Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1063: Wilds of Eldraine Vision Design with Chris Mooney

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

In this podcast, I talk about Wilds of Eldraine vision design with guest Chris Mooney, lead vision designer for 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. So I have a guest today, Chris Mooney, the Vision Lead Designer of Wilds of Eldraine. So we're going to talk all about Wilds of Eldraine. Hey, Chris. Oh, happy to be here. So this was your first design, first lead design. That's right. It was my first time leading vision design. Okay, so let's talk about, I tell you you're leading vision design. Start there.

So what were your thoughts? My thoughts were that, so I always like to tell this story, but when I came up for the Great Designer Search, after we finished the final round of the Great Designer Search, we had a special treat. And that treat was getting to draft Thrones of Eldraine in an early design stage, long before it had been announced. That was a ton of fun. I really enjoyed it. I thought the flavor was amazing.

I thought, you know, and the mechanics were fun. And I won the draft. So it was a very memorable experience for me. And ever since then, I've always loved Thrones of Eld Eldraine when it came out I had a ton of fun playing it so I was really excited when I heard that I would get to lead the vision design for you know at that time we were just saying it's return to Eldraine

right before we knew exactly what the flavor was going to be the fact that you let it and you love it were not unrelated things by the way yes yes absolutely it's not unrelated things, by the way. Yes, yes, absolutely. It's not like a lottery system in general, you know, to try to line people up. And I know that talking with you beforehand, it was especially nice to have a return to, which isn't easier in all respects, but it is certainly easier to come back to something that we know

and take the things that people loved about it, as opposed to starting from a completely clean slate and having to figure out entirely new things. So we were able to piggyback on a lot of what we knew worked about the first set. Yeah, when I pick somebody to do their first lead ever, returns are nicer, right? Because a blank page is very intimidating and a return is like well we know things yeah we'll introduce new things but we know things and that makes it a lot easier usually so um and additionally it was also a very very welcoming environment because uh you know i said throughout but like it was a incredibly stacked uh vision team it was a lot of people who had been at wizards for a long time and knew a lot

about their roles um you know it was you and doug and jenna and eric um who are all people who have you know names that other listeners might recognize from the history of magic um so having all of those people who were really uh experienced there also made it you know feel like okay i definitely can rely on them to bring in their expertise and their knowledge. Okay, so I know very early on, one of the earliest things I think that you pitched was the idea of the archetypes being fairy tales. You pitched that really, really early. It was pretty early. I think it was, in my memory, it sort of happened like kind of maybe midway through Vision Design, maybe a little bit earlier than that.

Because I think what it came down to was that in the beginning, we were like, so we really wanted to do a focus on fairy tales. That was the part of Eldraine that was very popular with players. It was the part that the creative team was more excited to explore because a lot of the wilds was left very mysterious. And so we wanted to venture in and learn more things about the wilds. And also, it was the part that we felt like still had a lot of, like, you know, resonant space left to mine mechanics out of.

But the sort of idea of tying them into archetypes i think it was for a while us and creative were sort of like okay well we're dealing with the themes of fairy tales uh and we're coming up with mechanics coming with general things but there wasn't really anything that was structurally tying the set together that was like here is the thing, because, so the way that I remember it is that at that point, you know, we had a lot of mechanics, like adventures, for example, and roles, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit later, that we were like, these sort of feel like they go everywhere. Like, they're kind of, every color wants to have a little bit of these mechanics, because they're fun, they're not necessarily locked into certain

colors, and the flavor wants to be in all the colors as well so we were like there's nothing that really ties specific colors together in a certain way until like i think the idea of oh what if we did our 10 two-color archetypes as stories and used that as the anchor for the structure of the set so that it was now like oh these aren't just you know a bunch of blue random cards that care about spells it's like no no we we pick a story to tie it into and we can have all the cards sort of flavorfully connect and that allow will allow people to sort of latch on to oh i see what's going on here um i think if i remember i was inspired by um in uh war of the spark so war of the Spark had recently come out,

sort of more recently come out when we were working on the set. And Doug Byer, who was the creative lead for that set, did something that I thought was really nice, which was that for certain color archetypes, there was like a little scene almost that was playing out. So like the red-green archetype in War of the Spark, a lot of the cards,

