Wizards of the Coast has formed a Magic: The Gathering Casual Play Design team, naming Melissa DeTora as its lead.
The goal of the of the new design team at WotC is to design and playtest cards for casual formats, such as Commander. This team will take a different approach to card design than the Competitive Play Design team does, zoning in on finding rates and play patterns of cards used in the casual formats to make the formats more fun to play. They will consider several factors in assessing specific cards, such as how much a card allows players to interact with it in games as well as the availability of counterplay measures to deal with card effects.
Melissa DeTora, the head of this new team, is a seasoned designer that started part-time at WotC in 2015 (see “‘M:TG Shadows Over Innistrad’ Set “) and became a full-time employee in 2017. DeTora worked on the Play Design team and was recently promoted to Senior Designer in 2021. Prior to her time at WotC, she was a Magic Pro and a writer for TCGplayer. DeTora was also the first woman to make a top eight cut at a Pro Tour.
Source: ICv2
