Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1047: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ with Glenn Jones

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

In this podcast, I talk to Glenn Jones, set design lead for The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™, about the making of the set.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the Drive to Work at Home Edition. Okay, so today I have Glenn Jones, and we're going to talk about the making of The Lord of the Rings, Tales of Middle-Earth. Okay, Glenn, welcome. Great to be here, yeah. For those who don't know, I was a principal designer at Wizards of the Coast, and I was the set design lead for Lord of the Rings, the main set, as well as the Ancillary product we haven't really seen much of, but that you've seen some snapshots of coming later this year. Okay, so let's start at the very beginning. You find out you're going to be leading Lord of the Rings.

How do you prepare for something like that? Well, first, I was very excited. I had not led the set design of a booster set at all up to that point. I had led the vision design for Commander Legends Baldur's Gate, and I'd been on a few teams, of course, but hadn't led a booster set through to completion. So that was very exciting. The Lord of the Rings is also just like a deeply important work to me personally.

It's one of the earliest books I remember reading, which probably sounds super dumb and bizarre. But yeah, in third grade, I had a teacher who really heavily emphasized reading and The Lord of the Rings is one of the sets of books in his library and I devoured them. They were fantastic and really instilled probably like the actual first like true high fantasy books I read. So very important to me in that regard.

And then also I was just doing a ton of our Universes Beyond work at that point. I'd done several, I'm not sure exactly how many, different Universes Beyond products. So I felt like I had a really strong grasp of how to translate uh ips into the magic the gathering brand and gameplay um and i'd gotten pretty good at doing it with brands i didn't even know that well for such as like transformers and street fighters or you know

brands i wasn't deeply familiar with until i started working on the set so lord of the rings i was very excited about it was like oh this is right up my alley like i'll just you know dive in and it'll be a slam dunk but um i also worked really hard because i as i went i realized like oh wow there's so much here that uh i hadn't immediately realized i could capture and that became kind of my my personal mission was like how much how many things can i find to like surprise and delight people because there's so much they're going to expect that's the biggest difference with universes beyond and normal magic is like normal magic sets are all about like surprising and delighting with new mechanics and new stories and you give people what they don't expect a lot uh which you're an excellent designer at doing mark uh and i think universes beyond you've got to deliver so much of what they do expect because

that's why they're here like they know the, they're excited to see Magic's interpretation of it, but finding all of the stuff that they don't, like that's where I was most excited to dig in. And so, yeah, the prep was pretty extensive. Normally for University of Beyondsense, I spend probably like four to eight hours like researching a brand if I don't know it super well at minimum before I get started. And that's usually like kind of two weeks of off focus, like I'll watch YouTube and TV shows and stuff like that. But for the Lord of the Rings was a lot deeper than that. So I rewatched all of the audio books, or re-listened to all the audio books, I should say. And I took copious notes as I did that, including making a checklist of every card

concept I could think of, which was a lot. I think there were something like 300, like just listening to moments. I'm like, how would this make a good card, you know, like in my head. And it's like, yeah, I can see the art like kind of forming and how would I mechanically design to it and that kind of thing. And yeah, and I checked out, you know, fan sites and other media, like what were the memes? Like I joined LOTR memes for the entirety of the design cycle on Reddit because I, you know, wanted to know what the audience delighted in. What would they enjoy? And that's how, you know, we knew to make sure we hit some notes that people are enjoying on Reddit and Twitter even today, such as Grond specifically. And the shadow facts having the reminder text or haste, like I knew that that would be like, oh, yeah.

As soon as I heard, I believe Chris Mooney was the first person to suggest that. I was like, yeah, that's got to be. We got to fight for that because that's the sort of thing people will love. Okay. So you led set design. Ben Hayes led vision design. So let's start from when you got the set. So when you got the set so when you got

the set what what state was it in yeah it was a unusual uh handoff because we hadn't done like a full vision design cycle on it in part because uh i don't i don't believe we were sure we would be moving forward on it and you know as a property it was kind of unique relative to other magic sets like we needed to investigate the things that might stop us from doing the sets which is not how most magic sets start right you figure out how to do it not how you might not be able to do it um so yeah there were things handed off in the file that were fantastic and there were concerns that i knew we'd need to address um i know you've talked about some of these in your own design content for the set such as the lack of flying in the set that was like something we had to be really aware of the heavy emphasis on humanoids versus monsters there

