Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1037: Shadows over Innistrad

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In this podcast, I walk through the making of Shadows over Innistrad and designing the set's mechanics.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to underdrive to work. So, recently, on Magic Arena, they've been playing Shadows over Innistrad. And it dawned on me that I went back and looked. I haven't actually done a podcast on the making of Shadows over Innistrad. So I thought, now's the time. So today I'm just going to walk through sort of how we made the set. And talk about the mechanics and different stuff like that. Okay, so Innistrad, so let me give a little setup here. The original Innistrad came about because Brady Donnermuth and I had a talk after Odyssey got made about how the creative didn't really match the mechanics of the set. That the set was all about the graveyard,

and Brady was like, this should be more like a gothic horror set. And I'm like, yeah, we should do horror as a genre. So anyway, that got it on my radar. It took me quite a while to get people to sign off on it. But eventually we did. We made Innistrad. Big hit. So we decided we wanted to go back to Innistrad. But at the time one of our thoughts was that on returns we should shake them up a bit. We go through different thoughts on what

returns are. We definitely have gone through a period of like, the return should be really different, and we've gone through a period of returns should be very similar. I think the actual answer is there's a middle ground. There's certain things that are sort of core to what the set is. You want to do those again. But you want to do different, you know, you don't want to make an identical what you did before.

Anyway, this is during the period where we were a little more on it's different. And so the idea was that the original Innistrad is gothic horror. And so we decided to shake it up a little bit and move into a different style of horror, what's known as cosmic horror. So cosmic horror is a little more aloof, a little more like some ancient evils lurking, and people slowly go mad. It's a different sort of style. And in order to make that true, there was a cool storyline

that the creative team had come up with, which is, okay, so on Zendikar, a little history of on Zendikar, the Eldrazi show up and are causing all sorts of problems. So three planeswalkers, Ugin, Sorin, and Nahiri, known as the Lithomancer originally,

create the way to imprison them in Zendikar. And what happens is they leave Nihiri. Ugin and Sorin leave, and Nihiri, who's the one native of Zendikar, sticks around trying to make sure that things are okay. Anyway, Nihiri kind of freaks out a little bit.

I mean, maybe rightfully so. The Eldrazi almost escape at one point, I mean, before they actually do escape. And anyway, Nihiri goes to Sorin to sort of say that she's worried about what's going on. And Sorin ends up trapping her in the Hellvault, which is not a good thing to do. And so I think what happens is when Liliana breaks open the Hellvault, or gets Thassa to break open the Hellvault,

because she's trying to free Gristlebrand, who's one of her four demons, I believe Nahiri gets out. And Nahiri is not happy. So one of the things that Nahiri decides to do is she's mad at Sorin. And Sorin's home plane is Innistrad. So Nahiri, through different means, manages to lure one of the Eldrazi, Emrakul, to Innistrad. Now, the idea of that was

we liked the idea, because one of the things that's big in Cosmic Core is mystery. It's like a big part of Cosmic Core is you don't know what's going on. And there's always somebody investigating and trying to figure out what was happening. And so we liked the idea of this investigation going on. So the idea that Emrakul was the cause of it wasn't going to be revealed in Shadows Over Innistrad. I think there were hints in Shadows Over Innistrad. We had some puzzles and stuff. But we didn't actually tell you who was behind it until Eldritch Moon.

But anyway, so a big part of the Shadows of Innistrad part of the story was the mystery, the investigation. What was going on? So we ended up having Jace play the role of the investigator. So we ended up having Jace play the role of the investigator. So Jace wearing a trench coat. I don't know if you've seen the ads for the box of Shadows of Innistrad. But it's Jace in a trench coat. He also ends up getting help from Tamio, who's been living on Innistrad. And he finds her journal, which is a...

Lost journals is a big thing in cosmic horror. So he finds Tamio's journal. Eventually he finds Tamio. Lost Journals is a big thing in Cosmic Horror. So he finds Tamio's journal, eventually he finds Tamio. Anyway, so the idea of Shadows of Innistrad was we wanted to bring back some of what made Innistrad Innistrad because it was a return to Innistrad. But the big change-up we wanted to do

was instead of Gothic Horror, it was Cosmic Horror. So the idea in the first set is things are going crazy. In the second set, it's more about transformation and mutation. I will do a podcast on Eldritch Moon. But today, it's not that. Today is about Shadows of Innistrad. So in Shadows of Innistrad, we wanted to make sure there's a certain amount of Innistrad, but then layered on top of that was trying to get more of the cosmic horror vibe. Okay, so first off, let's talk about what do we bring back?

