Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

I asked for feedback about my podcast, and one of the most common replies I got was that people would like me to occasionally mix in more recent design stories. So, this is part one of a two-part series on the design of Amonkhet.

One of the questions I get most often is "How can I become a game designer?" I answer that question in this podcast.

From time to time, I dedicate a show to talking about the many people who have worked on Magic. In this podcast, I'm talking again about R&D—this time covering the group I dub the "third wave."

In this podcast, I talk about one of the design tools we use—counters. I go through the various kinds and talk about how counters help us expand what we can do in design.

Wizards has made many games other than Magic. So many, in fact, that I needed two podcasts to talk about them all.

Magic is just one of the games Wizards of the Coast has made. Today, I walk through the many, many others.

This podcast is the fourteenth in my 20-podcast series based on a GDC speech I gave in 2016 about 20 of the lessons I've learned designing Magic for 20 years. The lesson of this podcast is "Don't be afraid to be blunt."

I talk about the use of different frames and walk through the many times we've used frames to aid the game mechanically.

On my blog, there was some discussion about the mechanical theme of "vanilla matters." (Vanilla creatures are creatures without rules text.) It was a complex topic, so I decided to spend a whole car ride explaining why the "vanilla matters" theme is so hard to do.

One of my popular features in my "Tales from the Pit" comic is an ongoing "sit-com" with planeswalkers I make using the Funko Pop! figures. I call the recurring feature "Sparks." In this podcast, I talk about how it came about and what I did to find the humor in the planeswalkers.