A lot of things are described as being "an art and a science." None so aptly as Design. Design is the Art of Science and the Science of Art. A designer must be able to feel with his left-brain, think with his right-brain and marry the two seamlessly.

"So, you want to get better at design? Design. A lot. A lot!" —MaRo

How many cards do you need to design before you can really call yourself a card designer? Like the question of the chicken and the egg, there is no identifiable threshold between designer and not, but there are still benchmarks that can give us an idea where we stand. Players who have been designing cards as long as we've been playing Magic like Ken Nagle or myself are probably in the range of 5,000 to 12,000 cards. The most prolific designer ever, Mark Rosewater, has probably designed 20,000 to 50,000 cards. Seriously. Remember, we're not talking about designs that have seen print or have even been proposed to others, just cards designed at all.

Remember that in the context of Wizard's R&D, it is not the designer's concern whether a card is balanced or whether the rules work. It is your job to innovate, to craft over-arching themes that resonate with your audience and, most of all, to make cards that are fun to play with.

"Thus, if R&D wants to make the game fun, we have to make you all happy and excite you." —MaRo

Magic 2010 was a small revolution for the game and not because of the much-needed rules changes that came along with it. While the quality of Magic and the fun of the game have never been compromised, there has been a long trend (basically Ice Age on) of focusing on the mechanical play of the game rather than the feel. I believe very strongly that the creative team has done an amazing job crafting engrossing stories, interesting characters and fascinating worlds around these cards, but a great deal of design for the past 15 years has been about "how would the game play if you could do this." The best example may be cycling. It was designed to solve two of the games worst problems: mana-flood and mana-drought; and it opened a lot of other design space in the process: making niche-cards like Angelsong or Break Asunder main-deckable and making a sort of anti-kicker as seen in the Decree of Pain family. But cycling's flavor is basically non-existent.

I love cycling. I would evergreen the keyword if I could, so I'm definitely not arguing that it shouldn't have been done; my point is that things like cycling should be book-ended by the strong, resonant fantasy flavor or cards like Giant Growth and Mons's Goblin Raiders. Until Aaron Forsythe brilliantly rerouted the Magic wagon, it was headed more and more into mechanics-with-flavor-painted-on-top country. Magic 2010 did much of what Richard Garfield's original incarnation did to capture the hearts and minds of Tolkien-inspired geeks around the world. I still remember the feeling of reading a card as simple as Mesa Pegasus and thinking, "flying and banding. Yup. That is exactly what those sky ponies do". Or the incredible Shivan Dragon; there was no need to label "{R}: +1/+0 until EOT" as firebreathing, it was understood. Cards like Silence, Reassembling Skeleton and Conundrum Sphinx really hit that instinctual mark in players' minds: Apart from discussions of constructed-worthiness, limited-worthiness and the like, every player fell in love with Magic because these cards feel right.

"The lesson for design is to always understand the parameters of your problem." —MaRo

Problem-solving deserves its own article if not a book or ten, but the main hurdle boils down to "understanding a problem so that we [can] formulate a solution." As Mike Flores recently wrote. Good article; you should check it out. Point is, you can't really solve a problem until you understand it and all of the parameters that define it. So your first step (and the hardest step) is to determine exactly what those are. Math word problems exemplify this best. The tricky part is never the math itself (as long as you haven't been sleeping during class), but determining which details of the story are relevant and what kind of math needs to be done on them.

"A toy train is 1.5 meters long and it rides on a 12-meter track. At a speed of 10cm per second, how long does it take to go around the track once?" Some students will confuse themselves by trying to find an equation that includes the number 1.5 even though the length of the toy train does not affect its speed.

The math itself is trivial—the real problem is detecting what math is required based on the goal and what parameters must be considered. Let's take a real example from the last Great Designer Search. In episode three, the challenge was to design ten cards to fill specific holes in the set while simultaneously making optimal use of ten abandoned pieces of art. Several of the contestants were able to make ten cards that fit the holes that needed filling very well but that didn't quite fit the art or that ignored important aspects of the art wholesale. A couple contestants were able to nail the art requirement but weren't able to fill the holes appropriately. One even managed both those requirements but failed at the implicit is-it-fun-to-play-with requirement.

