Recently, Scott had the chance to sit down and interview the Executive Producer at Wizards of the Coast, Chris Cao, on the past, present and future of the F2P title, Magic The Gathering: Arena. He was also able to ask questions that you, the magic community, wanted to know!

Below is a transcribed version of the same interview!

Me:

“Well first and foremost, I want to kind of get an idea of the Arena team over there at Wizards and you guys have specific experience with both Arena, working on Arena as well as just your general history with Magic the Gathering.”

Chris:

“Sure. I have a sticker on my window because as a manager you’ve got to have some sayings, but mine is, we are the players who change the game. And that’s meant to be double edged intentionally. We have to be players and be players first, but we also have to change the game with respect. And I mentioned that not from just some saying, it’s because everybody on this team that’s true of. I’ve been playing Magic since Arabian Nights but I’ve been doing the off and on thing, like by some cards, my friends stopped playing, I stopped playing. Other people here have been playing the whole time. Anyone who’s on the team is playing, we all play with live accounts without comps on them. So our background, we try to basically say we are players because the special thing about Arena is we don’t actually make the card content.

What we’re doing is making the video game experience, that free to play PC experience of it. So that is both good and bad. On the good side we get to see things with fresh eyes, try to interpret it for players, be those first players of the game. On the bad side it’s also, well we have this, I don’t know necessarily negative, but we have a lot of responsibility to make sure that that goes all the way through and that that experience stays really high quality.

And so I’m answering your question in the fact that everybody here becomes a player necessarily by being part of the team. Everybody has that familiarity with Magic, but we have people on the team who built cards themselves, who’ve worked in R and D, who’ve been at Wizards for a while. I’ve been here three or four years. A lot of the team is in that sort of timeframe. Wizards is sending up a lot of digital efforts, as you can see from the other things that we’re doing. And so we’re sort of the pathfinders there for in house digital. Magic the Gathering online being the very first thing and it’s our sister game within the company.”

Me:

“Specifically in terms of that, so is the Arena team fairly separate from the Magic the Gathering online team then? Or I’m guessing you’re fairly departed from like the Pokemon TCG group as well because that was yours.”

Chris:

“We’re not involved in Pokemon anymore as a company that’s completely with Pokemon itself. There was an earlier time where Wizards was doing paper product with them, but that was much earlier. Right now, yeah, we’re both in the digital views group. We’re sort of what’s called first party in the industry, which means developers who are in house with everybody else. So I’ll go upstairs and talk to Aaron Forsyth and Ken Troop and Gavin and the rest of them to get questions answered and they’ll come down and tell us about our stuff. So we are in direct contact, as is the Magic the Gathering online team. And we actually talk all the time, but they’re sort of the forefather because they have a lot more cards than we have. They’ve been around a lot longer and so they offer experiences like modern and other things that we don’t being a standard focus game. So the two of us are very complimentary in that way.”

Me:

“Now that you guys are leaving beta, final release, it’s the big time. What made you guys decide at Wizards that now was the time for to final release? What are you adding that warrants the final release moniker, I guess?”

Chris:

“Well really for us it’s that the game and where it is, the offerings that we have, the addition of historic and sort of completing the full cycle of what standard is with Magic, felt like the right time. But what’s interesting is live games, beta launch, whatever else, means something different than necessarily for a box game. All this really means is we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing, but we are now announcing to the world going big and saying, “Hey we are ready. Bring the players. We have a new player experience that’s robust, where you can come and learn Magic. We have the full feature set that you’re going to need to know about to play Magic. We have alternate modes like brawl and the drafting and all the rest of it. We have the standard Magic experience including rotation, all there so you can see it and can understand what the game is about.”

And we really felt like we had to go through that full cycle so that we ourselves knew what was going to happen. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop. Being a live game every single release, we recently released a state of the game where we talked about what we’re doing the rest of the year. Every single release, we’re just going to keep adding, modifying, changing stuff. Even what we’re doing with historic, our non rotating format is pretty different, making it a very sort of dynamic environment where we’re creating a new format essentially for Magic. So this is not a, “Hey, we’re done and go ahead and play it.” We release 1200 cards a year or something like that. So we are going to just keep cranking, but we’ve seen this sort of full cycle of a standard now, we understand it, we understand how players interact with it, how it works as a business. And we said, “Cool, now let’s go out there and let’s take that tag off.” For whatever it means for a live game these days.”

