Author's note: Due to a poorly timed power outage that has knocked out much of Southern New Hampshire, the following edits are being dictated by phone to a friend with an email connection. Please note that Mark actually prefers meat on his pizza and considers veggie pizza an occasional necessary evil. Also, all instances of "cowboy hat" should be replaced with "stylish and rugged Australian Outback brush hat".

"Hey, I want to apologize to you for having to hang up on you earlier. The office management isn't too keen on us taking personal calls during work hours." (This part is me.)

The voice at the other end is almost unnervingly fast, but I guess I should have expected it. I figured he'd be a little frenetic from the way he writes. "That's okay, I understand. So you're going to be in town at the end of the month? Well, I've taken a look at your work. It's interesting. I'd like to sit down and have lunch with you."

"Excellent." Really, what else am I going to say?

"Good. If you're free Friday, say, noon, you can come by the office and we'll go grab something to eat and just go from there. Do you know where the offices are?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good." My answers are uncharacteristically short. I'm a little nervous. Mark Rosewater, Head Designer for Magic: The Gathering, has just called my house to arrange a lunch meeting.

…

There aren't many figures in the Magic community more polarizing than Mark Rosewater. Whenever a major development in the designing of Magic becomes public, Rosewater is the man everyone points at. Who made this decision? Why is this mechanic so lame? Why would anyone approve a card as insane as Umezawa's Jitte? Whether or not he was the one solely responsible, the radical, emotionally charged swathes of the Magic-playing world usually have Rosewater painted as a crazy genius or an enemy of the state. For nearly all of us, the only glimpses of what's really going on with him are his own first-person accounts as written in his weekly columns on MagicTheGathering.com, which often come under fire for being too self-serving.

So what is Mark really like in person? What happens when you get to actually sit down with him and chat in person, rather than reading his articles? Which public view of Rosewater is most like the real thing?

If Rosewater is one of the men in charge of the greater direction of a game as complex as Magic, he must be some wild, outrageous personality in his everyday life, right? Nobody thinks of someone that "iconic" as just another person. Think about it. What is your opinion of him? All of you who imagined Mark Rosewater as the guy who lives across the street and two doors down, raise your hand.

Really, that's him. I've been there, I've met him, I've stood in line and waited for the change from our lunch bills at the pizza place with him. If I'm remembering it right, he likes veggies on his pie.

My wife and I had a few days of vacation time a few months back, and since we've been talking about moving out of rural New Hampshire and into the Seattle-Tacoma region for a while, we figured it would be a good idea to visit the area before committing anything to paper. For five days at the end of September, we played tourists in the Emerald City. We had lunch at the top of the Space Needle, slunk through the stores in the Pike Street Marketplace, explored the tunnels of the Seattle Underground, and drove up the mountain in Rainier National Park. On Friday, per our arrangements, I drove out to the Wizards of the Coast offices in Renton and checked in at the front desk.

"Hi, my name is Sean Fletcher, and I've got a lunch meeting with Mark Rosewater." The receptionist chuckled.

"Sure. Let me see if I can find him." She nodded over towards a small reception area. When I turned to take a seat I nearly walked right into him. Mark had been standing just behind me. I can honestly say he wasn't quite what I expected. If I hadn't seen his picture on the website before, I might have walked right past him and found a chair for myself.

The cowboy hat kind of threw me. Beyond this, he was dressed like one of my professors from college, with an Underdog t-shirt and the kind of jacket that looks like it only started getting comfortable after he'd left it under the couch for a month or two. At lunch I noticed the gold ring with the big smiley face on it, like the "grown-up" version of the ones the dentist used to give you as a kid. "My God," I thought, "He gets to wear whatever he wants to the office." Clearly, Mark just really enjoyed being Mark.

He shook my hand and asked if I was up for pizza. "We'll take my car," he said, "but first, I've got to stop by my desk."

I was going into the inner sanctum... or so I thought.

"Is this okay? I don't think I'm supposed to see any of that." Given the secrecy and the photos of the sign that says who is and isn't allowed "beyond this point" that they've shown on the Wizards site, I was genuinely surprised we were doing this.

"Don't worry," says Mark. "Everything is moving to the building across the street this week. You won't see anything you're not supposed to. So, did you play at the Ravnica Prerelease last week?"

I had, and I told him the highlights: I saw friends from Connecticut and Boston, played in two flights, wore a genuine Red Sox World Series Champions Ring, watched my iPod fry its hard drive, and helped my Limited rating tank. I was still coming off the high from the World Series ring, so stinking up the games and the iPod didn't hurt so bad. Mark seemed a little puzzled by this, but I suppose not everyone is privy to the joys of knowing The Curse is over... but I digress.

The offices were fairly bare. Aside from some old Legions press sheets in a recycling bin, you'd never know that this was ground zero for Magic. "That room over there used to be Richard's office," said Mark, pointing at what looked like an old conference room. If there had been, at any point, a Legendary Filing Cabinet of Lost Files of Legendary Lore, there I saw no sign of it. Nor was there any sign of Gleemax, the room where Bob From Accounting "fought" the Orgg, or a Time Machine. Unless the paperclip on the floor was actually part of one of Mark Gottlieb's secret ninja robot warriors, this place was just like any other functional office workspace - albeit one from which most of the desks and employee paraphernalia had been moved elsewhere. The most notable aspect of the space was a story Mark had about a window that was moved from the conference room here to a conference room elsewhere, leaving nothing but an otherwise unremarkable blank wall. While it was a little odd to register, I had to come to the conclusion that a lot of the work that goes into creating Magic is very similar to the sort of work that goes into, say, overseeing the resources for and production of paper goods.

Mark looks and talks like some guy I'd see raking leaves in my neighborhood. His office space looks like mine, with ordinary yellow post-it notes and ball-point pens. It's possible that this is all some crazy ruse, and Gleemax and the ninjas are just lulling me into a false sense of security. If MaGo's robo-ninjas are real, maybe MaRo's squirrel-ninjas are real too, and I'm under the influence of the memory-altering ink. Or it could be that the people who bring us Magic are pretty much normal people who clock in and out and do a job for forty-odd hours a week.

I did get to walk past the desks of the guys who maintain and manage the website, and one of them was at his desk. I don't know specifically who he was, but I thanked him for his efforts, and told him I hit the site daily. He thanked me back. I get the impression they don't hear it enough from the fans.

When we got to Mark's car, it was equally un-mind-blowing. See, Mark's got twin toddlers. His sensible family sedan has bits of crumbled Cheerios and shoe dirt in the floor mats. The stuff on the passenger seat got tossed to the back with the same abandon you'd toss textbooks (okay, comic books and late rented DVDs) over the headrest. Just like your car.

None of this was in any way, shape, or form a letdown. As a matter of fact, I was thrilled to find out that even the man whose whims towards the game could inspire torrents of internet fanboy rage was just another guy; it's validation that you can drive a road to success and still be the same guy you've always been.

Ten minutes later Mark's chowing on a personal pan pizza and I'm waiting for the one the waitress forgot to bring to the table. "It's not the fanciest place around, but it's tasty and close to the office". I like the way this guy thinks. To some degree, the dumb-guy part, that one that makes you think staying up to watch just one more episode of the Tuesday night midnight Aqua Teen Hunger Force marathon despite needing to be at work by 6:00 AM is a good idea, is still alive and kicking in Mark.

We talk about a lot of general design rules and principles; he's a game designer and director of projects and I'm a graphic designer and art director. It turns out there's a lot of overlapping in the thought processes on both sides of the table. I share my views on some things that I felt really hit home or fell flat of their potential, he talks about concepts like designing inside and outside of the box. "Leading a design team is tricky. If you encourage people to stay with what's safe, you risk stifling fresh, original ideas. On the other hand, if you challenge people to go ‘outside of the box' and push limits just for the sake of being ‘outside of the box,' you risk your team losing sight of why there was a box to begin with, and odds are there was a good reason for the box." I get this; I've been on both ends of this dilemma myself, having been the kid that alienated a client with proposals too far out there, and having had to explain to others why the wildest, flashiest idea was not necessarily the right one. Graphics, games, there's common ground in the design workspace.

Through the course of our conversation, it occurs to me that Mark may possibly use more parenthetical clauses in his speech than he does in his writing. I applaud the coworkers and family member who can keep his trains of thought on track long enough to figure out where he's going and get him there on time (I know his situation well myself; anyone who knows me knows that each of my stories is dependent on six others). We went from Magic to Oompa Loompas to The Living Dead to obscure Star Trek references and back. At one point I noticed a mother and her children looking at us sideways and very much confused. I burst out laughing and apologized to Mark. "Man, I just realized that if anyone is eavesdropping on this, they're hearing the absolute dorkiest earful they've ever gotten!"

I think the comment might have left him a little taken aback. I'm well aware that I turn into an uber-dork with the right people, but I tend to get self conscious about it midway in and try to pull back. Mark is, well, Mark. He's not ashamed to debate and analyze the socio-political metaphors of 70's pop-culture sci-fi and horror in depth in public spaces, and really, the rest of us are probably better for it.

Then he asks me what I thought of Ravnica, having played it the week prior. This is the part where I go over what I got really wrong, and what I still think I got right. Mark, if you're reading this, this is me with four and a half eggs on my face.

On the amount of removal in Ravnica: My first impression from the flights I played in Boston was that the removal just didn't seem adequate. I attributed part of this to what looked like poor distribution in the packs used at the prerelease. I still stand by this part of the argument, as it has happened before and is largely due to the mechanical process used to cut and package the sheets of cards as they come off the press. Suffice it to say the process is not truly random, as it is performed by automated machines with copious control measures.

Secondly, a disproportionately large segment of the players in my flights built decks around really hefty Green and White creatures, and cards like Last Gasp just weren't enough to kill things on their own. Third, Red got far fewer cheap common burn spells in Ravnica than it had in Champions of Kamigawa, giving the immediate false sense that the removal level was down. Lastly, I distinctly remember that in my first flight, everyone at the table was excited about Lightning Helix. With each of sixteen players at the table opening seventeen uncommon cards, this means that 272 uncommon cards will be opened. In that flight, only one single Lightning Helix turned up at that table. Now, it is still statistically reasonable that with over 100 uncommons in the set, this distribution was right on the money, but it just felt hinky at the time.

Several months later, I get why Mark seemed confused when I said the Ravnica removal base was weak.

On the ability to draft successful 5-color decks in triple-Ravnica: Yeah, I really got killed on that one. At the prerelease, I faced off with a local history teacher who was playing a five-color monstrosity with an amazing mana base. He had all four Karoos – some in multiples – and three of the four Signets. Throw in two copies of Farseek, and he finished the deck by simply playing the best eighteen cards in his pool, regardless of color. He was two-and-one when he faced me, and I barely edged him out in three games. This led me to the belief that five-color might actually be a viable strategy in limited.

I told Mark about this, and he said it sounded very unusual.

Turns out, with the exact perfect mix of cards, any strategy has potential. The deck I saw was a total fluke. Now I'm still not convinced that even with Guildpact that five-color is a good idea. Mark was right, don't go there... yet.

On the impact of the first four guild mechanics: Mark was very excited to hear about what I thought of the ten-guild plan for the block. I expressed some concern that if this were a format for long term set design that it could have a negative impact over time. My concern was that in the past, blocks followed a linear growth pattern over the three sets. A mechanic started basic and evolved from the beginning to the end of the block. Alternate uses and costs for mechanics kept the same mechanic fresh over the course of a year. With Ravnica, mechanics had a more geometric progression; take all of this mechanic and theme now in one chunk. Next, add a different chunk. Now patch in a third different chunk. The overlap is there, but there is no real growth in any one guild once it is presented. Theoretically, the guilds could have been released in any order at all.

Once Mark assured me that this was not a permanent change for all blocks to come, I was a lot less bothered by the idea. The "guild method" was the identity for Ravnica specifically. While the notion of re-purposing this method was not ruled out, it was not to be the new norm. From here I was able to voice my views on the individual mechanics themselves.

Mark's view was that no guild was designed to spawn a specific guild-mechanic based Constructed deck. He felt that the most likely scenario was that pre-existing Constructed deck archetypes would be updated with guild mechanic enabled cards. My argument was that two of the four mechanics were already synergistic enough to be preconstructed decks on their own, while the other two felt more like simple utility tricks.

I saw Radiance and Transmute as one-trick ponies that behaved more like Mark's vision, while Dredge and Convoke were potential powerhouses that could prove strong enough for Constructed play without much tweaking. At this point, decks like Ghazi-Glare and Friggorid (and the lack of any brutal Transmute or Radiance decks) seem to be backing my theory. Boros Deck Wins typically uses more Convoke tricks (Devouring Light) than Radiance tricks, and Transmute, without a notable host deck, is more or less exactly what Mark theorized all of the guild mechanics would be.

On the Pro Player cards: Mark was actually pretty excited to hear what I though of the Pro-Player cards that were officially unveiled with Ravnica. I felt a little dirty, what with the possibility of being the first "average Joe" to actually break the bad news in person to him about R&D's newest baby. The low point was that overall, the Pro Player cards were a flop. Only a few players at the prerelease were interested in collecting them actively, and with dozens being left behind or discarded, it was easy for the collectors to build complete sets. The potential for a secondary market value on the cards was weak, seeing as high cost requires high consumer demand in the light of short supply.

The good news is the fact that the new free toy surprise in the Cracker Jack box really didn't come at any cost to the players; it really was a freebie to take or leave. Unfortunately, the dirty little secret about many Magic players is that we're greedy little brats at heart (you know the shame too) and if the freebie isn't completely amazing, despite being given a free gift, we feel slighted.

I told Mark that I am infinitely jealous (in a good way) of the opportunities his job affords him, but that I don't envy the necessity to endure the constant online flaming he takes from fans who don't agree with him. He said he's learned in time that what it means is that people really do care deeply about the game, and that to inspire a passionate reaction on either side means that you're getting people to really think about what it is that they value about Magic.

If you feel that Mark is indifferent to criticism, understand that he's ultimately reached a zen-like appreciation of the fans. You don't have to agree with his calls, and he doesn't have to give you exactly what you demand. Knowing that people are constantly shouting about something is better than not hearing the slightest whisper at all. I've got to say that once he told me that, things seemed to make a little more sense to me.

So now you're fuming that I haven't spilled any huge spoiler news... and the truth is that even though it turns out that Mark is very much a regular everyday dude, he's also very professional and tight-lipped. This is a guy that makes his living shocking the bejeezus out of us with the "next bold moves" in Magic. He is, in fact, so slick and close to the vest that when I began – without even knowing I was doing it – moving the conversation too close to what we'd soon learn to call "Coldsnap", he changed the subject very smoothly with a simple "Huh. That's interesting. Never really thought about that. Hey, have you..." A few weeks later the reaction had a lot more meaning. Retrospect can floor you.

I do think it's safe to tell you that we probably won't be seeing a Polynesian inspired Magic environment with Tiki Gods and surfing-monkey mages in the immediate future. When I asked if we'd ever get there (it's a personal interest I'd love to see in print), Mark laughed. "Brady (Dommermuth) would have my head for that. Magic is for serious things. Monkeys are for Unhinged."

Eventually, I got my pizza.

We spent the next hour or so back at the reception seating area talking about things like other games I play, comic books (Mark actually inspired me to read Watchmen with an article about the White portion of the color pie) and the TV show LOST. From there, we got into talking about what it takes to build the environment for these stories, and the stories that Magic tells, to exist in. As a graphic designer, I'm used to designing "meta-systems" that smaller design templates lock into. If I design a product catalog, I need to design individual pages that complement one another in a catalog that must complement prior company branding. Websites must have a cohesive order and methodology from the root page to the deepest sub-sections. Mark was interested in my thoughts on creating more "literal" environments - the locales and mythologies used in the aforementioned television programs, comic books and games.

Mark had me well trumped on those. I had nothing.

I've since begun trying my hand at some environment design the way Mark talked about it. Hey, it sounded like some fun, so why not? If you haven't already seen or read about it, check out my "make your own set" attempt here. It should feel fairly familiar. I've begun with a story and built the rest around it (those that read all the design articles at MagicTheGathering.com will recognize this as "flavor-down" design). Bit by bit, I'm adding backstory, character profiles, and mechanical "previews". Overall, the presentation is every bit as important as the content, and if I took anything from my chats with Mark, it's that without both form and function running at top performance, the overall product suffers.

Mark Rosewater has a very unique position: every year he has the chance to help reinvent, reshape, and retool a game played by millions of people all over the world. Somehow, despite the power that the changing of something as little as one digit on a piece of cardboard gives him in his ability to elicit applause or rage from said millions, MaRo is surprisingly down to Earth. He says he reads every email he receives, and having met him, I don't doubt it. He may not be able to respond to all of them individually, but they do matter to him, and when he decides to actually go all out and chat in person with a fan, how much the community matters becomes abundantly clear. It's a big part of his life, and he does it every day… timeclock, Cheerio crumbs, post-its, and all.

Thanks again, Mark.

Sean "Spardo" Fletcher
Minor League Magic