which could have just been flavored as anything, instead they were sort of all flavored as these are the gruel clans that are you know banding together they're like finally it's our time the city's getting destroyed and now we're going to come and like you know fight for our home and get these invaders off um because destroying the city that's our thing um and i thought and there were a couple of those little packages in war of the spark like red white had like some borough like a you know we followed like one borough soldier who sort of was climbing up the ranks as she like defended people um and i really liked i thought that worked really well and so i pitched doing that even more so in this set of really leaning into it hard and saying

let's make every two-color archetype a different fairy tale and doug i think was really inspired by that idea and really like uh ran with it and and once both design and creative both really liked it at that point it was like oh for sure we got to do this because it seems like it's a slam dunk if we can pull it off and we spent some time the the interesting thing is once we handed it off to set design they didn't change the stories but we we went through infinite changes on what the stories were early on right yeah we it definitely some of them were easy and some of them were not easy um and what was nice though was that you know uh this is true of both the original eldraine and wilds of eldraine um is that we are doing our own twists on the stories you know like the stories are recognizable to anyone who's familiar with them,

but we have added our own magic version of the story. And that also allowed us to take some stories that were maybe harder to fit into colors and say, oh, well, if we just twist this in a certain way using our own magic flavor, we can get it to line up better. And so that certainly helped us out a lot as well. But in general, I think the

stories, right, a lot of them jumped out to us and we were like, that's it. We're definitely doing that one. Yeah, I think one of the cards that we do market research and stuff, and one of the cards that did really, really well in front of Eldraine creatively was we had a Goldilocks card.

But in our version, it would go like, she hunts bears, right? Right. All the focus testing we did really had a Goldilocks card. But like, in our version, it'll go like, she hunts bear, right? Like, it's a very, you know, and that, right, all the focus testing we did really said that what players enjoyed was we took things they knew, but right, it's magic twists on them. It's not just the story as you know it.

It's some fun take on it. Right. Okay, so let's, okay, so we had the idea of the fairy tale for archetypes. So let's get into roles, because I think roles are kind of the backbone of... Everything kind of got built around roles. So let's talk about the origin of roles.

Yes, roles were definitely the thing that I remember being on the forefront. Coming in, we knew we wanted to do adventures again, because everybody likes adventures. The players like adventures. The designers like adventures. Creative likes adventures. Everybody loves adventures like adventures, the designers like adventures, creative likes adventures, everybody loves adventures.

So we knew we wanted to do that. And then when we were thinking of, well, we want a big marquee new mechanic that will sort of be the thing we're showcasing in the set. And when we were talking about fairy tales and talking about what are the things that tie the fairy tales together, a lot of our thinking sort of came back to that story structure type stuff because at the end of the day fairy tales in general they are there's so many different things that happen in

fairy tales and different creatures and different powers each one has its own unique little magical system that's going on but the thing thing that was consistent was the character archetypes. And so we were really drawn to that and the idea of can we mechanically capture character archetypes in a way that is fun and isn't just sort of another creature type that you're referencing. It was actually something where you could

apply the character archetypes to whatever you wanted and create your own stories in that way yeah it's something that it's funny in front of eldraine one of the things we realized while we were putting the set together was that the way fairy tales are made is the same component pieces get used in different fairy tales that like the idea of the big bad wolf there's multiple stories with the big bad wolf there's multiple stories with the prince charming. And that they use the same components. That's why archetypes really made sense in fairy tales.

Because fairy tales are not, they don't live in a vacuum. The palette of tools to make a fairy tale really leans heavily on archetypes. That's why they're so attractive to us. Right. And for other genres that we tackle, oftentimes what we can do is we can lean on a certain magical power or component or something that is common to this mythology or common to the genre of fiction. But in fairy tales, it's like, oh, well, there's giant beanstalks. That's really cool. But the giant beanstalks don't show up in a bunch of stories they show up in just that one story so the the sort of magical components make for really good cards but in terms of a mechanic that goes between the stories we needed something that was like more

