Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1006: Lessons Learned – Strixhaven

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

This is another podcast in my "Lessons Learned" series where I look back at sets I led (or co-led) to talk about the design lessons I learned. Today's podcast is on Strixhaven: School of Mages.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my lessons learned series where I take sets that I led or co-led and I talk about all the things I learned about doing them. So last time I did one of these, I did Zendikar Rising. So the next set chronologically that I worked on was Strixhaven. Call time was Ethan Fleischer, not me. Okay, so Strixhaven is interesting in that we had a much larger sense of what the set was before we began. A lot of times when we do a set, like, we have a general sense of the, like,

when I did Ikoria, it was like, it's monsters. Or we did Theros, it was like, oh, we're doing Greek mythology. This set had a whole bunch of pieces, not that we had figured it out, but we actually started knowing a bunch of things. So, we knew, for example, that it was going to have, it was going to be a magical school, and playing

the magical school tropes. We knew that there were going to be, so we knew it was going to be a faction set, we knew there were going to be enemy colored, and we knew that incest and sorceries were going to be... So we knew it was going to be a faction set. We knew there were going to be enemy colored. And we knew that insistence sorceries were going to matter. We also knew that MDFCs would play a role.

Originally, this was going to be the set with MDFCs. We ended up spreading them out. There's good and bad for that. I think there's a world in which this is the only set that did that and we could make maybe a bigger splash. I think spreading's a world in which this is the only set that did that, and we could make maybe a bigger splash. I think spreading that was right, meaning I don't think Strixhaven did enough other stuff going on that I don't think it needed the splash for just introducing MDFCs. There are some lessons from MDFCs, modal double-faced cards. I will get to those in a moment.

Okay, so first off, I liked the space we were playing in. One of the things that we've learned more and more is the power of genre tropes. There's top-down stuff we do. Like, a lot of stuff we'll do cultural or mythological, like things that are more related to history and other civilizations. Those are trickier. I mean, we do them. But what we found is when you're doing pop culture genre tropes, the audience just knows them better, so you can go a lot deeper.

Like the example is when we were doing Amonkhet, which is, okay, we're doing Egyptian mythology. We just couldn't go that deep. The average person doesn't know that much about Egyptian mythology. So there was only so much resonance we could get. Like, there's only so many cards that go, oh, I get it, it's that. Just because, like, even some of the, like, really basic stories of Egyptian mythology, we found the average person just didn't know them. Now, on the flip side, the magical school trope is a genre thing, and it just hits things that people tend to be much more aware of. Also, the other cool thing about

doing magical school is it overlaps with school. So not only do you get to do magical school tropes, but you get to do school tropes. And school tropes are very universal. For two reasons. One, most people have been to school. Although, one of the lessons we did learn was that schooling is very... We did a bunch of things that were either very American, in a few cases very English. And so one of the notes we got from people was some of our school tropes, the generic ones, not the magical school tropes as much, but the generic school tropes, weren't quite as universal as we thought. Just because how schools function and how colleges function, for all intents and purposes, we were doing a college.

How colleges function just varies greatly from country to country. I did not realize how greatly until we put the set out. So that's something to be careful of when you're doing sort of, I don't know, everyday life tropes. We have to be very conscious of life varies quite a bit day to day from, you know, around the world. And so what might be a normal college experience for an American might not be. a normal college experience for an American might not be. The one thing we had going for us is a lot of the, most of the, or I should say the majority,

the majority of magical school tropes tend to center on England. And so people, while they might not experience them directly, are at least familiar with some of the English tropes that are sort of woven in to some of the magical school tropes. Anyway, it was a fun space to play in. So the one thing that I'm very proud of was we spent a lot of time in crafting the factions and that one of my, I've talked about this, one of my pet peeves for the magical school tropes is that they always spend a lot of time on like magic in classes, right?

It's potion class. It's charm class, you know, and that one of the things for me is like, don't they still have to learn like mathematics? You know, don't they have to learn the basics? And that the thing I enjoyed in our take on it was, you learned the normal subject matters. The fact that you had magic just changed the nature of how you learned them. And, I mean, yeah, somewhere you're learning how to do the magic.

