Intrigue
Trust Your Set Concept
Written by Janahwhamme
Adapted from “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott
and plagiarized with love from “The Penelope Instinct” by ThatDamnPipsqueak
People are very affixed on the idea of creating “a perfect set”. People are even more affixed on the idea of making a perfect start to their perfect set, to make a project that has no flaws. These are not unusual features to develop in a creative space, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. For custom Magic: the Gathering, this has led to a phenomenon here that I hereby dub The Endless Pitch, where a designer—usually, but not always, a first-time designer—finds themselves spending a very long time in Vision Design without ever actually moving forward and making the set, getting themselves mired without making progress. For those of you who have read Pip’s Penelope Instinct essay, these are very similar but not quite congruent terms.
Sometimes someone who’s stuck in the Pitch will jump from set idea to set idea endlessly, throwing an innumerable amount of pitches out for things that could be good sets, but never settling down on actually going far into it. Sometimes, they only have one concept, but they’re constantly shifting it over and over, changing up mechanics, or archetypes, or the theme, or the characters, or the setting design, going on and on and on, but never actually doing anything beyond shuffling around the starting premise. Sometimes, people will turn the eye on themselves and pick their ideas to pieces, finding everything that could be wrong with them, and then they throw it all out and start over again so that they can start from the beginning without any of those flaws.
Even more often than any of those are people who simply give up, find the process of revising too hard or too discouraging, and stop working on it altogether, let the idea rot and die, and who go silent altogether. All of these are manifestations of the Pitch.
It is far, far less work to reject or dismiss something than it is to make something. Critique should always serve the purpose of refining and moving forward--not rejecting.
There's a very meaningful line where commentary stops being valuable, and starts holding a developer back, or makes them overthink. This commentary sometimes comes from the creator themself. Fight this urge.
I feel we as a community do more than we’d like to admit to further this. Our expectation is to find the flaws in things—to see what isn’t good, and to try to push to “be better” as much as possible, because we are primarily a community of constructive criticism and shared interest. Our response to someone saying “hey, does this look good,” is to see it and try to find the things that don’t look good, because we want to find the flaws and fix them.
It doesn’t help that it’s so much easier to find flaws than to find successes. But by finding all the flaws in the start, and by enforcing mistakes, what we often do is to push people to “try again” rather than to “move forward”, and encourage them to go back and start again until they find a pitch that doesn’t have anyone who can find a flaw. Thus, our innocent critique has created a feedback loop where designers feel pressured to make a perfect start, and get them into the Endless Pitch.
But there’s no such thing as a perfect start. It’s not possible. Nobody can have greatness pour from their brow like Athena, emerging as something elegant and beautiful. The only way to get out of the Endless Pitch is to take a shitty start and keep working on it despite the fact that it’s shitty. It’s not possible to create a great first draft. What is possible is to make a shitty first draft, and then keep working on that draft until you have a real thing with it—so that you can then work on the actual made thing and iterate it into a better second draft, then hopefully a great third draft, and then on and on until you end up with the perfect set. It is so, so much easier to edit something and refine it and play with it (literally, for M:tG cards, play with it) than it is to start again and create a perfect start that has no issues. It is far more effective, too.
It's very common for designers to finish a set, and then return to it later for a "remastered" or redone version; which can be a great place to fix issues that came up the first time.
Possibility exists everywhere, in every set. It's the matter of the developer to take what ideas they have and actually use them to see how that possibility shakes out.
We must embrace the shitty first draft if we are to break the power of the Endless Pitch, both as direct designers ourselves, and as critics looking at them. A completed set is not something that emerges from the æther clean and elegant. They are long, and slow, and there’s plenty of time and plenty of space in order to find flaws as they come up, and adjust them as they exist. The designers can and should be encouraged to test and model these things based on finding data, from playtesting, and from actually designing cards, not from someone else, even someone else who is experienced, saying “hmm this doesn’t seem very good, try again!”.
The next time you have (or see) a set concept that does something that’s by-the-books and boring, like another black-and-red sacrifice archetype for Limited, or a thing that doesn’t actually play very well, like a keyword based around fighting, don’t let that get in the way of the thing being made.
It is far better to let someone try and fail than it is to tell them not to do it at all. Even if you’re looking at someone else’s project and saying “I’ve done this before and it didn’t work!”, it isn’t actually teaching them how to fix those mistakes by saying “this is wrong”, it’s just telling them to not do it. Experience is a learned process, and problems are solved by working with it, not by throwing it out. If you have a thing and it’s failed, you still have a thing, and you can work to fix it—you cannot do that if you do not have anything at all.
We are all guilty of enabling this to various degrees, both for our own works and for other peoples’. I know I do it more than I should. But it’s really important to just let people do the thing and actually get to making a set. In the bastard paraphrased words of Shigeru Miyamoto, “A shitty set can eventually become a good set. But a set that doesn’t exist will never become anything.”
