme.) It's my opinion. I' m intregue what others think about this subject.

1:01:00 sounds like they do ALOT of simulated game play

This didnt age well...

"Why don't you hire those people?" "Well, by shopping around and keeping them disposable it's easier to churn through more of them without having to splurge on stuff like benefits, a constant salary... essentially we get all the benefits of having them employed for a fraction of the cost!"

If only the writing/pr division wasn't as bad as it is...

Bring back the analogue paintings again!

This aged poorly.

'I have a really shitty labour flow that burns out into diminishing... thankfully hazbro doesnt care AND contractorz! They're not reaaly people." Ugh

MTG at GDC, how unexpected.

Insightful, but they really didn't succeed in making worlds that players could connect deeply with for a period surrounding this presentation. Many of the places felt like one-hit notes, where the worlds felt smaller than they really were. Seeing stories as focused around or through the eyes of the Gatewatch also robbed us of opportunities to spend more time viewing the worlds through their inhabitants. This is rather problematic, particularly when the shortening of blocks means that there would be less time spent exploring the lore of any given plane.

This was better. I wish they just went back to this type of production. MTG feels empty with bunch of disconnected sets.

I hate it when people use the word "analog" to describe something that's not digital, that's not what it means. Is that rock on the ground analog just because it's not digital? No, it's not, it's neither digital nor analog. There are so many better words you could use, "tabletop," "physical," "paper" to differentiate between a video game version of something.

So this is the guy responsible for the visual homogenization of the game. Streamline the process, just crank out set after set in order to push as much product as possible regardless of whether or not goals are met.

Seems like a lot of people at Wotc get paid to write a bunch of fluff that none of their customer base will ever interact with

Why do my Adblocker doesn't block this one hour comercial?

This guy thinks his own jokes are hilarious

Ravnica > Zendikar > Dominaria > Innistrad > Alara > Lorwyn/Shadowmore > Amonkhet > Mirrodin > Kamigawa > Theros > Tarkir > Kaladesh

so this is about a card game? ok...