Blog

Patrick Sullivan

Hello everyone, and welcome to the inaugural WoW TCG R&D blog.  My name is Patrick Sullivan, Head Developer for the TCG.  About a week ago, William Brinkman approached the R&D team (specifically me and Ben Cichoski) about being more directly involved with the community.  After Ben and I berated him for roughly an hour about adding a marginal amount to our workload, we agreed to write an article about once a week.  While I love giving Will a hard time, and I am a curmudgeon at heart, obviously the idea is a great one.  Sometime, when I’m staring blankly ahead at a printout of all the common allies for an upcoming set, trying to make sure none of the stats overlap, it’s easy to forget this is a pretty cool job.  Not only that, but the players and fans of the TCG absolutely love to get some insider perspective and stories about bringing the game to life, so I’m more than happy to oblige.

Patrick Sullivan and Ben Cichoski laying some verbal beatdowns on our NACC live stream

Some of you may have read other articles I’ve written for this website.  Most of those are in some “official” capacity, discussing some sweeping rules change or philosophical changes to the development process.  I hope that these articles can occupy a wholly different space.  While some will certainly pertain to what’s going on in the upper echelons of competitive play and what we think about it, I know that will only be one among many topics discussed.  I also hope we can humanize this whole thing a little bit.  Behind each card is a ton of hours, discussions, debates, and passion from a pretty entertaining cast of characters, and I hope to shed a little bit of light on that, too.  So I guess it’s easiest to start with myself.

I am often asked, “How did you get this job?”  The emphasis is generally placed on one of two words:

1. Emphasis on “How”—Implies “Holy crap your job is cool.  How does someone get into the industry?”
2. Emphasis on “You”—Implies “I can’t believe you of all people have this job.”

So, I think the easiest thing to do is just give you the story of how I got here.  Hopefully I can give something resembling an answer to both questions.  I don’t think I’m a talentless hack, but I also know that I caught my fair share of breaks to get into this position.  This also isn’t a script on how to break through into a creative industry; I certainly wouldn’t advise dropping out of college to play cards as a serious career arc.  Still, this is how it happened, and I guess you can draw your own lessons out of it, if you so choose.

I grew up in New Jersey, and started playing TCGs when I was 13.  My mom knew I loved games, and used to buy me whatever the hottest thing was every Christmas.  One year this was a Magic starter, right around the time that things really started to blow up with that game.  I tried teaching myself out of the rulebook to no avail; fortunately a lot of my friends had already been playing for a while so they were able to catch me up to speed pretty quickly.  It didn’t take long for me and my friends to get the itch to start playing beyond our kitchen table, and we starting exploring the fledgling local scene that Hillsborough had.

Our local stores were, to be frank, awful.  One was run by a rotation cast of dirty dealers, the other a front for a mafia operation.  Without a solid base to play, my friends and I lost interest in playing pretty quickly.  Not to speak ill of playing casually; I’m sure under a different set of circumstances I would have been perfectly content to never play outside of my friend’s basement.  But once I got the taste for tournament play, going back to the way things were seemed impossible.  “Regression” isn’t quite the right word, but it’s something along those lines.

All the local operations were mercifully shut down by the time I was about 15, with that I focused on my other interests—debate team, basketball, awkwardly hitting on girls, the usual stuff.  But around my sophomore year of High School, The Only Game in Town opened up in Hillsborough.  The store was a complete 180 from what I was used to—actually run by friendly, competent people who weren’t out to rip you off, or run off-track betting every Friday night next to the tournament.  With such an environment now afforded to us, it didn’t take long for my circle to get back into the swing of things.  Before much longer, I was actually working at the store, and then sort of managing it.

After graduating from High School, I attended Seton Hall University, about 45 minutes away in northern New Jersey.  I was going for Diplomacy and International Relations, and I had aspirations of working in the United Nations or something similar.  Still, something wasn’t clicking quite right.  It would be easy to chalk it up to being lazy and unmotivated, and I’m sure that factored in.  But I also just wasn’t as inspired about what I was studying as I was in High School.  Some of that was probably learning about the pragmatic functioning of international law and politics, which often seemed at odds with my sense of young idealism.  But I think I knew, even if I couldn’t articulate it as such at the time, that my real interests were somewhere else.

I left college after two semesters, the second one I think I attended maybe six classes and didn’t even bother to show up for my finals.  I was sneaking away constantly to go to the card store, and by the time I was back home for a week or two it was obvious college wasn’t in the cards.  The owner of TOGIT offered me a pretty sweet deal—two years of something approaching indentured servitude for partial ownership of the store.  With nothing else going on, and a flexible schedule afforded to me so I could play in tournaments, I jumped at the chance.

Working at a game store and playing games constantly, it didn’t take long for me to start posting results in serious TCG tournaments.  The poker boon of the early 2000s also proved lucrative.  While I’m by no means a poker master, I was more than good enough to make money when the field was awash with totally casual people who had never really played card games before.  This was my life for a few years—working at the card store, travelling around the world playing Magic, and hustling live and online poker.  As you can imagine, this lifestyle can wear on you after a while.  I think that for a short stretch of time it can be fun.  I met some of my best friends in those years, and the wild, unscripted nature of that existence has its appeal when you’re 22 years old.  Still, it was hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Was this going to be my life in ten years?  Twenty?  But what were my alternatives? 

That’s around the time that Upper Deck Entertainment opened its doors.  Flush with Yu-Gi-Oh! money, Upper Deck was looking to build some sort of hobby game empire.  A group of well-known Boston gamers, Your Move Games, had been hired to flesh out a game engine for a superhero trading card game, and they needed more people.  They knew me, both from tournaments (where I had a little bit of success and was a nice enough dude) and from my writing (passionate but shamelessly self-entitled), and decided to give me a three month internship.  Three months turn to six months turned to a year, and I’ve been doing the same stuff roughly ever since.

Working at Upper Deck had its highs.  Specifically, a ton of talented and motivated people were working there.  Still, the company itself was pretty horrible.  It was told to me by the higher ups that this was the cost of working at a game company, so many people wanted the job that they could afford to treat the people doing it poorly.  Fortunately, the exact opposite attitude permeates Cryptozoic Entertainment, and for that I’m very thankful.  It’s a different feeling to come to work feeling like you’re respected, feeling like the people running the show actually care about putting out a quality product and serving the costumers, and I think that vibe inspires everyone to do the best they can to put out a great product.

So, obviously, I’m a really lucky dude.  But if I can impart any wisdom it’s:

Q)  “How did you get this job?”

A)   Play a lot of games.  Write.  Put yourself out there.  Be respectful when you meet representatives from companies.  Volunteer.  Know how hobby stores work.  Go to conventions.  Be visible.  Being good at games helps but probably not as much as you assume.

Q) “How did you get the job?”

A)  Did well playing games.  Wrote.  Listened and learned when people better at the job were talking.  Cared about the quality of what I was working on.  Got lucky.

Make sure to tune in next week, when Ben Cichoski hopefully writes something much shorter than this.

-Patrick