About

 About

 I was born in Salinas, California but lived all over the US before settling down in the Seattle area. From an early age, I was enamored with video games and card games. From playing Speed and Spoons with my parents and grandparents into the world of TCG's like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! I always had a knack for understanding these games at a more top-down level strategically. I've always wanted to create games and see an idea go from my head to someone else's hands.

 2003

In East Cape Girardeau, Illinois, a small village of about 250 people, my younger brother bought some Yu-Gi-Oh! cards from a friend. Neither of us knew how to play the game yet but we tried anyway and made up the rules as we went. We didn't have a cohesive deck by any means and were just drawing from the same shared pile but it was magical nonetheless. I was the oldest, so rule-making naturally fell to me. Perhaps I wasn't even necessarily better at it, but I was the oldest and such is the burden of being in charge.

2006-2010

 After learning the rules of Yu-Gi-Oh! from some older kids a couple years prior, and then learning the actual rules from an instructional DVD my mom got me at Wal-Mart, this was around the time I started to become interested in competitive games. No doubt fueled by my newfound interest Call of Duty and Halo in the context of the e-sports scene I was just starting to become aware of, I started to also learn about tournament play in Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic: The Gathering and became fascinated by the cohesive strategies on display.

I started to look at tournament deck lists on the school computers and try to understand why there was this overarching theme in all of these decks, regardless of the game, where players were playing so few unique cards. Until this point, I'm sure my decks were almost always singleton decks because I wanted to make sure I had a card for any situation I could dream of. I'm sure there were times I'd duplicate things more from necessity than anything else, but largely I was blissfully unaware of deck building philosophies.

Some time late in 2010, while looking for something to kill time with, I started to read card game theory articles from authors like Patrick Chapin and Luis Scott-Vargas. I couldn't believe I'd made so many mistakes for so many years.

2011-2016

Now being totally engrossed in competitive card games, I was grinding tournaments in pretty much every one I could get a deck together for. This was when I'd start talking to other tournament players, theory crafting decks for specific formats or event metas, and growing as a player.

I also took great interest in judging these games during this time. I found myself naturally understanding the rules complexity better than most other players and as I got more involved in judging and tournament organization, I found that it was becoming even more rewarding for me than playing in the tournaments ever did.

I could sit down and wax poetic about the best line of play for this scenario or that but executing those lines at a table never fully came together for me like it did for other better players around me. What I could do better than they could was understand and remember the complicated web of effect timing sequences in a given gamestate or extrapolate from one mechanical interaction how another should work.

 2017-2019

By early 2017, I'd been studying every piece of card game theory literature I could get my hands on. Whether that meant reading books like Next Level Magic from Patrick Chapin or Road of the King by Patrick Hoban or that mean scouring forum posts on places like Pojo and following all the latest articles on sites like ChannelFireball or TCGPlayer, if it talked about CCG theory, I had probably read it.

I'd been working for a little while as a "design consultant" for a friend who was funding his own CCG. While this mostly amounted to prototyping different versions of various rulesets, there was also a chance for me to work on a thematically cohesive character design. Understanding the role the character needed to play in the game's meta, the type of player that might be drawn to the character, and how to design cards that appealed to that player was the first taste I had for actually creating something that might make it into the hands of a player I didn't even know and I was hooked on the feeling of seeing that moment.

 In 2018 I started working for a competitive CCG team organization known as Team Rankstar. We had teams across multiple different TCGs and CCGs like Magic, Gwent, Hearthstone, and Eternal. I was initially brought on to help manage the org's various Twitch streamers and YouTube creators. I was fairly knowledgeable about content creation for those platforms and I was floating around helping with thumbnail creation, chat moderation, etc.

In early 2019, I started playing a new CCG entering the market in alpha testing known as Mythgard. I'd never been so completely enthralled with a game. The game's mechanical complexity was deeper than any other card game I'd played prior and the world was captivating. I knew I had to get involved however I could. I started writing articles for Team Rankstar covering Mythgard. I eventually brought on other creators from within the game's community and within Team Rankstar's other teams to cover Mythgard as well.

I started running weekly tournaments and became frustrated that the game lacked a great deck building site. over my years in the competitive scenes of so many card games, I'd come to learn that they need a central hub where players can share deck ideas, communicate with one another about their lists, check tournament results, etc. I knew that I didn't have the web development skills to build such a thing but I surely knew what such a thing should ultimately look like and what the feature set needed to include. So my best friend and I hired a team to create MythgardHub.

