Twittering with Mark Rosewater About Counters

Looking over the fully spoiled card list for Khans of Tarkir—which I'm quite excited about and supremely bummed Life is preventing me from attending the prerelease for—cards like Rite of the Serpent hit a bell in my head that there's been a +1/+1 counter theme (or -1/-1) in every block since the first Ravnica. On a whim, I struck up a conversation in the hopes of giving voice to the concern that counters are over-used.



I was delighted when Mark responded and continued to respond through the evening.

That's true, of course. It's quite useful to design something just to see if you can as an experiment, to learn from the process, because it gives you a better understanding of what is possible and what is worthwhile. However, it's a very poor strategy to create a product just to show that you can, because an experiment is helpful whether the results are positive or negative (that information is the real product of an experiment) while a product must serve its audience.

I wasn't trying to suggest that the basis for a future block be "no counters," but it's clear how anyone would read it that way. It's interesting to note that we both made assumptions here based on our environments. Coming from a world where all my designs start as experiments and I select products to build based off of the ones that turn out exceptionally well, I assume that challenges that grow oneself as a designer are always worthwhile. That's simply not the case for R&D, whose primary focus is on delivering a high-quality product on a regular basis with tight schedules every time. Mark assumed that I am not an experienced designer and wouldn't understand that design-because-you-can is bad design. I can hardly blame him since he hears from beginning designers every day, and the last he's seen of my work was when I botched the first finalist round of GDS2.

I misplayed here. This response wasn't terrible, but continues under the idea that avoiding counters might be the basis for a block like land-matters was for Zendikar, and that's neither a good idea nor the concept I was trying to express. I should have gotten to the point, that R&D is over-reliant on counters.

Yup. Mark is dead-on here. I used this argument having recently read his article explaining that the novel draft structure of Tarkir caused the team to start from a new angle and that gave them a fresh perspective that we can feel in the finished product. If the design team were to aim for "no counters" as an additional parameter in the design of some block with a proper heart, that would add a design restraint and force the team to find different solutions to serve that heart. But no-counters is definitely not something to build a block around. That was my miscommunication.

Game mechanics are one of a designer's tools, and both tapping and counters are game mechanics. If {Q} is a mechanic—and Shadowmoor's product page lists it as such—than {T} is too. That's not news to Mark; he's using the term here to refer to a feature unique to the block, that shapes its gameplay, and helps sell the set. This reveals an important perspective. R&D isn't thinking of +1/+1 counters as a 'mechanic' even though their audience does.

Counters that modify power and toughness are a game mechanic (sometimes with a keyword like Graft or Wither, and sometimes unnamed, like the vampires of Zendikar or the ordeals of Theros) whether they sell the set or not, and one that the pendulum hasn't swung away from for nine years.

Alpha had 47 cards that tap for an effect (38 if you don't count land). It had 7 cards that used counters, 3 of them +1/+1 counters. Wizards of the Coast has a patent on "tapping" cards, but not on +1/+1 counters. Counters aren't as vital to Magic as the tap symbol, but Mark happily clarifies that when people ask.

And finally I get to my point. The reason I challenged Mark to make a block without +1/+1 counters is that they aren't such good game design that they deserve to be featured in every block without question. Game designers must be hyper-aware not just of the cost of components packaged with their game, or that the game asks players to supply of their own accord, but with the logistical burden that their components impart on the players. Counters don't come in booster packs and new players don't know they need to supply additional components to play. Players are asked to stack counters on various cards in front of them, and to be careful not to misplace them as they move their cards around. Players are expected to know whether there are five counters on a given permanent or six, for all their permanents, at all times. I'm not saying counters are a huge burden, but they are a burden. There's a reason they don't use Cumulative Upkeep anymore.

To paraphrase Mark, we're not trying to make Magic simple, we're trying to make it less complex; Everything we can do to simplify it will only get it closer to merely-very-complex instead of absurdly-complex, as it was before NWO and further back.

