Multiple Choice Magic Design Question of the Day 1

1) Which of the following is the least appropriate way for Design to serve these audiences?
 a) Design should make sure there are high mana costs for Timmy.
 b) Design should make sure there are bad cards for Jenny.
 c) Design should make sure there are under-costed cards for Spike.
 d) Design should make sure there are wordy cards for Mel.
 e) Design should make sure there are funny cards for Vorthos.

Click through to see the answer and my rationale.

Timmy doesn't love cards because they're expensive, they love big effects despite their proportionally large costs. Scornful Egotist would be of no interest to Tammy without morph, but costly cards with proportional effects are. That said, they do recognize a correlation between high costs and big effects that will make them pay more attention to expensive cards.

Jenny doesn't so much love bad cards, as they do the challenge of doing something impressive with cards others have dismissed. Search the City is an example. Squire not so much. (There are uber-Johnnies who appreciate absurd challenges like that posed by One with Nothing but we don't make cards like that often.) Jenny likes 'bad' cards that can be great when their conditions are met, but reaching that state is hard, slow, or unreliable, because they are up to the challenge.

Spike does play under-costed cards because they have a high value:cost ratio, a major factor in building tournament-winning decks. They also appreciate flexibility, resilience, reliability, and contextual worth (Shatterstorm is bonkers in a format with some artifact decks running around, but usually unplayable). Though efficient cards are appealing to Spike, particularly under-costed cards tend to dominate and warp the formats they're in, which reduces deck-building choices and variety of matches. There's also no particular skill to selecting the most obviously strong cards.

Some Mels feel good about themselves when they can figure out how a complex and/or wordy cards functions, but mostly Mel is excited by clever mechanisms and novel rules implications. Our inner Mel is what compels designers to push the envelope just to see if they can. Mel would be satisfied with elegantly-worded cards doing something mind-bending, but wordy cards do have a tendency to be complex enough to satisfy them too.

Vorthos loves resonant design, decadent theme, and meaningful story. They appreciate the joke behind cards like Goblin Test Pilot because that card commits to the core identity of goblins as reckless, dangerous, violent, and unfortunate (sometimes tinkerers). While Vorthos is likely to have as good a sense of humor as anyone, most aren't in it purely for the laughs. Tammy probably enjoys Apes of Rath and Gorilla Titan more than Vorthos. Mel enjoys Rules Lawyer more. Many funny cards make their joke at the expense of tonal consistency to the theme.

C is the best answer. Design doesn't determine the costs on cards, Development does. And there are better ways to please Spike.

E is the second best answer because humor is largely perpendicular to theme.

(As long as I'm making these questions, I'm going to do what I feel strongly should be done: Offer partial parts for good-but-not-best answers; that's a more precise judge of aptitude than weighing all but the single best answer equally.)

The trick I intended was identifying the strength of correlation between the proposed thing and what that audience really enjoys. The trick I stumbled into was identifying what's in Design's wheelhouse as opposed to Development's.