Jason Mical was the Wizkids Communications Manager from 2003-2006, but you may know him on the Realms as BrotherMagneto.

I'm The Le, and you may remember me from my popular articles, Top 5 Overrated HeroClix, HeroClix: For Profit, and Fixing HeroClix. As usual I'm bringing you some of the best HeroClix articles you'll ever see, and this time I sit down with Jason and talk about Spawn HeroClix, Groo HeroClix, Special Powers, and everything in between.

Yes, I said Groo HeroClix.

(read on)

In an unprecedented Cross-Over, HCRealms has teamed up with HeroClix World to bring you the Jason "Brother Magneto" Mical interview! The first part of this interview can be found at #############.com, while the second (and best) part is below.

The Le: What kind of PR nightmares did you run into while at Wizkids, and how would you respond to them today?

Jason Mical: Heh, a PR person would never use the term 'nightmare' but that's actually pretty darn close on some counts so I won't contradict you. The biggest one is the whole Galactus debacle. I came in the weekend after Wizard World Los Angeles, the one convention that year I couldn't go to, and found that HeroClix fans wanted to string us up for not being able to buy Galactus and worse their treatment by some of the staff at the show. That was a major learning experience for us; I don't use corporate terminology that often but it's appropriate here.

All of our calculations for conventions in terms of the stock we brought were based on how well things sold at other shows, and how many people we expected to attend that particular convention. The only thing we had to base our calculations for Galactus on were the Dropship sales from the prior year - and the backstock of Dropships we still had taking up space in our warehouse at the time. So people were appropriately skeptical that a $100 HeroClix figure would sell. I suppose history kind of speaks for itself, and it was a major error on our part.

The Le: I'm sorry, "Dropship?"

Jason Mical: The Dropship was the first convention 'big figure' WizKids did. It was a spaceship for Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and really a cool piece. I tried to rig mine up with lights but only ended up ruining it. Sigh.

In retrospect I'm not sure there's much I'd do differently about that situation. I was on the forums as much as I was on the phone, gathering information and trying to figure out exactly what happened. It didn't take long for us to realize our calculations for future conventions were way off and we ordered the next batch to go into production almost immediately, but we still had a massive bruise from what happened at Wizard World LA that year, and it's one that we never fully shook off. I know there are people on the 'Realms who still believe we intentionally shorted people at Wizard World LA to create demand. It's simply not true, and if I could do anything to respond differently today it would have been to issue a statement sooner that we hadn't intended to short people and that attendees who missed out on a Galactus could have had the chance to get one in another way. Sure, there would have been unscrupulous people who gamed the system (there always were a few) but the goodwill it would have saved us would have been immeasurable.

Another major one was when our website got hacked. This isn't really a PR debacle by most people's standards but I remember a very nasty exchange on the 'Realms right after it happened. I learned about it on a Friday night about 9pm as I was going out with some friends; I got the call as I was going into a casino actually and I was trying to coordinate getting the site back up and still salvage my time with my friends.

I checked the forums when I got home and some of the responses were just downright mean. People calling us stupid for allowing it to happen, and one person saying not-so-subtly 'well I told them about this security exploit a month ago, and now look!' It was one of those times when I realized that turning your hobby, something you care about, into your job, something you have to do, has some major drawbacks. Sometimes those drawbacks are on a personal scale, because on one hand you simply need to do your job or to have a very hard skin to abusive people. On the other hand, you're thinking yourself 'well, yeah, this was pretty damn stupid on our part' and the insults hurled your way find a way to connect. If I had that one to do over I might have made sure the website was put up and come back to the forums after I'd had time to sort through it a little bit. That, and I would have approached it with a much thicker skin.

The Le: Well, even Microsoft and Google have gotten hacked from time to time. Are there any features you would have liked to incorporate into the website?

Jason Mical: Well our CMS was not the most robust thing on the planet. I'll admit that my technical knowledge is pretty limited but even I knew the CMS didn't work right all the time, and was a mess for search engines. The figure gallery (which was hacked) wasn't a heck of a lot better, but it had to deal with a massive amount of data and interface with our spreadsheets so I'm not sure how it could have been done any better, at least at the time without a massive overhaul. (Note: CMS = Content Management System)

The Le: What other PR issues were there?

