Introduction - 2025-03-06
Why is there an MTG section of your website about Canadian Privacy News?
While I am passionate about Canadian privacy and seek professional fulfillment within the privacy domain, my family, girlfriend, and closest friends can attest that I spend more time thinking about Magic: The Gathering than anything else. My mind is constantly filled with Magic: The Gathering designs, even when I’m not consciously thinking about them. So why post them here instead of keeping them on my desktop, hidden from potential employers? Because I spend a significant amount of time thinking about this game and how it's designed, and only now have I realized that this website could serve as a place to concretize and share the ideas I’ve kept to myself. I want to turn my ideas into something that feels more real—maybe even something I could leverage later on in my career. So, if you’re here for Canadian Privacy News, it costs you nothing to ignore this section of my website. Please navigate away and return to your scheduled programming!
Context
I accidentally found my dad’s shoebox of old Magic cards when I was eight years old, and my love for the game has only grown stronger into adulthood. I imagine my experience at eight years old was fairly common. A younger player’s love for Magic often starts with the art. This is mostly because, as a child, Magic is too complex a game to fully grasp. Everyone who played Magic as a kid has a story about playing at the kitchen table and tapping their Llanowar Elves to search up a forest from their library and put it into play—I was no exception. In the absence of a formalized game, you hone in on the storytelling implicit within the visuals, playing creatures based on how they look rather than how they actually function within the proper rules of the game.
As a player matures, they begin to appreciate Magic on its deeper levels, naturally focusing on the appeal of its gameplay. Take, for instance, the newest Magic: The Gathering set release at the time of my writing this—Aetherdrift. It features some of the least legible art I’ve ever seen and, in my opinion, sacrifices crucial world-building for the gimmicky payoff of portraying Mad Max: Fury Road in card form. I found the aesthetic of this set especially disappointing because of how much I loved the aesthetic of Amonkhet—a world that Aetherdrift revisits—and the first Magic set I took seriously and drafted at my local game store. However, despite my gripes with the aesthetic of Aetherdrift, I’ve played an obscene number of drafts because the gameplay is rich. My point is this—the hierarchy appears as such: gameplay > balance > aesthetic. But when you’re eight years old and don’t yet understand the game, aesthetic trumps all.
Why Design Magic?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo, I wrote a paper about the Magic: The Gathering colour wheel. While Magic is widely recognized as the “first” and “best” in many aspects of the tabletop gaming industry, I find the true genius at its core to be the colour wheel and its underlying philosophy. This is because the colour wheel enables Magic to translate anything—and I mean anything—into its property.
To illustrate what I mean, here’s a parallel example.
Recently, I’ve been editing my father’s book on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and one recurring theme in the Q&As with those involved in the property is the Turtles' ability to adapt while maintaining an unchanging core. Turtles can do sci-fi, drama, comedy, or even a crossover with Usagi Yojimbo, and it all works because the foundation remains unchanged: the family dynamic and brotherhood between the Turtles. This adaptability is what allows the Turtles to endure as a franchise—there are knobs to tweak that keep the property novel, but its core identity always remains intact.
Magic operates in a very similar way, and I argue that its unchanging core is the colour pie and its uncanny ability to accommodate any other property. Each colour of the wheel represents a perspective rooted in a guiding philosophy. Green seeks harmony through acceptance, red seeks freedom through action, black seeks satisfaction through ruthlessness, blue seeks perfection through knowledge, and white seeks peace through order. This framework is a brilliant system for translation that allows Magic to incorporate any character, action, or entity—even from other intellectual properties. Properties such as Fallout, Final Fantasy, Marvel Superheroes, and The Walking Dead have all been, to the chagrin of some, translated into the Magic design space through the lens of the colour pie.
To further illustrate, let’s try translating TMNT into the colour pie (you heard it here first—the TMNT Magic set will be on shelves in 2026). Raphael is red because he is emotionally volatile and acts before he thinks. Donatello is blue because he fabricates tools and approaches problems analytically. Leonardo is white because he is a leader who unites his brothers around Splinter’s teachings. Michelangelo is more nuanced—he could be red because of his emotional expressiveness or green because of his “go with the flow” attitude. A designer would have to decide which of his traits is most defining for this iteration of his character. This exercise ignores the likelihood that they’d be multi-coloured, which would further deepen the examination of their identities. If we assigned two colours, Mikey would likely be red-green, Donatello blue-red, Leonardo white-green, and Raphael red-black. Hopefully, by now, my point is clear—Magic's design space is a powerful tool for reframing anything through the colour pie and distilling it to its essence. And reaching that essence is satisfying.
What Have I Designed So Far, and What Are My Plans for This Section?
Now for the practical side of things. As I just spent the last section explaining, Magic is an incredibly satisfying design space for translating other properties. Like many aspiring Magic designers, I started by taking a property I love and attempting to translate it as accurately as possible into the Magic framework. For me, that property is DOTA 2 (Defense of the Ancients 2), a Valve game that was originally developed as a Warcraft III mod. Side note: I’m only now noticing the parallel between DOTA as the first MOBA and Magic as the first TCG…
Currently titled DOTA Set, this set was designed as a cube for four-player drafts, optimizing for my playgroup’s most common gameplay scenario. As of this writing, the set includes 360 cards: 69 artifacts (3 artifact creatures), 2 battles, 173 creatures (126 legendary), 41 instants, 22 enchantments, 24 lands, and 25 sorceries. Yes, I know that’s only 356 cards—I’m constantly refining the set.
As a fun insight, here’s the very first design that sparked this entire project:
When I first designed Anti-Mage, the final line of the card was not there because I had not created that mechanic yet.
Anti-Mage was deceptively easy to translate into Magic's design space and I think that’s why it was the first card I thought about when brainstorming this idea. In DOTA, he has an ability called Counterspell, which grants magic resistance and reflects incoming spells. I represented this in Magic with “hexproof from instants and sorceries”—maintaining his magic resilience without making him completely untargetable, which would be unhealthy for gameplay. More importantly, Mana Burn—his defining DOTA ability—removes an enemy’s mana and deals damage based on the lost amount. In Magic, “mana burn” was actually an old rule that dealt damage for unspent mana, later removed from the game’s rules. I decided to bring this mechanic back for Anti-Mage, templating his ability from the existing Magic precedent: Yurlock of Scorch Thrash from Commander Legends. This design forces an opponent to tap out when Anti-Mage attacks them, reinforcing Anti-Mage’s mana burn flavor and counterspell hate.
What’s Next?
Right now, I’m putting the finishing touches on the DOTA Set and balancing out the ratios of the colours to ensure that each colour is accurately represented within the 360 cards. I plan on doing a weekly blog post on my progress, as well as providing a novel mechanic each week that I could tinker with in the future. Thanks for reading.