are monsters in the lord of the rings of middle earth of course uh but like they're they vastly are outweighed by the number of people uh that are important to the story and magic sets like that's not nearly as true you know like an indrick can be a uncommon on you know a ravnica set that's totally fine but in on middle earth it's like no we really want as much of it as possible to be like recognizable and meaningful to the audience um but there were many things from vision design that just stuck uh really well like a mass orcs was uh in vision like i basically just built parts like the mechanic was uh good to go once we got it through rules and editing and the elves being green blue um and having a scry focus that was also something that was in the vision design handoff that i was really excited to explore

uh green blue can be a really tricky limited color pair to find a satisfying identity for um as we've dealt with in multiple other magic booster sets and i was stoked to be leading a set where i felt like i had a strong green blue color pair identity that was also really fun and novel and resonant like i felt incredible it's a weird that's like a very designery thing to feel lucky about but i know i know you sympathize with it oh yeah oh wow this thing that's hard for everyone is going to be easy for me? Oh, my gosh. What to do with the green-blue? That is a common problem.

Yeah. And they did have a version of the flame-in-the-ring and ring-bearer mechanic, which I know you've already written an excellent article about. So it went through a ton of permutations, but it was also part of that vision handoff. So let's talk a little bit about trying to capture the ring. And one of the things that I know people have talked about online is you want to capture as much as you can the flavor of the thing you're trying to capture, but also it has to be a fun play experience. It has to be a good game.

So let's talk a little bit about capturing the ring in a way that it was the ring, but it played well. Yeah. I'm going to zoom out a little bit because I think it'll help to understand kind of the goals in a larger regard, which is playing the set. We want you to feel like you're playing the story of the Lord of the Rings. And that's different from enjoying a game set on middle earth. Right. And that's another difference between the universe of beyond and normal magic

sets. Like feeling like you're on Ravnica is very achievable and you don't necessarily need to feel like you're running through the maze of the guild pact uh etc you know etc like that capturing that feeling in a draft not super important want to pay it off some but yeah but for our set we wanted it to be like no like while i am playing i am engaged in the conflict of the story itself um so that's one of the things the ring caters to right and also like why we have so many characters with multiple cards uh especially at uncommon like if aragorn never shows up in your drafts do you feel like you're in the story of the lord of the rings no like you need to see him around or you feel like you're maybe just off in you know the other hemisphere of middle earth

so the ring's kind of similar like we want the ring to have a meaningful appearance it should show up in the majority of your games or feel like it could or show up or feel like it matters in the majority of your games so all of that adds up to we want an as fan of frequency for the mechanic that's going to be really high like we're going to want it to show up on a lot of commons. I don't remember exactly how many it is, but it's probably, like, around 20-ish commons in the set. And it's got, you know, similar volume at uncommon. It's going to be one of the most common mechanics.

It will be the most common mechanic of the set, essentially, in conjunction with Legendary Matters, which kind of shoots off of it. And if you think back to sets that have had mechanics with that level of depth and frequency, like Explore and Ixalan maybe, and Cycling and Ikoria, those are examples that spring to mind of like, yeah, you see it all the time. It's just everywhere. And so when a mechanic's going to be like that, when it's going to show up at a really high frequency,

that has a lot of difficult elements to it. Compare it to something like Morbid, which doesn't need to show up, you know, all over the place. And Morbid's difficult to pull off. You have to kill, you know, a creature. That's not something that's trivially easy to do on demand. So if you get, like, one Morbid reward, like, every other game, you're still feeling like you're engaging with that mechanic. But that's not what we want for the ring. The ring, we want to feel like you're engaging with that mechanic but but that's not what we want for the ring the ring we want to feel like you're engaging with it every game and maybe multiple times per game so it can't be difficult to do and it can't be punishing to do it can't require a really difficult amount of setup or very specific

conditions and those are all things that are created when you attach negativity and drawbacks to a mechanic. So we did try a lot of stuff with the ring that could be negative. We tried it as an equipment at one point with like the ability to pay some life to re-equip it and that helped it feel negative. We tried some costs that would occasionally make you sacrifice things. We tried a lot of stuff where we put a negative drawback at some point in the ring track and pretty much without fail. Every time we did that, we saw it like pretty deeply affect how the gameplay would go. Either people would really reduce the frequency with which they tried to

claim to have the ring tent them. I know I'm going to say claim the ring a bunch of times in this podcast, because that was the play test name for the mechanics. So I'll apologize in advance. But yeah, we tried a bunch of versions that did stuff like that, and very frequently it would go one of two ways. Either people would disengage from the mechanic in playtesting

because they would see a drawback coming, and they'd know, oh, I really only want to do this once, maybe twice a game, and then the drawback will hit, so I don't want the drawback to hit me. Or we would attach a reward that was strong enough to counter the drawback. For example, at one point we tried, whenever this deals combat damage to a player, you can pay two life to draw a card. It was at one point the third level of the ring. And in that case, the exact opposite happens where people are like, oh, I will just over-engage in this in a dramatic way, and it will warp the game completely. And that's kind of how drawbacks go, right?