Jason Mical: There's various other little things that happened too, misprinted figures or other quality control issues that ended up becoming PR problems. I'd like to think that I handled it all pretty well. If anything, what I'd like people to know is that I always approached that job as a fan of the game who got lucky enough to work for the company, not some PR schlub who could have been selling widgets or HeroClix because he simply didn't care about either. I tried very hard to represent the voice of the community and the fan base in meetings, whether that was fighting for the company to do the right thing even though it would cost a little bit more or saying 'hey, it would be awesome if we did this!' in a brainstorm.

Don't misunderstand - there were a good deal of people at WizKids who cared just as much as I did if not more; Seth, Jon, Wade and Rollie just to name a few. If anything I would have been more transparent to try to help people understand why we did some of the things we did or what was going on behind the scenes a little more. There are some things that are not appropriate to share with your fan base of course, and it's hard to tell if sharing any more information would have simply given the nay-sayers more fuel to add to the fires or if it would have helped them understand. But I always believed in doing right by the fans, and I hope that showed through in how I did my job. In fact I hope it showed through in how WizKids approached our games and our community, even after I left. Some of their best work was done following my tenure there and the people at the company always cared a great deal. Working there was like working with your friends in a clubhouse. Just a clubhouse where we were responsible to some very cranky stockholders and accountants.

The Le: I've usually given Wizkids the benefit of the doubts when it comes to production problems, but there's one thing that always bugged me though -- how did you guys miss the "Giant Symbol" on the DC GIANTS set?

Jason Mical: Well, to be fair, we should have implemented better quality control to catch the production problems. We might not have solved all of them but there were some that could have been avoided, like the Giant Symbol from DC Giants. If I remember correctly that may have been the time when one of the symbols somehow got swapped out between the final proofing phase and when the data went to the factory, or the factory didn't have the symbol, or something like that. To be honest I don't precisely remember. We took a good degree of flak for it and rightly so. Things like that are the things we should have caught.

The Le: Well I've always believed you guys took a lot of blame for things that might have been out of your control. What kinds of challenges did you face when dealing with the factories?

Jason Mical: Some of the things with the factory were beyond our control, yeah. We used several vendors in mainland China to produce our games. There were several challenges: sometimes there were incompatibilities with the software that delivered the dial information, which resulted in some dial misprints. The Chinese work-year cycle didn't help either. As anyone who has ever dealt with manufacturing in China can attest, Chinese New Year is difficult as most of the factory workers go home during this time (I should note, Chinese factories are almost small, self-contained towns where workers will come in from across the country to work for a season or two to earn money to take back home.) The factories shut down during Chinese New Year and worker turnover is really high, sometimes as high as 75% afterwards, so the new workers have to be trained. This is most noticeable to the end customer when it's substandard paint jobs or poorly-packed boxes.

There's also the delay in shipping from the factories, usually a month or more. We could airfreight things in and occasionally did for conventions but it's prohibitively expensive to do that for anything in large quantities. We did actually lose stock off a container ship a couple of times as well (this apparently happens more than you might think, which is a scary prospect for me as I'm about to pack my life into a container again for another international move). Luckily insurance covers that when it happens.

The Le: I've never played Mage Knight, but I am utterly fascinated with the Mage Knight 2.0 PIE DIAL -- I think it's far superior to the standard HeroClix dial. Can you give us any tidbits it about it, and why we've never seen it in HeroClix?

Jason Mical: It's not a major secret that the original HeroClix rules and the powers and dial were pretty much straight out of Mage Knight. We actually debated whether rebooting HeroClix in the same way Mage Knight was rebooted with 2.0 would be a good thing or not. MK2.0 was such a large leap forward for the game that it left a lot of the original players in a real lurch, and there was sort of a feeling that doing the same thing to HeroClix would not be a good thing for the game. There was also a bit of a feeling of 'if it's not broke, don't fix it.'