But it was more interwoven into the actual subject. So, I liked the idea that we divvied up our colleges on actual school subjects. And those are somewhat universal, you know what I'm saying? Like the kinds of things you study in school, maybe what history you study varies from, you know, place to place, but that you study history doesn't. So anyway, the other thing that we did that I enjoyed, and it's interesting. So Lorehold was red and white, and they're based on history. And they were definitely the school we pushed the most. Red-white, traditionally speaking, is known for aggro.

So we did something completely different. And we did a very slow, controlling, graveyard-oriented deck, which is something red-white just doesn't normally do at all. And the interesting thing is we had pushed a little bit more. Our goal, basically, in making these was we were trying to not be what the Ravnican guilds had been. And so, you know, we definitely wanted to be... we were trying to be different.

I think what we ended up doing was... I think we pushed a little harder than we should. Well, I mean, it is harder. Like one of the things that I'm learning more and more is we have to think downstream. And that one of the things is the public does enjoy things going differently. But there's only so much that can happen. Like one of the lessons from Rise of the Eldrazi, which I did not work on. I mean, did I work on the development? I was not on the design team.

I think I might have been on the development team. But one of the issues on Rise of the Eldrazi, actually I was on the development team. Anyway, one of the issues on Rise of the Eldrazi was we had deviated a little bit too much for the average player. The experienced player, the enfranchised player, actually loved Rise of the Eldrazi Unlimited just because it was so different. It wasn't your normal set. But what we found is if you deviate too much, like you need something for the average player to hold on to. That like, okay, I'm not quite sure what's going on, but I'll do the thing I always do.

And it'll kind of work. It might not be the best strategy, but it'll work. And you can really get burned that there's basic strategies that just didn't possibly work in Rise of the Eldrazi. And a lot of the less enfranchised people really disliked it because they were confused. So one of the things to keep in mind is I think, I mean, the role of vision is to push

a little more than normal, giving set design options. And I'm glad we did Lorehold. I love the idea that we did something really out of the box. One of the notes we got from the Varian franchise players was, well, Lorehold was great. Why weren't all of them that crazy?

And the answer was, they can't all be that crazy. I think we can do one archetype that's just not at all what you're used to. And you can do a couple archetypes that are like, okay, in the ballpark, but you know, playing into this set's themes in a way that make it a bit different.

But I think if we had made five schools that none of which were anything you ever experienced in those color combinations, I think that would have been a little bit too disorienting. Um, and in fact, I think what we turned over, uh, to set design was a little much. Set design, I think, properly pulled back a little bit. Um, I think we tried to push a little farther. Um, and I'm not, not that we shouldn't have, not that we, like, I do think vision's supposed to sort of push and, and let set design figure out where to pull back. But set design often should

pull back. I think vision pushing allows set design some options of where to push. The other interesting thing that came, another interesting lesson was early on, Prismari was not the art school, but the hard sciences school. So originally we played with this idea of blue and red are the elements. Well, what if, so we decided, what if we did hard science and soft science? So the idea is blue-red is more like earth science and physics. And so we found those two things. One was the division of science of having biology be one place. We decided it was a little too much.

Just understand the differences between sciences. Even though there is a line you can draw. It's not a line the average person knows, so it's not a good line. And the second thing is, we were trying to not be Ravnica, and just going hard into sort of science got us a little closer to Izzet than we wanted. And making sort of art people that express that, you're like, blue and red together really get creativity. That's a fun thing for blue and red.

And so, I get that the Izzet are creative, but they're creative and much more like we're creative scientists, right? We want to do creative artists. And so anyway, I think I was a little reluctant at first just because I really had to solve. So one of the things that happens in design is you get attached to things. And one of the things, like a really important skill, is you have to learn when, okay, am I too attached? Have I got premature, like, okay, this is a cool idea,

but is there a better idea? Did I get attached to an idea that's not the best idea? Now, I did come around. It wasn't like I said, no, no, no. I said, let me think about it. And the more I thought about the first Mario, the more I said, okay, I get that. There's some cool stuff we could do.

