Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1038: Eldritch Moon

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In this podcast, I walk through the making of Eldritch Moon and designing the set's mechanics.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for Drive to Work. Okay, last time I talked all about the design of Shadows over Innistrad, but that was a two-set block. So today I'm going to talk about Eldritch Moon, the other set. But before I get to that, I realize, I think I forgot to name the design and development teams. This is back in the days before we shifted over to vision design, set design, play design. So this is the old model, I believe. So the design team was run by Gottlieb, Mark Gottlieb. I was on it.

Ken Nagel was on it. Ken would lead the design team for Eldritch Moon. We'll get to it today. Gavin Verhey, Sam Stoddard. Sam would lead the development of Eldritch Moon. Andrew Veen and Adam Lee. And then the development team was run by Dave Humphries. It included Tim Aiden, Ethan Fleischer, Eric Lauer, Ari Levitch, and Sam Stoddard.

I just want to... I had wanted to reference that last time, and I believe I forgot. So let's get into Eldritch Moon. Oh, I never talked about the codenames. So, okay. So what happened was we were moving to a system of large, small, large, small. And previously we'd been in a system of large, small, small, and, or large, small, large, but a three block system into a two block system.

So the code name for, um, the code name for, uh, battle for Zendikar was Blood. And then the codename for Oath of the Gatewatch was Sweat, which made Shadows over Indusrod Tears. Now, we didn't want to give away that we were changing from three set to two set until we actually did it. And so we ended up calling this set codename Fears. So it was Tears and Fears, because, I don't know, uh, this set code name Fears. So it was Tears and Fears, because, I don't know, Tears for Fears is a band. Um, so this set was code name Fears, and Shadows of Innistrad was code name Tears.

I'm sorry, yeah, right, Tears. Um, it's funny, because every once in a while the code name lines up. Like, we don't mean them to line up, obviously. But the idea that Eldritch Moon was a horror set and Fears was its name was kind of funny. People always assume that the codename means something, and it actually almost never means anything. It's just... This is back in the

day where we would name all our blocks in names that... Like, when they were three-set blocks, they were Control-Alt-Delete or something like that. And then we got to two-set blocks, we did, like, Ham and Eggs and something like that. And then we got to two set blocks, we did like Ham and Eggs and stuff like that. Anyway, okay, so now let's talk Eldritch Moon.

So I said last time that Shadows of Innistrad had 297 cards. Eldritch Moon had 205 cards. 74 commons, 70 uncommons, 47 rares, 14 mythic rares. So much like Shadows of Innistrad, DFCs, double-faced cards, played a part of it, transforming double-faced cards. So that required us to have

a separate sheet. Now, while there were DFCs in this product, there was one big shift. So, I explained last time the story, but let me get a little more into the story. So basically, Nahiri gets upset at Sorin for actions Sorin took, and as sort of payback for what she blames. Zendikar went through a lot, so she blames Sorin for that. So she decides she is going to impose something onto Innistrad.

And that something is Emrakul. So she lures Emrakul away. Now, what had happened was in Battle for Zendikar, there were two sets, Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. And each one had a Titan, Eldrazi Titan. But the third one, Emrakul, was nowhere to be seen. And so we saw Kozilek, we saw Ulamog, and the two of them ended up getting killed in the story,

the Othvigedra story. But Emrakul we haven't seen. And like I said last time, originally these were two different blocks for a whole year, so we had drawn out the story a little more but the idea was that the third Eldrazi Titan was in fact here on Innistrad and the one thing about Emrakul

is Emrakul causes mutations the presence of Emrakul makes people sort of go crazy and we were definitely playing into cosmic horror like I said, we decided to shift from gothic horror to cosmic horror And we were definitely playing into cosmic horror, like I said. We decided to shift from gothic horror to cosmic horror because we were trying to shake it up a little bit. In cosmic horror, some unworldly alien thing comes and causes chaos. And like, oh, the Eldrazi. It sounds like the Eldrazi.

That's why we did the Eldrazi. When we were doing cosmic horror, we were like, if only we had unfathomable alien creatures. Like, wait, we do have unfathomable alien creatures. So that is why we involved Emrakul. So what that meant for the Devil's Face cards is that the theme we played in

most of the time in an Innistrad set, Devil's Face cards are about transformation. Dark transformation is usually how we say it. The werewolves go back and forth. Vampires will turn into bats or mists. And we have humans turning into monsters. We have a lot of transformational things.