The solution we finally hit on, adding the card mechanics and Seth's additional rules changes, I think reflected better the kind of game that HeroClix was and needed to be. Mage Knight was always more of a skirmish-level miniatures game, where HeroClix was - or at least had the potential to be - a somewhat simpler (feel free to argue that point) and more casual game. Part of that is a stigma associated with wargaming, that it's something that only appeals to hardcore gamers while HeroClix was always designed to appeal to a wider crowd, comic people who might want to dabble in strategy gaming.

So I guess the answer to the question is that we didn't want to overhaul the mechanics in the same way 2.0 overhauled Mage Knight. We focused instead on ways to keep old pieces worth playing while adding enough new things to make the game interesting. Seth's game design also helped this a lot; I can't say enough good things about his design prowess and ability to make pieces genuinely interesting to play. To be honest, Seth would be a good person to ask about this because he could get into far more depth than I can about it.

The Le: Okey, to Seth Johnson then -- same question.

SETH JOHNSON: The first products I designed at WizKids were Mage Knight expansions (Omens and Nexus), shortly after Mage Knight 2.0 had released. So like Jason, I'm definitely familiar with what fans and players were saying around that time.

When I moved over to work on HeroClix, we had a number of design meetings where we talked about where the game was, and where it needed to go. Unless a game is a standalone one-shot, it needs to grow and change, both to improve on the past and set a course into a exciting future. HeroClix is no exception. But the lesson we learned from MK 2.0 was that making a lot of changes all at once made some longtime players feel like we'd pulled the carpet out from underneath them--they enjoyed the game as it was and had invested a lot of money in it, and they (justifiably) didn't like anything that put that enjoyment or their investment at risk. So whenever we sat down to talk about potential changes we might make to Heroclix, it was always with an eye both on new players and the players who had been with the game since the beginning. We were always trying to improve the game's accessibility and breadth of game play, but hopefully never leading our existing players to regret the money they'd spent on our products and how much they enjoyed the game.

I often see it argued on fan forums about whether the current state of the HeroClix rules is HeroClix 2.6 or HeroClix 1.17 or HeroClix 14.0. I like that there's no clear answer; it means that we made those needed transitions from one state of the HeroClix rule set to another as smooth as possible, and that on the whole players feel it's one large evolving continuum rather than a line with a big compatibility break in it. Compatibility breaks have their benefits--see what the 3.0 and 4.0 breaks have done for Dungeons & Dragons--but I really like that someone who took a leap and spent the money to buy into an unknown set called Infinity Challenge could still be bringing some of their first loves to the battlefield when Arkham Asylum was on the shelves. You might not _want_ to, but at least it's a choice the player made rather than one we forced upon them.

All of which is prelude to saying that we did talk about whether or not we wanted to change the HeroClix dial to one with a pie-shaped slot rather than an L-shaped slot, and whether or not to add a mechanic similar to the MK 2.0 nexus abilities to HeroClix. There were production-cost reasons in the mix, but from a design standpoint it was eventually decided that we wanted to maintain that enduring continuum of figures that looked and played alike, and not add the layer of confusion that would come with two powers appearing in one slot via a nexus. When we did eventually add that possibility via special powers, it was only after several more years of cleaning up the wording of powers and when we could include character cards that allowed us to include specialized rules text when needed to help clarify the combos for players.

The Le: how did the invention of HeroClix CARDS come into play (Feats, BFCs, Bystanders)? (I always assumed that Topps pushed for them since they do lots of baseball cards). Were there any challenges you faced with pre or post implementation?

Jason Mical: Believe it or not the cards were something that WizKids added and pushed for, not Topps. We wanted a way to easily add game mechanics without either expanding the Powers and Abilities Card to another sheet or creating a 100-page rulebook. Cards were our solution to that question. Apart from keeping the ideas new and fresh the challenge with the cards was a physical one: the first time they were included in the boxes the factory workers seemed to bend them to cram them in, so a good 50% or so of cards out of the first batch were screwed up. Not the kind of first impression you want to make with a product debut!

The Le: Wow... surely there must have been some successes at Wizkids?

