I am frequently asked how and why I acquired an internship at Wizards of the Coast. For both ease of access as well as maintaining my own sanity, I decided to compile my thoughts and methods here for any prospective applicants to see.
Background and Caveats
I’ll try and keep the background brief, but there are some notable caveats to my story.
First, you must be a student enrolled in an accredited degree program to get an internship at Wizards of the Coast. I enrolled in and graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology with a degree in Game Design. I acquired this internship in no small part through utilizing DigiPen’s career services among other resources like professors and peers. I was put face-to-face with a Wizards of the Coast designer to pitch myself at our school’s career fair. That is a privilege you don’t get everywhere, and I think it played a big part. Many game-centric schools like USC, DigiPen, NYU, etc. have great connections that can open doors for you. While DigiPen absolutely did not do all the work for me, it’s hard to quantify exactly how much it helped, as such I’m calling it out.
I am NOT suggesting you apply to DigiPen to get an internship at Wizards of the Coast. Obviously an expensive and insanely rigorous education helped me a great deal, but it is not for everyone. There are a ton of awesome ways to learn about game design and development, and some paths aren’t even well supported by most game schools (Production, for instance). Plus, I’m leaving with a ton of student debt and maybe even some work/life balance problems I’ll have to unpack in the years to come.
Second, I was somewhere around 22 when I got my first internship. That puts me roughly 2 years older than most of my classmates. Before I enrolled at DigiPen I spent two years at art school pursuing animation, I worked part-time with some indie collaborators as an artist, and I developed some semi-successful web/game projects with my close friend Jack.
Design is a life skill and one that can be further elevated by leveling up other skills as well as simply advancing through life. Thus, I was entering college ahead of the curve in a few regards. For example, some of my peers were adjusting to living on their own or with roommates for the first time ever. I had been doing it for a few years and as such it didn’t require much adjustment. This can be reiterated for a lot of different factors, but the point is once again it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much my 2 year detour helped, so I’m calling it out.
Lastly, I am a straight white dude. While I am more hispanic than I look, the fact is that I am white-presenting and I don’t think you have to be a genius to think up all the countless ways that did and will continue to help me advance through the games industry. Wizards of the Coast really values diversity, especially in their interns, so don’t let this caveat dissuade you. If you’re good, they’ll want you.
With all of those caveats out of the way, I can finally begin to outline my process.
Growing My Understanding of Magic: the Gathering
In the years before I entertained applying for a Wizards internship, my primary method of interfacing with Wizards products was through Magic.
I was taught Magic through the Commander format by a group of close friends. Commander, being an eternal format, had a massive card pool to draw from and I loved making strong decks, so I would regularly browse through every single legal card in Commander, identifying popular cards and trying to understand why they were popular. I would look up set codes, open Scryfall, and just browse for hours and hours.
As my understanding of Commander and the popular cards in that format grew, I began to grow curious about the other ways to play Magic. This led me to Magic’s countless design articles as well as Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast, where he regaled his listeners with stories of old sets, mechanics, and cards. Through absorbing these materials and becoming deeply familiar with the Modern, Standard, and Commander formats, I grew to have a pretty strong grasp of the game come the winter of Sophomore year.
A fantastic introduction to Magic’s mechanical color pie can be found here.
I had also inherited a lot of useful design knowledge from playing Hearthstone competitively during high school and writing design articles about it for Tempo Storm.
Application Prep
There isn’t a trick to getting a good application (that I know of). I very much brute-forced my way into a good resume by filling a lot of my extra time with side projects and many visits to my school’s Career Services offices. The wonderful staff there would help me improve my resume’s wording and structure, my website’s layout, and help me prepare for interviews. My art background also helped me to design my resume in an appealing way.
I visited Career Services at least 12 times to review my application materials. If this sounds like a lot of work, it was — especially finding time for this inbetween all my classes. It’s important to realize that your resume will look incredibly similar to your peer’s resumes, because obviously you’re taking all the same classes. Obscene levels of preparation can help you stand out, especially when trying to get through the recruiters.
All-or-Nothing
I wish I had a cooler name for it, but I’m dubbing my internship application strategy “All-or-Nothing” because I feel it accurately depicts how short-sighted it was, but also the disappointing reality of getting your foot in the door in the game industry.
When you’re applying to jobs or internships in the game industry, it is critical to understand that you are competing with, at best, many other equally skilled people for a specific position. Some people out there have very one track ambitions: to make games at their dream company. Some studios like Blizzard have this a bit more than others, but Wizards absolutely has this culture amongst prospective employees. You are competing with those people. I was competing with those people.
My professors did a great job communicating this to me, and thus I decided that my way to stand out would be to go all-in on a Wizards of the Coast internship. I would — once again — brute force my way into getting noticed by putting in a ton of effort. Lots of my peers were either making a generic resume and mass-applying to companies or picking two to three companies and making more focused resumes.
I figured that if I could make my cover letter and application materials focused and indisputably decent, it would pique someone’s interest somewhere along the application process. If I tried my hardest and failed to garner any interest, then that was a sign to me that either I wasn’t cut out for Magic: the Gathering design or that I was missing something critical in the process.
After I made my decision to focus on Wizards, I spent a bit over a month and a half developing a proof-of-concept Magic set with its own limited draft archetypes, custom mechanics, and with rares and mythics targeting a variety of formats. I got feedback from my friends and playtested some cards, iterated, and revised my work.
I arbitrarily decided to pull an all-nighter the night before the internship fair to write a comprehensive document about the decisions I made around my set and what I learned.
This proved to be an unbelievable stroke of luck, because as I learned when I proudly showed Senior Magic Designer Glenn Jones my set of cards, he respectfully shielded his eyes and informed me that Magic designers cannot look at cards other people make. Thankfully, I was able to hand over my design write-up in-lieu of my card designs and Glenn gave it a once-over. I asked him some burning questions I had about set design and he gave me super thoughtful answers. We chatted a bit about my resume and I took my leave. In the moment I felt like I had made a super good first impression, most of which was made possible thanks to all my preparation.
If Glenn or any of my previous managers end up reading this and provide me with some more context, I’ll be sure to add it.
Interviews and Beyond
In all honesty, after submitting my application materials, I really felt like the process was completely out of my hands. I wish I could provide more background as to the inner workings of who my resume went to, why specifically I was chosen, and what the difference makers were — but I just don’t have that information.
After the internship fair, I was connected with a recruiter who did an initial screening interview. I took a few moments before answering questions to really think through them and tried to be as honest and confident as possible.
The same is true for the questions and interviews past the screening. I answered questions regarding communication, design choices, and team building as honestly as possible. The only bit of feedback both me and my fellow classmate who also received a Wizards internship got about our interviews was: “you were the only candidates who actually answered the questions we asked”. While it isn’t the most precise feedback, I understood that to mean both of us had taken time to process what we were being asked, and returned with tangible answers.
Conclusion
That’s really all I have to say about my internship process.
I worked on Magic and some other cool stuff I can’t talk about for two summers. I have since ended up on the D&D Digital team doing some other cool stuff I can’t talk about.
If this didn’t answer all your questions or you really want clarification, feel free to reach out to me on socials (@notpjrivas on Twitter) and I can answer your questions personally or update this article with more relevant information.
Hope this helps!