For this set, because we were trying to play into the influence of Emrakul, and we're trying to get into the darker side of the cosmic horror, we wanted mutations. Mutations are darker side of the cosmic horror, we wanted mutations. Mutations are a big part of cosmic horror. And so the double-faced cards in this set transform into something horrific, you know, mutations. And so the werewolves, for example, start as werewolves. Normally, the front side of a werewolf is a human,

and the back side is a werewolf, and goes back and forth. With Eldritch Moon, we started with werewolves. They transform into, like, mutated werewolves, and they don't go back. Excuse me. Good to hide to me. So, one of the things about the transformation in this set, all the DFCs, is that they were one-way transformations. You mutated into something, and then you were the mutation. You didn't demutate or anything.

And we definitely, so one of the things about this set, I touched upon this last time, so let me hit upon this a little more this time, which was we were trying to do Cosmic Core, and we broke up the two sets into sort of the two phases, if you will, of Cosmic Horror. The first day of Cosmic Horror is just things are creepy and unknown, and there's mystery and investigation. So early on in the Cosmic Horror stories, there's just hints of things, but you don't see them. You just sort of like

something is wrong, and the vibe is wrong, but you don't know what's going on. That was Shadows Over Innistrad. But then, horrific things start happening, and so Innistrad. But then horrific things start happening. And so Eldritch Moon is the horrific things start happening. In retrospect, looking back, I think that Shadows Over Innistrad was fine because while it wasn't quite gothic horror,

it didn't deviate that far from gothic horror. I mean, yeah, the vampires were going a little crazy and stuff, but I think it's this set where we really pushed and made, like, the mutations that we did were very... I mean, one of the nice things about gothic horror is there is definitely

horror there, but it's a little on the prettier side, if that makes sense. And that this set was a little more graphic in a way that normal Innistrad hadn't been. I mean, normal Innistrad could be a little bloody, I guess. But it's not. This is, you know, like the most famous public transformation is there's a horse and a rider. And they transform into this mutated form where they're not one thing.

The horse and rider are fused together. And it was cool, but kind of disturbing. And so one of the responses to Eldritch Moon is we kind of pushed in a direction that was a little bit different than what Innistrad had been. And I think some shifting was okay. I think Shadows over Innistrad was okay. But Eldritch Moon, the feedback we got was it just pushed a little too far into something that, you know. I think Shadows Over Innistrad was okay. But Eldritch Moon, the feedback we got was it just pushed a little too far into something that, you know... I think one of the lessons we've kind of learned is that if we really wanted

to sort of shift genres, go to another world, you know, we could have made a cosmic horror world, maybe, rather than making Innistrad into a cosmic horror world. I think we were like the idea of, well, what's our horror world? And we're playing different genres of horror, but I think people sort like the idea of, well, it's our horror world and we're playing different genres of horror, but I think people sort of, like, we have enough worlds

to make, maybe we should split up our genre, you know, and that gothic horror is interesting. Other types of horror, we could do other things. Anyway, so the DFCs in the set were all one-way transformation, because they were representing sort of mutation. Now, like I said,

there were two different sort of mechanical components beyond the DFCs and the monsters in the first set in Shadows of Innistrad. Part of it was the mystery. That's where investigate came from. The second part wasn't about mystery. We moved past that mystery phase of Cosmic Core into sort of the revealing phase where you see all the grotesque things. So we decided not to do investigate in this set just because thematically it didn't make sense. But the crazy part of it, the madness, the delirium, that stayed because people are still

going mad. I think that part of it was a little lower. It was dialed down a little bit. It's still centered in black-red, for example, especially the madness. But, so Sam Stoddard was... So, sorry. One of the things Ken Nagel did in design, and the other two I think were done in development. So, let's first talk meld.

