Designing UniVersus: Playing Games

As a kid, I sat in the back of my most boring school classes daydreaming about how awesome it would be to make games for a living. I loved playing games, so getting paid to play them must be awesome, right? Turns out, it is pretty awesome. Today, we’re going to look at what playing games to make a card set actually looks like.

Development Versus Design

Last week, I talked about the difference between game design and game development. The first games that get played on a new set are in the early design phases, where designers are experimenting with concepts and design ideas. Because we’re a remote-first company, we frequently use digital tools to create cards, build decks, and jam games against one another. Our goals at this phase are to answer questions like: “Is this mechanic fun?” or “Does this ability do the thing I want it to do?” You spend as much time in this phase in spreadsheets and concept meetings as you do jamming games. Battles really pick up in the second phase: development.

Games For Days

During development, our goal is to absolutely snap a set in half. This is the critical phase where we evaluate whether cards are overpowered, whether a format has come together to be a joy to play, and how the Limited environments feel. Unlike building decks to win your next Regionals event, our deckbuilding focuses on testing extremes as widely as possible. Each card in a set needs to get some cycles in a deck to make sure we didn’t miss anything major, but we particularly focus on Ultra Rares, Secret Rares, and Character cards to ensure we don’t have major misses on the cards most likely to define a format.

One challenge we face: most of the cards we test in Standard or in a Spotlight format have not been released, which means we rely on internal card database tools to look up what’s eligible for deckbuilding. This is a little trickier than using any of the great online database tools you may use for your own deckbuilding. Exacerbating the challenge: many of the cards we’re building do not yet have card art, so we have to use placeholder art or go without. Nothing reminds you how important the graphic design of a card set is like not having it on the cards you’re playing!

Because we’re remote-first, when we jam games we’re using digital tools to create cards and play, though there is an exception to that: several team members live near one another in Seattle. That enables us to get together in person and use printed prototypes for playing games, something that I feel is key to helping us be successful with our designs. There is a meaningful difference between playing in a digital space and playing in person in a physical landscape, the way cards will be used by players at their local game stores or kitchen tables.

The biggest, and most important, difference between the games we play and the games you might play is that we’re trying to put every card through its paces, not simply build a deck to win a particular tournament. In particular, by the end of a testing cycle, each Ultra Rare, Secret Rare, and Character card has had decks built to focus on their strengths and to feel out whether those cards are shaping a format and play experience the way we want them to. The two most important questions we’re constantly evaluating in these games are:

1. Is the thing I’m doing too powerful/broken?

2. Regardless of power level, are the games I’m playing fun and enjoyable?

Day to Day

That gives you a rough walkthrough of what playing games looks like from a “what” and “why” perspective, but doesn’t describe the “how” of our daily life. Because our team is all over the world, we prioritize collaboration meetings in the mornings/early afternoons for most time zones to ensure we have significant overlap. Once meetings have wound down for the day, we settle into game playing.

With a new set, we start with the Limited and Spotlight constructed formats. This gives us the chance to see if we hit the mark with the set as a whole. After several weeks of adjusting a set in the context of Spotlight, we’ll broaden the horizon to look at Standard. After games, we provide feedback to one another on experiences, calling out specific changes we recommend or trends we’re seeing. A set design lead incorporates that feedback, makes the call on the changes they want to accept, and adjusts the card file accordingly. Dozens or even hundreds of changes can happen to a set in a given week, which means you also have to review set files in your downtime to make sure you’re up to date on what changes are happening so you can adjust your deckbuilding.

Speaking of which, a designer may build many different decks in a week, and we usually share those decks so many people can use the same decks. If someone has an Eren deck they’ve already built, sharing the deck frees someone else up to build a Sasha deck instead, though of course, anyone is free to build a different take on an Eren deck to test other angles. Adding to the complexity of this type of deckbuilding and game playing: multiple products are in flight at the same time, so while you might spend some of your afternoon playing Spotlight constructed games for the upcoming set <codename: Candy Corn>, your games afterward may be in the full Standard environment to examine a different set that will be delivering earlier than that one. It’s a lot of context switching, which can be challenging to manage day to day.

On Fridays, we dedicate time specifically to testing our Challenger decks against one another. The cards from Challenger decks are available for all playtests and get tested in Standard throughout the week, but Fridays are intentionally carved out for us to explore how the experience of each Challenger deck pairing goes together. Are they fun? Are they balanced mechanically, or does one win all the time? Dedicating intentional time to play those games helps us make sure the out-of-the-box experience is compelling instead of focusing solely on how those cards play in a format like Standard.

Game On

Young Bill was mostly correct about playing games for a living (though he should have been paying closer attention in class): it’s pretty fun. There’s a lot of intensity around building fun environments and games that fans will enjoy, and we take that responsibility very seriously. By the time a set reaches you at your local game store, it has been put through hundreds of hours of games to work towards building the most fun we can in the worlds we visit.