Me:

“I’m curious because you’ve mentioned previously how you really wanted Arena to be of digital representation of kind of like your table top experience, your kitchen table experience of Magic and I think with a lot of it, it nails it. But why the decision to release or go the final release now as opposed to waiting for a features like a friends list or friends messaging, which friends list is coming in October according to the road-map that you guys put out in your state of the game and then friends missing is in development. Why not wait for those kind of community aspects and social aspects to be done, in the bag first before leave the beta?”

Chris:

“Yeah, those are both very important, players have asked for them for a long time. We’ve actually been developing them and you can see how close we are to handing those out right now. Really for us it’s about the experience around the standard focus, what the consequences are of rotating cards, what it means to add other types of play to the game as the core value proposition. We believe the game will be better with the friends list, with the direct messaging, with some of the things we’re even talking about like deck sharing, just things that make it like you’re playing Magic. But we can’t possibly recreate all of the 26 years of person in play history that goes with Magic. But we believe we have the game center of it and now we can rapidly add some of these other things that we’ve been looking for for a long time, as well as things we don’t yet know about.

Magic is a great, very sort of responsive community. We’ve been talking with the community a bunch, they’ve given us all sorts of opinions on it and we want to keep adding to that as we go out. So there could potentially never be a day that it would be ready if we just said, “Oh just one more thing.” So for us its standards here, rotations here, Eldraine’s here, everybody sees the full game and hey just over the horizon there, friends list, friends messaging and more of kind of features that people just want as a lifestyle game versus a game you pick up and put down.”

Me:

“With the friends list will I be able to just right click on a friend’s name and challenge them to a game because right now it’s a little complicated I would say to do the direct matches with friends. Is that kind of the idea between behind the feature of the friends list or is it more just showing what friends are currently on, what they’re playing and that’s about it or can I directly challenge them just through the friends list itself?”

Chris:

“No, it’s actually one of the reasons why we are making sure it lands in October and it’s actually just a pace past launch. We want to make sure a direct challenge is really good. We’re going to have constructed brawl in there as well and the current system was put in very quickly to just let people play with their friends, but we want it to be like, “Hey Bruce is there. Cool. I’m going to challenge Bruce. We can choose what we’re going to play, we can have fun.” We wanted to upgrade that experience so it will be what you would expect from a sort of just challenge a friend and go kind of thing. Direct messaging will sit on top of that and we’ll continue to add more and more layers to it as we go through the different months of release.”

Me:

“Going on into kind of the balance between for players of both the physical card game as well as Arena. Arena’s dabbled in this a little bit so far with the Throne of Eldraine deluxe collection. Some of the pre-made decks have offered codes that will unlock content inside Arena. I’m curious if there’s any plans or if at some point players can expect perhaps the same kind of code to come with premier commander decks or even standard booster packs, to unlock some sort of digital version of the specific decks or give you a booster pack in Arena if you buy the physical booster pack. Is there any sort of thought behind doing something like that?”

Chris:

“Well, I think it goes to sort of our overall philosophy, which is Arena is part of the Magic ecosystem. While it’s the PC game, invariably, people who play Magic, play both sides of it and what we’re doing is finding out a lot about those folks, finding out what they like and what they play. So we’ve been running experiments with the different kinds of codes. You’ll notice different codes and products that redeem for different things and have been in different kinds of products. We’ve done that explicitly to try to figure out where the sweet spot is of it’s the right amount of fun or value. It helps really that product. Because we are trying to give that Magic player a digital part or digital value to whatever they’re doing in paper. We don’t necessarily want to stay one for one with everything.

We don’t want everything to be literal translations because we’re not just a strict simulation. We’re not just a copy. We have traditional Magic, we keep it pure. You can come play, play best of three and get it, but Arena also offers a lot more on the video game side. And so we want players to be able to go, “Yeah, I like playing Magic. I am a Magic player. Oh what did I get for Arena this time?” And not have the expectation because not everything translates directly. Magic itself is so much bigger and has such a greater legacy than Arena is yet there. We definitely want to get and catch up with our big brother, but we’re not there yet. So we are experimenting and we don’t want to necessarily set the trend that everything translates directly. Instead we want to go, “Oh, that’s cool too.” It just gives us more options, like we can give away things that tabletop doesn’t actually have, but that Arena has in some cases”

Me:

“For players that might not be super familiar with Arena that might be listening to this. Can you give kind of an example of that?”

Chris:

“Yeah, so I mean there’s basic things like the card sleeves that we do where we make different kinds of animated card sleeves or sometimes we make special ones that just don’t match up to anything in paper. We have introduced pets and are finding out what’s going on there, but who knows what the crossover potential is for our cosmetics overall. We have different kinds of events here than paper does necessarily schedule as part of organized play. So we are able to offer different interfaces but we want the same thing to come around, “Hey your a Magic player, here’s some more value, here’s some more fun. Go try something out.” And we want to keep experimenting to find the right thing because we have tried the literal translation in some cases and it didn’t work as well as some of the sort of more free form stuff where it was just, “Oh okay now I’m going to put on my Arena hat go play there and get something that matters to my Arena play specifically.” Rather than just is the literal thing otherwise.”