If you're going to have a drawback, it either needs to be small enough that you can pay it by ignoring it, in which case it often won't matter. Or when it does, you'll just have to leave it alone. Or it's going to be big enough to have a good reward. And then the reward is going to become very warping because it's so strong. Yeah.

The other thing that went on, which is interesting with the ring is, it went through, like you're saying, it was equipment at one point and it ended up becoming an emblem. The emblem's an interesting story because we had never done an emblem outside of a planeswalker. So how did it end up becoming an emblem? Yeah, that's a great story. So we started off, we started with the equipment. we wound up not liking that just because it had a lot of uh kind of bizarre incentives around artifact destruction or artifact exiling effects in the set where it's like we don't really want

that specific thing to be happening all the time because it feels pretty frustrating if you build your deck around the ring and your opponent has you know whatever common artifact to get rid artifact removal thing to get rid of it also like that shouldn't happen right like the ring being destroyed shouldn't feel commonplace that's really hard to do that's the whole story yeah um so while we think it's a flavor win that it happens occasionally like we didn't want that to be like the default uh occurrence in every game that you're playing like the ring should feel difficult to get rid of um and then from there um we tried basically basically moved into dungeons was kind of like the next space we went. We're like, well, we know we can make dungeons work.

So let's look at something that kind of resembles a dungeon and maybe attach it to a creature in some way. So that was what basically spent the majority of design under me as was some version of dungeon was what we had as like our play test uh cards that were set out except that it would you know designate a creature in it and tied into that and it turned out eventually that emblem was just from a rule standpoint the most elegant and effective way to execute on that concept um so that was how it was it was implemented like that actually mostly happened the actual transition to emblem mostly happened when set design was done, once we had established what functionality we wanted. And a lot of that was related to, you know, we wanted it to put a trigger on the creature that would happen frequently and have a passive effect that modifies it. So once we're at that point where we're trying to do a lot of things and triggers, the emblem, I think, just made a lot more sense.

In contrast to, like, we did try at one point a version that basically only gave you Effects as you level so it'd be like, you know When the ring tempt you thing happens and then there isn't a an ongoing ability other than that like no attack triggers and stuff like that as discussed momentarily we go like that had of course the Incentive of now and you should fill your deck with as much the ring tempt you as possible so that you can trigger Things multiple times over and over and over, which wasn't exactly what we wanted either. Like, if one person's trying to draft, like, 20 of the Ring Temp Shoe cards,

like, then nobody else gets to enjoy the mechanic, so. And also, I mean, flavor-wise, it's important that the Ring does something to you, because, I mean, in the story, that's pretty important, right? Yeah, we wanted the characters to feel like they were carrying something powerful as they did it. And we did work a few drawback-y things

and flavorful things in as we went. Some people online have picked up that it was already really... It's really common when you put an aura on a creature that the creature becomes the primary target for your opponent's removal. That dynamic very much exists with the ring temps you where the ring bearer now is a primary target for your opponent's removal. That dynamic very much exists with the ring tempts you where the ring bearer now is a primary target for your opponent's removal.

And we knew that that would be the case, so that helps us capture some of the feel of the effect and that the object just feels powerful and influential in the game, like depriving your opponent of their ability to use a ring bearer. Also important. The legendary matters mechanic helps with that as well. Especially we have a variety of parts that, you know, care about having two legendary creatures, not too many.

But, like, that's another way that, like, losing out on the ring makes that a much more difficult condition to fulfill. So let's get into the Legendary Matters. That was an interesting theme. So, I mean, I guess this is twofold. Let's start by talking about how to get the characters into the set. Like, one of the things about Universes Beyond is, like, one of the joy of playing Universe Beyond sets

is that you get to play characters that you love, that you know from, you know, you... Like you said, you've been reading Lord of the Rings since you were a kid. You know, getting the chance to play Gandalf is pretty cool. What were the challenges of putting characters in the set? Yeah. I mean, I knew I wanted basically everybody important to appear at Uncommon because we wanted them to show up in the gameplay at a frequency that would be enough to communicate the story. And that would also let us pay off some really cute ideas about like how these characters might interact with one another.

