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Interview with Aaron Forsythe

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ July 1, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

We decided, with all the changes com­ing to Magic 2010, both in the forms of rules changes and the new cards, what bet­ter way than to get answers from Aaron Forsythe, the Direc­tor of Magic R&D as well as the Lead Designer on Magic 2010. Below are ten ques­tions that Trick sent to him.

Can you please intro­duce your­self and your role with Magic the Gath­er­ing, for those who may not know who you are?
Hi, I’m Aaron Forsythe, Direc­tor of Magic R&D. I was a pro player for a few years (two PT Top 8’s) before com­ing to Wiz­ards to run magicthegathering.com in 2001. I now head the R&D depart­ment, over­see­ing design, devel­op­ment, cre­ative, and editing.

What part have you played in the devel­op­ment of Magic 2010 as well as the changes com­ing with the set?
I was the lead designer on the Magic 2010 set, and was the cat­a­lyst and point man for the rules changes. (I had lit­tle to do with the changes to the tour­na­ment rules, although I am a fan of them.)

What do you think of these changes?
I think they were painful but nec­es­sary, and will end up mat­ter­ing less and being eas­ier to adapt to than most play­ers imag­ine. Magic is too hard to learn, plain and sim­ple, and we have to take steps to make that less true, even if that means upset­ting a few apple carts along the way. We would do noth­ing to hurt the game inten­tion­ally; every deci­sion we make is done so with the long-term health and growth of the game and its com­mu­nity in mind. Every­one here lives, eats, and breathes Magic.

Were there any you were not in favor of ini­tially?
I was uncer­tain about mana burn leav­ing, but I’ve since become con­vinced of just how extra­ne­ous it was. The new com­bat rules were a tough nut to crack; once we agreed to take dam­age off the stack, com­ing up with a sys­tem that let dam­age pre­ven­tion and regen­er­a­tion work intu­itively in multi-blocking sce­nar­ios was tough, which is where the ordered block­ing thing came from. My only regret there is that it is way harder to explain than it is to play with that par­tic­u­lar rule.

Obvi­ously Wiz­ards has tested and explored these changes in depth before announc­ing them, can you give us an idea of what sort of test­ing hap­pened and how long you all worked on them?
The com­bat changes were being worked out dur­ing Shards of Alara design and devel­op­ment; you can see that cards like Car­rion Thrash and Blood­pyre Ele­men­tal were worded such that the tran­si­tion would have no effect on how they played. The rest of the changes were added some­time between Shards and M10 devel­op­ment. So the com­bat sys­tem in par­tic­u­lar got almost a year of test­ing in our FFL [Ed. Note: FFL is the Future Future League, the inter­nal league used for playtest­ing by Wiz­ards] and lim­ited playtests, with a vari­ety of play­ers from Pro Tour win­ners to beginners.

Com­bat is draw­ing a great deal of the atten­tion in terms of changes seen to be neg­a­tive. While the use of the stack in com­bat was counter-intuitive it was still inline with the way the rest of the game worked. This is seen as an illog­i­cal change as it trades one counter-intuitive issue for another. Why make the change?
Peo­ple get hung up on the “other forms of dam­age use the stack so should com­bat” thing, when that’s the wrong way to look at it. Untap­ping your per­ma­nents at the begin­ning of your turn doesn’t use the stack and can’t be responded to. Draw­ing your card for the turn doesn’t use the stack and can’t be responded to. Same for the act of declar­ing attack­ers and declar­ing block­ers, and the same for all the stuff that goes on dur­ing the end step (like dis­card­ing down to seven and dam­age clear­ing). The only part of the game that used the stack other than spells and abil­i­ties from cards was com­bat dam­age. Play­ers just didn’t get that; we saw it time and time again. That might be hard to believe if you are sur­rounded by knowl­edge­able play­ers or play online, but it is very, very true. There was this big incon­sis­tency in the rules and it tripped up play­ers over and over, so we removed it.

Some play­ers fear that Wiz­ards is mak­ing these sort of changes out of a desire to draw in new play­ers with­out regard for cur­rent play­ers, do you have any com­ment on this? Obvi­ously the game is meant to grow.
If we wanted new play­ers with­out regard for older play­ers, we could have done some­thing really rad­i­cal like change the card­back and make every­one start over. In no way is that the case. Yes, these changes were made to get new play­ers. The gam­ing envi­ron­ment has changed in the past decade. Video games have all these great learn­ing tools and sys­tems that we do not, which makes the bar­rier to learn a com­plex “paper” game like Magic even higher. We have to be will­ing to adapt. If we just kept cater­ing to the same crowd, it would shrink over time just by nat­ural attri­tion, even­tu­ally mak­ing this whole thing not viable. No one wants that. We need to stay ahead of any neg­a­tive trends and not wait until some­thing hor­ri­ble actu­ally goes wrong to try and fix things. And the enfran­chised player has to under­stand that we do tons and tons of stuff for him all the time, like offer a robust prize-laden orga­nized play sys­tem, a web­site brim­ming with con­tent every day, com­plex new sets and card mechan­ics and lim­ited envi­ron­ments, the list goes on. It’s easy to latch on to some­thing you don’t like and think you’re being for­got­ten, but we know who’s out there buy­ing boxes… we just want to make sure there’s more of them.

These changes are being com­pared to the major changes which came out with Sixth edi­tion, how do you com­pare these rules changes in terms of effect on the game?
These changes are far less severe, but at the same time they are also less clearly nec­es­sary to the enfran­chised player. These changes are meant to fix prob­lems that are below the sur­face of what most peo­ple see or read about on major web­sites or at big events–they’re tar­geted at play­ers that many of your read­ers don’t inter­act with, so it may be hard to under­stand our motives.

Tell us the truth, did Gleemax make you all put these changes into place so that he could squash his rival Mogg Fanatic once and for all?
Look, I love Mogg Fanatic. My orig­i­nal screen name after Tem­pest came out was “mog­gfa­natic”. I put Mogg Fanatic in Tenth Edi­tion. These were hard changes to make, but peo­ple just have to trust us that they’re for the best.

Thanks for your time. Man­a­Na­tion and its fans appre­ci­ate you answer­ing our ques­tions con­cern­ing these rules changes in Magic 2010. Do you have any­thing you’d like to add?
To peo­ple that still don’t like these rules, the best anal­ogy I can make for you is that they’re like an immu­niza­tion shot or a tax increase — things you don’t par­tic­u­latly want to be sub­jected to in the short term but that have a long-lasting pos­i­tive effect else­where, often in ways you can’t notice. You have to put some amount of faith in us that it will all work out in the end.

Indeed. We truly do appre­ci­ate Aaron tak­ing time to answer our questions!

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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