So, we have this mutations happening. Things are melding together. I talked about man and horse. So Ken Nagel had an idea. And he'd been trying to do this for a while. I know it was in New Phyrexia for a while. Ken really loved the idea of two different cards that came together. Now, the first version of it, I actually did the first version of it in Unglued. There's a card in Unglued called BFM, Big Furry Monster. And there was a left half and a right half. And the idea behind it was you couldn't cast it unless both halves were in your hand. And then when it came to the battlefield,

you put the two halves together and it represented one giant 99-99 creature. So, according to all our market research, that was actually the most popular card in all of Unglued with BFM. So I think one of the things that Ken had tried to do for a while was figure out how do we get,

like Ken was really enamored with the idea of, you know, the bigger card. There's a left side and a right side and it gets bigger. Ken had tried a version in New Phyrexia. I think he called it Link. And the idea there was there were left sides and right side. And any left side could go with any right side. That idea, interestingly enough, I would expand upon

and it would be sort of host augment from unstable. I liked a lot what Ken was doing, and I found a way to do it. In unstable, I came up with the idea of the left side is the input and the right side is the output. So the idea of what you were doing was making an input and an output.

And the output could stand by itself, so I could, the host creature, I could play by itself. And then when I drew an augment, I could augment a host creature, and then it had a similar feel to it. Anyway, it didn't end up working out. In fact, Link was in New Phyrexia,

handed off, Aaron Forsythe was the development lead, and he ended up pulling it, not because he didn't like the idea behind it, it just wasn't quite working out mechanically or rules-wise, and he replaced Link with Phyrexian Mana. So a little story there. Okay, but Ken, while messing around with double-faced cards, made an important realization. One of the things that you could do with double-faced cards is, it was a way for you to get the left and right side on the board in a way that you could sort of build up to it. And what he realized was, if you had double-faced cards

in which the backside of one card was the left side and the backside of the other card was the right side, and they only flipped when you had both, you could, in fact, make two cards as one per minute. Double-faced cards ended up being the solution. Ken had tried a lot of ways to do it with just normal, everyday magic cards. Couldn't find a way to do it.

Like I said, I found a way to do it. I don't know. The interesting thing about host augment is I don't know whether it works in the rules or not. I didn't have to make it work in the rules because I was in an unset. I do

think it might work. There's some creative quirks to solve because the idea of a left side of a creature and the right side that you just sort of put together was fun for an unset. But I'm not sure if we would do exactly that creative treatment in a normal set. Anyway, Ken came up with meld. Now, I think the way meld ended up in the set was it was a vertical cycle,

meaning there was a common meld, there was an uncommon meld, and there was a rare meld. The rare one was the angels that melded together. In the story, they get melded together. So that happens in the cards. I know there was a lot of experimentation with doing more meld. And I think the idea was, it was kind of out there enough that let's not overdo it. And the feedback we got,

meld actually went over really, really well. In fact, the number one note about Eldritch Moon was not enough meld, because there only were three melds, and only one of which, the common one, like sometimes could happen in Limited. The uncommon one, I mean, maybe happened a few times. The rare, you know, if once somewhere.

The rare was tricky because you had to both draft both rare cards and then have both of them come up at the same time. Anyway, so Meld was designed by Ken and the design team. I know they tweaked what the Meld card was. I know Sam and his development team spent a lot of time figuring out exactly which meld card should be. I knew the angels were there from the beginning because it was a story point. The other two, I'm not sure. Probably the creative team was involved with those just to tell interesting stories.

Okay, the other two mechanics were created in development. That was Emerge and Escalate. So Emerge is a mechanic where you are allowed to sacrifice a creature when you play the card and then you reduce the generic cost of the spell by the sacrificed creature. I believe that's how Emerge works. And so the spell by the sacrifice creature, I believe is how Emerge works. And so the idea was the Emerge cards represented sort of

grotesque Eldrazi mutations. And so what happened was you would sacrifice a creature and the flavor was that creature is now mutating into this mutation. But the cool thing about it was it let you get pretty big creatures out for a lot cheaper than normal

because you were sort of you were using, you know, you were transforming in some way, it wasn't technically transformed because the card wasn't double-faced, but it had a similar feel just like we, I mean, our double-faced cards, a lot of them transformed into Adrazi versions of things

but this was a different way to do that and Emerge was a different way to do that. And Emerge was a pretty cool mechanic. One of the things that's nice is that in Limited, you have a curve. So if we want you to care about big things, it's tricky. Obviously, there's things like Rise of Adrazi where we sort of bend over backwards

to get you to play large things. But in general, you can play a couple. You can't play a lot. Just because you can't play it until late in the game and you don't want to draw things early on. Now there are a bunch of tricks that we use. We could put cycling on it. We could, or land cycling. You know, we could

let you trade it in for something else early. You know, there's things we can do with large creatures so that they have a function early in the game. Emerge is nice because Emerge says is, look, if you draw this late in the game, you have the mana, you can just cast it. But if you draw it earlier in the game,