Jason Mical: Believe it or not there were more than a few! I'd break success down into two categories, my own personal successes and the company's overall successes. The first list is shorter so I'll start there.

I pushed hard for more IndyClix stuff; there was a real hesitation against it because IndyClix didn't sell nearly as well compared to Marvel and DC, so doing another expansion was not an option. When we started moving towards the collector's set model I lobbied to explore IndyClix releases in that form. I know Seth pushed for this too so it's not 100% my doing, but I feel pretty good about having done it. And I did personally arrange for the BPRD set to be made, so yeah, I'll take credit for its existence (not so much the production errors on it!)

There were other little things too. Sometimes cost-cutting measures or the 'easy way out' were presented and I would then turn around and say 'look, if we do that we're going to completely alienate our fan base.' And I'd often use the WizKids forums or HCRealms as proof points when I needed to. I would often use myself as a litmus test, because underneath my suave, Mad Men-style PR exterior I'm basically a huge geek and invested in HeroClix as much as anyone. If I thought 'jeeze, I would think WisKids are D.B.s if they did that,' then I would recommend against it. I can't go into details here about everything but to address a question from the HCRealms thread, most certainly we took feedback online seriously. The trouble with online feedback is that you have to sort through the extreme cases and find things that really are trends that should concern you, and there were more than a few people at WizKids who couldn't make that differentiation, which is a shame.

Oh yeah: before Crimson Skies was discontinued they released a set of collector's cards, similar in style to baseball cards, with pieces of fiction and scenarios and such. I designed some of those myself. I think maybe 10 people including my mother saw them, but it was pretty neat that they let me do it.

In terms of overall successes, the biggest one for HeroClix was Seth's approach to character design. There was a bit of 'conventional wisdom' from the early marketing department that you had to do only Tier 1 characters, and Seth lobbied hard to buck that trend. He also changed the game from a first strike and/or turtling game to something far more nuanced and strategic.

Pirates was a success in every definition of the term; the game was an experiment designed to attract a certain Disney license, and we didn't know it would sell nearly as well as it did.

Overall WizKids had some very elegantly-designed games. Race Day played very well and even MLB SportsClix in both its iterations was a hell of a game Regardless of some of the other decisions made at the company the game design was always incredibly sound, and it was a real pleasure to work with people like Seth, Jon, Matt, Mike, Kelly, Scott and Ethan, to see the kinds of things they could do. It was a great learning experience for me too from a general 'creative' point of view, because they taught me to see a game or a narrative from a completely different angle, as an interaction between various components.

This is probably as good a place as any to say that one of my favorite aspects of the job was the interaction I got to have with the community, both online and at conventions. I'm not going to be so arrogant as to say it was a 'success,' as there are things I realize could have been done differently, but it was extremely fulfilling as a part of my career. The things I learned at WizKids I put into practice today, and I hope to do again at some point in the future.

...continued below...

The Jascon Mical interview concludes below! Don't forget to check out #############.com for the first part of the interview!

The Le: I asked the HCRealms community to fire off some questions, if you don't mind...

BudPalmer: What was the best day of your life to this point?

Jason Mical: The day I got married. The day I got my job at WizKids was in the top 5 though.

CarlosMucha: Not a question, but tell him that he was the best person/worker that Heroclix had!

Jason Mical: I was part of a team, and it was really a team effort. I just happened to be the public face of that team. But thank you!

Algrim: What exactly happened to the program he was looking to implement for the envoys where they would have access to unlicensed prototype figs and figs that just never quite made it

Jason Mical: The short answer: too many envoys, too few prototypes.

Indiana Ton / Sensualninja : How much input do you think the HCRealms community will have on the new Heroclix line, and future lines?

Jason Mical: That's hard to say as I'm not familiar with how NECA responds to community feedback. If they're on the ball, then hopefully at least some input! HCRealms and general community feedback was always taken into consideration, even if we couldn't always incorporate some or all of it for various reasons.

Hair10: Where does he get those wonderful toys?

Jason Mical: Nowadays it looks like the Disney Store. Sigh.

anonym0use: IS there a Sister Magneto? Is she single?