elemental um so i remember with the story archetypes whereas you know uh that became roles we had a couple of different character concepts and we were sort of oh the mechanic was you apply the title of that role to whatever character so whether it was princess or huntsman or you know wizard or whatever um and you could apply that role to one of your characters and we spent a lot of time figuring out like what does that mean and does every card need to tell you like what being like it's just the fairy godmother it can make you a princess doesn't have to say what being a princess means is being a princess have its own individual meaning we were like is this a counter or is this a token that attaches or is this a just a like a name like i remember one thing we tried was just your name became like princess

comma whatever and so it was like you know it was princess ginger brute and you know princess uh red cap or whatever um so we tried a lot of different things but i remember that when we were going down our list of all the different ways we could do roles the one that stood out the most to me as the lead was the aura tokens um for a couple of reasons if i remember one was that um people like really like playing with auras like auras are something that is constantly very popular with magic players um especially players who are just getting into the game it's very fun to just put stuff on your creature and make your creature more awesome. But more experienced magic players sort of become jaded by auras because of the card advantage that,

you know, it's like, oh, I put an aura on my creature. My creature died. I'm down a card. That feels bad. I don't like auras as much anymore. So we liked rolls as a way to say, hey, you can play with auras. You can put auras on your creatures and make them cooler and you don't have to worry about it being worth an entire card because uh the rolls all come attached to some other effect that you want um another thing that it did was that it introduced the theme of enchantments to the set so the throne of eldraine did not really have an enchantment theme. It had one archetype that cared about artifacts and enchantments. But for the most part, it was not really focused on that card type. But once we started to make...

Once we made the rolls enchantments and we started to make other cards that cared about enchantments, all of a sudden, it just sprang to life. It's like, oh, of course! The fairy tale set, enchantment, is such a fairy tale sounding word. Enchanted creatures and enchanted... we go into the enchanted forest. Like, it's such a resonant word that we are like, it's such a, it feels like such a natural fit, even though it wasn't in the original set. And another thing I just want to point out is, for some reason, the flavor of artifacts, like we've done so many sets based on artifacts. done so many sets based on artifacts and that enchantments really we behind the scenes like enchantments just need to have more like they they do everything the artifacts do but we've had like

five artifact sets and like one enchantment set so finding other places for enchantments made sense so that like it was a combination of things like it made perfect it felt right and we just wanted to do more with enchantments just because they've gotten the short shrift over time. Right. And, like, we knew we wanted to do Sagas, because we didn't have Sagas, or, you know, we had Sagas with Throne of Eldraine, but they were still new. No, we didn't. No, the reason we didn't, real quickly, was

at the time, they weren't quite deciduous yet, and so we either were going to put them in Throne of Eldraine or put them in Theroth Beyond Death. And Theroth Beyond Death, they're like, oh, we're going back. So we have stories to tell and we have an enchantment theme. And so they won out.

Basically, they won out. So like we said, only one set can have it. And so we didn't do them. We wanted to. Right. Sagas existed at the time, but they weren't in the set Throne of Eldraine. Right. But we knew we wanted to do sagas here because by the time we were doing Wilds of Eldraine, sagas had become more of a mainstay in Magic.

Players liked them. We liked making them. So we knew we wanted to have them here and they were enchantments. So that was another thing that tied into, oh, well, if we know we want to have sagas and we're doing this aura thing and we can just lean into the enchantment flavor um and really and really double down on that so one of the the other things that really drew us to the aura implementation of the role mechanic was that there were so many archetypes that came out of it one of the things that i always uh whenever i can that i like to see in sets is when, you know, one mechanic is able to fuel a lot of different strategies. And what was nice about rolls is that, you know, the rolls mechanic allowed us to do a enchanted creatures matter theme and a sacrificing enchantments theme, which is something we've never been able to do before because you've never been able to have that

many enchantments in your deck. It also inspired the there's a red white archetype that's about having two permanents enter the battlefield on the same turn uh and that can be challenging to do with just casting spells but all the role like many of the role cards are like i'm a creature and i also make a role and so i trigger all of your you know double your double permanent fall abilities uh celebration i think is what it's called in the final set yeah we um it didn't have a name when we turned it over but set design name right right yeah uh and so and so i really enjoyed that element where it was like not only is this bringing a lot of flavor but we can sort of milk this for a lot of different mechanical space and get some novel uh strategies that you might not have been able to

to do before without the mechanic yeah i think roles think roles, it's funny, there are things in the set that are very structural and foundational, and there are things that you sort of add on. Roles were super foundational, like everything that built off of roles. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about, okay, so roles exist. We make roles. Oh,. Oh, so let's talk a little bit about the making of the roles. So I think we handed over 10 roles is what we handed over. Something like that. Yes. Yeah.