"We need to pay great attention to the little things because en masse they will do much to affect the players' response when they see it." —MaRo

Those of you with jobs will nod quietly when I say that doing your work quickly, quietly and flawlessly will rarely earn you praise, but every mistake, every missed deadline and every question or complaint will earn you admonition. Similarly, here no one was rewarded for completing the task under the guidelines, but those who did not were eliminated from the competition. If you want to get a raise, a year-end bonus or win this search, you have to go above and beyond: work extra hours, save someone else's bacon (preferably your boss's), or really slam dunk the card designs, satisfying every listed requirement but also making some legitimately fun cards that showcase your craftsmanship.

It may seem like you are being asked to serve too many masters. With all these parameters, how can you be expected to produce anything of quality? Actually, these restrictions are what make it possible for you to excel. It is the different kind of thinking required to solve a problem that leads to unexpected solutions. No one asked Newton or Einstein to "make something awesome" and if they had, you can bet they wouldn't have. It was the exploration of the specific problems they originally set out to solve that led to their "eureka" revelations.

"The reason restrictions are so helpful is that they force the person to radically shift their mental processing." —MaRo

You can't think outside the box if there is no box.

"I'll follow my gut, often when I have absolutely no idea why I'm doing the thing my gut wants." —MaRo

The human mind is not meant for logic. Humans are absolutely capable of rational thought, but it is quite simply not what our brains were built for. We don't process the world in black and white, 1s and 0s, true or false: our brains are fuzzy devices meant to handle the kinds of subjective tasks computers have so much trouble with: voice and facial recognition, object classification and free association.The act of thinking logically is dangerous at best. Fallacies are more than prevalent and the only thing worse than a person who believes something untrue is someone who ‘knows' something untrue. It is also not in the nature of the human mind to think objectively. Because of our neural networks, everything we know factors into the decisions we make whether we are conscious of it or not. You probably disagree with about half the world's political orientation; if all humans operated logically and objectively, we would all agree. I don't regret this because we would all be Borg in this scenario, but the point is that any conclusion you reach through ‘logic' or ‘objective thought' is highly suspect and that by not listening to your gut, by ignoring your instinct and failing to recognize the surprising power of your unconscious mind, you are doing yourself a disservice.

You must embrace the thing that makes you better than all the world's super-computers; embrace your instinct. If you're designing a card and you don't feel a little warmth in your belly, a little bile in your throat or quickening of your breath, it probably isn't clicking. You have to feel that you have tapped into the essence of the thing your card represents. This is Art. A sculptor can chisel a perfect replica of his daughter, but if that statue isn't dancing or giggling or torturing her little brother, it won't feel like her and it remains a block of stone. But if he can hammer together a pile of slinkies, scooters and flowery hair-clips that evoke happiness, innocence and wonder then only the heartless will still call it garbage.

"I can create things I have never created before and I can create things in a way that I've never created them before." —MaRo

Some things have been done so much, that in order to do anything new, you have to add or change many things, not just one. A gourmet chef will rarely boast that his latest sauce contains only three ingredients. Rather they are always adding a teaspoon of kiwi juice and a pinch of cumin for that little something subtle to make it their own. Well more than 10,000 distinct Magic cards have been created and it is natural to feel you need to add one or more tweaks to your designs to make them different enough, but pizza is pizza and stew is stew: Nothing will ever replace cheese on dough or beef and potatoes. More is not better and more almost never resonates. Simplify, man.

In the case of game design, your goals will usually be some prioritization of fun, challenge and grokability within some pre-established framework. Anyone can design cards, but to design good cards (much less great cards), you must discard all ideas that do not benefit the larger design's goals more than it detriments them. That is, a card that is really fun but really hard to understand serves your purposes worse than a card that is just kind of fun but very easy to understand.

"Much of the responsibility of a designer is to make sure that the set you're working on fulfills the basic needs of the game."—MaRo

Remember also that in the context of a CCG each card designed is part of a larger whole. As MaRo has said many times, the card does not justify the set, the set justifies the card. A card that is excellent by itself but has nothing to do with the current set would better serve another set. Therefore, using it in the current set is a waste and is bad design at the macro level. Not only that, but under Mr. Roswater's reign, cross-block design has become the norm so your set needs to satisfy not only its block but the one before and after it. So now you've got to ask yourself, if this well-designed card that interacts well with the current set would be better released in the next block to help tie the two together.

"Doing things for the sake of doing them leads to bad design." —MaRo

Just as you must not waste a good card in the wrong set, you must not waste a good idea on the wrong card. Everyone can recognize a bad commercial because the advertiser had his nephew do it for him and his nephew is not a professional. The reason you can recognize it is that the first instinct of every amateur is to use as many tools as they can figure out in order to make them look knowledgeable. Rotating title screen, wipe to sponsor who is green-screened over stock footage, offers slides down in a starburst. Just reading that hurt, right? I know writing it did. The problem in their thinking is that knowing how to do something is not knowing when to do something and that is where experience cannot be faked.

