In the summers of 2020 and 2021, I interned at Studio X -- the Magic: The Gathering branch of Wizards of the Coast. While I primarily worked on the Magic: Spellslingers team -- analyzing and developing cards and rulesets in live collaboration settings, playtesting changes, and drafting flavor text and art briefs for future sets -- I also had the privilege of working with the Dungeons and Dragons team as well as the broader Magic design teams.

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On the Magic: The Gathering teams, one of my primary responsibilities was playtests -- and as a newer Magic: The Gathering player and designer, I was able to offer a fresh insight, suggest strategies to overcome new player pain points, and was able to clearly identify any overpowered cards (aka. Any time I won a game. Haha!) I also assisted in the archival and documentation of Planeswalkers' character traits from across their 25+ years of webfiction and comics. Additionally, I wrote art briefs and name suggestions for cards in the D&D crossover sets, Brother's War, and All Will Be One. It was my first time working in a multidisciplinary, corporate environment, so one of my biggest takeaways was learning how to network across departments -- as well as how to create a strong community in a predominantly remote environment (given that this was during the Covid Pandemic).

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Additionally, while the Dungeons and Dragons teams do not formally take on interns, I was still able to shadow their work and contributed to both the Wild Beyond the Witchlight and the Curse of Strahd Revamped D&D sourcebooks by co-drafting trinket tables with the designers already on the team. I also had the privilege to analyze player feedback on unreleased classes and draft character backgrounds for the Ravenloft setting. This allowed me to learn the specific ins and outs of writing for Dungeons and Dragons -- such as how trinkets differ from items, the ways backgrounds can and cannot overlap with each other, the cultural sensitivities around particular topics, and so forth.

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My crowning achievement is, as I like to say, "convincing WotC to release its first non-D&D Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG) in years": Magic & Minions, the one--Magic--card--sized TTRPG I had drafted and playtested, went to print in the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set. I got to work with the Magic: Minigames team to develop games that could be played entirely with Magic: the Gathering booster packs and six-sided dice. In these lunchtime meetings, we designed intuitive game mechanics, wrote concise and easily understandable instructions, and playtested these games for functionality and player engagement. It was honestly a dream come true to get to work on this incredibly passionate and knowledgeable team! I really thrive anywhere I can have true ownership of a corner of a product.