Design

The design of Magic: The Gathering is the act of creating new cards and sets for the game. This is done by several teams within R&D. Exploratory Design investigates potential design space, Vision Design creates the blueprint for a set, Set Design builds the card file, and Play Design team balances those cards for the core formats.

Sets used to be created under a design and development model, where a design team built an initial card file and a development team finalized it. The shift to the Vision, Set, and Play Design system happened circa 2016 internally, with Dominaria (released 2018) considered the first product built under the new system.

Task

Designers create new cards, mechanics, and themes for Magic sets. Every set should do something innovative that hasn't been done before. It also should bring back something from the past and present it in a new light; it should add new elements to old ideas. Every set should make players shift their thinking about the game in some way while creating a moment that is uniquely its own. By definition, some bad cards have to exist, even at rare. The rules of design provide four major functions: structure, clarity, consistency, and focus.

Life cycle

The design of a typical set has four components: Exploratory Design, Vision Design, Set Design, and Play Design. Each of these teams usually has 4-6 people on it. Head Designer Mark Rosewater has likened designing a set to building a house: Exploratory Design gathers relevant information, Vision Design creates the blueprints, Set Design builds the house, and Play Design does the finishing and interior design.

Exploratory design

Also known as pre-design, advanced design or advanced planning, exploratory design was an innovation in 2014 in how Magic sets were designed. Long before design starts, exploratory design begins. It concerns the needs of the block and loops in the development and creative teams. The team can talk about mechanics and how each color plays out, but is not concerned with an actual card file.

Vision Design

Each set starts with two to three months of exploratory design and then four months of vision design.

In 2017, the design team was rebranded as Vision Design, with a shorter, more creative-focused mandate. Vision Design (usually led by Mark Rosewater) is responsible for figuring out what the focus of the set's world is going to be mechanically. Vision Design's job is to be a metaphorical architect, drawing the blueprints for the set to come. Vision Design hands off a file complete with themes and mechanics, and a full set of commons and uncommons plus enough rares and mythic rares to be able to play Booster Draft or Sealed.

Design handoff

When the lead Vision designer passes the set off to the Set Design, they also create a handoff document. This document is the guide that the Set Design team (formerly development) can refer back to throughout the design process. In it, they can see the vision and end product of the Vision Design team; what was important to them, what rules did they set, and what they were trying to accomplish.

Set Design

The second part of the design is Set Design. Set Design is responsible for making the set, metaphorically building the house based on Vision Design's blueprints. This team takes the design from concept to finished product. They're the ones who field-test the ideas and mechanics the vision team created to see if they work together, fixing or replacing them if they do not. The Set Design team is then on the hook for designing all the cards (Vision Design creates cards as it iterates, which the Set Design team can use as they see fit).

Set Design has two segments. First, there's a six-month segment where the file is compiled, and then after a three-month hiatus, there's a three-month segment where the team works with Play Design to finalize the numbers on the cards. These teams replaced what used to be the former development team.

Play Design

Play Design lasts three months. The first two months are the last two months of Set Design, and the last month is set after Set Design hands off (but when there's still time to tweak numbers if necessary).

Postmortem

Once a set comes out, R&D gets a whole stream of data. This is partly due to more people playing the set — millions of players as opposed to R&D's double digits — and partly because a lot of people play digital formats, which are great for collecting a lot of crunchy play data. A normal part of the design process is a postmortem where R&D looks at how a set performed in various formats, especially Limited. This allows them to double-check their internal data to see how close their estimations were to the actual played environments.

There is also external market research. Wizards of the Coast talks to players about all aspects of the set and gets them to give their opinion. There is also research on sales, play numbers, and trends on trends on social media. All these are statistically relevant from a mathematical perspective.

Design and development

Work used to be divided between the design team (loosely Vision Design) and the development team (loosely Set and Play Design). In official set credits, these teams are called initial design and final design, respectively, to better match industry terminology.

Under this system, Mark Rosewater distinguished three distinctly different stages in the main design phase: the vision stage (6 months), the integration stage (3 months), and the refinement stage (3 months). Apart from the Head Designer (Rosewater), each design team ideally consisted of a lead designer, a "strong second", a development representative, a creative representative, fresh blood, and a file keeper. Roles were sometimes combined in one person.

Devign

"Devign" or "Structural Development" used to be the space between design and development. Design still had control of the file but was addressing notes from the developers. During these early times, Development tried out cards that felt risky, but could also add something cool and interesting to the game. Early playtesting was for taking the big swings. Many of the card designs handed over in the initial handoff would not make the final version of the set, and many more would get tweaks, such as casting cost, power, toughness, or activation cost. Still, others would get cut from the set entirely to make room for new cards that either filled a specific role that was missing or were just independently cool. On the opposite side, some fun cards are made stronger.

Changing to the new model

Several factors contributed to the adoption of the new Vision-Set-Play Design model. Development teams were consistently overworked, so the handoff between design and development was pushed back by three months. When this happened, the teams were renamed Vision Design and Set Design to better match terminology used by the games industry. At the same time, R&D identified a need for more work on balancing tournament play and created the Play Design team to address this problem.

The shift due to the new model happened during the production of sets released 2018–2019. Rivals of Ixalan changed to the new model in the middle of production, resulting in a combined Vision and Set Design team. Dominaria is the first set to use separate Vision and Set Design teams, with some input from Play Design. War of the Spark is the first set with a full Play Design focus, and Throne of Eldraine is the first set where Play Design provided input during Vision.

Historical stages of design

Mark Rosewater distinguishes seven stages, or historical eras, of Magic design. The first three stages correspond to specific Head Designers (or, in the first stage, Richard Garfield), while Rosewater himself has overseen the fourth stage onward.

• First stage (Alpha–Alliances): Designers focused on individual cards more than sets or environments.
• Second stage (Mirage–Prophecy): Head Designer Joel Mick focused on cleaning up of the rules, defining the color pie, designing for Limited, and designing sets in blocks.
• Third stage (Invasion – Saviors of Kamigawa): Head Designer Bill Rose introduced block themes, giving each block a mechanical identity.
• Fourth stage (Ravnica: City of Guilds – Rise of the Eldrazi): Head Designer Mark Rosewater introduced block planning, allowing better set-up and follow-through on block themes.
• Fifth stage: (Scars of Mirrodin – Rivals of Ixalan): Design shifted focus to creating emotionally resonant gameplay; mechanical themes were seen as tools for evoking emotions.
• Sixth stage (Dominaria – Innistrad: Crimson Vow): The old design-and-development system was replaced with the Vision, Set, and Play Design model. The game shifted to a more eternal environment with more backward compatibility to facilitate the popular Commander format.
• Seventh stage (Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty – present): Design started questioning fundamental assumptions. This stage includes bolder attempts to "redo" worlds, greater card complexity, more deciduous mechanics, the advent of cameos, and the introduction of Universes Beyond.

Creature type

Designer is an Unglued creature type which was eliminated from the Comprehensive Rules list during the Grand Creature Type Update (Richard Garfield, Ph.D.).

See also

• List of Magic slang/R&D slang – design terminology
• Making Magic – official column about Magic design