So we just, I think our philosophy, and this is true for vision design, is look, over deliver. Just make as many different things as we can. It's way easier for set design to pull back than it is to expand. So we just did a lot of different things um yeah and like right like you said that's what normally envision design you're not necessarily trying to find the answer you're trying to find here's all the space that we reasonably think can work and it's up to set design to determine what to keep and what to get rid of um with roles i remember handing it off we were like feel free to cut a lot of these.

You don't need all of them, but you do need some amount of them because you, in order for the roles to be charming, you have to see that there's multiple different ones that you can apply. Yeah. And, uh, I believe if I time it correctly, um, Chris gave me permission. So I'm doing a two part, uh, in my, my column where Chris's actual vision design document is going to go up and then I'll annotate

it. But you guys will see actually what we handed off. Yeah, that'll be cool. Just a few quick things that didn't and we had an

animated one that animated an artifact and turned into a creature. We had multiple that you had a tap ability that you grafted a tap ability onto the

creature. One of the things that we were interested in when we first made the mechanic, we were like, when we first made the mechanic, we were like, how can we make it so that you want to put the rolls on different kinds of creatures?

And so one of them was like, oh, what if we made some that were tap abilities? And so you wanted to put it on your little 1-1 instead of putting it on your big creature that you're attacking with. It's one of those things that's like, it's cool in theory, and it's cool when you're just brainstorming, but over time you, you test everything out and you're

like, ah, these ones aren't as fun as the other ones. Maybe we don't need them, you know? Yeah. And the other thing, um, I'm hoping to get Ian on, uh, we at the time just made roles all sorts of different power levels, not worrying about like, did roles have to have a unified power level or not? We just tried lots of different things. Set design would later figure out they want to set power level so that that meant that all of them had to kind of cost the same like the the element of the role you know if it was an

yeah they were closer to one another yeah and and also like one of the things i'm sure you will talk about this when he's on but one of the things the big things that set design did was when we handed off the roles they all did sort of different things in terms of some of them gave you stats some of them didn't give you stats some of the stats were like lopsided it was like plus two plus oh or something and in set design and this is something that you this is the reason like the kinds of work that set design does it's like for playing with the set you know way more than we played in vision it's like hey these are like really difficult to remember like they're really difficult to do the math and all the stats and stuff can we just make them plus one plus one and there's sort of a default bonus

you get from having a role plus an extra ability that makes it flavorful and that's one of those things where you know right when you're just doing vision design you're just brainstorming you just want to come up with like the coolest most interesting version but that isn't always the one that plays the best and it's nice to you know set design finds that compromise of hey they're still flavorful they're still capturing the thing you wanted but they're also way more fun to play with um and so a lot of the things that you know i think for if you're a newer designer out there and you're listening to this uh this is certainly something that you know i think for if you're a newer designer out there and you're listening to this uh this is certainly something that you know i went through when i was in college you know you

have like the idea you have your initial idea and you're like oh i thought of all the clever uses of this idea it's so cool it's so interesting um but at the end of the day like you you have to sort of give up on your perfect vision of what you think your original idea was going to be and accept that like hey this version that's not exactly what you handed over is actually way more fun and works way better and it's actually a good thing that it changed in that direction um and roles i think were exactly that of like for vision design where we hand over all of our wackiest ideas and set design figures out which of them are actually the most the most fun way to execute on them okay so let's talk about the next mechanic. So once we hit rolls, you talked about having a sacrifice theme,

which, right, sacrificing champions isn't a thing we've ever done because there's just not enough. So that got our next mechanic. So let's talk about bargain. So where did bargain come from exactly? So if I recall correctly, I believe bargain was an eric lauer special uh eric lauer who i believe has been on the show before um yes he is extremely good at thinking about sort of the structural elements of magic design he can you know look at a set and look at the mechanics in the set and say like oh here's what you're going to run into um here's a problem

that is going to happen in your limited environment. And so for Eric, he looked at the set and said, you know, one of the things that I'm seeing is that you've got a lot of these roles. You've got food. You have, you know, you're going to make creature tokens. Every set makes creature tokens. And you've got adventures,

which are, you know, tend to stay face up in exile for a while. You're just going to have too much stuff in play. There's just a lot of stuff that's just laying around. And that will make the boards really complex, and it can be overwhelming to read everything. And so he was like, there should be a mechanic that helps to clean up some of the stuff, that just gets rid of permanence on the battlefield.

