Chris Cocks became President of Wizards of the Coast in June 2016, before which he served as Vice President of OEM Technical Sales at Microsoft. We sat down with Chris to talk about his origin story, the future of digital Magic, and plenty of other fun topics. Below is the transcript of our interview.
To provide some context and analysis of what we discussed with Chris, we also wrote three-part article series. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
Who Was Chris Cocks Before He Was CEO of Wizards of the Coast?
Zac Clark: I guess we should just start out by having you give us a little bit of background. We know you’re from Microsoft initially, but tell us a little bit about your experience with a Wizards products before the transition.
Chris Cocks: I think my first Wizards product that I started playing was a Dungeon and Dragons that was probably around the age of 10 or 11. I remember I picked it up at a buddy’s house who lived a couple streets down and his big brother taught us the game and that was my first kind of real experience with a kind of fantasy games and fantasy genre over and I was hooked. They also introduced me to one of my favorite authors. So the Sword of Shannara was one of the first books I picked up after, after learning how to play DnD. And that was kind of fun as well.
We actually had Terry Brooks out here to talk to our company a couple months ago, so that was fun to have a little hero awe going on for myself. I’m meeting someone who’s written dozens of books and I’ve read them all. So that was fun. So, I started off in DnD and in like ’83. I then picked up when it was like 10, 11. I picked up Avalon Hill games a couple years later when I was like 12 or 13. So call it sixth grade or seventh grade, my first game there was Axis and Allies, and I loved strategy games and they quickly then picked up Conquest of the Empire, Fortress America and You Name It. And then I started playing Magic my junior year of college, either the late winter of 1994 or early winter of 1995.
And I think the first card set that I bought was the Fourth Edition. I remember picking it up with a buddy of mine in Newbury Comics in Cambridge and played that for several years. Then between that, I have a bunch of experience with a lot of our video games as well, particularly the DnD kind of old school RPGs. Pool of Radiance, Eye of the Beholder, the Planescape games, there were several dozen between like the late eighties and mid-nineties. And then a game that actually got me into the video game industry was Baldur’s Gate which my wife bought me Christmas of ’98. That immediately got me hyped up on video games again.
I came back to Cincinnati after college and went with a company called P&G and I was giving was doing healthcare and I was working on an osteoporosis medication for women 65 years and older. That was as predictably interesting to a 25 year old kid as you guys could imagine. After playing Baldur’s Gate, I was like, “I’ve got to get into an industry I have passion for.” And a nine months later, I ended up at Microsoft working initially in the PC games team, but within a couple months they splintered off a couple of us and we formed the core for the first party games team for Xbox. And so then the rest is kinda history.
Zac Clark: Very cool. I mean, you have a pretty solid nerd resume!
Chris Cocks: (Laughs )Yeah, I did. Yeah.
Zac Clark: You started the Magic just about the same time I did. I started in Fourth Edition/Ice Age.
Chris Cocks: Cool. Yeah, I played for a couple of years, my buddy, who I started playing with, um, he played a couple years longer than me. He went to law school after graduating from college and uh, he ended up actually helping to defray some of his living expenses by getting into some of the early Grand Prix, like in the mid to late nineties.
Passing on Magic to Your Children as an MTG Dad
Chris Cocks: I picked magic up again, I think in like 2011 or 2012 with Duels of the Planeswalkers. Then started playing paper Magic again when my son turned 8 and he was playing Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and I didn’t really understand the rules didn’t want to learn them. And it was like, OK, let me teach you the game that I learned and I think you’ll think this is cool. And he and I have been playing ever since. So that was fun.
Chris Cocks: I think I read an article on Hipsters of the Coast that was by you Rich, about being an MTG Dad.
Rich Stein: My daughter was born five weeks ago today.
Chris Cocks: The insights in the article kind of spoke to me as someone who started playing back in the 90’s then life took over for a while and then started getting back into the game. You’re a bit more of a competitive player than I ever was. But uh, I definitely, understood your life choices.