there's means by which you can reduce the cost in a way that it is playable earlier in the game. And Emerge was pretty flavorful. I think it did. It had a nice sweet spot of matching the two of them. Oh, real quickly, I mentioned this in passing. Madness and Delirium did stay in the set. I don't think they changed colors much as far as where they were focused. And I think in general it got dialed down a little bit. But they were there. Unlike Investigate that went away. I don't think there was any Investigate

in Eldritch Moon. But there was DFC in Transforming. There was Delirium. There was Madness. Okay. So that was Emerge. Next, Escalate. So Escalate was a mechanic where... Okay, let's talk about a little bit of the history of Choice.

So in... What was it? In Mirage, the Mirage team came up with the idea of what we called charms which were having multiple effects that you could choose from on a spell. With charms there were three effects. And the idea there were here are three small effects that are kind of too small to put on a card by itself

but the choice of having three options was enough to put it on the card because it had more functionality. We liked charms. We did charms a lot. We eventually did commands, which are four things, choose two. And we did, I mean, early magic had modes, like, you know, disenchant and stuff.

But as we started doing charms and things, we got more into doing modes. In Mirrodin, I came up with a mechanic called, um, what is it called? Entwine. Uh, and the way Entwine worked is the car to let you do one of two things. But if you paid the cost, you could do both of them. Um, and so we had done a lot with modes. We had done a little bit with, um, there like, Replicate, where you could... That wasn't really modes, but you could do the...

You could pay to do the same spell multiple times. And I think Escalate was kind of a cross between Entwine and Replicate, where the idea was, I can pay extra mana to do more, but instead of doing the same thing again, I could do an extra mode. And unlike Entwine, which only had two modes, the Escalate could have more modes. I think the base Escalate, I think as you went up in rarity, you got more modes. There might have been two mode Escalates in common, but then there were three and four.

two-mode Escalates at common, but then there were three and four. So the idea of Escalate is that just, there's a mana cost. So you cast this spell, you choose one of the modes. It's like a charm or whatever. But you can pay an Escalate cost. And for each time you pay the Escalate cost,

you can pick a mode that hasn't been chosen yet. So the idea was, if it was two modes, you could pay the escalate cost once and have both modes. Kind of entwiny. If there were three modes, you could pay once and do two things or pay twice and do three things. And obviously with four, same thing. You could do up to three. So the interesting thing about escalate is I think it's a strong mechanic. Meaning I think modes is good magic.

I think choosing modes is fun. So as a mechanic in a vacuum, I like Escalade a lot. I think there's a lot of fun to it. The interesting question for me is why exactly here? So let me answer that. Why here? exactly here um so let me answer that why here um so one of the things that happens a lot especially in set design or later design is sometimes you don't have all the mechanics you need and so what you do is you say to yourself okay what am i missing um and so you're looking at

saying okay well dfcs are almost exclusively permanents. Delirium went on permanents. Madness could go on spells, but we liked it a lot on vampires. So it could go on spells, but it went on lots of permanents. Emerge went on permanents. So what happened there is Sam and his team were looking at it going, oh, we don't have a spell mechanic.

We should get a spell mechanic. And so I think what they did is they found what they thought was just a good spell mechanic. And Escalate is a good spell mechanic. I'm not quite sure. It's one of those things where I think it fit the, like, they were looking at what was missing from the set, and I think Escalate fit those things. So it was a good fit in the sense that

here's what the set was missing. I think it misses a little bit in why exactly is it in this set? Why is Meld in this set? Because you're making crazy mutations. Angels are getting fused together, and Meld, like, nails that flavor. Why is Escalate in the set?

Because, you know Because giant mutations are happening and this lets you turn creatures into the giant mutation. Why is Delirium and Madness in the set? Because the entire world is going crazy. Why is DFCs in the set? Because things are transforming into mutated vert.

Everything else in the set has a real purpose why it's there. Flavorfully why it's there. Escalade suffered a little bit from, well, like I said, a good mechanic, it played well, there's nothing wrong with it. Once in a while we have this issue where you have a mechanic that just

kind of isn't, it isn't showcasing itself in the context of the set. Not that it's a bad mechanic, and to be honest, we can have some work more mechanics, you know. Sometimes in sets you put a mechanic that just works well or does what you need the set to do. This was one of the ones that stood out a little bit to me in that it, like I said, it's a good mechanic.

