It's my birthday today! Do you have any trivia on my favorite card in all of Magic- Whirler Rogue? If not, can you talk about your favorite recent example of lenticular design?

When we were designing cards from Kaladesh in Magic Origins, we were walking a tightrope. We wanted to introduce Chandra’s home world in a way that felt complete (it was in blue and red), but also didn’t cause a problem when we visited the world two years later. I think we ended up in a good space with Whirler Rogue being a great example. Happy Birthday!

Having read your answer to a question about removing mana screw, this is my response to you. Being a big fan of both MtG and riot games' Legends of Runeterra, and having played Mojang's Scroll (may it rest in peace) I've found that resource generation and designing around the cost of creating that resource can be interesting. I find that LoR's system, by also using a region system similar to the color pie, but maxing out with 2 regions means it's more about resource management of cards in hand, and tools to use to advance the game plan of reducing your opponent's life to 0, and Scrolls was unique in that you had to give up scrolls to add to your mana cap to generate a resource, so it was interesting design. Overall, I've found that in games that use a universal mana system in which everyone gets an additional mana to spend each turn, it becomes a challenge of "how do we maintain a level of variance that ensures the game doesn't get stale?" I think that magic as it is designed now could never be changed to prevent mana issues. The game was always designed around the variance that lands provide. Games like hearthstone and LoR went with deck building restrictions and other systems to ensure enough variance is maintained. If a game is designed to provide mana to each player each turn, other design choices must be made to ensure variance is maintained. I personally think each system has its pros and cons, and each game I've played has done well to design around the pros and minimize the cons.

I think I forgot to make an important point in my answer. I was talking about making a trading card game that was designed to appeal to both enfranchised and non-enfranchised gamers. If you’re aiming at a more enfranchised gamer, like yourself, you do have more options open to you because that type of gamer is much more comfortable handling complex decision trees and tension. That style of gameplay though can drive away less enfranchised gamers. One of the big reasons players exit a game early on is being overwhelmed by it. They get too caught up in the choices they’re asked to make to enjoy the fun of the game. This gets into what I call lenticular design, where you create your game in such a way that the more complex decisions are hidden to the less experienced player. The mana system does that really well. I hope this clarification helps.

Personally, I'd like to see cards designed without worrying about misclicks or extra clicks. Lenticular design gets cut off when cards specify "an opponent controls". And there were rare times when not putting a counter on my Ajani's Pridemate was the right decision; now that strategic depth has been lost. (These are just two examples of lenticular design and strategic depth, which I don't want to lose.)

Digital play is a large percentage of overall play, so it’s something we have to be conscious of. Having a chance to do something 0.0001% of the time is often not worth all digital players having to have an additional click every time they play the card.

Your article on Lenticular Design made me understand many things about day to day life. One realization it gave me is that there are films adapted from books that in some cases are successful with enfranchised fans, but not with people new to the franchise. And sometimes it is the opposite. I realized that the franchises that are popular with both groups of people have a lenticular aspect to them. To appeal to the most people you need to have different layers of complexity.

My lenticular design article is one of the ones that’s been embraced the most by the game design community. I’m very proud of it.

Not quite a Magic-in-pop-culture sighting, but something I think will make you smile: this week's episode of Game Maker's Toolkit, a youtube series on game design by Mark Brown, was about synergy. He explicitly mentioned you as the source when explaining lenticular design, complete with a fake Mark Rosewater card and some Arena in the background for that segment. You know your ideas are good when other people start teaching them!

Always happy to hear other game designers share my ideas. : )

Reading your article about Lenticular designs, I came across a point which lead to a question. These designs could be flipped, in which the design very, very complicated to new players but fairly easy to experienced players, such as the suspend mechanic. Since there's a set for beginners, could we have a set, probably in the winter, for advanced players so we could return some mechanics like suspend?

Supplemental sets are where we can make sets focused just on very enfranchised players.

I can't comment on posts for some reason, but I can't recommend enough "Lenticular Design" for aspiring game designers of any kind.

FYI

Another prerelease in the books. This time I brought my daughter, making 3 kids playing. All the kids had some wins and losses and all got prizes. Definitely some quality dad time with the bonus of some teachable parenting moments. Ixalan lines up great to introduce kids. The lenticular design is there, with both obvious and less obvious lines of play. I certainly learned some things, and I didn't even play. Thanks for the design!

You’re welcome. Thanks for introducing Magic to a new generation.

Personally I much prefer the old O-Ring template, I understand the reasoning for the new template, but to me its about the discovery of something new and very cool that you can do with a card you've been playing with for years, while also making the card stronger in context, to me it feels like lenticular design. As for newer players feeling cheated, many interactions can feel "cheap" or unintuitive, that doesn't mean we should remove all of them.

Think of it this way. Imagine we were making a video game that had a glitch. Players would take advantage of the glitch while it exists, but when we discovered it we would remove it as soon as we’re able.

I think the user asking about complexity might benefit from your lenticular design article where you talk about comprehension complexity, board complexity, and I think one other type.

Good suggestion. Here you go:http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/lenticular-design-2014-12-15