Play Design

Play Design is a Magic R&D team solely dedicated to the health of tournament environments, to make sure that playing Magic in structured settings is as enjoyable as possible.

Task
The team was introduced in 2017, after R&D had missed the copy cat combo. Play Design is primarily focused on Standard, Booster Draft and Sealed.

Play Design does the bulk of its work roughly one year before a set is released. The team has four three-month segments in the Design process, one for each play environment (with four Standard-legal sets released each year there are four distinct play environments). Each one lines up with Set Design such that the first two months are the last two months of Set Design and the last month is the set after Set Design hands off (but when there's still time to tweak numbers if necessary).

Play design interacts with digital Magic — including MTG Arena and Magic Online — and how it affects the design and development of cards.

Current members

 * Bryan Hawley (founding member; manager )
 * Ian Duke (founding member; technical lead)
 * Adam Prosak (founding member)
 * Melissa DeTora (founding member)
 * Andrew Brown (founding member)
 * Jadine Klomparens
 * Michael Hinderaker
 * Donald Smith, Jr
 * Emma Handy
 * Zac Elsik
 * Oliver Tiu
 * Ben Weitz

Former members

 * Tom Ross
 * Dan Musser (Modern Horizons; manager)
 * Dan Burdick (founding member; former lead)
 * Andrew Veen (founding member)
 * Paul Cheon (founding member)
 * Allen Wu
 * Michael Majors
 * Kazu Negri

Column
In June 2017, the column named Play Design replaced Latest Developments on Magicthegathering.com. It was started by Melissa DeTora, but other members also contributed. By 2019, that column had largely been replaced by a weekly stream on the Magic:The Gathering Twitch channel.