We did find a way to use the elements in how they performed. So ice and fire were there a little bit. Water and fire were there. Okay, next. Magecraft and Instants and Sorcery. So the Instants instance and sorcery theme was cool. I'm very glad we did it. It very

much defined what, in some ways, the two things that most defined what the set was, was the magical school tropes and instance and sorcery matters. I mean, it's a faction set. I did have a lot of fun, although the factions, in my mind, play into the school tropes. So I consider

the factions to be an extension of that. But the instant sorcery was a very interesting lesson. Sometimes you go, okay, I want to do something. And then what you realize is it's, I want to do something. And then what you realize is it's a lot harder to do. Like, the reason that instants and sorceries don't tend to play a larger role in most sets. I mean, we often do, like, a two-color pair, red-blue being the most common.

That, like, sorcery, spells matter, non-creatures matter, something. That's a theme we do on small doses. Trying to do it in big doses was a little trickier. Mostly what it means is you just have to, like, you have to push in the direction so that those things happen. You have to sort of, like, for example, you can swap some stuff. Like, if you want instant sorceries matter, you can take things that aren't instant sorceries and make them instant sorceries. A great example there is token making, for example. You know, tokens can replace a lot of vanilla, French

vanilla, you know, simple creatures. And so the idea is we leaned on token making a little more because token making gets to go in your creature slot, but they exist as instant sorceries, even though they sort of count toward creatures. Another thing that we did, I mean, so lessons learned did not happen in um vision design interestingly but the original lessons learned is when we were making kaladesh we made mechanical inventions that were cards that went and get artifacts from outside the game that you that

and you could pick which artifact you wanted to get. Basically what happened in Kaladesh was there was a lot going on, and energy was a big ask. And the team said, we can't do energy and inventions. You have to pick one. And energy seemed way more core to what the set was and the world was, so we chose energy. So inventions got sort of tossed. I think when Yanni and his set design team were looking,

the idea of how do we have spells that aren't instant sorceries, but get you instant sorceries, another way to sort of add extra instant sorceries in. And that's what led them down the path to sort of saying, whoa, what if we did inventions, but instead of being artifacts, they're instant sources. It turned out that instant sources work better with that. That's a common thing that you learn sometimes is you try something, it doesn't quite work

or it has complications. And then when you come back to it, tweaking a little bit, addressing a little bit differently, sometimes answers some of the issues to make it a little bit easier. And so, I mean, I don't know, maybe one day we'll do inventions, but perman make it a little bit easier. And so, I mean, I don't know, maybe one day we'll do inventions, but permanents are a little bit trickier.

So I like where lessons and learn went. Anyway, not exactly my lesson, I guess, since lessons aren't my lesson since I didn't make them. But I do think it's interesting. I like how Yanni solved some of that. The one thing that we had done, what happened was we had put Flashback in the set.

And the idea being is we knew that we were going back to Innistrad and we knew that Innistrad would want Flashback too. And my idea was I think there was a core set in between them. My idea was, okay, so two sets in there's two Flashback sets in standard. That's fine.

I already believe in the model where every set's a different world, we sometimes overload standard with two mechanics. And I'm like, okay, I think we can repeat mechanics. But the interesting lesson was I was, I don't know, alone. I mean, I guess my team was behind me, but R&D in general really did not want flashback happening

in two different sets. They felt it kind of they felt one set should do that, and they felt Innistrad made more sense to have that. The reason flashback worked so well in this set was it was another way to get more instants and sorceries because flashback only goes to instants and sorceries and you get to cast them twice. So it's a way

just to cast additional instants and sorceries. I get why we didn't do it. I do like lesson learned. And had we kept flashback, we wouldn't have got lesson learned. So I, it's not that I don't think that pulling flashback might not have been the right call. I guess I disagree. I think that two sets can have flashback.

In my original mind, I was thinking, oh, they were back-to-back sets, but I forgot about the core set. And for some reason, flashback, not flashback, flashback upset people more than flashback back-to-back. I did like how the two sets used flashback completely differently. I thought that was cool. Anyway, I mean, I guess the important lesson there is you need to understand, like, making magic is not a solo endeavor. It's a team endeavor. making magic is not a solo endeavor.