But, you know, they're also supposed to be the most exciting characters. So we want to be able to attach, you know, powerful, exciting, and complex ideas to them as well. So we want them to appear at Rare and Mythic. Hmm, how are we going to do that? Well, the obvious conclusion we came to was doing multiple versions of each legendary creature. And we were actually in design either slightly before

and eventually in parallel to Brothers War, which wound up coming to the same conclusion for Urza and Mishra. That's how you make it feel like Urza and Mishra are fighting, is they appeared uncommon and they also appeared higher rarities. So we came to the exact same conclusion. I don't know, I don't actually know if I knew that Brothers War was doing it until we did it. I think it was just two ideas that, you know, gelled in the exact same way and totally made sense. And then from there, we were really mindful of what I think M20 had done with Chandra,

where, you know, the story moments in her life and her costume changes often attached to those story moments kind of separated the planeswalkers from, like, an uncommon Chandra, a rare Chandra, a mythic Chandra. And we really liked that as well. That felt like an elegant thing for us to key off of. And a lot of the characters in Lord of the Rings have very meaningful character changes that are also either definitely accompanied by or could be accompanied by costume changes because they're not necessarily defined. Gandalf is the most obvious of those, right? Like Gandalf the gray becomes Gandalf the white, changes his clothes, changes everything. So we're like, okay, great. We can do that Gandalf that way. That's one way

we can manifest a story. And so we went through and found all of the, as many moments as we could for characters where it felt like they had a really transformative moment. It was probably most difficult for Legolas and Gimli, whose character arcs are, you know, not as large from like, there's a lot more emotional and kind of like a belief system change for them as opposed to like, no, they're like a different person now. So, you know, Gimli, we captured the addition of green to his color identity as, you know, like, yeah, he's, you know, coming to befriend Legolas at that point. And Legolas, like, in turn, like, loses blue as he goes from uncommon to green because, you know, he's less maybe about the elven traditions that green-blue represents in our color pie and more about the community that green specifically espouses at that point the other thing i want to stress is when you're making multiple versions of the same character you kind of want to make them in different colors so that different decks can play them yeah and so like from a game standpoint

there's a lot of impetus to want to sort of make them different and right finding story reasons to do that is a great reason you know allows us to do that and it pays off both ways too because by changing their color you literally change what the card is capable of doing in many cases which serves to emphasize the story um trying to think of like a really clean easy example of that that is also definitely previewed or whatever but uh yeah, Frodo's probably the most... We have the rare Frodo that has some black

in his color identity. Let me read real quickly. So Frodo, Sauron, Spain is what you're talking about, I assume? Yeah. So it's white for a 1-2 legendary creature, halfling citizen, two hybrid white-black manas. If Frodo storms Bane as a citizen,

he becomes a halfling scout with base power and toughness 2-3 in lifelink. And then black, black, black, if Frodo is a scout, he becomes a halfling rogue with whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, that player loses the game if the ring has tempted you four more times this game. Otherwise, the ring tempts you.

Yeah, so, like, there's some abilities in that mix there that you wouldn't expect to see on Frodo as he sets out from the Shire, necessarily. Like, that's endgame Frodo content, where, you know, it demonstrates ambition and potential ruin, not for you, but for your

opponent in this regard. And so, yeah, like, that's a way that we can use color to kind of add to people we did we did it in a different way with gandalf where gandalf the gandalf uh friend of the shire to gandalf the gray um the important properties here being yeah mono blue gandalf um at uncommon you know has flash and gives uh sort your sorceries flash and then the blue red one at rare uh is kind of representing him in conflict in a fight and you know he's defending his friends so like there's where we kind of felt

like it was an appropriate place to add red to his identity uh he's that's gandalf at among his most literal fiery he declares himself uh you know that he is the keeper of the sacred fire literally uh something along those lines. And that felt like a really great moment to demonstrate, like, Gandalf's passion as opposed to maybe some of his other qualities. And that's one of the other ways we used color identity and tried to deliver it in a way that mechanics and flavor could both represent. Yeah, I also want to explain something really quickly on characters and color,

which is, a character that has a lot of depth to them might be many colors, and that we don't want to necessarily, I mean, we did in a few cases, but we don't want all religious characters to be three or four colors, and so a lot of times you're picking elements of the character in the moment, in the story, and

like, it's not that Gandalf, you know, in this moment, at this time, you know, he's more blue and red than he is other things. Not that he doesn't have other qualities to them. That we're just showing this moment. And I think that's important. That's why the same character could show up in different colors also is playing different aspects of the character. Right.

