The Indigo System

This is going to be a long one! I’ve been catching up on your blogatog over the past couple hours and I’ve been reading all the discourse surrounding Universes Beyond. I saw your response talking about the three options for coping with the changing trajectory of MTG, and I really appreciated the frankness and sympathy it carried.

I’ll be frank in turn- I don’t like universes beyond. In fact, I hate it. Watching it take over half (arguably more than half) of the game that I grew up playing and loving has hurt me deeply. I care very, very much about Magic. Its world, its art, its gameplay, and the people that it has brought into my life. I probably wouldn’t have even a quarter of the good friends I have now if it weren't for Magic gathering us, for lack of a better term. Pun fully intended.

I don’t love new IPs coming into a game I love. That’s part of it. I do understand that I am part of a minority. For a bit I had deluded myself into thinking that WotC was completely ignoring feedback, but I play magic with a lot of people, and almost all of them enjoy universes beyond. This much I can’t deny. The game is irrevocably changed in a way I don’t like, and I still play it. I just choose not to include universes beyond cards in my decks, and I don’t give people grief for running them in theirs.

In your reply detailing the three paths, you said that you would like to help people steer towards option 1, learning to love and appreciate the new form the game is taking. I was hoping I could get some advice from you on the matter. I appreciate the time you spend talking to the community, and the clear passion you still share with us for this incredible game. If you don’t mind, I’ll explain the crux of my difficulties here, and I will try my best to do so in a way that is respectful and descriptive, while still getting my point across adequately.

As I already explained, the outside IP aspect of UB is difficult for me. That being said, it isn’t the part that makes me feel so ideologically opposed to it. My main pain comes from the fact that, no matter how you slice it, universes beyond is largely driven by profit. You can color it how you want, but as you have said, it’s market research that your consistent return to (and ramping up of) universes beyond is driven by. Obviously, this makes sense. Magic is a game but it’s also a business. It’s a wildly successful business that rakes in more money than I will ever see in my life. I’m truly glad that Magic has seen so much success, and I love that it has grown to be so mainstream. I say all this to hopefully express that I am not speaking from a place of ignorance.

Magic the Gathering being 50% comprised of sets that are not, in truth, Magic: the Gathering feels like a departure not only from the aesthetics of the game I love, but the very spirit of it. When I started playing magic, around 2011, it felt not only like an incredibly well designed game, but a game that was backed by people who truly loved it. Magic’s original success, I feel, stemmed from the fact that the game was not only well designed, but relentlessly creative, and innovative. I know that there have always been players who did not like the way magic was going in some way or another, like with the art of Lorwyn, as a sole example. But, Magic was still Magic. It wasn’t the Avengers, or Spongebob, or Fortnite, or Furby, or the Walking Dead, or even Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t secret lairs designed around cereal boxes, or baseball cards, or instagram posts, or garfield, or movie posters. It had creative integrity, it had constraints that it designed within, and as you often say, restriction breeds creativity.

Now, it feels as though the game and the people behind it have willingly tossed aside the constraints that made it great in favor of making more money. It feels as though the soul of magic has been squandered because shareholder pressure demands record profits year after year. It feels as though WotC loves money more, and their players less, every year. I want to be wrong about this, but it’s hard to feel as though I am off base when each new year, it feels as though the envelope is pushed further and further. How can I reconcile this perceived reality with my love for this game?

I truly do mean all of these questions in good faith. I love Magic, and I want to keep loving it, but for a long time now, I have felt as though I love a smaller and smaller part of it. I want to love the whole game again, not an increasingly small sliver of it. I have come to terms with the fact that Magic changes, and I understand that this is one of its strengths. But in my case, understanding has not led to acceptance, and it hurts me to see the game that I care about so much leave me behind because more people are willing to pay more than me for more of the game.

Thank you for the very thoughtful post. I hope I can respond in kind.

Let me start with what I think is the biggest place we differ. While Wizards is a business and, yes, sets selling well is good for business, the idea that sales are the sole and only reason we have ramped up Universes Beyond is simply not true.

I, and the rest of R&D, truly love Magic. All of us joined Wizards already a huge fan of the game. We see it as a force of good in the world (all of our lives were improved because of it) and it is our desire to spread its influence. Magic brings great joy and friendship and helps people cope with hardships in their life. The more people that can play, the better.

Part of doing that is adapting the game to the desires of the players, what I refer to as the gestalt, that is the wholeness of the playerbase as a unity. Magic is ever in flux and it continually moves in the direction of what the players, again as a whole, want.

