My name is Raymond Miller and I am a seasoned player, former esports athlete, and have been invited privately to test a variety of other games during their Alpha and Beta stages of development.  This experience includes but is not limited to games such as Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, League of Legends, Shadowverse, Aion, Cards and Castles, and Duelist.  I believe I would be a good fit for this internship both due to my previous experience in the field and my passion for creating an enjoyable experience in the games I play.

For League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, I was an esports athlete for various major organizations, such as Velocity, Evil Geniuses, Tempo Storm, Complexity, and Cloud 9.  The experience I gained from this was the ability to look for abstract synergies, broken strategies, and to find even the slightest imbalances to create small percentage advantages for my team.  Between my previous experience of understanding how certain axis of gameplay are balanced and my professional knowledge of understanding how even a small percentage give you the upper hand, I was able to make changes to gameplay most people did not notice or were very subtle.

Examples of this include Knife Juggler going from a 3/2 to a 2/2 in Hearthstone.  Something as simple as a power/toughness change on a card can be hard to spot.

In Heroes of the Storm, the characters Tyrande and Abathur received major reworks after tournament gameplay involving my team's abstract use of the characters.  Tyrande, a support we used as a global vision and DPS buffer instead of healer, and Abathur, who we create a team comp that did not need to ever fight the opponent utilizing what we considered an overtuned ability (his ultimate ability of coping an ally, including their ultimate).  We mathed out that this ability was impossible to balance so long as the ultimate copied your ally's ultimate ability (as opposed to basic ability).  The development team worked with me on balancing these two heroes and they remain major characters still working as intended.







If I had the ability to make a mechanic evergreen, I would choose the ability battle cry.  I believe promoting combat is essential for newer players and is also not an overpowered ability in limited formats.

Battle cry, when I first played with it, was a very interesting mechanic.  It rewards you for playing to the board but also allows your opponent to have plenty of gameplay and interaction with you.  There are still plenty of ways to punish you, similar to exalted creatures, that can create tempo positive results for them.  This promotes interaction and combat damage for sets where this keyword become relevant.

When first strike, double strike, menace, reach, flying, and other evergreen keywords promote combat it is very clear that battle cry helps with understanding the core concepts of why it is important to swing with your creature while also helping drive home the point, vs other battle cries from your opponent, that there is value in blocking.  Many newer players do not get this point drove home enough, including forgetting that double blocking is a thing.  Allowing players to actively have to remember to "pump the team" also drives home the idea that "My team can block", hopefully aiding the players in learning to double block.

The ability is not very complex so it is also easy for a beginner to pick up and play with, which is exactly the type of mechanic you're looking for (compared to morph, echo, etc which most beginners have multiple questions about for quite some time).











I would phase out defender, as I don't think it is very beneficial to newer players.  It is very easy to forget your cards have defender, as it is somewhat counter intuitive for newer players.  Combat should be incentivizing players to swing, race, or block, and defender does nothing to add to this.  If anything, it promotes durdling games with less interaction, because walls are generally cost efficient at blocking (Most are 0/3 or 0/4s) and that's it.  You want to make the game entertaining and fun for both parties.  You want both parties, in a game of magic, to feel like they accomplished something interactive and fun.  In nonstandard formats, this can be producing engines, denial of resources, etc.

In standard and limited, denial of resources is very feel bad and should be mitigated in every instance possible.  Defender as an evergreen keyword promotes gamestates that are not fun for one player while promoting an uninteractive game of magic for the other.  If you replaced most defenders with another combat oriented keyword and adapted the power/toughness to match, you would find much more enjoyable games of magic for the average newer player.

I believe evergreen keywords should promote the best parts of Magic: The Gathering and the most interactive games possible to any and all newcomers, or even veterans from Alpha.  It also must be as intuitive as possible.  Defender fails both of these tests.