Rich Stein: Yeah, you know, it’s really crazy. I was talking to Zac the other night and I was thinking to myself, I used to play MTGO in college back in 2003, and I’m drafting the 2 AM with my roommates. Now it’s 15 years later, and I’m building sealed pools at 2 AM while my daughter is falling asleep. And that’s like a very weird, full circle sort of thing.
Chris Cocks: It’s interesting because like Magic is starting to actually become multi-generational. Guys like us, who started playing like in the 90’s and early 2000’s, we’re starting to have kids and the kids are starting to get into the age where they are into the game as well. Your daughter sounds like she’s still maybe a little young. But it’s fun to see people get back into it and I think we’ll see a lot of that this year with the 25th anniversary and some of the things we have planned either through our digital expressions of the game or through cool new sets we have like Dominaria, which are kind of blast from the past.
What Can We Look Forward to with Dominaria?
Zac Clark: I’m really looking forward to Dominaria myself. I’m really excited to see what happens with that. And when I talked with Mark Rosewater at a HasCon said, he said, “If you have an old-school heart for the game, you can’t not love this set.”
Chris Cocks: Oh yeah. I’ve only gotten to play about three or four times. We just did a draft last week of first off the line product, and it’s fun. You definitely get that flavor of the past if you’re an old school player. Playing in 1994, 1995, I remember looking at the art on the package going like, wow, this is amazing, really geeking out about it. Now revisiting Dominaria for the first time in a decade and a half and looking at the art is amazing. I was an English major in college, so I apologize if this references maybe too obscure. It’s kind of like comparing Gawain and the Green Knight to Game of Thrones. Technically, they’re both fantasy, but one definitely has much more modern sensibilities. I think that’ll be very surprising and pleasing the people who play the game.
From a plane mechanic perspective, I know we haven’t given away a lot of details yet, so apologize if I can’t spoil too much, but I think the R&D team did a good job of finding an accessibility point for newer or more casual fans that make it relatively easy for them to be able to draft or play limited or build constructed sets with classic fantasy tropes that are accessible. Like, Hey, I want to play as the white knights or I want to play as the dark paladins or I want to play as wizards from the school of magic. But also having a lot of more highly competitive subtle mechanics that the competitive old-school player will like, and that are really nice references to the past as well.
How Wizards Designs Products for So Many Kinds of Players
Rich Stein: That’s kind of what was the challenge with Magic. You know, we just talked about generational differences, right? So parents and their children playing old school players with, you know, new school players. It seems like every product that you produce a under the Magic brand has to appeal to an extraordinarily large group of people. With many subgroups that have very different needs, wants, and desires. How do you balance that out? How do you approach that?
Chris Cocks: That’s probably a better question for Mark or Aaron on the design team. I can give you the business person’s overview or the marketing person’s overview on it. Magic is a universe of fans who probably over like the 25 years the brand has been in existence, there have probably been 30 million people who’ve ever played the game and who called themselves a fan, there’s probably actively playing today somewhere in the tens of millions. What we’ve seen is, with a player base that large, you do get segmentation. There is certainly a large set of people who are really active in our competitive scene and who play a lot in store, who tend to be kind of like that gladiator personality or completionists. They tend to want to buy everything and kind of their omnivores for Magic.
But increasingly, as it gets to be a longer-lived game, you get people who want to play in ways specific to them. The last year or two, we’ve seen a lot of people who want to have more of a casual, slower rotating version of the game. And that’s why we have things like Commander. Unstable a really appeals to insights like that. You see older players who still really like to compete, but maybe not wanting to brew as frequently as the Standard player might have to, and so what we’ve done with some of our Modern products are big there. And then I think Standard is a very wide swathe of players the largest we have. And we try to segment the products so that there’s some obvious purchase choices for a new player. So a Planeswalker deck or Starter deck are obvious purchases for a more casual player. For competitive players, draft opportunities or what we do with leagues inside of the store. And then there’s purchases for that kind of hardcore, gladiator, Planeswalker persona who really wants to play at the highest competitive level. They tend to do more of the trading market and picking and choosing and brewing specific decks that they want to compete on. At the highest level, business-wise, it’s basically segmenting our audience, understanding that there’s different play motivations and then trying to get products that appeal to that broad set of play motivations.
