Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

For the second year, I took my daughter to VidCon, the convention for YouTube stars. As an outsider looking in, I always get a lot of insights that I can apply to Magic.

My daughter and I visited eight colleges in five days, which spawned this podcast.

Back in June, we had a week with more announcements packed into it than we had ever done before in that condensed amount of time. This podcast walks through all the reveals of that week with some behind-the-scenes info about making it happen.

This podcast is dedicated to Magic trivia, focusing mostly on trivia from the early days of the game.

In this podcast, I talk about the biggest constant of Magic—change.

This is my first mechanical color pie podcast where I go in depth on one mechanical aspect. For my maiden voyage, I chose to talk about how the five colors handle creatures.

A few months ago, I wrote an article where I spelled out what colors did what in the color pie. In this podcast, I talk all about the making of this article and why the mechanical color pie is so important.

In this podcast, I talk about the role complexity plays in game design.

In this podcast, I talk about the mechanic flashback. I discuss how it got originally designed and the many different blocks that have used it.

This is second part of my two-part series on the design of Amonkhet.

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.

In this podcast, I talk about the difference of designing a set for a new world and designing for a return.

This is a history podcast where I talk all about the history of Prereleases, from the first one for Ice Age to modern day.

Wizards of the Coast makes games other than Magic. Today, I talk about one of our other big games. I discuss its history, how it influenced Magic, and how it came to be a Wizards of Coast game.

I talk a lot about the design of Magic, but there are many other teams that design has to work with. This podcast talks about all these other teams. I talk through the lens of Amonkhet, so if you’re eager to hear a few Amonkhet stories, you might want to give this a listen.

In this podcast, I talk about the nuts of bolts of rarity, including some history about how different rarities have worked over the years.