That's how magic can show story in its gameplay is using color to represent what is happening in a moment, as opposed to, you know, what, what the core thing of a character is and in magic sometimes like, especially in traditional magic, um, we veer towards a little bit more where it's like, we, you know, we're like Thalia, you know, is a model white character. Like she has really strong white ideals and her character will bleed a little bit less into other colors as part of our story development, because we know what we're doing with her. Um, but lord of the rings wasn't built for a magic set right the lord of

the rings is a story and so its characters are well-rounded they're really fully fleshed out they have moments of weakness they have moments of strength um and we can represent those using the color pie in a lot of different ways and that's a lot more satisfying than you know trying to answer the question of what color is this exact character? And then we represent them with those exact colors every single time they manifest. Like, that's not a very interesting approach. Like, it's much more interesting to see what they might look like or what they might do in specific moments. Yeah, you hit on an important theme for people to remember in that most of the time we're making a magic set, everything is flexible.

most of the time when we're making a magic set, everything is flexible. If it makes a better card to do something, we can go to the creative team and say, hey, we need to change this. You know, I remember in Innistrad, I'm like, look, I need the werewolves to be red-green. And they're like, okay, we'll make them red-green.

Like, we'll change the world so it makes sense. In Universes Beyond, you know, the Lord of the Rings is the Lord of the Rings. We're not changing the Lord of the Rings. It is what it is. And so that's one of the big challenges is there's some freedom you normally have as a designer that you do not have. There's some gains you get as well,

but it's a locked thing, which it has some challenges to it. Yeah, and a good example of that that is funny as well is our Boromir card, for example. And the Boromir that we have in the set is mono-white. And the art even depicts him shield up, defending his hobbit friends. This is Boromir right before he's making his last stand against the orcs. And it's easy to say, oh, Borom Boromir, we should represent as like white,

black or white, red, because he's, you know, tempted by the ring. Like that's his, that's his role in the story is to demonstrate the power of the ring's evil to corrupt even this very good person. But this moment in the story isn't Boromir in a moment of temptation, right? Like this is Boromir at his most white, like he is putting his life on the line to do what he thinks is right to to right a wrong uh even though it's his wrong and save his friends so like you can make i think there's a fine case to make an argument that boramir is a white black character for like a large chunk of the story but the moment we wanted to capture was uh really noble um and that we didn't feel like tainting it with the evil was the correct way to go.

Okay. So let's segue into, you talked a little bit about legendary matters as a theme. So let's hit upon that. You have a lot of legendary characters. So how did the theme come about? Well, we knew we were going to have a lot of legendary characters. That was the easiest way to know that it would be a good theme. But also it kind of creates an alignment of both incentives and expectations. So we know we're going to have a lot. We didn't know how many. Eventually, I figured out

it was definitely going to be over 60, and I think it wound up being 75, I think, in the main set. From memory, maybe 75. I think 75 is correct. Yeah. So that's enough volume to make a limited theme, for sure.

We know that. And even though it's only going to appear at Uncommon+, which is Uncommon, many limited themes, you do need, like, a lot of stuff at Common in order to make them work. But that's where the Ring Tempstu comes in for us, because it's effectively putting legendary creatures at Common, because of all these cards that can turn them legendary. So that kind of fed into itself in a really elegant way because the idea of turning a nobody into a legend is also very in keeping with the story of the Lord of the Rings. You know, like hobbits are so unknown that the ants didn't even know the species existed when they met them. So that's the ascent to legendary status and cards saying oh now that you're legendary things are better like it's important that you're a legend like that's

that's all of how the story kind of links in and frodo ascending from anonymity into being this hugely important character this very important friend to all of these people uh and a hero to them eventually um that's that's both like how the story works. It also makes sense for the player, like having a legendary character in play, like, Oh, that's great for me. I should always want a legendary character in play. I should want to be building what really feels like a fellowship by having as many legendary characters in play as I can. And so, yeah, that's that.

It really just fed into itself. Naturally. We shaped the gameplay around making legends great. In addition to Legendary Matters cards, like the majority of the signpost uncommons, the two-color uncommons that kind of teach you what the limited archetypes are about, those are mostly legendary

characters, so that when you're drafting a deck around your two-color theme, you're also drafting a deck around your legendary creature. And those marry together really well from a resonance standpoint as well as a mechanical one. Okay, so you used, I think, three cards used Historic. How did Historic end up in the set?