Our job as R&D is to constantly iterate on Magic. We try new things, sometimes influenced by ideas from the players, sometimes of our creation, and see the feedback we get. The feedback comes in many forms as we have a *lot* of data at our disposal. If the playerbase likes something, we tend to do more if it. If they dislike it, we do less.

The ultimate goal is to make the current players we have as happy as we can, and create as many new players as we’re able. Universes Beyond is succeeding at those two goals by all the metrics we monitor.

Yes, one of those metrics is sales. It also includes sanctioned play, digital play, market research, and numerous online metrics.

But I want to present it a different way, because you’ve read me saying the above many times, I assume. Let’s say we had the following technology - happiness meters.

Each player has a device that measures how much happiness the game brings them. It looks at the joy, the friendship, the interactions, all the ways the game adds quality to their life. If it’s a net gain in happiness, the amount is recorded.

And that happiness reading could be negative, if it takes more happiness away from them than it gives them. For any player where the net gain is a loss, we measure that as well

Now imagine if we got all that data collected in one place: a composite happiness reading. We can look at all the players together and see if Magic is a net gain or a net loss to their total overall happiness. We could also measure whether the actions we take raises or lowers the happiness total.

Obviously, our goal is to have that net gain happiness be as high as it can. I should add in that there needs to be sustainability added in. Maybe players would be even happier if we just gave away the game for free, but that wouldn’t be sustainable as a business, meaning it would cause the game to end and that would be a big knock against the happiness volume long term.

One of Magic’s core traits, its quality, comes from the fact that it’s so profitable that we have the luxury of time and people to make it so good.

Now let’s get to the philosophical question. Let’s say we introduce some new aspect to the game. If it raises the total happiness meter, is it okay if it lowers the happiness for some portion of the audience? And this doesn’t mean their happiness level turns negative, it’s just lower than it would be without the new aspect.

Are we good or bad stewards of the game for raising the overall happiness, even if we lower the happiness level of some players?

Let me help you out by bringing up an important point. It is essentially impossible to add anything to the game that raises overall happiness without lowering the happiness of some percentage of the playerbase.

Regular blog readers should know this. Pick your favorite addition to the game. Other players hated it. There’s a famous R&D saying: If we added a twenty dollar bill to every booster, some players would complain how it’s folded.

R&D’s answer to this philosophical question is absolutely. If we can raise the total amount of happiness, we believe we should. Are there exceptions to this? Of course. We have values as a company, and we don’t want to do things to break those values.

Your question kind of implies that you get that Universes Beyond brings happiness to a lot of your friends. That ties into my Dark Night of the Soul posts and podcasts. At some point, you have to understand that a thing that might make you less happy, makes a lot of others more happy, and that part of being in a community is enjoying and valuing others’ happiness. Appreciating others’ happiness can raise your own happiness.

To really get the power of Universes Beyond, talk to your friends that enjoy it. Hear from them the joy it brings them.

To give my own personal example. I have been playing Magic continually for 33 years. I truly, *truly* love Magic. I, without exaggeration, believe it is the best game ever made. And I am emotionally invested in Magic in ways few people are. There are sets I willed into existence, sets I have poured my heart and soul into.

I give all this context because I want to stress the importance of this next statement. My first time playing with Marvel Super Heroes, the very first sealed playtest we did (and note we started design before Spider-Man, so the very first time I played with Marvel-themed Magic cards) was one of the most fun times I have ever had playing Magic. Ever!

Why? Because Marvel is part of my psyche. It filled an important role in my youth and has been part of my life for almost as long as I can remember. It’s part of my DNA of who I am as a person. Combing Marvel, something I love to my very core, with Magic, something else I love to my core, was *so* much fun. And I was playing early exploratory design. We’re talking a far cry from the finished polished Magic you all know. And it was one of the most joyful times playing Magic I ever had.

That joy is what truly sold me on Universes Beyond, not the company’s fiscal bottom line. I’m in the business of getting the happiness level as high as I can and I just realized we had the most potent tool we’ve ever used.

I talk a lot about the importance of resonance. That you, the designer, don’t have to start from scratch. That you get to build on top of emotional associations players already have. Universes Beyond is resonance, but on steroids.

Another important point. We’re not abandoning our own creative. We’re doing three new sets a year, and we’re bringing our A-game as the recent preview panel showing off 2027 demonstrated. We’re doing the best design and creative of our own world sets I think we’ve ever done.

We have a TV show being made. We have a deal to make a movie. We’re advancing our own material in ways we’ve never done before. And Magic is reaching a critical tipping point where we’re becoming part of pop culture in a way we’ve never been.