What was so iconically Innistrad we had to have it? I think what we decided was there were two main things, mechanically speaking. One was double-faced cards have been introduced in original Innistrad, transforming double-faced cards, and they've been pretty iconic. In fact, in original Innistrad, we had Innistrad and Dark Ascension, and then for the third set, which was Avacyn Restored,

we sort of revamped things mechanically, and we didn't do Double-Faced Cards. And the number one complaint about Avacyn Restored was, what happened to the Double-Faced Cards? So we kind of knew going back we really wanted to do double-faced cards. I think the idea was we wanted to do where—oh, so the second part of it is we wanted to have— one of the things about original Innistrad was there's a creature-type theme.

There are four monsters and then the victims, the humans. So the way it works is white blue is spirits, blue black is zombies, black red is vampires, red green is werewolves, and green white is humans. And so, and there was a

there was a creature type matter. It was a little lighter in Innistrad. We did a little bit more in Dark Ascension. But all in all, it was a much lighter touch than, say, Lorwyn or Onslaught or even like Ixalan. It was there. You could draft it. You could

build it. You could make a zombie deck. But it wasn't... It was less on rails than a lot of our sort of more creature type oriented sets. Anyway, so we knew we needed to bring back those five creature types in those five colors. Those five color pairs.

And we wanted to have transforming double-faced cards back. Those are the things we knew we wanted back. Oh, and then we decided so for the red and green was mostly going to be the werewolves. We brought back sort of the werewolf mechanic, if you will, where if you do nothing, then the werewolves come out. And if you do two spells in a turn, then the sun comes out and the werewolves turn back into humans.

So we brought the werewolf mechanic back. I think some of what we did is more trope space. It's like a vampire turning into mist, stuff like that. And then some of it was, we used it of people going crazy. That was another big theme of Cosmic Horror, so of Shadows Over Indertrod, was this idea of something is slowly causing people to go crazy. In fact, we made a whole mechanic around this.

Let me talk about delirium. So one of the things, oh, another thing we decided we wanted was graveyard mattering was important in original Innistrad. Original Innistrad had flashback, which were spells that worked out of the graveyard, and it had morbid, which sort of cared about when things went to the graveyard. So we decided not to bring back flashback or morbid, but we still wanted the graveyard to be a thing, to matter.

So one of the things we looked at was in the original graveyard matter set, Odyssey, the one that spawned the idea of doing Gothic Horror in the first place, we had done two different mechanics. Well, sorry. We had multiple mechanics because it was a graveyard set. We did Flashback, which we had brought back for original Innistrad. We did Threshold.

So Threshold was a mechanic that said there are cards that get better if you have seven or more cards in your graveyard. So it was an ability word. Also, not in Odyssey itself, but in Torment, which was the second set of the Odyssey block, we introduced Madness. And Madness was a mechanic where if you discarded a card and it had a madness cost, you could pay the madness cost to cast the spell. So if you discarded the card for another purpose, you then were allowed

to pay that spell. So it allowed you to discard it, get credit for discarding it, and still cast the spell. Oftentimes, the madness spell was cheaper. Not always, but the majority of the time

it was cheaper. So if you could find a way to discard it, then you could cast the spell cheaper and you got the reward of whatever you got for discarding the card. Okay, so we wanted to make graveyard matter. So we ended up bringing back one mechanic, which was madness. And we ended up creating a new mechanic, which was delirium.

Okay, let me talk madness real quick since that's what we brought back. Madness, interestingly enough, I do a thing called the storm scale where I rate the chance of the mechanic coming back. I think I gave madness an eight, which is pretty high, which kind of implies I don't think it's coming back.

And I didn't think it was coming back. I think what happened was that we were trying to play into cosmic horror and insanity is such a strong part of cosmic horror and we wanted Graveyard to matter that we just sort of said, hey, are we missing a golden opportunity? And one of the things I always say about 8 on the Storm Scale is, well, it could happen if the stars align is usually what I say and it's sort of like well the word madness was just perfect

it thematically fit, we wanted to care about the graveyard so discard made some sense and I think we ended up, the vampires I think were slowly up, the vampires, I think, were slowly going mad. And so, and black and red are traditionally where we do madness stuff. So we made the vampires going a little bit mad. And made madness sort of part of the vampire theme. Now, Delirium, I think, came about because we talked about doing Threshold.

