Designing Team-Centric Processes: A Magic: The Gathering Case Study

The key to winning competitive games isn’t just skill - it is the strength of teamwork and collaboration.

Discover how designing tools and processes that focus on team collaboration transformed the performance of a top Magic: The Gathering professional team. By moving beyond traditional, intuition-based methods, the team adopted evidence-based, hypothesis-driven frameworks centred on open communication, player motivation, and collaborative learning experiences.

In this session, you will learn how an iterative design approach involving research and team member growth helped prioritise testing efforts, create visual templates to integrate learning and understanding of complex scenarios into clear strategies, while enhancing team communication and accountability.

This human-centred collaborative design approach yielded a higher-performing team with improved win rates, making this session invaluable for game designers, esports analysts, researchers, and team leaders seeking scalable ways to manage complexity, enhance collaboration, and build engaged high-performing teams.