Beyond that, it’s really up to the creativity of the designers and the artists who work on the product and what their muse is on what they want to create. I think they’ve been doing a great job of having a lot of variety, they’ve been pushing the envelope. Sometimes pushing the envelope yields amazing things and sometimes with pushing the envelope, maybe we pushed it a little bit too far. That’s OK, because I’d rather we release a set that has 250 cards in it, maybe two or three of them have a problem, but the other 247 are great and the mechanics are great and it’s a lot of fun. I’d rather deal with that. Then just kind of have the same old thing coming out again and again and again and the meta getting stale.
Is the Current Release Schedule Too Full?
Rich Stein: From a marketing perspective, I think there’s definitely a lot of products coming out, which addresses exactly what you were just talking about. This demand for all sorts of different ways to play Magic. When looking at kind of the Planeswalker type players, the omnivores from Magic, as you called them, there’s been some sentiment that there might be too much coming out at once or that the message of some of the products isn’t as clear, at times. Have you guys picked up on any of that and like how do you guys take that feedback and revamp your process while still making sure you’re providing products to everyone?
Chris Cocks: We do regularly listen to the feedback of our players. My preferred platform is Reddit. I go and look through the Reddit channels for Arena, finance and TCGPlayer. Mark is super active on Twitter. Then we do a lot of playing in stores. I took my kids over to Meeple’s in West Seattle to go play in the Rivals of Ixalan Prerelease. And that’s a great opportunity to go meet players. Whenever I go to Mox Boarding House over in Bellevue to play Friday Night Magic, I probably always see at least two or three Wizards employees in and amongst the 60 or 70 fans playing. Talking to fans and hearing what they have to say is important.
Then we do a heck of a lot in the market research and market testing as well. And you’re going to even see us do more of that in the future. Not only do we research kind of ideas and ask people for feedback, you’re actually gonna see us do some targeted test markets, looking at testing specific ways to show a product, having a product in a given market where we see how people adapt to it, how much they get engaged by it, and how much they like it or dislike it. And then using those kinds of feedback mechanisms to kind of refine our product mix and kind of a living laboratory.
If you go into like the TCG aisle in a Walmart or a Target and it tends to be kind of like a really thick and dense wall for the uninitiated and it’s a little difficult to tell where to start and what to buy. We’re doing a lot of work right now and have been over the last probably nine months on trying to figure out what’s the best way to kind of bring in the casual fan, help the help point the gift buyer to buy the right product. For the highly engaged and or competitive fan, what we tend to see is they tend to come into stores being highly knowledgeable about what they want, about what the value proposition is of each product. And they also tend to be less oriented towards Walmart and Target, where it’s an unassisted sale, and more focused towards local game stores, where they have very knowledgeable staff who they can trade ideas with and talk about the pros and cons to the products. That’s, generally speaking, how we think about it and how what we’re doing. I think the tl;dr on that is: We recognize there’s a lot of stuff and we basically treat our product mix as a learning laboratory and evolve it as quickly as we possibly can base on feedback we get from players.
What has Chris Cocks Learned Since Becoming CEO of Wizards of the Coast?
Zac Clark: I want to pivot from product talk to you as CEO. What have you learned since you’ve come to Wizards of the Coast?
