My name is Jeff Liu.  You might know me, but if you do, I’d guess you were someone in my family or something.  Unlike some of my co-workers, I haven’t done as well at other card tournaments or won the tournaments they have.  Instead, I was, and am, relatively unknown in the hobby gaming community.  How then, would someone like me end up in R&D?  Could you be the next me?

I’ve been playing games my entire life.  When I hit college, there were some people in my dorm that played card games competitively.  I started playing tournaments and was hooked.  Eventually, college ended and I moved out to San Diego for work.  I continued playing tournaments and met some of the people from Upper Deck in my travels.  Upper Deck Entertainment was making strides with VS at the time and hiring consistently.

The first person at UDE I starting hanging out consistently with was Antonino DeRosa.  He had just moved to the area to work at UDE and asked around at local card shops to see who might be qualified for an upcoming “Pro Tour” so that he could find playtest partners.  Someone gave him my number and that was that.  Fast forward almost a year and UDE was once again hiring to work on a new project.  You may have heard of this one, but I’ll use the secret acronym so that it’ll still be a secret between us.  The project was WoW TCG.

Now I can’t condone moving to the San Diego area so that you can apply for future job openings here, but we live in a realistic world and I’m sure it helped me quite a bit that I already lived in the area and was friends with a handful of the people already working at UDE.  Like Mike Hummel said in his post, knowing people and making contacts is HUGE.  Of course, competency is also important.  Having already honed the skill-set to properly playtest, and having the background of gaming is a must for every applicant into R&D.  But as I found out after getting the job, this is just the beginning and I had much to learn.

When being interviewed, I didn’t even realize what Danny Mandel (the main person interviewing me) was even looking for from my answers.  Now, I’m going to arm many of you with the knowledge of what people may be looking for while interviewing.  First off, they’ll always try to figure out how much you already know. Understanding game systems and being in touch with the average player are two of the most important aspects for this job in particular.  You have to be able to recognize which things a majority will enjoy, while also knowing what will and will not play well in the game rules.  Complexity, fun, and pure power are often all tugging against each other in every card.  Secondly, they’ll see if you can be taught and how easily you can evolve.  And lastly, they’ll try to understand how you analyze things.  Figuring out why something occurs is much more important than knowing the results of actions.

So why me?  Other than knowing the people already, I fill certain roles on the team.  We all specialize in certain areas. Everyone does everything, but not everyone has their strengths in the same areas. Some guys on the team specialize in making the most powerful decks and testing for broken cards.  That’s the obvious role everyone thinks of when they think of R&D.  There are people who design cards also.  These are the people who are often keeping their eye on the complexity and “fun-ness” of cards.  These 2, however, are obviously very different.  There are developers (testers) that also break up into groups of being better at testing for complexity and others at fun.  Knowing what you find fun and what you think other various types of players would find fun is a back-breaking task of erasing your preconceptions. 

So again I ask, why me?  Even though I wasn’t anywhere near ready to design when I first arrived, I’ve learned much.  I’ve shown that figuring out why things happen rather then what happens is actually something I can excel at.  That all led up to the third set in next year’s block, which I’m lead-designing.  This must mean I have shown at least some aptitude for creativity also, apparently.

I’ve been primarily a developer up until this point.  The thing I do more than others is to recognize and build the “combo” decks.  Things like the Wondervolt or Galway infinite combos, along with many non-infinite combos originated here.  Yes, we knew about Wondervolt before it came out and yes, we tested it plenty and believed the environment could handle it.  We as a group felt adding combos to the game livens it up and there are plenty of players out there who really enjoy trying to build up crazy contraptions.  So that’s what I do.  I help to make sure there are card interactions that build up for more effects then each of the single cards alone, while at the same time making sure it stays interactive and within the correct band of power.

So with Set 9 more then a year away and still very early in development, I’m sitting here wondering what I can and can’t reveal.  Maybe just some hints, then… Mages may be making people turtles… Shadowfiend may be getting a brighter brother… and Paladins may be cut from the game.  Now you get to decide if I’m lying to you.

To recap… connections and convenience help.  Making things easier for people makes it more likely they’ll do what you want.  This is applicable in every aspect of life and is a good lesson not just for getting a job.  Practice, learn, and always think about the big picture behind cards, rather than individual results from testing.  Hone your skills to impress others with the few chances you have.  There’s nothing worse than to be given a chance to prove yourself and then to not being prepared.  You never know how many chances like that you’ll get.  That’s about it.  If you have questions, WoW_R&D@upperdeck.com is always open.