Jason Mical: I have a brother, and he just got married. Sorry!

Glen_smith: What is your most memorable convention experience while working for WizKids?

Jason Mical: The answer may surprise some people. I was working the late-late shift at GenCon and there was a kid, probably 10 or 11 years old who was there playing until really late, 3am or so. This was near the end of a three-convention circuit and I was dog-tired, but the kid couldn't get in touch with his mom to pick him up and I wasn't willing to leave him sitting outside the convention center on his own. We went to security and we eventually found his mother, who had (if I'm remembering correctly) fallen asleep. She drove in to get him but it took her an hour, so I sat outside with him and just talked about games and stuff for a while, even though I had to be awake and fresh in a couple of hours. I don't know why but that's always stuck out in my mind as my most memorable experience at a con.

subliminalthreat: why no one punched Tuttle in the throat?

Jason Mical: I'm a pacifist, and violence solves nothing!

Imbalance: What was your favorite toy as a child?

Jason Mical: Either my Choose You Own Adventure books, or my Legos. For many of the same reasons.

mr-coffin: What positions should NECA be sure to have in their new wizkids branch?

Jason Mical: A community manager, but I'm biased in that regard since it's a job I wouldn't mind having.

bill4935: What's Tony Randall really like?

Jason Mical: I have no idea.

WolvieFan9: Any good slightly embarrassing, insider anecdotes about former employees you'd like to spill? (Especially any involving any employees whose name closely resembles the common name for a Terrapene?)

Jason Mical: There was a company quote board for a while, which was usually stuff taken out of context that sounded vaguely sexual. It actually turned into a competition at one point to see who could work the best double-entendres [check the spelling on that] into conversations. Then we (thankfully) wised up a bit and it went back to being just really odd stuff we'd hear from time to time.

wintremute: If you could make ONE change to HeroClix (rules, system, whatever), what would it be and why would you do it?

Jason Mical: Make HorrorClix 100% compatible with HeroClix, which is how it should be.

WolvieFan9: Who was Boneyard's "Deep Throat"?

Jason Mical: There were two: a playtester we never identified, and me. By the way, this is a great place to plug Boneyard's awesome comic, Bedbug, which I would have liked very much to make into an IndyClix piece.

I should clarify: Boneyard and I had an arrangement that I would send him accurate information so that he wasn't leaking pre-release stuff, or non-approved figures/characters or stats. I don't really care that we never caught the leak, but it was certainly fun being the approved Deep Throat for a while.

phantalien: were there any that you heavily lobbied for but it was not supported by the company.

Jason Mical: Groo baby.

darius_dax1: Why Groo?

Jason Mical: Groo was the first comic I read that made me think. This was at a very young age, and looking back on it the satire was pretty juvenile by adult comparisons, but to someone who's 9 or 10 years old it makes you begin to reconsider some of your preconceived notions about things. It's the same reason my favorite sci-fi book is Brave New World: it's not necessarily the best at what it does, but it played a major role in my own personal development. Plus, he is pretty cool. Who doesn't like a barbarian with two katanas?

Tidge: Just how disappointed were you that there was no "Reed Richards" LE from Clobberin' Time?

Jason Mical: Very. But I can tell you why it happened: the Mr Fantastic sculpt was on a different sprue (the 'tree branch' of plastic that each figure was on - the mold was big enough for about 10 figures per sprue, so figures came out of the mold attached to a big branch that had 10 different sculpts on it.) LEs were always made from the same sprue of figures to save production costs, one-offs were very rarely printed, or if they were they were done in such quantities that they were for things like conventions. Which is the story of why there was no Reed Richards LE from Clobberin' Time.

delowen: What do you feel was Wizkids' biggest blunder of the last few years, besides letting you go?

Jason Mical: Selling themselves to a company too conservative to understand how they operated as a business, and the best way to let them innovate and make great games.

CuriousLurker: Godzilla... How close were we to getting him?

Jason Mical: The negotiations were on the table as I left, I don't know how things progressed from there.

zero_cochrane: What figure was your own MVP?

Jason Mical: I absolutely loved playing the FF from Fantastic Forces. I'm not sure if I'd call them MVPs, but I'd call them MFPs (most fun players.)

IceHot: Do you think the "HeroClix Formula" is complex enough to keep the game balanced are do you think there are elements of the "Formula" that need to be adjusted to make a more balanced game?

Jason Mical: Yes and no respectively, but understand I'm not a game designer.

krazycp: What is your favorite Clix figure?

Jason Mical: House of M Magneto, for the sculpt. If I could have a 12" sculpt of any one of our figures, that would be it. Sitting on my desk, right now.

The Le: Thanks for taking this interview, it's been great talking to you. Any final thoughts?

I really appreciate it. I don't make it back to HCRealms often but I did so after TheLe posted his thread there, and I have to say it's a testament to how strong and great the HeroClix community is that the site is still going strong this long after the game was cancelled and announced to come back (take that, naysayers!) That more than anything is what differentiated HeroClix from any other WizKids game: the strength of the community around it. It's a testament to how great everyone is that they're still discussing the game and still hanging out on the same places, and that there are actually new players joining.

HeroClix may become way more niche than its been in the past, but that's not a bad thing. As I'm looking forward to coming back to America and planning some of my travel next summer to conventions it's fantastic that I'll have a few games of HeroClix to look forward to in that mix. Keep gaming guys. You all rock.

You seem pretty cool, sir.

Don't lose that magic.

Thanks for the interview! and Thanks for the Years of awesome service BroMags! You have spoiled us all

Great interveiw, from both sides.

I love this kind of insight into Heroclix and the processes that made the game what it was. Excellent interviews, thele.

Just wondering, but why did you allow this question through?

What kind of a question is that? I'm just surprised that you actually gave Jason this question, as it's so immature and does not lend itself to a polite answer at all.

Sorry, I had to ask. Anyway, thanks for the cool interviews! Rep to you.

For the most part, I had a hard time determining which question would be appropriate... so I simply emailed all the questions to him! I told him, "You don't have to answer all the questions, just pick and choose the ones you want to respond to, and I'll omit the others."

So it was up to Jason to respond or ignore. (and I think he handled himself just fine and dandy).

-The Le

Great Interview! It was lots of fun to hear those insider stories. I always wonderd why the hell there was no Reed Richards LE in CT!


A Bromags interview is like listening to snippets of old Ronald Reagan speeches. You just think about how long you've missed good leadership.

Throat punching is pretty severe. A swift kick in the ### on the way out the door however...........

Jason Mical: Yeah, IndyClix really did have some great stuff in it. The thing about Indy comics is that a lot of characters do tend to be pretty similar - Blades/Claws/Fangs makes sense when you've got a bunch of ninjas for example. I know the dials have been criticized as not being as good in-game as others, but my take was always that 'well, they're character-accurate and that's what's important.'

I LOVE Bro Mags! that is EXACTLY my point of view! for that I collect carpy dials from some figures, because there is not point to have a super hyper version of Namor or Green Arrow (like the crazy Crisis version) because when this "normal" power figures are over powered all the figures who REALLY deserve be powerful and great don't look that good.

Keeping reading..

"In terms of my favorite other WizKids game though it's definitely Pirates. I wrote a good deal of the card fiction for several of the expansions so I'm personally invested in it, but the mechanics were great and it just had a sheer joy and fun factor that is missing from a lot of miniatures games. It reminded me more of the Comic Fanboy games of HeroClix we played at the beginning, where having fun was more important than playing two Firelords and two Booster Golds, or whatever the cheese team of the week was."

Awesome.

Cripes man! I need me some Godzilla.

Ohhhh, I can't believe my joke question *actually* got asked!! What a wasted opportunity.


Now for that one sentence, you're going up on my "Wall of Fame". Truer words were never spoken. "Clix is clix", that's my motto.

wintremute: If you could make ONE change to HeroClix (rules, system, whatever), what would it be and why would you do it?

Jason Mical: Make HorrorClix 100% compatible with HeroClix, which is how it should be."

Yea!

GREAT Interview the Le! and thanks for include my "question"!