It's a team endeavor. And that you need to sort of, like, you have to respect the larger feeling of a larger group. That you can't sort of say, well, I know the group doesn't agree with this. Now, interestingly, I have plenty of histories of doing something that people are initially skeptical of

and having to convince them of it. A, this didn't, I mean, the removing of flashback happened when I wasn't there. But B, I get it. Like, I didn't really fight it in the sense that I got where it was coming from. And you need to pick and choose where you have those fights. Like, if I fight to defend everything I want, every time I lose the ability for people to go, oh, this really matters to Marco. You have to pick and choose your battles, and you have to make sure that, look,

if I fight for everything, on some level I fight for nothing. If I'm constantly fighting, they just get the idea, well, Marco fights for everything. But if I fight for only a few things, Marco's, oh, this matters to Marco, okay, maybe we should listen. And so there is some value into that. Anyway, Magecraft. Magecraft is interesting. I generally like Magecraft.

It's a good example of us taking a thing we normally care about and then keywording it. So the one, I know, controversial. The one thing we did that is an interesting question is we made Magecraft so that if you cast or copy an instant of sorcery um the reason we had done that originally was i was going to put a little more copying in the set for example we had a cycle of spells that copied themselves so it made two of them so essentially when you were casting it um it was a cycle that just sort of did two of them and so it allowed you to sort of do a double spell at once.

So it would trigger Magecraft two times. That spell cycle didn't make it. Although I'll be honest, I like that spell cycle. I thought it was pretty simple. And it's one of the things that got removed that I was a little bit sad of. But anyway, the thing I'm bringing up is Magecraft cared about copies. The fact that we did that, I mean, it's 50-50.

I mean, on one level, it made it a little bit different than what we, like, it wasn't exactly the thing we normally do in sets. So naming it felt a little different. But the fact that we did that makes it a little bit trickier to just use Magecraft in later sets in the sense that,

although I guess even the set that we put it in, there wasn't tons of copying going on. There was a little bit trickier to just use Magecraft in later sets, in the sense that, although, I guess even the set that we put it in, there wasn't tons of copying going on. There was a little bit. So, I guess I like it adding a little bit of difference to it, and I do like the simplicity of spell copying, so, I don't know, maybe a future Magecraft set, because Magecraft can go other places. Spells Commander can go other places. It does, like I said, it does require a lot of revamping of how the set works. So, anyway,

next lesson, Modal Double-Faced Cards. So, I'm a big fan of Modal Double-Faced Cards. In general, Modal Double-Faced Cards went well. The land versions in Zendikar Rising went extremely well, probably the most popular. I think the gods in Kaldheim went pretty well. I don't think we did our MDSCs as good as we could have done them.

The biggest mistake we made, I think when we originally made the Deans, we had made them a little bit simpler, and I think what happened was Yanni and team was trying to make them really good commanders and ended up making them a little more complicated. And the big lesson, the big takeaway is when you make an MDFC, the backside has to be relatively simple. Ideally, you have to give a few clues to what the backside is on the front and that people understand what it is. That when you get too complicated,

I think MDFCs, that's the biggest problem with MDFCs is when the person can't sort of grok what's going on in the back. Oh, it's a land that comes to play tap, not hard to grok. Or I think even with Call Time, where it was a little bit more complicated, it wasn't crazy complicated

and they were thematically tied in a way that was a little easier to remember. Oh, Odin has the raven on the back. Thor has his hammer. It was a little bit easier to remember the nature of it. I do think there are ways we could have done the Deans where they were mirror images of each other, where they were playing in space,

where one of them reminded you. And I think there were some designs we did do. I think there was a design where the green and black were like plus two plus two to you and minus two minus two to them depending on whether you play the green side or the black side and like oh they mirror each other so it's a little easy to remember

what they do I also, it's funny I wanted a little bit more of like creature on one side and spell on the other side Yanni really moved away from that because of the nature of adventures. And I get that. I get that adventures are similar. In some ways, adventures are a cooler version of that.

But I still think, I don't know, I mean, we did do a little bit of it. I think we could have done a little more. Anyway, I don't think we handled MBSs as cleanly as we could in the set and I think that they could have been done better next, the mystical archive so this was added in set design I wholeheartedly applaud it

one of the things in general so we call them bonus sheets so Time Spiral introduced the bonus sheets so I was very instrumental in the making of the first bonus sheet. And Time Spiral block had three bonus sheets. Although they're used a little bit differently nowadays. The bonus sheets in Planter Chaos and Future Sight were new cards. I think the bonus sheet in Time Spiral