But I think we wanted something a little different from Threshold. Threshold, mostly, is just get a certain amount of spells and what we wanted was something that just caused you to build your deck a little differently let you play a little differently so the idea we came up with was instead of caring about how many cards are in your graveyard what if you care about the types of cards in your graveyard and so the thing we ended up looking at, we talked about color, we talked about creature type. In the end, card type seemed to be the most interesting because it really affected how you built your deck.

Like, okay, well, I want not just, I mean, normally in Limited, for example, you'll put creatures in your deck and you'll put lands in your deck, but I want to make sure I have some instants and some sorceries and some artifacts and some enchantments. And it made things that were double, like

artifact creatures were super valuable, because if you got one card in your graveyard, it counted for both creature types. Sorry, both card types. And we played around. I know the delineating number we talked about should be three or four or five. I think four ended up being the sweet spot where it wasn't easy to do, but it was doable.

I think we tried five for a while, just it was a little too hard to get there. And three was a little too easy. But anyway, we like Delirium in the sense that, so there's this nice synergy between discarding cards. So thematically, your hand represents your mind, your active mind. Like your deck is sort of your subconscious mind, if you will. And your conscious mind is your hand. That's what you're casting spells out of.

So a lot of times when we do discard, the idea is something's happened to your mind. discard, the idea is something's happened to your mind. So the idea of insanity, of going crazy, being tied to discard was very thematic. And so the idea is as you're losing cards from your hand, you're moving toward. We also liked the idea of using milling as a theme of like sort of madness inducing, right? That it's churning away at sort of your long-term brain. And so the idea was that milling and discard would play into this madness theme. And then, well, the madness mechanic specifically sort of played off discard

and delirium would interact with both discard and milling, right? Just getting cards in your graveyard are valuable. And so that whole package sort of came together where just to play up the themes we wanted of Cosmic Horror, of just there's things you can do and it causes you to lose a little bit of your sanity so you're discarding cards. And if you discard enough, you can hit madness

or get delirium. And so that whole sort of package of something is slowly making you go crazy just came together to make a really interesting mechanical, cohesive package. And one of the

things, by the way, that is interesting is I know a lot of people pooh-poohed me when madness came back and kind of what I said to people, I was kind of happy it did. I'm like, look, the reason I made the storm scale is to say how likely something is to come back. And yeah, if I say something's a three, it is more likely to come back,

but it's not guaranteed to come back. And likewise, an eight means it's less likely to come back, but it can. And this is a perfect example where just the stars aligned, it was the right mechanic at the right time, and we said, and the reason I did think we were going to bring it back was it would cause a lot of problems for play design, for balance, right? It's a tricky mechanic to balance.

But it was years later, we, you know, our play design team had become more advanced, and they were able to handle it, and they did a good job. Okay, the other thing that was important to capture the cosmic horror vibe was this idea of investigation. We put Jace in a trench coat. We had to do something mechanically. And so what we ended up doing was,

the idea was we liked the idea that investigation got you information. Well, what is information? Well, information in the game is cards, right? Drawing cards. The problem was that it turned out that if we just drew cards, A, it was a little too good. B, we couldn't do as much of it as we liked. And C, it starts warping in colors and stuff. Like, every color can have a cantrip, but you start drawing multiple

cards. Not every color really does that well. So we came up with the idea. So we actually started to investigate saying we wanted to have the word investigate. That's how the mechanics started. And a lot of people ask why like we later would go on to do other tokens, artifact tokens, that just make the token. We make food, we make treasure. We don't have a word that does it. And the reason was, this was early on in us, and this is kind of our first artifact token in mass. I mean, we'd made artifact tokens before.

But the idea of making something that there's a lot of them in the set, Clues was really the first one. So anyway, it came about because we were trying to figure out how to make Investigate, to make a mechanic called Investigate, where you investigate. We loved the word. One of the things as we get more and more into doing a lot more top-down stuff is just the value of words. A lot of times these days I'll figure out words I want on the cars and figure out how can I make those words happen. I want to say such and such words.

That's really indicative of what we're doing. Okay, how do I make those words real mechanically so I can put them on a card? And investigators are like, we like so-and-so investigates. You know, this creature investigates. Okay, what does that mean? And once we realized that drawing a card was too much, we came up with the idea of a clue. So realized that drawing a card was too much, we came up with the idea of a clue. So the idea of a clue was, well, it's kind of like part of a card. And what we meant by that is, well, you get the clue.

