Week 9

One aspect from the development of Magic: The Gathering that I was able to see connecting to our design process was that they took inspiration from other games. In the article, Garfield talks about taking inspiration from Cosmic Encounter (Garfield, 539), Marbles, and Strat-o-matic^TM Baseball (Garfield, 540). I see this relating to our own design process as I thought about other card games, such as Spades, Liverpool Rummy, and Kemps when thinking up ideas. Similar to how Garfield says, “These thoughts were the essence of what eventually be Magic” (Garfield, 540), the ideas and inspiration of other games were what helped me think about certain aspects of the game, and how they work, like the teams in our game and the team in spades. Another aspect that I saw in our design and in the reading was that Garfield talked about cards differing from their original purpose: “Copper Tablet no longer even remotely resembles its original purpose, which was to swap two creatures in play” (Garfield, 543). The was that I could see this in our design is that some cards that were originally intended to harm an opponent were used to benefit the team instead. This could include a player swapping hands with their teammate so that they could better utilize their cards instead of swapping hands with an opponent that has less cards. During our design we also experimented with having less number cards and/or having more face cards so that more power-up cards were being played. This caused the game to drastically change with the pacing and the balance. Ultimately, we decided on keeping the game just as two whole decks. This is also something that I saw relating to Garfield’s design process.  

“The whole game’s flavor could change if a handful of seemingly innocent cards were eliminated, or even mad eless or more common.” (Garfield, 544)

One other aspect that I saw in the reading that I related to our own design was the balancing of the cards. Through our design, we thought of different power-ups for the cards, but some ideas just ended up getting scrapped due to the balancing of the power-ups. Originally, the black aces were to give someone 7 more cards. This couldn’t be stopped unless you used a red ace. Furthermore, you could only use the aces of the light and dark side if you were on that side. This caused a lot of balancing issues as the dark side team could easily give someone seven cards if they had an ace while the light side did not have anything to do back at the opposing team. This also caused the light side to not have any use of their ace besides blocking the black aces. Another balancing change that was made was how teams were created. We went through multiple versions of creating teams before having a final product due to trying to decide how balanced it would be if there were an odd number of people on a team and if everyone should be able to know who was on their team. A main issue of this being that we had the information of which team other players were on as hidden information. This caused issues of “what if we are all on the same team”, which them started to change the game as a whole.