is more often how we're using it these days which is a way to mix in old stuff thematically and I think that Shrickshaven did a really good job of showing a really neat way of doing a bonus sheet it introduced the idea of new art and new sort of concepting that the bonus sheet represented something it's like oh it's a school

they have a repository of all the spells of the multiverse sort of concepting that the bonus sheet represented something. It's like, oh, it's a school. This is, you know, this is the, they have a repository of all the spells of the multiverse. So it was a, it's a really good thematic way to bring it in in a way, like, one of the things we've learned about bonus sheets is that we want them to matter in a way that feels organic. We don't want them to feel stapled on. And so the ones that

tend to work the best, like Strixhaven and then Brothers War did a neat one, is where like, okay, we're doing something that just feels very organic to what the set is. Here are old artifacts done with the old artifact frame. It did something that really made it feel like

no other set other than this set would do this. That's where the bonus sheets are shining, where you're like, well, the Mystic Archive couldn't just go anywhere. It had to go on Strixhaven. And I really liked a lot of the art treatments they did with it. It really made it something special and unique and

added some value to Strixhaven in a way that was cool. Other things we learned. The making of the... The interesting thing for me was one of the tricks we learned when making the archetypes. So how do you make archetypes

in a way that does something new but isn't horribly complicated, right? That was like, if every school did something that was just, you've never seen that before, it would be a little bit overwhelming. So the trick we did that I was pretty happy with is we took archetypes from other color combinations and we put it there. For example, black and green was a life matters thing. Traditionally, we tend to do life matters in black-white.

That's the archetype that normally does that. So the idea is, well, green also, like, the reason it works so well in black-white is white is really good at gaining life and black is really good at spending life. And, okay, there's a nice mix there. And what we learned with Witherbloom, black-green, was, well, green, I mean, green also is a life-gaining color, and so green can do a lot, like, green can substitute in for white.

And the cool thing there was, like, we didn't have to remake it from scratch because the Life Matters deck is something we've done before, so play design has a handle on it, but it's using different tools. For example, it's using green tools instead of white

tools. Now, some of those overlap. You know, green and white both have, you know, creature enters and you gain some life. Both colors have a little bit of life gain that is similar to the other color. So some of it is you can just do what you would normally do in white and green. But, where the fun part comes in, is because you're doing

it in a new color, you have access to, like, green does some stuff that white doesn't do. And so you can sort of add in some elements that just, that archetype is not familiar. It's a way to take an archetype that we understand well

enough that we can build with it, that it's not as problem for play design and even for the player base, someone who's used to the archetype understands the general gist of it, even if it's shifted a little bit. And I like how that was. Interestingly, the trickiest of the, like, Witherbloom came pretty fast.

Lorehold was weird, but we loved the idea of history early on in the graveyard. And, like, we at least understood the nature of where we were going. What happened was we knew what the schools were centered around. So knowing that blue-green was math or white-red was history, it really sent us in a direction. And the combination of having the school theme and then having the Ravnica guild that you weren't really helped set us.

For example, we figured out that black-white needed to be quick. Red-white wasn't going to be fast. And so the next logical thing to be the more aggro deck was black-white. And black- white is a bleeder deck you know in Orzhov so it's not you know but one of the trickiest things Orzhov was the, not Orzhov, sorry

Silverquill was the hardest one we had to work really closely with the creative team like we understood what we wanted we wanted something that was more aggro oriented and we wanted. We wanted something that was more aggro-oriented, and we wanted to use spell... Like, we knew spell... Oh, the other thing we did that was very different on purpose

was most faction sets, the way we do them, is we isolate a mechanic per faction. So each faction's doing something, kind of its own thing. And one of the ways I wanted... Like, part of the whole point of the set was to say, we can do a faction set where we're doing factions in a way that's not just every other faction set. So one of the things I had wanted, interestingly, I originally wanted to try this on a Ravnica set,

but I was told at the time that, like, let's make Ravnica sets feel like Ravnica sets. So I didn't do it there. But the idea of, let's do a faction set where we run the mechanics across all the factions. That it's not that each faction has its own mechanic, it's that each faction

has access to the same mechanics, but how they execute on them is differently. For example, take Magecraft. White-Black was aggro, so its output for the Magecraft were very aggro-oriented things. Creatures got little buffs. Like, it did things. And so the idea there was, if I'm playing black-white,

I want to do a lot of cheap instants because I'm going to do a lot of combat tricks. I'm playing an aggro deck. And so when you're playing Silverquill, the instant sorcerers you want tend to be very cheap. Now, in contrast, when you're playing Silverquill, the instant sorceries you want tend to be very cheap. Now, in contrast, when you're playing Prismari, that was all about doing a big show. It was a ramp deck. Again, ramp, we normally do ramp either in red-green or we do ramp in green-blue.