It's an artifact token. Well, you get the clue, but you have to pay more for it. It's not all of the card. It's kind of like, basically, if you're going to draw a card, like, let's say I have something like James Dayton. Like, I just have an activation to draw a card. We tend to cost that about four. That's about four mana to draw a card, roughly.

So the idea was, well, what if we give you half the card, we pay for two, and then you pay for two? So sort of we're giving you half a card is how we thought of it. Meaning you still had to pay for the rest. You had to pay for the other half the card, we pay for two, and then you pay for two. So sort of we're giving you half a card, how we thought of it. Meaning you still had to pay for the rest. You had to pay for the other half the card. And we ended up making a token because we needed something like, you needed to pay more mana, and we didn't want you to have to pay it right then and there.

And so we came up with this idea of, okay, make this token. And the token, there's still mana to be paid paid meaning we haven't done all the work for you but it's you know cheaper than normal so like having this artifact that isn't a you know that didn't cost you a card um that's another important thing when you investigate you make this token but that you still get whatever investigated you know offensive creature so you're not losing on the card so it may but mostly it's just kind of this free card, except we're making you pay something. So anyway, we made clues. Once we had clues as an artifact token,

we then realized we could care about the clues and that we could interact with clues in other ways. And that's one of the things that made us realize the value of artifact tokens or tokens in general. I guess they don't have to be artifacts. The reason we make more artifact tokens than enchantment tokens is artifacts represent tangible things, and enchantments represent non-tangible things.

And it's a little bit easier to do tangible things. It's like, oh, it's literally food, or it's literally treasure. Things that are just more tangible. I do think over time we'll make more enchantment tokens just because there's an interesting space we have there. But you're playing in a little more ephemeral space, which is just a little trickier. Doable, but trickier.

Okay, so we... What am I doing? I'm talking about investigate. So we ended up putting investigate and stuff. It worked out really well. We were able to make a decent amount of investigate. We could put it in all the colors, even colors that didn't draw as many cards. Because the idea essentially was we thought of them as cantrips. And so if you Investigate once, every color can do it.

If you Investigate multiple times, we have to be careful. We have to sort of do it in a way that that color would draw cards. But that's something we were able to do. Okay, the one other mechanic, brand new mechanic we made, was called Skulk. So Skulk says you can't be blocked by greater power. So the idea was,

this came about, I believe Skulk was my baby. I was trying to solve the problem of a lot of times when we have invasion, if you grant invasion, what you want to grant it on are things that are big. And so you put it on your large things and then it gets, it kind of gets a little bit run away. So I was like, okay, can we make an invasion mechanic that didn't kind of like it was built into the mechanic that it worked better on smaller

things than bigger things. And so the obvious answer was, what if it cared about power? Meaning, what if I can't be blocked by things bigger than me? I'm sneaking around and, you know, if you put a skulk on a one power creature, it's like, well, only other one power creatures can block me. And depending on what we do with the toughness, for example, if the toughness is one higher than the power, let's say I make a one-two with Skulk.

Well, if I can only be blocked by a one-power creature, even if I'm blocked, I can't be destroyed without, you know, help. And so, anyway, I made Skulk. So the reason I made Skulk was we've been trying to find a blue-black overlap mechanic. We eventually put Flash in black to solve this problem. But before that happened, we were trying to find a blue-black overlap.

I mean, flying overlaps, but flying a little more white-blue overlap because it's primary in white and blue, but secondary in black. And anyway, we needed an overlap. Like I said, we ended up adding Flash in black so blue-black can do flash. But I thought that Skulk would be...

Black and blue both are invasion colors. And I thought it would be neat. So I made Skulk and I put it in the set thinking it would become evergreen. That was my plan. What ended up happening was... I mean, Skulk's an interesting mechanic. It does solve a lot of the problems I was trying to solve.

It turns out it's not that easy to design. It didn't have as much design space as we thought. It's a little trickier to balance. And it was just harder to process than we thought. That, you know, oh, I have a two-power creature. Oh, all I have to do is just look at my opponent and figure out what creatures are two-power or less. But there are things that can activate. So like, oh, you have a Rootwalla. So your Rootwalla has a one power,

but you can activate it to make it bigger. So, oh, actually, my one-two could be blocked by your Rootwalla, and you could kill it. Or, I'm not sure Rootwalla's a one power, but imagine a one-power Rootwalla. Anyway, so Skulk ended up being okay. It wasn't quite the slam dunk Evergreen style mechanic I was hoping it would be. That's why we put things in sets, by the way.