"Rules shouldn't be broken solely for the purpose of breaking a rule. Rules should be broken when they serve a larger purpose." —MaRo

Some of the greatest designs we've seen have broken the rules as they were understood at the time. Breaking these rules (more like guidelines, really), is an important part of what keeps Magic fresh and exciting. It is also very tempting design space for a card designer—like the explorer who discovers the buried Indian temple full of riches under a hill the other explorers noted and ignored. But it is similarly dangerous. What if you spend three years digging that hill and discover there really is nothing of interest. Or what if you anger sleeping demons? Cards that break the rules must be in the minority, not only because some rules aren't meant to be broken, but if every card broke the rules, there wouldn't be any rules (and there are no games without rules). The aspiring designer should take a cue from Bob's Shrimp Shack and save the blinking text for when he's old and wise enough to know it's not just a solution, but the best solution.

Whether you are already an expert card designer or not, you'll want to brush up for the test. I have three prime recommendations for doing that. One, read about it. As it turns out, the best repository of game design advice on the web is Mark Rosewater's archive. There are over four hundred articles in there, so I have collected most of the best in a list throughout this article and below for your reference. Two, design a set. At least a set, probably a block. You will learn so much more about card design when you have to worry about over-arching themes and mechanics, relative card balance and limited & constructed play. Three, grab a few buddies of like mind and BYO draft.

Full-on Build-Your-Own draft will involve each player designing three booster packs worth of cards. I recommend a partial BYO draft in which each player designs one booster pack to compliment two real booster packs. M11-M11-* is an excellent starting point, but Zendikar-Worldwake-* or Scars-Scars-* are also excellent options. Within this context, you are not creating cards in a vacuum, but rather you are trying to match the other sets' themes and mechanics. These added restrictions will help build your design muscles better than a free-form BYO. Remember, you will actually be drafting these cards and playing with them, so you'll get to see which cards get played and which do not as well as how well the cards play. This live feedback is something that simply cannot be gathered on paper and is a great learning tool. It's also fun as all get-out.

There are several solid books on game design and creativity that you would do well to check out. I recommend A Theory of Fun or A Whack on the Side of the Head if you're the bookish type along with most Making Magic articles and a lot of Latest Developments. You probably don't have time to sift through all that, so try these.

• Kind Acts of Randomness
• What's the Problem
• Topical Blend #1 – To Err is Human
• The Space Between the Notes

  Ten Principles of Good Design, Part 1 & Part 2

• All Together Now (on Convergence)
• My First Ever Design Article (by Ken Nagle)
• Villainy 101 (by Tom LaPille)

You would be a fool not to review the original GDS from beginning to end. I strongly recommend trying to answer each question on your own before viewing the answers and to evaluate the answers before reading the commentary so that you can gauge how well your current thinking is in-line with the judge's. Concentrate on where your opinion differed from his and try to convince yourself that he knows better than you. Find arguments to justify his reasoning. It doesn't matter if he over-looked something or if your answer seems better because you will not be scoring the results, he will. It is not your goal to answer the questions in the upcoming tests correctly, it is your goal to answer them the way the Wizards judges will.

Let me give you one example to get you on the right track. Question 30 of the multiple choice quiz asked which of five Ravnica Guilds would have gotten Buyback as a mechanic. Boros and Rakdos were incorrect answers because they are aggressive guilds and Simic was incorrect because that guild is all about creatures. You might have been tempted to answer Orzhov since they are the guild of wealth (something buyback requires in mana and grants in cards) and of cheating death (what buyback does for spells). The correct answer was the Izzet because they are focused on spells and on manipulating them. You might have read MaRo's Izzet article and been of the opinion that building up resources in order to do the same thing over and over again doesn't fit the red-blue philosophy, but then why would they have printed Replicate? (Too bad Cascade wouldn't be invented for another couple years.) Remember that your goal in the test is to answer how the judges would answer. If R&D felt Replicate suited the Izzet, it makes sense that they would associate buyback, a similar mechanic, the same way.

Here are some more links to remind you of your judges' mindset:

• The Great Designer Search Archives
• State of Design 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, & 2009
• Design Language (Player Psychographics)
• The Evil that Designers Do
• Rare, but Well Done

creativity is "the ability to see connections between things that others do not."