Play Design

Play Design is the name of several Magic R&D teams that are tasked to make sure that playing Magic in structured settings is as enjoyable as possible. It is the successor to the Future Future League.

(Competitive) Play Design was introduced in 2017, while Casual Play Design was created at the end of 2021.

Competitive Play Design

Competitive Play Design is solely dedicated to the health of tournament environments. It focuses on the highest level of play: cards that effect tournaments, and getting the card distributions (the rate/probability at which cards appear in draft boosters) and power level right for cards that will see the most play in Standard, whether that’s at Friday Night Magic events, on the Magic: The Gathering Arena ladder, or at the World Championship.

The team was introduced in 2017 after R&D had missed the copy cat combo. Play Design is primarily focused on Standard, Booster Draft, and Sealed.

Play Design does the bulk of its work roughly one year before a set is released. The team has four three-month segments in the Design process, one for each play environment (with four Standard-legal sets released each year there are four distinct play environments). Each one lines up with Set Design such that the first two months are the last two months of Set Design and the last month is the set after Set Design hands-off (but when there's still time to tweak numbers if necessary).

A major upheaval in the state of Standard was the movement towards a three-year rotation lifetime instead of two. One of the notable issues was that with two years, Play Design never gets to see any real-life data of what cards are being played in time to change any cards, at most putting some cards in the seventh or eighth set in response to data from the first set. The change in rotation was to lighten this load, while also giving them the chance to power up some synergies that were unsuccessful.

Play Design interacts with digital Magic — including MTG Arena and Magic Online — and how it affects the design and development of cards.

Current members

• Dan Musser (manager)
• Chris Kvartek
• Michael Majors
• Andrew Brown (founding member; technical lead)
• Jadine Klomparens
• Michael Hinderaker
• Donald Smith, Jr
• Carmen Klomparens
• Oliver Tiu
• Ben Weitz
• Arya Karamchandani
• John Penick
• Abe Corrigan

Former members

• Tom Ross
• Dan Burdick (founding member; former lead)
• Andrew Veen (founding member)
• Paul Cheon (founding member)
• Allen Wu
• Kazu Negri
• Zac Elsik
• Bryan Hawley (founding member; former manager)
• Ian Duke (founding member; former technical lead)
• Melissa DeTora (founding member)
• Adam Prosak (founding member)
• Eric Engelhard

Casual Play Design

Casual Play Design was created in the last weeks of 2021, under the lead of Melissa DeTora. The team is responsible for making Commander and other casual formats fun and balanced, testing cards that don’t fit the criteria of being tested by Competitive Play Design or that don’t effect Standard (e.g. Commander Legends, Commander preconstructed decks, Universes Beyond, etc.). Balance means something different for casual play than competitive play because of how much more diverse the experience is from player to player, so the team will not focus on balance in the same way that Competitive Play Design does. Their primary focus will be finding card distributions (the rate/probability at which cards appear in all products) and play patterns that make the format most fun for everyone. Some things they consider as they playtest and balance cards include:

• How likely is the card to show up? Is it fun if it does show up in high quantities?
• How much fun is this for the table (net fun)?
• How easy or difficult is it to include this in your deck?
• Does the card have enough interaction points and counterplay?

Current members

• Sara Mox (manager)
• Melissa DeTora (founding member; technical lead)
• Michelle Roberson (founding member)
• Chelsea Santamaria (founding member)
• Elizabeth Rice (founding member)
• Megan Smith

Former members

• Cameron Williams
• Jacob Mooney

Column

In June 2017, the column named Play Design replaced Latest Developments on Magicthegathering.com. It was started by Melissa DeTora, but other members also contributed. By 2019, that column had largely been replaced by Weekly MTG on the Magic: The Gathering Twitch channel.

Stream

For community engagement and visibility, Play Designers (most often Paul Cheon and Melissa DeTora, but also others) streamed on the Magic Twitch page starting from July 16, 2018. The stream ran relatively consistently for about a year, ending slightly before the general release of Magic: The Gathering Arena.

External links

• Jadine Klomparens (June 7, 2019). "From Playing the Designs to Play Design". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
• Melissa DeTora (June 14, 2019). "Play Design Q&A". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
• Bryan Hawley (November 18, 2019). "Play Design Lessons Learned". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.