Usually we don't just make something as Evergreen. We sort of try it out first. And it ended up being not as clean as I thought. And so Skulk is something we've brought back although not in a big way, but in small ways. But we haven't it's not something, I mean we did make it evergreen and Skulk's the kind of

mechanic that might come back in the right set. I can imagine that. Other things about Innistrad. The other thing about Innistrad was there were a bunch of things that we had wanted to do in original Innistrad. The other thing about Innistrad was there were a bunch of things that we had wanted to do in original Innistrad that we ended up not doing for different reasons.

Probably the biggest one was the werewolf planeswalker. So in original Innistrad, one of our slots we had made was for a werewolf planeswalker. That was really cool. There was a planeswalker that was human some of the time and a werewolf some of the time. We thought that would be awesome, right? Now, it turned out that in the storyline for

Innistrad, Liliana and Garak get in a big fight and Liliana ends up using the chain veil to I don't know what the right word is.

Curse, I guess, is the right word. To curse Garak. And so it's in the storyline where Garak gets cursed. So like, oh, we can't miss that. We have, you know, not often we have planeswalkers that can transform. Oh, we have to do normal, you know, monogreen Garak into blackgreen Garak when he gets cursed. And I get it. It made a lot of sense.

We really only had one slot allocated for a transforming planeswalker. And there was just this awesome story moment we could do with Garak. So we ended up doing that. It made a lot of sense. I wasn't upset that we did that. But in my back pocket,

like I want to do a werewolf planeswalker. So when we came here, I went to the creative team and I said, look, last time we wanted to make a werewolf planeswalker, please, please, can we make one? And they're like, okay, thematically that makes sense. And so Arlen Kord got introduced. But it's funny that

Arlen Kord, like the seeds for Arlen Kord actually went all the way back to Innistrad. Because the original Innistrad, we introduced Sorin, right? Sorin was a vampire planeswalker. And I think, and Liliana was an original Innistrad, right? Sorin was a vampire planeswalker. And I think Liliana was an original Innistrad, right? And Liliana is a, I mean,

a zombie planeswalker in that she interacts with zombies, not that she herself is a zombie. So the original plan was vampire planeswalker, zombie planeswalker, werewolf planeswalker. That was our original plan. Garrett changed that up a little bit, but that's where it came from. I am happy that we finally got Arlen Kord

into a set um oh the other thing that I didn't get into let me talk a little bit is um so the card had 297 cards

which was a little bigger than normal at the time uh 165 commons 100 uncommons 59 rares

and 18 mythic rares and then 15 basic lands um so one of the things about doing double face cards is that you have to do Uncommons, 59 rares, and 18 mythic rares. And then 15 basic lands. So one of the things about doing double-faced cards is that you have to do its own sheet. The double-faced cards, they don't have a magic back.

They have a second face on the back. So you have to make your own sheet to do the double-faced cards. You can't put double-faced cards on a normal sheet. You can't mix and match faces and backs. It has to do mix and match faces and backs. It has to do with how we print the backs. The backs are printed a little bit differently.

And so the way we print the backs and the way we print the fronts aren't, from a printing standpoint, the same. So you can't mix and match backs and fronts. All that means is when you're doing double face, you need to do a whole sheet of double face. Now, we did Magic Origins, we did one of the core sets with the one with Bolas. Like, we've done sets with very, very few double face cards. And all that means is, like, when we did Bolas, where Bolas was literally the only double face card

in the set, we had a whole sheet of Bolas. Like, he took up an entire sheet. And sheets ain't cheap. So, like, normally when we do sheets, I mean, that happened to be the centerpiece of the set so we did it. Likewise, Magic Origins, the changing Planeswalkers because that had the legendary creatures

that turned into Planeswalkers of the five original members of the Gatewatch. And so, most of the time when we do double-faced cards, we want to do enough of them, you know,

that it makes sense. And so, and the other thing is because we're doing a double-faced sheet but we want to do enough of them, you know, that it makes sense. And so, and the other thing is because we're doing a double face sheet, but we want to have rarities, how many times you print something on the sheet will matter, right? You have to print at a three to one ratio between common and uncommon and likewise. So there's, there's ratios that we have to do between different things. And so it depends on how many cards we do. If we do enough cards, then usually there's two sheets.