Yeah, I don't even remember all three, I'll be totally honest. I know Samwise Gamgee does. I think it was on a common of two rares, I think is what ended up. Yeah. I wanted to, for one thing, the set's a little unusual, right? We haven't really made a set that's going to have exactly the profile of this, where we want it to be really appealing to an audience that maybe isn't necessarily already engaged with magic.

Like, The Lord of the Rings is an excellent entry point to magic to take some fantasy, a fantasy world that everyone loves and introduce a game that we hope they can love to them as well. So we want the set to be pretty approachable. That's one of the reasons we used a lot of mechanics that we already knew really well that were also kind of simpler to grasp. We spent almost all of our complexity points in the set on the ring

temp sheet, right? Like that's, that's the most of our complexity points in the set on the Ring Temp Shoot, right? Like, that's the most complex thing going on in a set by Miles. But at the same time, like, you know, lots of already engaged Magic players, they're going to come here and want to see cool stuff that's recognizable to them. And so I was a little bit more flexible at higher verities about how we could kind of pull from other mechanics and sets

that maybe you wouldn't expect in like a standard set to see. Like a one-off historic card would be very unusual in a standard set. And it's unusual in our set too. But we're less constrained by that strangeness, I guess, is an easy way to say it. So specifically, I liked the word. Like it's just a great word. And we did consider building the set around historic instead of legendary matters at one point.

And if I could go back in time, knowing what I know now and how much better a designer I am now, maybe I'd even try and do that. It's a tricky tightrope to walk since it changes a lot about your incentives. And one of the things about historic that prevented us from wanting to make it a major limited theme was how few colorless artifacts we really would want to appear at common and uncommon because we wanted to use our characters and story. And those are really color aligned things a lot more. There aren't a lot of things that felt like fitting common color, colorless artifacts in the set. We had to scrape for those.

So that was why we didn't want to use it throughout the set. But in a couple of spots, it felt really good. And Samwise Gamgee is like the example I love the most because that's Sam, you know, after the story, he's with his kids, he's feeding them food, and he's telling them about his adventures with his best friend. And that's his history, right?

Like historic is just the most resonant possible word for that. So I was like, you know, we want it to, his history literally is sagas and legendary characters and artifacts. Like that was Sam's, that's his life story is these three elements and how they impacted him. So historic was just like a really natural fit for him specifically.

And we actually had it uh at one point it was on mythic rare gandalf the white as well uh who keys off of legendary creatures and artifacts instead uh and honestly the reason we took historic off of that is kind of a weird one which is that uh his it didn't his card didn't function with sagas the way people almost always intuited that it did. So we wound up cutting it down to legendary creatures and artifacts just because it made the card... It avoided people accidentally cheating with the card, which happened almost constantly when it had the historic keyword. We are almost out of time here. Any final thoughts? it had the historic, the historic feeler. We are almost out of time here. So my, any final thoughts on, you know, looking back,

because I should stretch to the audience. This was a longer than normal. You guys had a little extra time. And then I know you spent a lot, a lot of time on this. So any final thoughts on, on the making of the Lord of the Rings? Yeah. I mean, there's still, there's so many things that we could talk about with the set still. I mean, like, just the creation of the large multi-card scenes alone was, like, a total adjustment and required new processes to be invented.

But yeah, as working on the set, it's kind of surreal to work on something, and you're like, I'm pretty sure this is going to be, like, the coolest thing I ever do. And then, you know, you get done, you're like, yeah, no, I think that will have been the coolest. Like, I don't think I'm going to, 20 years from now, will I have done anything cooler than like led the set design for the Lord of the Rings to me personally? Like, I don't know. I think not. Like it's, you know, it's kind of a crowning achievement for me almost in a way, which is also a little bit surreal because it's also, you know, like the first set that I led on that scale. And so it's also where I made a ton of, you know, what I'll look back on as mistakes and learnings. So I'll just have to live with those, but that's a whole different

thing. So yeah, I was very honored to do it. I felt privileged to have been trusted with the material. And yeah, it was just a joy and everyone who helped me, which is a huge, huge long list of people. Yeah, I'm very grateful to all of them. Well, I want to thank you for being here. This was great and I loved having a chance to talk with you and it was really neat to hear all the stuff behind the

scenes. Yeah, thanks Mark. So to everybody else, what this means is this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.