Off the topic of counters, but relevant to designers-exchanging-perspectives; As a designer, I depend on blunt and truthful feedback and I find myself giving that kind of criticism sometimes too freely or even unsolicited, as in this case, which is why it's important to step back every once in a while and clarify that I'm not trying to tear an idea, a game, or a designer down, but to engage in useful conversation that can lead to better understanding, and eventually, better games. Mark is on board.

I'm not the only one aware of the cost counters impart on Magic. They really can add up. Here's the thing: Cards on the battlefield can add up too, but that's okay because Magic is a card game; not only is the game literally impossible without cards, but seeing a lot of them is expected as soon as players hear "card game." Counters enable a lot of cool things, and I would be much sadder if we never saw any counters again than I would be if they continued to be ubiquitous, but they are in no way a requirement to make Magic good, fun, interesting or weighty. They're useful to that end, but it is possible to get there otherwise. Alpha would not have been a flop without those 7 cards. Again, not a reason to excise them from a game, just banishing the assumption they're critical.

Having to compensate for the lack of counters is exactly the intent of my challenge. Looking for new ways to do things leads to positive growth. The audience has to appreciate that Magic needs to prioritize delivering a great product on time over exploration, but we've seen a lot of exploration happen through that process and I'm sure a little bit could be done in this realm given time.

I read "I'm at the mercy of mechanics not flavor" to mean that some of the best work Wizards has done recently was delivering on theme like Innistrad or Theros by tailoring the mechanics to flavor and not vice-versa. While we know that's not the only path, I agree it is the best. I never want to see the no-counters block, built around the absence of counters; and despite my challenge, I don't particularly want to see a block with a legitimate heart that also happens to have no counters at all; but I do want to see counters used more judiciously in general. I want to see R&D try to be conscious about their use of counters, to use them more sparingly, like on a few particularly cool rare cards, or a keyword that focuses on them. I want to see that R&D understands the cost of counters—because it appears from the last decade of sets and from this exchange that they don't—and weighs that when deciding how many to include in a set.

Again, Mark isn't blind. He knows what he's doing, and then some. He knows counters come with a cost, and it's clear that not using counters would limit what we can do, and how we can do it. My concern is that R&D has been weighing the former cost too high and the latter cost too low.

It's also not like WotC hasn't gotten better about counters. They moved away from weird counters like +1/+0, +0/+2 and +1/-1 counters a long time ago, promising to only ever use +1/+1 or -1/-1 counters to modify power and toughness. It's also been a great while since they've used multiple types of counters on creatures within a block. Both these moves show that they understand some of the problems with counters and will take steps to mitigate problems they're aware of. I'm confident that if we show that even a single counter type can bog the game down when it's used as freely as the tap symbol that they will improve on that too and swiftly.

The conversation dried up here. (It was Friday evening… I was more than impressed how late he did banter with us.) The biggest failure in my communication was in getting across my premise—that we use counters more than we should—which was disguised by the opening challenge, intended to get a dialogue started. I could have been much more clear about that, and I'm sure Mark would have been able to address my concerns more directly if not for the confusion I fostered. Hindsight is 20-20.

To clarify what I meant, it sounds from Mark's tweet that he takes it as given every set needs to track bits of progress that are smaller than a card. There are a lot of fun mechanics that wouldn't work without counters, or would be cumbersome if implemented without them, and I wouldn't omit or impair them by banning counters, but there are a great many more mechanics that don't need counters and there's nothing inherent to Magic that requires changes to permanents smaller than a card. Cards can be self-sufficient, particularly when you can modify them through auras, equipment, tricks and lords, just to name a few. It's okay for cards to matter enough sometimes that we don't have to clutter them with glass beads or pieces of ripped up lands.

There are a ton of mechanics that wouldn't be worth doing without counters and many of them are among my favorites. I want Magic to use counters to enable Hydras and Oozes, Evolve and Bloodthirst, Level Up and Proliferate, definitely. But I've designed and developed more than enough games to know that Magic uses counters a bit too much. While it is possible to make an entire block that uses no counters and is still one of the best ever, I don't care if they ever do. That's not important. But I'm certain that if they weighed the cost of counters higher that Magic could be even better than it is today, and that's saying a lot.