Announcing a New Project: M13

GDS2 and the CCDD have taught me a lot. A lot. But the most important lesson I've taken away from them is humility. While confidence is necessary to fully pursue a dream, and if you're going to dream at all you might as well dream big, it remains that there is no warp-pipe to mastering a skill and there can be no true success without serious skill.

I forget when exactly it occurred to me (because I had to bury the idea for a while so that I could focus on polishing up board games for GenCon), but the next step in a budding Magic designer's curriculum after designing thousands of cards is not designing an expert-level expansion, much less a block. That's like a blacksmith's apprentice going directly from making nails to swords.

Is such an apprentice more qualified to attempt to forge a sword than folks who haven't practiced the art at all? I suppose, but a dull, brittle, unwieldy sword isn't much of a step up from not-quite-even-a-sword. Is it a fair test of your students' talent to see which of them can come closest to crafting a decent sword before you've shown them how to do it? It certainly demonstrates their intuition. Regardless, there are things the apprentice must learn and master before he or she can become a swordsmith.

A budding designer can't hope to design a good expert-level expansion until he has first designed a good core set. A core set is the perfect place to develop the fundamental skills necessary to create a fun game, the same skills that will act as foundations to build upon through more intricate and complex expansions later on. The fact that we now have three years of post-modern core set design to analyze and model our own off of is perfect, giving us a really well-defined set of requirements and a jumping off point.

So that's the project. We're going to design a core set. ('Grats to Alex Spalding who guessed it first / most precisely.) The next core set. Making our target Magic 2013 specifically, rather than some unknown future set does a few things for us. One, it gives us real, immutable parameters to build from. It has to feel like the core set that replace M12. It has to feel like the core set that follows Innistrad. If we had any clue what the next block would be, it would have to feel like the core set that precedes that. Two, it gives us a hard deadline. We have to finish before Wizards releases the real M13. Deadlines are good because they spur activity that might otherwise be put off and they test our dedication and endurance. Finally, by designing to (nearly) the same specifications that Wizards is, we can compare our version and theirs, allowing us relevant and objective evaluation of our effort.


You may have noticed I used the word 'we' a lot. It's not the 'royal we.' The second biggest lesson I've learned this year is that solo-design is vastly inferior to team-design, particularly in Magic. I'm looking for your help on this project. Ideally, there would be two tiers of participation: team members and community feedback. I would love to have five or so designers on the m13 design team collaborating as much like they do in R&D as possible. I know a lot of folks have busy schedules or don't want to commit to such a long-term project, and that's absolutely fine. You can read what the team posts and give us your feedback. Team or no, I will be posting design holes on occasion for the community to fill.

If you're interested in being a member of the official design team, let me know in the comments below along with a short blurb about something you'd like to see new/different in a future core set. I'm also curious to know what your impression is of the project.

Another alternative is that instead of working together on one set, those so inclined could use the same base parameters and data to create their own set in parallel and then we could compare the final products. Personally, I'd much prefer see the greatest product we can craft as a whole but I know some folks prefer to work alone.

As for timing, I will allow the timeline and needs of the project to dictate how often updates are posted. I definitely won't be posting CCDDs on days that I post about this.

Finally, would people be interested in trying to develop the set after the "design hand-off?" This blog isn't really about development, but as amateur designers we tend to wear both hats anyhow, and it's certainly a similar skillset. We need to know early though, because it cuts the design timeline nearly in half if we do.

Stay tuned for the next post, which will address the goals for the product itself (as opposed to the goals for the project, which are basically just learning and developing set design skills).