Hello, everyone! I'm Jules Robins, a physics student at UCLA and a certified Magic: The Gathering addict. Until today, I've been writing predominantly about the Commander format over on QuietSpeculation, but here on GatheringMagic I'm going to try something a little bit different.

When I began thinking about applying to colleges, I started to consider what I wanted to do with my life. I was pretty sure I wanted to at least try majoring in physics because I'd enjoyed physics classes and books so much in high school. But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that physics held no careers I'd enjoy. Work can be a slog, but why should it be? And with that thought, I decided that I wanted to work at Wizards of the Coast, making this game we all love.

Wizards of the Coast’s offices in Renton, Wa

Since that time, I've been honing my craft by designing my own cards and sets and subsequently following the second Great Designer Search religiously (I was too young to enter when it took place). Since then, Magic design content has gained a lot of traction with Gregory Marques's professional perspective on Channel Fireball, Bradley Rose's project on Red Site Wins, and the entirety of the Goblin Artisans blog.

I haven't worked at Wizards, nor did I prove myself in the search, but I've been doing a lot of design work, predominantly on Jay Treat's Magic 2013 design team, and I want to support the burgeoning design community in any way I can. On that note, I've been looking for an underrepresented area of Magic design, and Chah came up with a great suggestion: world building.

Sure, that piece of the puzzle technically falls under Creative, but the recent push has been to integrate flavor very closely with design. Zendikar’s land focus led to an adventure world which necessitated quests and Allies; the only reason that the Mirran faction was even in Scars block was because it made for a cooler story to tell; and Innistrad is looking to be the most top-down block experience ever.

This shift in focus has made world building much more important to modern design, and as such, it was in this arena that the GDS2 finalists proved themselves. As that might tip you off to, world building is hard. Today, I’ll share the methods I’ve gathered, and in subsequent weeks, we can try to employ each of them and see what comes about.

Taking Derivatives

The easiest place to find a world concept is in existing fantasy tales. I got my start in card design at age eleven when I decided to combine my love of Magic with Lego's Bionicle franchise. Here, I created nothing—I just faithfully tried to turn everything in the world into a Magic card. This isn't an approach I'd recommend; Magic worlds require a lot more precision than a given fantasy plane, and this setting left me with terrible color imbalance and a dearth of non-permanents. That said, the basic concept holds value. If you're at a loss for a world concept, tweaking an existing one and adding to it can get you started. Still, unless you stray pretty far from your inspiration, it's going to be hard to pass the world off as something new.

Atmosphere

Mechanics and settings shape one another, so rather than coming in with a fully fleshed-out world, it’s entirely plausible to instead pick a genre and start with top-down designs of its signature elements. Innistrad seems to have done this for gothic horror, where we see top-down designs of common elements without the entire set coming straight from a single text. Rather, both Innistrad’s tropes and unique additions are emblematic of the horror setting, and one could imagine much the same of a Western-themed block like Daniel Williams’s Deadsands.

Inner Workings

Zendikar offers us another approach: Without any sort of creative starting point, one can choose a mechanical game element to emphasize and build a world from there. “Lands matter” led Wizards R&D to an adventure world, and then they redefined the block from there. Similarly, starting from an “instants and sorceries matter” front for one of my own designs brought me to a despotic aristocracy that used magic to oppress the mundane masses, and then, I designed cards in that vein that had nothing to do with non-permanents.

This is a great approach to use if you identify a whole, new unexplored area of design space or have a cool mechanic idea that you want to work around, but it starts to lose relevance when you go for something like Lorwyn that repeats an old theme in a new setting.

Elementary

While Zendikar-like world designs seem to stem from mechanics, you can actually put the method to good use without one. In using a mechanic, you’re essentially defining that element from a flavor perspective and then building up the rest of the world to support that. In much the same way, you can use one idea for a piece of the setting to build an entire framework, even if the original element doesn’t take kindly to being represented on cards.

This approach is particularly helpful when it comes to creating a storyline. Trading card games are a terrible medium for conveying a linear story—not only is the designer unable to control the order in which the audience sees the various elements, he doesn't even have a guarantee that they'll encounter the main characters. For this reason, recent Magic designs have focused less on a single story than an overall shift in atmosphere. For instance, I'd bet that a lot of you didn't know that Venser died to break Karn out of the praetors' clutches, but almost every one of you knows that Phyrexia took over the plane of Mirrodin.

This divide can make things awfully frustrating when you come up with a fantastic storyline idea, but the more you explore a story, the more of the basic world you'll develop to convey that, and then you've got something to build around.

Singular Focus

In a similar vein, even without a story, defining one element of your setting will ignite a chain reaction of creative process. A great way to make logic work for your creativity—rather than against it—is to make a single change to a basic fantasy world and trace out the consequences.

What if instead of being reviled beasts, dragons were regarded as prized creatures of sport, like horses are now? Not only would they not be hunted, people would raise livestock specifically for them to eat. There would be dragon racers, and law enforcement would cruise around on their backs. Dragons wouldn't travel at the same altitude as pedestrians, so there would be no competition for space on the streets, and as technology progresses, no intersections. City planning might not even emerge, leaving windy streets that would make cities difficult to navigate, so perhaps they would never grow into huge metropolises. With less concentration, plague would spread more slowly, and people would be less willing to submit to a religious authority that promised deliverance. Perhaps on this plane, life is seen not as a test, but as a test run. Once you get it worked out, you can live happily for eternity, but you aren't damned for weakness. Well, I guess that means we don't need demons.

There you have it, domesticated dragons imply the nonexistence of demons, and you could go on from there. None of these implications needs to sound reasonable—the player never sees them. But going through this sort of process should spark ideas for things to change, and that's all you really need.

Thus far, these five methods of world building have proved most effective for me, but I'm sure there are many more ways to go about it. If you've ever tried your hand at building a backdrop for a Magic set or have any ideas about how to do so, I'd love to hear them. Next week, we'll get to some actual card design when we begin exploring different world-building techniques, and if all goes well, we may eventually begin work on a set. Any and all feedback, about what you'd like to see less or more of, or even whether you're interested in Magic design at all, is appreciated.

Jules Robins

Julesdrobins at gmail dot com