I expect us to use it somewhere. It's a very useful mechanic. It just didn't, it was not as organic to the set as it could have been. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Eldritch Moon. I think Eldritch Moon definitely pushed a lot of boundaries. Meld, like I said, was the big push that I think did pay off. And ironically, the feedback was not enough Meld. So obviously, in Brothers War, we did Meld again.

Again, we didn't do a lot of them. We did three of them. One of the challenging things about meld is it's hard to do at low rarity when it's one for one. I think if we do meld in the future, and I think we will, one of these days we'll try to do a higher concentration meld. And I think what will have to happen there is some sort of left

meets right system where any left goes with any right, sort of harkening back to the original idea that Nagel had when creating meld, the link, the precursor to meld. I have some

ideas how to pull it off. We tried some of them in Brothers War. I think the problem in Brothers War was, once again, it wasn't organic. Mel's made sense on Urza and Mishra and Titania, but it wasn't a lot of the flavor we were giving to make sense of how to pull off the common things. It just didn't seem to play into the main themes. I mean, it played into the themes, I guess, but it didn't quite... It was eating up a little too much space for the amount of... It didn't quite match

enough. I think if we want to do MELD as a common theme, it's going to take enough space that it has to be organic to what the set is doing. It can't be an afterthought to the set. In fact, it's probably where we start the set. Hey, we want to do a meld common set, a set where you can meld unlimited. Let's figure out how to do that. And I think it's the kind of thing you would build a set around,

that it's so defining in its mechanical presence that you would start from that. That would be a very bottom-up set. Okay, we want to do this. How do we make that happen? What do we need to do to do? And so that is something. I do think there will come a day where that happens.

Will Emerge be back? I do think Emerge will be back. I think Emerge was a pretty cool mechanic. I think there's some other flavors you could do with Emerge. I don't think Emerge always has to be Eldrazi-flavored. Maybe it was in this set,

but I don't think it has to be. I do think that there is some flavor of change that makes sense with Emerge, because you want the idea of the one creature becomes this creature, that a lot of the flavor makes sense. So if we redo Emerge, I think, again, it's the kind of mechanic that just wants the right flavor to it. I think that flavor

is not impossible to find, but not easy to find. So, Emerge coming back is, I do think it'll eventually happen, but I think it's a little more challenging. Escalade, I actually think will come back sooner than Emerge. Only because it's a little bit more flexible. Although, once again,

maybe its flavor is harder. I'm not sure. I do think Escalade could fit in more sets. I think Emerge has a very exacting flavor it needs. And we love doing double-faced cards, and it's sitting on double-faced card space. Maybe the answer to it will be one day we have some flavor that works well with double face cards

but we're like, oh, maybe not do double face cards. Then a merge might be, oh, here's a way to do this flavor that doesn't require a double face card. So that is my guess where a merge will come from. So how did Eldritch Moon do? As a whole,

one of the, I mean, so this is in the period where we were doing large, small, two-set blocks. Two-set blocks were not that popular, as evidenced by the fact that we didn't do them that long. I mean, we did three-set blocks for a long time, large, small, small. Then we experimented with large, small, large for a while, for like every other set with large, small, you know, every other block with large small large. Then we moved to two set blocks. So Shadows Over Innistrad,

sorry, Battle for Zendikar, Shadows Over Innistrad, Kaladesh, Amonkhet, and Ixalan were the five mini blocks

that we did before we transitioned over and then stopped doing mini blocks. Or, you know, two-set blocks. Mini blocks would be the wrong word. Two-set blocks. So Eldritch Moon had a bunch of things stacked together. One is the small set and the two-set block never, I don't know, was there any great successes in that? None of them were great

successes. Maybe Hour of Devastation was the best. That had a strong story that helped a little bit. But in general, that period of time, our experiment with two-set blocks did not, the small sets did not do well. Now part of that was that we made this decision to really

push boundaries on our returns and do things we really hadn't done before, like cosmic horror rather than gothic horror. I think looking back, I mean, it's funny. Whenever we try something that ends up not working out as well as we hoped, it's not

that I dislike that we tried. In fact, I like that we try things. I like that we push boundaries. My big, one of my truisms about trading card game design is, I think it's okay to make mistakes. I think you have to be careful not to make the same mistake.