Me:

“Okay. And this kind of, the digital only kind of exclusive content that works, kind of plays into a question that we actually got posed to us from over on the Magic the trading card game, Reddit. I asked both the MTG Reddit as well as Magic Arena Reddit’s to submit questions and we got some fantastic ones. And this one specifically was from Darth Finster from over at the Magic TCG, Reddit. Their question was, any plans, and you touched a little on this, but to go a bit more into depth, any plans for digital only formats, cards, sets or things that can only be done in the digital space? You touched a bit on the card sleeves and stuff, but are you planning on kind of expanding that to specific, really things that can only be done in the digital scape?”

Chris:

“Well I mean, I don’t want to, we haven’t announced anything that’s specialized so I’ll just recap some of the stuff we have talked about. Like historic is probably the best example of that because while it is using cards and you could potentially play it in tabletop, historic is meant to be Arenas, digital only, non rotating format. Now we’re starting there because if players do want to replicate it in tabletop, why not? I’m saying like it’s still in that we’re close to home sort of space, but we have tried other things. We’ve tried other events you can’t really play like [inaudible 00:15:13] is probably the most classic example that we borrowed from Magic online, that’s not really a thing you can play easily in tabletop. But we are experimenting actively in those areas. I think there’s a missions draft, which is another thing that you could potentially play on tabletop, but it’s much better and much easier in digital.

So what we’re doing is sort of starting with what we know is fun, what players like and expanding from there and taking steps away from it. We’re not looking to make radical jumps here. We’ll continue to explore this space because we can, but that doesn’t mean that along the way we don’t just pick up a lot of this stuff that people have been having fun with. There’s other formats that we have yet to bring, like some people call it prints or otherwise, but uncommons and commons being brought in. There’s other things that we want to just offer to players that maybe just isn’t efficient or easy to do in tabletop.”

Me:

“So with specifically on what you were touching on, with the challenge of bringing things in. Where does the difficulty lie? What’s the most difficult, and this is from theory from Magic Arena, excuse me, theory from Magic Arena, Reddit and they want to know what’s the most kind of difficult and annoying card mechanics that you’ve kind of encountered coding into Arena. And how hard is it to regularly implement a lot of the older sets into it?

Chris:

“So what I think is interesting is we haven’t shared a lot about this because it’s a little bit of a tricky topic, but to give the highline, not all cards are equal. Obviously players know that. But some cards are so disproportionately hard, that putting them in, by hard, it doesn’t mean necessarily impossible, it means a lot of [inaudible 00:17:07] work or a lot of multiplicative, sorry, complexity that makes everything else more complex. So we might put a card in and it might be fairly straightforward to do, but then it suddenly changes the way everything else works forever. And that is also part of the complexity that goes into it. The complexity of what does it cost to continue to build Arena. For just a specific example, dampening sphere took almost two weeks to do the rules for just by itself as a card and the proportion of it in play, how important it is. We have to adjust and modify all those things.

We’re committed to being a standard focus game. We worked actively with R and D to bring the best of the crazy stuff they come up with because that depth that Magic has no one else has. And it’s because they’re being daring with their mechanics and trying out new stuff. You can see for more of the spark, that is for sure. But at the same time we have to be willing to absorb that cost and build it, which then means when we go backwards or when we pick up other cards from Magic’s history, we have to evaluate them on a lot of axes that don’t look at just what does it take to put it in. There’s a lot of cards that just kind of work, but the few cards that don’t, have incredible levels of complexity to them.”

Me:

“Real quick to jump back to what we previously talked about, just for the people who have played more physical Magic and not so much Arena. Can you give a brief description of what the historic format is?”

Chris:

“Sure. The historic format right now, it’s tomorrow that it starts officially with the release, is any card that has been in the last standard and Eldraine. So it’s basically any card that’s in arena right now, which goes back to Ixalan at the start. We previously had through, as we were developing the product, we had [inaudible 00:20:19] and we had Amonkhet in the client and playable. Folks think we had in, Shadows Over Innistrad, but we actually didn’t, we had a few tests cards there. So to dispel that rumor, that’s not there. And folks have asked us why we didn’t bring back the other sets and that’s actually because we want historic to be fun and dynamic and driven by the players rather than just a big pile of everything we had. We could just put in everything we had, but it becomes harder to curate and to keep conversation going with players.

Now we’re only one set different. So historic is only one set different than standard, which means it’s a great time to start putting a few select cards back in there and tweaking it and having it build its own meta. And while we’re not a historic focus game, while it’s more of a thing that’s played as an also part of the game, we want to make it its own fun thing too. You earned all those cards, you unlocked them all, we want to make sure there’s still fun ways for you to play with them.”

Me:

“So will historic basically just include, is the plan I should say, for historic to only really include the previous rotation along with, cards from the previous rotation and the current rotation? Or will I ever lose cars that I have from the standard rotation?”

Chris:

“No you won’t. There are plans for historic to be the repository of all cards that have been standard in Arena at any time, including the open beta as well as cards we specifically add to it. And the reason we’re adding those cards is to make sure that there’s a meta and that there’s actually an interesting non rotating format to play. They’re going to help us tweak that and we’re working with the card studios to make sure that that’s a fun experience

And those cards, those select cards, those are the ones from even older sets that go back farther.”

Me:

“And those cards, those select cards, those are the ones from even older sets that go back farther.”

Chris:

“Right.”

Me:

“Okay.”

Chris:

“Correct. And they’re not beholding to any format. They aren’t necessarily just from modern or from any place. They could come from any place in the past. They could come from a modern horizon set. It’s really about the card and how the conversation between ourselves and the players goes to try to keep historic fresh. That’s really the value of historic for us, is we want to know what players are playing. We have deep analytics so we can actually see what’s going on and we can live tune that much more easily than the tabletop game can and that’s not a detriment to them, that the pace they work at. Since we work at digital pace, we can make an on rotating format that actually adapts and keeps its meta fresh on purpose, through the addition of cards or maybe sometimes the banning of cards.”

Me:

” I’m curious with kind of casual duels and unranked things, playing with friends, are you going to give players the option of kind of tinkering with any of the game rules specifically for that match? Match rules like starting life or banning certain cards that they don’t want to play or unbanning banned cards, things like that. Are you giving … is there any thought behind letting players play with friends kind of how they want in that regard?”

Chris:

“We haven’t announced any of that stuff, but a while back I used to talk about how we have a dreaming section. That kind of stuff is definitely in our dreaming section because people do that already on tabletop and have fun and that’s how formats are formed. So we’re dreaming about it, but no solid plans.”

Me:

” I’m going to touch a little bit on the roadmap that you guys recently put out. How long would you say, specifically in the in development and in concept columns, I have the graphic up right here, how far along is kind of each of those items? Is it organized in the order that we can kind of expect or to currently expect to kind of get those things? Friends messaging will probably be out first followed by the Mac build, etc. Or is it more just they’re all kind of in there, to be in there with no order?”

Chris:

“Sure, sure. It’s a very natural question, especially since you see road raps from other games and other products that are time based. The reason we presented it this way is because of the way game development works, especially live development. What we want to do is make sure what we put out is as good as we can make it. And a lot of times, even in our own beta, we’ve had to take pretty significant feedback about stuff and change it either in live or before it goes live. And so when something’s in development, that means it’s not just being, we don’t just build something and then ship it. We build it, play test it, consider it, measure it and change it. And so when it’s in development, we don’t put a hard timeline on it. It’s still in the relatively near future, it’s not like it’s forever away.

But we don’t want to necessarily set players expectations about a specific date because then that’s us making a promise to them and committing to a date regardless of the state of what we’re building. And we’d rather develop and release really excellent things that are on target, than just necessarily hit the date. The reason that coming soon has it is because those things are already going through the development phase and are now in the finalizing phase. Pretty sure they’re going to hit there but we still want people to know that that’s our target and if something else happens we may need to shuffle things around.”

Me:

“Can you give us and fans kind of a general idea of what’s kind of the lead thing that your focused most on the in development column and then the one that is kind of getting the most look at or is the furthest long right now in concept one, are you able to shed any light on what kind you’re prioritizing at this moment?”

Chris:

“To be fair for the next week or so I’m only caring about the launch and working on that. The answer to that one will always be card sets. Card sets take a very long time to build, we have to start very early with them so we are constantly developing overlapping layers of card sets. Beyond that, we aren’t really ready to announce anything because right now our focus is launching, hopefully everybody getting out there and doing the October friends and constructed brawl and all that. So that gives us our immediate timeline versus promising something that’s farther out.”

Me:

“Completely understandable. We’ll take one more from Reddit, and this is from O’Cyrus Brisbane from the Magic Arena, Reddit, kind of a two prong question. What lessons has the Arena team learned from Magic, the Gathering online that you felt allowed you to make Arena a stronger product? And what’s one thing that you’ve similarly learned about Arena that you think could be improved in Arena?”

Chris:

“So we learn constantly from Magic Gathering online. A lot of the players still play both games. There’s a lot of conversations between the team as far as development. We both released the card sets in our own software way. So it’s kind of hard to nail it down. As far as the biggest thing, they launched 15 years ago at a time when the idea of digital object ownership wasn’t even a thing in the broad universe. So they’re sort of pathfinders in all that, and that makes them a unique game. We’ve launched at a time where free to play and everybody being able to access a game is more of a thing. So we share a lot of the, how do you make cards knowledge, how do you run it? But we’re sort of very different products in our DNA side of the business model.

As far as what is the biggest thing we’ve learned from Arena itself, I think it’s just, we don’t quit when we talk to the players. We keep talking to them, we’ve said things, there’s things that have been popular or unpopular or whatever it is. But we’ve learned the true value of just staying engaged, doing what we’ve got to do to make the game as fun as possible. Keep talking to people, keep listening. And it’s something we’ve done from the very earliest days of closed beta and we’re never going to stop. And for Arena and for Magic itself, the ability for players to have input at that level, to be able to basically keep building the game with us, that’s just going to continue on. Sure we’re launched, but we’re going to keep adding features and those features are going to need the feedback and the game itself is always going to change. It’s a way to play Magic now anytime you want for free, but we got to keep that interesting, exciting to people as Magic itself continues to grow over hopefully the next 25 years.”

Me:

“And we’ll end with just kind of some fun theoretical ones. Chris, what vintage block, from any set, from Magic’s founding basically, would you like to most see in Arena?”

Chris:

“So my answers going to be, we have engineers right now who are already trying to pitch to get these things in and we’re having to sort of say, “Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let’s do these in our own time.” So we have lots of people who are excited. I don’t have a favorite. If I said my favorite, then I’d have some engineers mad at me and some others very happy. So I don’t even promise my own people’s stuff right away. We’re all very excited. There’s so many cards. We can add but we want to add the right ones at the right time.”

Me:

“And you guys are just getting ready to officially launched Magic Arena. I want to take a look into the crystal ball, into the far future as Magic Arena is in maintenance mode, and Arena two or Coliseum or whatever is coming out. Big hoopla. What do you hope, what feature sets and what would be your ideal end goal for the feature set or modes? What do you want the end state I guess, of Magic Arena to be, in the perfect world, what would you want?”

Chris:

“I think that’s super hard because Magic predates the internet. Magic itself is one of the few brands in gaming, at least in modern gaming, that starts to get to the level of chess, where it could be eternal as a game itself. I mean I know that sounds like a big claim for 26 years, but there’s not a lot that stays this popular and grows over 26 years. Arena is an expression of it. So I don’t know if we’ll be playing on refrigerators or VR headsets or with our holograms in the future. But Arena is another way to play that Magic. But Magic itself has been going and will keep going. So my hope is just that we’re another way that people can play this fantastic game and just, 30, 40, 50 years from now people are still playing and still having fun.”

Me:

“I desperately want hologram Magic now. Just so you know. If you guys could make that happen, I think you got a hot one in your hands with hologram. And finally, Chris, last question. What’s your go to color combo for Magic?”

Chris:

“Oh, so if I’m having a good day, my go to color combination is Boros. I like running into people’s faces and smashing them with things. If I have a bad day then I go to one of those horrible decks that steals stuff from people or anywhere in blue basically. And I try not to go there too often because nobody wants to spread blue too wide and far. But I get the people who love it. I just feel a little bit like, it has some things that make the game very interesting for the other person.”

Me:

“Yes, it does. It kind of turns you into a lightning rod of hate, I found with some of my blue decks.

Chris:

“I’d rather just go fight and have the cards battle than the trickery. But that’s why it’s great, you can change your mood and change your deck.”

Me:

“It’s perfect. But Chris, thank you so much. Just want to thank, please extend a huge thank you to everyone working on Magic Arena. I absolutely love it. It’s a fantastic game. Can’t wait to see what all gets added to it. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and have a wonderful, wonderful launch.”

Chris:

“Oh, we appreciate it. I will definitely pass it along. It really helps all the folks out there on the floor to hear that. They really love what they do and they’ll be excited to hear it. So thank you so much.”

And there you have it folks! Our interview with Chris Cao, Executive Producer on Magic Arena over at Wizards of the Coast! I hope you learned something you didn’t know before about the game, what’s coming down the road, and where the game may eventually end up!