Chris Cocks: First off, I’m thinking about, what I’ve learned that I can talk about. Let me just go through no particular order about what I’ve learned. I think probably the biggest thing I’ve learned as the president of the company at the end of the day is to hire and incentivize the right people to help us drive our game. I remember when the recruiter first came to me like it was like November of 2015 and he was a friend of mine who I used to work with Microsoft and he was like, “Hey, I’ve got this job and uh, I think it’s your dream job and you should come and have lunch with me.” And I was like, well, I doubt it’s my dream job, but sure I’ll take a free lunch. We chatted and caught up for awhile and then he told me what the job was and that it was leading up Wizards of the Coast, the people behind Magic and DnD. He knew I was a long-time nerd and played those games ever since I was a kid and I literally couldn’t talk to people at Wizards or Hasbro quickly enough. They did the right thing. They took their time figuring out who the best candidates were and what the best needs of the company were. It was so amazing to be able to come onboard to accompany that was so important to not just my childhood, but, honestly, my professional career and the career choices I’ve made. So coming onboard, a very special accountability to the products and having the right people in place to do the right thing for those products, I think are very, very important. Like any company, we’ve done some great things and we’ve made some missteps. A lot of continuing to do those great things and correcting those missteps is having the right people in place.
You’ve already seen probably some of the impacts of some of those people decisions and some of those leadership decisions. One of the best examples is the Play Design Team under Dan Burdick inside of R&D. Kaldesh was a product that we did a lot of innovative design. But, it was probably a bit overpowered versus what we intended and Playtest Design was a very early decision working with the R&D team to say, “Hey we need to increase our testing resources.” We need to bring on people who are the highest caliber magic brewers and competitors to really help us be able to balance this meta because our players expect it and the challenges of balancing and meta in a hyper-connected Internet age are only going to grow and grow as information becomes more and more shared. That’s one example of some people decisions we’ve made.
We have 600 people at Wizards. In the two or so years I’ve been here, we’ve probably hired 150 of them. A lot of them have been in our digital initiatives. I think people are starting to see the fruits of those labors this year with what we’ve shown with Arena and our closed beta. We’ve got a ton of new initiatives that we haven’t really disclosed yet, but I think people will be pretty psyched by, that will let people play a Magic in all the genres they want to play it in all the platforms they want to play it in. And I think getting those right really goes back to the people that you have in charge of them having the right experience and having the right motivations.
It even goes with kind of like the entertainment blueprint that we have. Probably one of the most delightful surprises I had coming into the building was I got to look at our world design books. They’re basically 200 page 8.5 x 17 inch binders where we flesh out the story and the look of a world that you only see in our cards right now. And those things are amazing! They tell the story, they tell the characters behind the world, they fill out the nooks and crannies that you’d expect in visiting a place, the religions, sociology, to the major peoples, and history of a place. And it’s really, really cool. Currently the only way we let our players really experience that is through the constraints of a 3.5 inch diagonal card frame. And you really only seeing maybe 5% of those worlds. Jeremy Jarvis is one of our creative directors, the guy who helped us really generate those worlds and that design philosophy. He’s been doing it for several years and not only did he do a great job building that discipline, but he’s actually created a philosophy behind it that shared very broadly in the building. Another big thing that we’ve done is, we transitioned Jeremy away from just being the art director for Magic to being the creative director for the entire franchise. And his new remit is to work with entertainment publishers and entertainment partners, whether they’re comic books, movies, TV, books, you name it, to help us kind of get beyond that 3.5 inch diagonal card frame and really allow people to experience our worlds in a fuller way. That’s a great example of just kind of learning about the people and putting them in opportunities that can really explode the potential of the brand and the potential of the world and the number of people we can reach with them.
Promoting From Within Wizards vs. Hiring From Outside of Wizards
Rich Stein: Amazing. Yeah. We’ve all seen, I think the job listings is going up constantly on the job board for Wizards. You guys have definitely been hiring a ton. What have you seen in your time so far at Wizards with regards to growing the talent you have within the company that was there when you got there and augmenting it with some of the outside talent that you brought in? Like Dan Burdick?