There's the common, uncommon, double-faced card sheet, and then there's a rare, mythic rare, double-faced card sheet. The reason those are separate is the ratio differential between a common and a mythic rare is so great that you have to make so many commons on the sheet that usually it doesn't make sense to have them all on the same sheet. In certain cases it can, it depends. But anyway, one of the things that we looked into

for Shadows of Innistrad was upping the number. The way it worked in original Innistrad was there was one double-faced card per booster. So every booster had exactly one double-faced card. I think we looked into, for Shadows of Innistrad, having two double-faced cards. We ended up not doing that because the AS fan was a little higher than we wanted based on the number of double-faced cards we had. I think in the end, it was something like 1.25,

which meant you always got one double-faced card, and there was an opportunity to get a second double-faced card. But like one-fourth the time is what 1.25 means. Now, you'll notice in March of the Machine, that set has two slots. One because Battles was a slot, and then we did a bunch of other double-faced cards. So that is an example of a set where there were, the Aspen was two. There were, I think, two slots. But we also

did a bunch more with double-faced than we did in Shadows of Innistrad. In general, I think the repercussion of what happened was we liked the Cosmic Horror on happened was we liked the cosmic horror on some level in the sense that it allowed us to do something a little bit different. We had some themes that were different. I think the response we got from the audience

was they wanted a little more sort of original Innistrad that we had shot a little too far away. I think the other thing is Eldritch Moon got too far away. I think the other thing is Eldritch Moon got even farther away. I think Eldritch Moon was the, I mean, I'll get into that when I get into the Eldritch Moon podcast, but I think Eldritch Moon was like a touch too far.

In some level, the Shadows of Innistrad was playing into a lot of the themes, but we hadn't really, like, a lot of cosmic horror, there's buildup till you get to it. And so Shadows Over Innistrad was kind of the buildup where things are mysterious, you don't know what's going on. And the payoff was in Eldritch Moon.

And I think the cosmic horror payoff ended up being a little much that people kind of wanted more gothic horror than cosmic horror. But I think that the mystery element worked a little bit better in Shadows Over Innistrad. I think when things started mutating and you got like half horse, half rider things, that was where... Anyway, that's Eldritch Moon. We'll get into Eldritch Moon. Eldritch Moon was the second set.

Oh, the other thing let me talk about real quickly. So one of the big things that happened in this set was, when we planned Battle for Zendikar and Shadows of Innistrad that were right next to each other, they were originally three set blocks. They were a year apart from each other. They were, the idea was Battle for Zendikar would be, you know, large, small, I don't know if the third set was large or small, but it would be a three-set block, followed by Shadows of Innistrad.

That would be a three-set block. And the idea was the Emrakul reveal, the idea that the mystery behind what was going on with Emrakul, wasn't supposed to happen to the third set, or the last set. And in this case, it was the second set. So the idea was that you would have a year of the Eldrazi, and then you have two sets of Innistrad where there's creepy things going on, but it wasn't until the third set that we tell you it was Emrakul.

So kind of the space between the Eldrazi was a little bit more. The way it ended up playing out was Eldrazi, Eldrazi, not Eldrazi, more Eldrazi. It was a little closer than we meant. Then we condensed down from three sets to two sets. So when I get into Eldritch Moon, I'll talk a little bit about this. I think Shadows of Innistrad generally went over a bit better than Eldritch Moon did. Investigate was very popular. And I mean, all the things that were

popular in the original Innistrad that we brought back, transforming double-faced cards, all the monsters and stuff, all that was very popular. I think, I mean, there were definitely people that enjoyed Delirium and Madness. I mean, there was a group of players that really did enjoy that. I think it was a fun package.

But it was definitely something, and it's one of the reasons we probably have with Madness in the first place, which is a lot of Madness is discarding your cards, and, you know, not all the time are you casting the Madness. So, like, part of it is, you know, being willing to discard some of your cards, and

not every player wants to discard their cards, so there's some aspects to that. Delirium is a fun mechanic, and there's a lot of neat deck building with it, but it's a little complex. It's not... I mean, I think in the right place at the right time, it's a very fun mechanic,

and I think a lot of people enjoyed it, but it definitely is something that requires some brain space. Skulk did not go over quite as well as I had hoped. There were definitely people that enjoyed seeing Madness back. There were definitely people that were very fond of Madness coming back. But Madness had a... It was a season taste, if you will. Anyway,

all in all, I think Shadows of Innistrad went pretty well. I think a lot of the larger choices we made, Eldritch Moon sort of paid more of those costs than Shadows of Innistrad did. But anyway, that is the making of Shadows of Innistrad. I hope you guys enjoyed the talk through Shadows of Innistrad.

I will do an Eldritch Moon podcast in the not-too-distant future. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. But I'm at work. So we all know that means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Hope you guys enjoyed today's show, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye.