Beyond the Norm: WotC School of Business (Crash) Course Catalog

(Disclaimer: I love Magic, have a lot of respect for Wizards R&D, and understand that building formats is a very tough job. The following contains some… er… playful jabs at Wizards, but is hopefully enjoyed as good-natured.)

Are you a fan of the world’s most popular trading card game, Magic: the Gathering? Are you interested in taking your love of the game to the next level? Well, it’s time to step behind the curtain! Wizards of the Coast is excited to announce the creation of a new set of classes that will teach you how to do game design and management like we do! I’d say check out our website, but there are still a couple of bugs. Just so you can get a sneak preview of what’s to come, here are some screenshots of what we’re using for inspiration!

Now that you have a good sense for what it will look like, check out some of the exciting classes we’ll be offering!

Game Design 101

Have you ever wanted to learn how to design Magic cards? We anticipate this being our most popular class. Here are some testimonials from early focus group participants:

“Designing cards is about the only thing that Wizards does competently,” raved Reddit user 3dgyT33n69

“I don’t think I’ll ever get Mark Rosewater’s voice out of my head. But then, I suppose that’s a feature, not a bug. And restrictions do breed creativity…” said a participant whose name we couldn’t get before he wandered off muttering about the color pie

Development and Playtesting

[NOTE TO CATALOG EDITOR: We need to make something up here. What do these words mean? Do people really think we play the cards before we release them? Like… in actual matches?]

Recruitment

Learn all about how we at WOTC find the next up-and-coming players to spotlight at the Pro Tour and other big tournaments! This class will cover the following topics:

• How to play Hearthstone
• How to stream Hearthstone
• How to figure out which Hearthstone streamers have the most viewers
• How to write checks to Hearthstone players

Co-Req: Public Relations 201: How to Deal with Public Outcry after you Screw Up

Logo Design

It’s important to have a strong logo to represent your card game. When we shifted to our newest logo, the response was overwhelming.

 In fact, graphic designer Sam @RhysticStudies posted a 13-tweet series on Twitter gushing over our new logo on the Dominaria Art Book.

He summarizes the series by saying, “so to recap: three different fonts, all leaning to the right, jockeyed out by an overbearing symbol, with poor attention to spacing between the titles, and an outdated drop shadow to contrast foreground / background, on the cover of a book about graphic design!!!”

Cardboard: An Introduction

You tear up Amazon boxes made from it, compare bland foods to it, and generally take it for granted. But cardboard is not only a cornerstone of our society; more importantly, it’s a cornerstone of our game. Are you curious about how to ensure that your cards have that charming, signature parabolic curve? Are you looking to learn our secrets about how we fixed the problem of rigid, unbending cards? After this class, you won’t need humidity to do the kind of bend-job we’re going to do to these cards – and your mind.

Drug Trafficking

You can learn everything you wanted to know about the cardstock itself in the previous class, but what that class won’t teach you is what makes the stuff so damn addictive. In this class, you’ll learn all about how we pack each booster pack full of a cocktail of highly addictive powders disguised as that “new card smell.” It might surprise you to learn that we move more volume than any other drug dealer in the world. When they made Breaking Bad, did the producers go to actual drug cartels and the DEA to do research? Hell no; they came to us.

Commenting on Commentating aka Puns 101

Are you tired of being just an average commentator? Perhaps, when it comes to Magic, you’re looking to be a commenGREATor! Look no further than this class, where we reveal that the secret to great Magic commentary is not knowledge of the game, understanding what the cards do, or the ability to analyze gameplay but is in fact found in incessant, nonstop wordplay! Once you’ve mastered the punniest of puns, we’ll move onto more advanced topics, such as how to frequently remind your audience of how exciting this all is, how to attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of formerly unliked players live on-camera, and how to provide plenty of dead air to give your audience a break from your verbal barrage of puns! 

Intellectual Property Security

Look, leaks happen. And when you work at Wizards, leaks happen approximately once per set release. But what if I told you that it was all for a reason?

This class is broken into two parts. The first part teaches you how to build a distribution network that will have leaks at pretty much every level. You want to make sure that you give every opportunity for people in warehouses to take fuzzy pictures on their smartphones, steal stuff and take it home, and push rules updates for the new set in other languages, just to keep things interesting. Why do we build our system this way? So that we can catch the scum who share the leaks on social media.

The second part of the class really focuses in on how to hunt down anyone who shared the leaks, prosecute them, kill their families, and then, worst of all, ban them from the DCI. We’re optimistic that in the future, we might even be able to “take care of” those annoying punks who look at leaks.

Digital Boot Camp

Here at Wizards Academy, we really believe in learning from our students. So even though our website is well-organized, clean, and minimizes clicks, our flagship digital product has basically zero bugs and is well-coded so that new releases never break it, and we generally appear to demonstrate a mastery of all digital… things… we’re still looking for input from you. So if you’re a computer person who has been to “the cloud,” can speak to pythons or a cup of java, or is just really, really good at Microsoft Excel, we invite you to take this class so that we can learn from each other!

[REDACTED]

We hope you take this class, but, unfortunately, we can’t really talk about this class. Nor can we talk about why we can’t talk about this class. If you’re interested in taking this class, there are some items you’ll have to send to our Accounting Department. We can certainly not confirm that these items have monetary value, but we are interested in having them for collectability. Of course, our Accounting Department has people who do things for us there, but they’re not actually “employees.” Because if they were, and we paid them in cardboard, that would be illegal. Also it would be bad because it might imply that said cardboard has monetary value. Which it doesn’t. Obviously. Don’t gamble, kids!

Meeting Expectations

You always want to keep your audience wanting more. We at WOTC have mastered this art. That’s why when you say, “Bear Commander/Bear Lord,” we hear “creature with subtype ‘Bear’ that is not a 2/2 and does not care about other Bears.” It’s why when we made Khans of Tarkir a wedge set, we made sure not to follow-up the thing you’d wanted for years with more of it; instead, we switched to Dragons. Roar. Same with Magic Arena. Finally, we’re stepping into the 21^st century and really carving out some space in the esports market! But wait – we’re going to saddle it with an economy that will be sure it will never be played by competitive players! Here are Wizards, we know that the key to keeping your customers engaged is releasing products that are pretty much everything you want… except for that one thing that sinks them.

We hope that you’re as excited to enroll in these classes as we are to mismanage them! Be sure to share any ideas for other classes you have in the comments!

Ryan Normandin is a grinder from Boston who has lost at the Pro Tour, in GP & SCG Top 8's, and to 7-year-olds at FNM. Despite being described as "not funny" by his best friend and "the worst Magic player ever" by Twitch chat, he cheerfully decided to blend his lack of talents together to write funny articles about Magic. Make fun of him online through Twitter (@RyanNormandin) and Twitch (norm_the_ryno).