Chris Cocks: Wizards is best in class at making tradable card games. There is no question that we have the best designers in the world on tradable card games. We invented the category. We have an amazing art staff. We have a great team who helps to lead our partnership on a competitive events as well as the working with the hobby channel, which is really kind of the core of how people experience Magic and by Magic and play Magic. And we are great in that. That’s been areas of the company that we continue to invest heavily in. Areas where I think we’re kind of growing is definitely in the digital domain. We need and we’ve hired people who are experts in being able to translate a two dimensional art work and a game that has the constraints of analog rules and be able to build rich kind of 3D expressions of that to allow you to really to have your imaginations come to life when you play a game of Magic.
To me, just to use Arena as an example. The way that I think all of us internally want a game of Arena to play is that there’s probably three basic rules that we want to see happen when you play Arena. The first is that we want it to be all the rules of Magic. We want it to be super authentic. We want it to be all the mechanics so that he played in paper. You can play it digitally and it just feels right. Second, we want it to be super fast and super efficient for you. We want you to be able to find a match with someone who’s a great competitor for you and be able to play that match in a matter of minutes. And make it just so that if you want to play Magic, you can play it on the platform you want at the time you want very conveniently. Finally, we want to take that great artwork and that great imaginative spirit that kind of comes with artwork and we want to bring it to life for you.
I remember when I saw the first Harry Potter movie and I was a big Harry Potter fan reading the books before I even had kids, and you went into that first movie and you saw Diagon Alley and you were just like, “How did they know what I was imagining when I was reading the book?” Hopefully what we’re trying to do visually with a game like Arena is allowing you to experience the imagination what you thought the card should do, if you’re an actual planeswalker in a battle. And do it in a way that’s fast, but do it in a way that’s cool and makes the game play even better for you. More watchable, more playable, more enjoyable. And so in digital we’re trying to do that and replicate that across multiple genres. We have people working on TCGs, we have partners working on genres like RPG and a whole bunch of other strategy, fantasy adjacent genres that we’re not ready to talk about yet. And you need to bring in the right people who understand those games, who have reverence for kind of the source material, but can also take that source material to the next level and the capabilities of the platforms.
The Future of Organized Play
Zac Clark: What’s the long and short term future growth for Organized Play like from Pro Tour down to FNM?
Chris Cocks: Yeah. So last year, our overall Organized Play grew by about 5-7% in terms of total number of players and about 30% in terms of new players who participated. So it’s definitely a core strength for the brand and we’ll be continuing to invest heavily through our network of 6,000 plus local game stores. You’ll continue to see us have a mix of more casual and new player friendly events like open house leagues, what we call pre release parties, which are less competitive versions of pre-releases, as well as the hardcore traditional competitive mix that we’ve had with things like show down and the upper echelons of FNM and PPTQs.
On the Pro Tour and what we do with Grand Prix and the next echelon of play, the biggest thing you’re going to see from us over the course of the year, unfortunately I can’t get into too many details, is we’re a big believer in online streaming and watching card games being played in order to learn how to play them and help with deck design. We definitely see that as a trend in Magic. And we definitely see that as a trend in other TCGs. What you’re going to see us do is really optimize our approach of the offerings we have in those so that we’re always live with great content that people can watch that is programmed by Wizards or programmed by our partners. And then I think our digital products are going to offer a new way for people to be able to experience high level competitive content that is user generated. My hope is that as we have Arena and then we have other games come out, you’re going to see this explosion of viewable content that’s a lot of fun to watch and is valuable to players. You’re going to see viewership increase commensurate with that explosion of content creators as well.
Incorporating MTG Arena into Organized Play
Zac Clark: I wanted to circle back to what you were saying about coverage and also how people watch and take in a TCG is as well. Do you think that that might ever translate into showing Arena for your coverage as far as Organized Play is concerned?
Chris Cocks: Yeah, what you’re going to see us evolve into is there’s going to be a mix of paper coverage and there’s going to be digital coverage as well. You will see high level competitive events that will be focused on digital versions of the game and you’ll see likely even more competitive events that is focused on the paper version of the game. Probably, maybe it’s a year or two down the road, a hybrid events where both are kind of showcased.
Channel Fireball’s Performance Running all Grand Prix
Rich Stein: Over the past year with coverage and obviously with moving forward with coverage of the Pro Tour in the Grand Prix events, from your viewpoint, how’s everything working out with the partnerships you guys have formed with Twitch and Channel Fireball events.
Chris Cocks: So Channel Fireball, we just signed the agreement late last year and so they started taking over the Grand Prix just this year, so far so good. It’s still pretty early and we worked with them really closely, and right now we’re monitoring player feedback on satisfaction with the events and you know, where we can optimize. Channel Fireball, they have a vested interest in making sure these players have a good time and feel like they’re having fun at the events. Because it’s not just the events that they have to concern themselves with, its their overall brand, just like us. Twitch, I think they’ve been a great partnership with us. Our online viewership, if I haven’t seen the latest numbers, but through the middle of last year it was up substantially like mid double digits. They’ve been a really strong partner for us as well to extend Magic viewership and Magic content. To summarize my last answer in terms of what we’re doing with Twitch, there’s going to be a combination of more programmatic view options from us in terms of a competitive coverage and special events that we do. Then there’s going to be an explosion of user created content from streamers we work with, fans who play our games, who can just post things to Twitch and it’s going to be a more content than our Magic fans have ever had available and I think it’s going to be to the benefit of them and it’s going to bring in more fans into the franchise.
The MTG Arena Beta and Lifting the NDA
Rich Stein: Last summer we had the opportunity to meet with Trick and Blake at Grand Prix Vegas. One of the things we got to talking about was the idea that a lot of people have this expectation of Wizards to create a lot of content for the community to consume. What I’m hearing you’re talking about is a shift towards continuing to grow, at very large rate, the amount of user generated content. So how do you kind of approach the challenge of helping more people create content that you’re talking about?
Chris Cocks: The easiest level is giving them a platform to be able to create the content on. Arena, we’ve talked a lot about this publicly, we haven’t lifted the NDA yet on the closed Beta, but we will be doing so shortly. We want that to be a super viewable and watchable experience that’s fun to play and fun to watch. I probably play five or six matches a day.
Rich Stein: When will we know when the NDA is going to be lifted so we can all start talking about Arena.
Chris Cocks: We’ll be ready to talk a little bit more about that in the coming months. I definitely direct you to the, uh, to Wednesday streams that we’re doing a every once in a while with, with Nate Price. You’ll be able to find out a lot more information about that when we’re ready to release it. It’s not going to be that long.
Rich Stein: We’re definitely looking forward to it. We have four or five folks on our team who stream Magic Online fairly regularly and obviously there’s a large community of folks streaming Magic Online. I think that a lot of them are looking forward to streaming Arena.
Chris Cocks: I think it’ll be a fun way to learn about deck tech and piloting skills. It looks good. Right now we’ve got animations in there, but we probably only have a percentage of the animations that we want to have. They’re going to get more varied as we started having more card sets up there. The other day I saw the Amonkhet cards and there’s a really cool animation for Embalm where basically they’re wrapping up the cards like a mummy on the screen. I think people will dig that. If we can give people a platform to be able to stream on, and we think Arena is going to be a really cool one, then we can help the streamers make an income off of their past time, whether it’s a hobby or whether it’s a full time profession through things like codes, supporting them, featuring them in our own programming. And then we just continue to have a really fun game that a lot of people were enjoy and are interested in. I think the animal spirits will start to take care of themselves.
Zac Clark: I mean, you got, you got me hooked. I bought a pc for the first time since 2007.
Chris Cocks: Are you a Mac guy?
Zac Clark: I am a Mac guy.
Chris Cocks: Yeah. It’s great that you bought a PC because that was what my whole previous job was about. It only took me coming to a card company and building a card game to get you to do it.
Zac Clark: You got one!
Chris Cocks: We will support other platforms like Mac, so that likely won’t be until either the later stages of the Beta or around when we declare it as a launch game, but Mac will be a platform that supported as well as all the other platforms you would expect us to do. The timeline on those other platforms are as soon as we can prioritize it based on player feedback and what we think is the best thing to do to make a fun game.
Back to the Future (of Organized Play)
Rich Stein: So talking more about the future of Organized Play. Other than the inclusion of digital coverage and the growth of coverage through Channel Fireball and Twitch. Internally through your Organized Play team, last year was high profile when Helene who’d been running Organized Play for so long stepped down. So I think things have been kind of stagnant for us as far as what we’ve been hearing coming out of Organized Play. It’s kind of been status quo. What’s going on in that space? What’s kind of the long-term future for growing Organized Play at the Grand Prix and the Pro Tour level.
Chris Cocks: Davide [Bonati, Senior Director, Competitive Gaming & Esports] joined us from Wizards Europe and he runs our Organized Play team. For this year, what we’ve announced, because I have to kind of segmented than what we’ve announced and uh, and then kind of just allude to some of the things we have planned. For the first half of the year we’re going to be very heavily focused on the 25th anniversary of Magic. We’re going to have the 25th anniversary Open House, kind of like a birthday party for Magic in the July timeframe. We have the 25th anniversary Pro Tour, which, I think will be a really fun event where you get to watch teams playing Legacy, Modern, and Standard for a million dollar prize purse, which is the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Then we’ll do a series of other in-store events throughout the year to help people to be able to play Magic at all levels. In the back half of the year, you’re likely going to see us make some announcements about how we can further extend the reach of Organized Play. We have ideas to make Organized Play be even more watchable and streamable, Then we can get more people playing at the highest levels, and taking some cues from some of the best in the business in terms of how they’re thinking about the leagues and teams and kind of the overall professional level play. I wish I could tell you more, but the interview is about six months too early.
Other Non-MTG Arena Digital Products
Rich Stein: There’s a lot of other digital stuff going on that’s not just Arena. You guys announced the MMO, and obviously we all assume there’s more going on than just Arena. What’s the timeline there when we expect to hear more about the rest of the brand’s digital product space.
Chris Cocks: At last count, we have about six different game or digital product initiatives going on right now that should launch inside of the next year and a half to two years. Arena is what we’re focusing on now, it’s probably one of the biggest and most important of those initiatives. I use this term called the castles and boats. Think about like kind of Magic as a castle. The Magic paper business is this big bold business that has a ton of fans, a lot of history, a lot of partnerships that are very important and people who are super passionate about it. And so you treat Magic as this castle that you want to defend and you want to take care of and you want to grow over time. If a castle costs a trillion dollars to make, a boat costs a fraction of what a castle costs. Boats don’t always pan out. You can send a boat out and sale for 20 days and not find anything and it comes back empty handed. And that’s OK. When we think about a lot of our digital initiatives, we think about them as boats that kind of extend our castles of Magic and DnD. I think Arena is a little different though. And I’m going to extend the metaphor maybe to it’s breaking point. Arena is the port that we’re building on the Magic castle. It’s core to the castle. It represents the core of the game play. Doing Arena right let’s us build permission with our closest and most important fans to really be able to extend the franchise in new and exciting directions. And so right now we’re putting the finishing touches on that port. As we get that port in front of more fans and finalize it you’re gonna find us announcing more and more of these boats.
I think what we’re doing through our partnership with Cryptic, like their Action-RPG MMO, it’s really, really cool. Based on what I’ve seen in the game so far, we’ve had a couple a good milestone reviews. I think Magic Fans will enjoy it. An RPG is a natural extension of a fantasy franchise like Magic. We have some non-game almost companions that we think will be popular with our highly engaged fans. We ask “How do we take this great experience you have in store organizing tournaments, a adjudicating rules, understanding how cards interact and be able to port that onto your phone and have this amazing experience that you can replicate at home?” And we have a whole host of other games that we’re working with both with internal teams as well as partners that further extend out to the Magic franchise in a logical direction.
Magic game has been played by 30-40 million people. There’s probably 250 million strategy fans. Magic stands as fantasy franchise. RPG and adventure games are natural extensions of fantasy is probably another 250 million fans. So while we’ve tapped about, 40 million fans of our IP, we see about another 450-500 million fans out there that we think our IP would be super relevant for. The games you see us announcing and the partnerships that we announced them with will make sense.
The Future of Magic: the Gathering Online
Rich Stein: Where does that leave the “Old Ironsides” Magic: the Gathering Online?
Chris Cocks: MTGO has been around for 15 years and we’d be perfectly happy if it was around for another 15 years. It’s the way our most die hard fans like to play. They can play all of Magic on it. Arena is going to be very focused on Standard at launch. Over time, we will grow that in terms of the cards we have and the variety of cards we have. We might delve into the backlist, we might create original cards and original versions of play for Arena. We’re going to play it by ear based on what our players want. As long as MTGO fans play it, we’re committed to MTGO.
On Card Stock
Rich Stein: What’s going on with card stock?
Chris Cocks: We definitely follow people online, follow the social media trends, getting feedback and we’re constantly monitoring card quality. I think what I can say at the highest level is you’ve heard the old adage, you can have it fast, cheap, or you can have it good. And we’re committed to having all three. It’s important to us. So we meet with our vendors regularly. We test the heck out of the cards regularly, and if we need to make any changes, we’ll make those changes.
Why Did you Choose Wizards of the Coast?
Zac Clark: As much as WOTC chose you, you chose WOTC as well. Could you give me a little insight into that decision?
Chris Cocks: Yeah, I mean that’s an easy one. Let me describe myself as a 10 year old. Before I started playing DnD, it’s actually very similar to my 10 year old today. I was a kid. I was at 10. I’d never read a book cover to cover. I remember in second grade taking a reading tests. They’d show you these flashcards and you’d read the flash cards and they put you into a reading group. And I remember how fun that, that Flash Card test was and being able to read the words and then I remember a high level reading group. And they asked me to read some story out loud but there was no way I was going to read it. And I was immediately bumped down to like from the top reading group to like the bottom reading group, because I just wouldn’t engage. I was very unfocused. That was super creative, but didn’t really have a much direction. And I started playing this game called DnD and all of a sudden, not only did I learn about these new genres, RPG and fantasy, that had never known before, but it inspired me to read. It inspired me to create. I started learning things like design rules. I started like designing my own RPGs to use in my own systems of games, my own toys. When I was 13 I had an NDA with Kenner toys which was later bought by Hasbro for a toy line that I was pitching to them. It didn’t go anywhere, but it was cool. I look back at the kid that I was, really hyper not very focused, and how a product like DnD helped me to refocus and recalibrate, Avalon Hill Games, which gave me a love of history and then Magic, which really resparked my imagination for games and introduced me to the TCG aisle, all the way up to Baldur’s gate, which was a DnD game that kind of set me on the path to video games. Being able to work on a set of brands that meant so much to me, not just as a player but who helped to develop me as a person… Gosh, there was no greater honor than be able to do that. So it was an easy decision.
Zac Clark: That’s a beautiful answer, Chris. And honestly, a lot of your experience I relate to growing up. Especially with the reading and stuff like getting into DnD and Magic are sort of the things that like made me reader.
Chris Cocks: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I’m not gonna lie reading the Sword of Shannara as an 11-year old took me from like 11 to about 13. It completely transformed the kind of student I was and the direction I had.
Thanks for reading! This interview was conducted by Rich Stein and Zac Clark.