Sometimes on the way to beautiful, you have a lot of chaos
Mark and his wife decided to move to a new home because they wanted to give their children a better education as they weren't happy with the schools at their location at the time. The process of finding a new home, selling the old one and renting a temporary place until the permanent house was finished wasn't smooth. They suffered from delayed schedules, lack of space and resources because thing didn't go exactly as planned. Mark's wife, at some point, told him that the chaos that they were enduring was part of a long term goal. Mark tells that designing sets is pretty much a chaotic process where things change, shift and sometimes you are left hopeless because nothing seems to work.
Mark likes to take the approach of starting with a concept that is complicated but at the same time captures what they want to achieve in the final version. They play around with it and iterate many times, discarding unnecessary parts and refining it until they reach the desired state. The example that he gives are the sagas, enchantments meant to capture Magic's storytelling nature. It started out as a game board where players had their own pawn and a track, in which some key events would be marked along the way. The final version is what ended up being printed. A subtype of enchantments that, each turn, triggers an event, until the last one is triggered (the climax) and the enchantment self destructs and thus, ends the story it represents.
I can see his point. When I think about a map, it's usually something big and that needs to be trimmed down to a more manageable size. I believe that most games start as a pool of ideas and not every idea is going to make it to the final product. Many more ideas are going to sprout up along the way. Now let's think on the opposite direction. Can something begin small and then grow up, expand, till it's much larger than it was in the beginning? Yes. I can't say which way is right but I tend to agree with Mark that by starting out at a higher complexity level does give a lot of room to experiment, to discuss and to look at something from many different perspectives. It can be argued that by starting out simple, at a lower complexity level, is better in some scenarios though.
About the chaos that ensues during the process of creating something new or moving into previously unexplored spaces I pretty much agree with him. Life itself is never a straight line where everything progresses as smoothly as possible. However, with decades of experience in making magic I'm pretty sure that Mark has a very good ability to predict when something is not going to work or foresee the next steps when making a set. That's the experience that we all gain when we became more skilled at doing something. I'd add that when chaos is excessive there must be something wrong, because we shouldn't view chaos as a prerequisite or something that is bound to happen no matter what. That's not the lesson here: that we should always expect chaos or that we should strive for it.
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