The Tonight Show just did a whole bit about us in the monologue. Saturday Night Live now mentions us with some regularity. The next five years of Magic is going to be transformative to the brand.

And I haven’t even gotten into what Universes Beyond is doing to bring in new and lapsed players. It’s just introducing a whole segment of people to Magic. And those people are mostly playing the game and sticking around.

Our recent in-Multiverse sets have reached heights old sets never reached, because the rising tide is helping all sets.

I should also point out that for all but five of Magic’s thirty-three years, we put out three or less in-Multiverse all new content premier sets. If Universes Beyond sets are not for you, we’re making the same amount of in-Multiverse content we’ve made for most of Magic’s life.

Also, Aaron’s original inspiration to make Universes Beyond didn’t come from a spread sheet. He saw how many alters people were doing where they made their cards look like characters they loved. He saw me answer endless questions on this blog about what color different characters were. He was inspired because he saw a desire from the players.

And like anything, we started by dipping our toe in. Yes, the Walking Dead Secret Lair created a lot of negativity in online discussions, and then went on to be the best-selling Secret Lair of all time (well, at the time - other Universes Beyond Secret Lairs have passed it).

Ever time we tried Universes Beyond, we found a lot of players that were really excited by it. We could see the metaphorical happiness meter go up. So we did more. We got here iteratively. We got here because the gestalt wanted it.

All that said, I do understand why the detractors don’t like it. Cross-branding isn’t for everyone. I get the people who honestly don’t want peanut butter in their chocolate.

As someone who used to be a professional writer of fiction, I understand the value of purity of expression.

I also sympathize with the inability to escape it within the game. We have explored avenues to provide a Universes Beyond-less experience. The challenge is we have internal metrics that tell us when something has enough of an audience to work, and right now the anti-Universes Beyond crowd isn’t big enough.

That’s why we’re watching things like Planar Standard. If the audience can demonstrate a volume that we’re not seeing in our metrics, we’re more than happy to give support, but there has to be a true demand. Us forcing formats that players fundamentally don’t want has a terrible track record.

To sum up, Universes Beyond is raising the total level of happiness, bringing in lots of new and lapsed players to the game (in a more successful way than anything we ever tried), and raising Magic’s brand awareness to new heights.

And yes, it’s also making us a lot of money. I think Magic being super profitable has many dividends for the players. I’m not denying it’s not amazing for us as a business.

But it’s not the driving force of Universes Beyond. If we truly believed it was good for short term financial gain, but bad for the long term health of the game, we’d scale back. We very much care about the health of the game. No one has more riding on it being healthy than us. And as I explained above, Magic as an entity, as a force of good, is personal to all of R&D.

And one of the things we constantly ask is when and where will we scale back. None of my coworkers believe 50/50 will continue for the rest of Magic’s existence, but right now the happiness meter keeps going up, so we’re sticking with the status quo.

The big question is do you believe me? You were very honest in your question, so I’m trying to be honest in my answer.

This blog, believe it or not, is not technically part of my job. If I quit it tomorrow, literally nothing changes for me at work (well, other than how the knowledge helps me at doing my job - but that’s all my call).

I do think at some level you get that it’s a net gain for your friends, and a net loss for you. I think you’re close to the point I was with my own Dark Night of the Soul, where I had to truly understand that the game making others happy was fundamentally good for me, but in ways a little less apparent. And yes, me being the game’s Head Designer makes me care about things the average player does not, but si still care about it deeply as a game.

It’s very hard to see actions you dislike as being for a greater good, and viewing it as the greedy action of a faceless corporation is easier to process.

Yeah, I and my co-workers, like seeing Magic successful, but not if the long term effect of it would damage the game. Again, we believe Magic is a force of good and we are its caretakers. That might sound cheesy, but I, and my co-workers, believe it to our core. We’re all in on Universes Beyond because we fundamentally believe it leads to a higher happiness level.

And again, I can’t make you believe me. I can just lay out my points and let you process them.

It’s why I do this blog. I believe whole heartedly in what I do, and I’m willing to come here every day and defend our actions because I believe in them. And okay, I’m openly a company spokesperson, and I’m not going to actively trash the company, but I’m under no obligation to defend things I don’t believe in.

I should note I will explain the reasons for decisions I might not believe in, but I’m never passionate about it. You can tell when I truly care. I never hide my passion.

Anyway, that’s me, in many words, saying here’s why I think your take on our motivations is wrong.