Like, once you learn something, you want to be careful not to do that same thing again, right? You want to learn, and then, you know, you want to learn from it so that it it's something that you're able to grow from and so making the same mistake

is a problem but I don't have an issue with making a mistake. I think we want to try things and there are some things you just don't know until you make them so I like the cosmic like I like the idea of can we stretch Innistrad into being sort of a larger

set about horror and then stretch into being sort of a larger set about horror and then stretch to other sort of genres of horror, or sub-genres of horror? And I think the answer is, you know, no. Kind of what works best is find a world, get a feel, get a flavor, get a tone, keep that tone, and then if you want to get a different tone, make a different world. And so rather than have one world

that does everything we can do that's horror related, hey, we have a gothic horror world. That's what Innistrad is. Stay true to that. And if we want to do something a little bit different, hey, we can make that world and do that thing. And the other big lesson, I guess, is that

we have to make a lot of magic sets. I don't think we have the luxury of saying this genre is just, this one world is the genre. I think what we've learned is there are sub-genres and that we can be more fine-tuning in how we cut up worlds and making worlds. And that there are cool genres that might actually make sense, you know, that there are sub-genres

that make sense as their own world. So I think that was a valuable lesson from Eldritch Moon. actually makes sense. You know, there are sub-genres that make sense in their own world. So, I think that was a valuable lesson from Eldritch Moon. Anyway, I am almost to work. I had a little extra traffic today.

So, final thoughts. I mechanically did like Eldritch Moon. I do think there was a lot of fun stuff going on. I think the interplay between the mechanics was really good.

This is what we call a high synergy set, which means... So a high synergy means the mechanics all interact with one another in a big way, so that there's a lot of cool things. There's a lot of neat interactions that happen. A low-synergy set is one in which there's mechanics, and mechanics, not that they don't function together, but they don't sort of play off each other

quite the same way. Like, Madness and Delirium have a very interesting relationship to one another, right? Madness wants you to discard cards. Well, Delirium wants you to get cards in your graveyard. So they're, you know, if you're playing Madness cards in your deck, it kind of encourages you toium wants you to get cards in your graveyard so they're you know if you're playing madness cards in your deck it kind of encourages you to play some delirium cards in your deck

there are other environments we make where playing one mechanic doesn't really beget you playing the other mechanic usually in a low synergy it's not that you can't play the mechanics together it's more about the individual cards and like well this card and that card works so I'll play them.

But it's less like, oh, this mechanic that gets you playing that mechanic. And the low synergy. Eldritch Moon is pretty high synergy. And like I said, I think it was a fun environment. I think a lot of the lessons from it are

more about sort of what were we doing kind of big picture like a lot like for example this is an important thing to state is um a lot of times we make decisions very early on like envision design and then set design like you know we make the blueprints set design builds the houses sometimes set design did an amazing job building the house it's a really cool house the house looks exactly like the blueprint. And sometimes the flaw isn't the house, it's the blueprint. It's like, well, we told you to build this, but in retrospect, maybe we made a mistake.

And there's a lot, like over the years, like for example, another classic example, like in Lorwyn and Shadamore, I had this big idea to really change the colors between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. So, like, goblins were in, whatever, they were red and green in Lorwyn, and they were red and black in Shadowmoor. I think that's right. And that was a mistake. You know, the changing of the colors, I think, stuff like that. So, anyway, there are definitely times where the flaw of the system

was decisions made very early in the process. And I think a lot of Eldritch Moon's flaws were not in execution, were not in gameplay. I actually think that plays really well. Was in we pushed in a direction that we made the decision to do, the business made the decision to do, that I think in retrospect, like I, looking back, I would like Cosmic Horror to be its own world. I wouldn't mind having a cosmic horror world rather than, and you'll notice when we went back to Innistrad for the third

for Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow, we sort of retreated back into, I mean, we made nods that there were some changes that happened, but mostly we went back to sort of the gothic horror vibe. So, anyway, that, my friends, is Eldritch Moon.

So I hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about it. It was a lot of fun to talk to, but I am pulling into the parking lot. So I hope you guys enjoyed hearing about Shadows of Innistrad and Eldritch Moon. The reason I did Shadows of Innistrad in the first place, by the way, was it was playable on Magic Arena, which hopefully it still is when this airs. Anyway,

thanks for joining me, but as I'm in the parking lot, we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.