So normally when we do ramp, green is the central part of it. ramp in green-blue. So normally when we do ramp, green is the central part of it. So we said, what if we took the two colors that we ramp in but that aren't green and try that? And once again, it provided some challenges. Not doing the core color

is a little trickier. The nice thing, for example, about the life gain deck is black spending life stayed the same, which is a bigger aspect, because white and green both gain life. But green is king of ramping, so when you do a non-green ramp deck, you just need to do some different things.

Blue and red have to, the whole reason blue and red are the secondary ramp colors is they have elements that can help you. But anyway, the way you use magecraft in those is the instance of sorcerers you care about tend to be bigger. They're about building up to using giant instance of sorcery,

which is very, very different than Swirlverquill using really small stuff. And so the idea of the concept of how we divide them up is we play differently, and then how they use the same mechanics, which have to be much broader. Like, magecraft is a much broader mechanic.

It cares about something that all the colors do, which is casting Incense and Sorcery. So, um, I was happy with how that turned out. Um, there was a lot, when we originally were putting together, there was a lot of concern that, like, oh, you're doing a faction set. Well, this is how faction sets work. And I was like, well,

you know, one of the, one of, and I guess this is an important lesson. One of the things about making magic is we have to keep questioning things, right? If we want to keep making new and different things, we have to think about how we do that. And so a lot of what Strixhaven was doing was trying to sort of question the nature of, you know, how do you make a faction set? And we were trying some things that were different. It's not, once again, it's not that there weren't similarities.

Obviously a faction set's a faction set. So there are some things that faction sets just do. But we tried to do some things that really made the faction sets feel different. And I'm really happy how Strixhaven came out. Strixhaven in no way just felt like, oh, it's just Ravnica, it felt like it's own thing it's own identity

I think how we do the factions like a big part of doing Ravnica was what I'll call a low hanging fruit faction set that it was a faction set about factioning where Strixhaven is a good example of a faction set

that's centered in more top-down. That we have a theme and the faction comes out of that theme. You know, and that just makes a very different feeling thing, right? That the factions in Strixhaven are school-based. That the division is

flavor-based. That the category has to do with the nature of what the thing is. based that the category and has to do with the nature of what the thing is and that is really different and I and I enjoy that I definitely you know one of the things that I like a lot about shrink-saving was we were trying to prove that you could do things like that we can do a faction set in a way that we hadn't done before and for most I mean there's a little tiny quibbles on things, obviously, but I'm pretty happy. I think we did a good job.

Like, I look at Strixays, and I'm very happy that Strixays came out. I think we laid out a good vision for it. I think Yanni and his team, you know, threw in lessons and learn, added in Mystic Archive. I think the additions they made to the general structure were good,

but they really did honor the essence of what the thing was trying to be. You know, they listened to us and how we did the factions. They didn't opt in to, like, changing it to the E-Chain mechanic or anything. Anyway, so I think I look back at Strix Save, and I'm not saying there's not mistakes. Yeah, the genes could be different. There's some subtle things, but in general, I'm pretty happy. Like, it's one of the sets that I've done,

that I've let, and I've let infinite sets. But it's one of the ones I'm more proud of, of the finished product in that, in like, wow, I really like where it ended. I mean, I'm proud of a lot of sets. I guess that's kind of unfair. But I'm proudest. It's one of the ones I'm proudest of, I guess.

I really, I mean, hats off to Yanni and the set design team, and my vision design team, and my exploratory team. Everybody did a great job, by the way. And my exploratory team. Everybody did a great job, and so I'm happy with it. So anyway, guys, I'm now at work. I hope you guys enjoyed sort of the look. I like doing these lessons learned.

It's a good chance to sort of get a sense of sets, and I like looking back. But anyway, guys, I'm at work, so I don't know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thanks for joining me, and I'll see you next time.