Working on MythgardHub and on Team Rankstar's content creation team afforded me the opportunity to get to know the developers of Mythgard a bit closer. Whether it was chatting with a designer on Discord or working back and forth with the community manager on getting assets for the site, I was becoming more acquainted with more of the team.

2020-2021

In October of 2020, I was lucky enough to be hired on at Rhino Games to serve as the new Community Manager for Mythgard. I remember trying to explain to my grandfather why this role was different from the things I did at Team Rankstar or when helping a friend with a personal project and the best description that came to mind was "This is like... a company with a real office and everything."

Given the nature of such a small team, while I was hired on as a Community Manager, everyone at Rhino Games wore a lot of hats. It wasn't long until I started being involved in the live balance process. I also worked on our competitive play format and updated broadcasting guidelines for official tournament streams, etc.

Around January of 2021, it was time to start pre-production on a new expansion for Mythgard. I'd come up with some ideas that I thought were worth pitching to the team. The rest of the guys liked them and we agreed that we'd explore the idea further. I started working on expanding that idea into a full cohesive expansion. Between learning about the internal targets for card distributions across mana targets, faction inclinations toward certain card types, and rarity distribution targets, I also started to learn how the game data was driven and got to work on actually hooking these card ideas up in Unity and testing them out by cobbling together bits of existing card effects that didn't need engineering work.

Unfortunately, funding was hard to come by and Mythgard hadn't gained the footing it needed and Rhino Games was no more in June.

I picked up work on another fantasy CCG called Runestrike and did some expansion design, live balance, and community management with them for a few months.

In late 2021, Mythgard was purchased by a new company called Monumental and I was hired to pick up where I'd left off months prior.

2022-2023

Early days at Monumental were focused on writing more documentation that I ever that I'd write in my life. Much of Mythgard's inner workings, design goals, customer support processes, etc. were only ever used by the guys who built them so nobody bothered to properly document how they'd worked. I got intimately acquainted with Notion during this time.

Monumental wanted to continue work on the expansion I had started at Rhino Games, so I went full bore into that work. Although that expansion was never shipped, due to a change in marketing plans for the game, I did get to see it through the process far enough to have designs in place for all 130+ cards, specific thematic elements and story continuation planned out, and even managed to hook a fair chunk of it up in Unity and play around with it. It was pretty cool and should any Mythgard player stumble across this page, I hope they have had a chance to see some of the designs we actually showed off.

With Monumental's plans shifting around, I was asked to learn another CCG they'd acquired known as Little Alchemist. I jumped straight into the game and began to dig into the card acquisition model, gameplay balance, design philosophies, and internal themes.

Little Alchemist's gameplay was dominated by rather binary effects and I got to work in live balance to adjust existing cards with the intent to raise the floor of unexciting cards and uninteresting card packs to better drive player spend.

While we were getting praise for the live balance changes being made, I was asked to start work on some new content for the game as well. I provided support on card packs like Jungle, Shrine, Wintertide, Summertide, and Pirate to make sure they were following the new live balance guidelines we'd built from the live balance work I'd previously done. I designed some original card packs as well, with the Meta pack and the Anniversary pack being some top sellers.

Toward the end of 2023, I was moved from the Little Alchemist team to start work on card and feature design for Monumental's next title.

Early 2024

Having acquired a major IP license, Monumental had been at work on re-imagining Mythgard. Ultimately, the decision was made to pivot the current project to build from the Little Alchemist base, as its simpler gameplay was a better fit for the property.

I spent January through the end of June working on card design targets ranging from writing frameworks for card distributions, internal design metrics, live balance targets, power level scales, AI decks, NPC dialogue, and alternate game modes for what would become Nickelodeon Card Clash.

Following the acquisition of Kongregate, Monumental went through a restructuring and I was let go.

 Late 2024-2025

 It's now July of 2025 as I take the time to write this out and in the year since I was let go, I've been stuck in the seemingly endless cycle of tailoring a resume or CV for a design role that opens up, being one of who knows how many applicants thanks to the terrible slate of layoffs in the industry over the last few years, and then repeating the process all over again.

When I'm not doing those depressing things, I'm finding significantly more happiness in playing and designing all sorts of card games. Thankfully, the repetition in this facet of life is much less monotonous than the other. :)