And so we came up with Bargain, which is essentially Kicker, but the Kicker is always you sacrifice an artifact or an enchantment and we were like oh we have food we have rolls so so we have we have uh rolls and we have food so those are artifacts and enchantments that are in play all the time um and uh bargain gives you another use for them. It's a pretty simple mechanic. Didn't really, you know, it was a little bit, it was certainly not as flavorful as like Adventures or Rolls,

but it was extremely valuable role player. Just like Eric said, it helped to give more uses and more ways of using all of your permanents and stuff. So that's what we handed off. During set design is when somebody suggested, hey, there's also this, the black red archetype is the Pied Piper and it has all these rat tokens.

And someone was like, hey, it's weird. I think Reggie's the one. I think Reggie's the one that suggested that. Yeah, so right. There's all these tokens laying around in your rat deck and you couldn't bargain them away. And people were like, that seems kind of lame. But we didn't want to make it sacrifice any permanent

or sacrifice any creature. It just felt like it was too easy. There wasn't really a... You weren't really having to build your deck to make use of Bargain. You just got to Bargain in any deck, which we thought was a big loss from a gameplay standpoint. We enjoyed the fact that Bargain was a reward

for playing certain kinds of decks. So, right. Sounds like Reggie was the one who suggested hey could this say artifact enchantment or token um and at first we were like eh does that make it too easy you know there's a lot of ways of making creature tokens but once we tested it out we found that oh this it's it's extremely fun it still has it's a lot easier to build your deck, certainly, but there are still constraints on what kinds of cards you want to play with your bargain cards and sort of what play patterns work best with it. And it opened up a lot of space for that rat token deck

to be able to play all the bargain cards, which it wasn't before. So that was a change that happened in set design, and it sort of opened the mechanic up. And in general, I mean, I think bargain was one of the mechanics where when I handed it off in vision, I was a little bit like, ah, like you could take or leave this one, you know, it's not super inspiring. It's not like really, you know, exciting. Um, but what it was is it was really easy to make cards for. We made a lot of cards with bargain and they were all really fun because it was fun in limited to figure out,

Hey, can I have an extra token in play to sacrifice? And even in constructed it, it, we made a lot of standard cards that were, Oh, actually, you know,

when I'm building my standard deck, I have to think about now where, what cards do I have that are making tokens? And should I be playing more tokens or should I be playing some sagas or some, you know, artifacts that I wasn't otherwise to try and bargain them away? So we really enjoyed it in sort of a bunch of different formats. And so we were really happy with how it turned out, despite it being more of a, you know, it takes a backseat to some of the more exciting mechanics in the set. Okay, so let's talk our next named mechanic, although we didn't name it Envision, Celebration.

So it's just in red-white. I believe it was just part of the red-white archetype. So where did it come from? Do you remember the original version, by the way? I think was it just any two permanents? No, no, no. So the one we handed off was whenever a permanent

it triggered every time a permanent entered. Oh, sure, no. So the one we handed off was whenever a permanent, it triggered every time a permanent entered. Oh, sure. Yeah. And so there were more scaling effects, right? Because they were, the more time you did it, the more it happened. And then set design was like, well, can we just like, can we just solidify this to a singular thing? And so they ended up saying, how about two? And they locked it down to two. And so they ended up saying, how about two? And they locked it down to two. Right.

It certainly, celebration is a mechanic that it exists because we had the same sort of trigger on a lot of cards in red, white. And eventually we're like, hey, we have enough cards that have the same text. Maybe we should just give it an ability word name and that'll make it easier for people to keep track of that all these cards are doing the same thing. But that archetype was another, I think Eric was the one who originally suggested that on, hey, if you've got these roll tokens and a bunch of creatures enter the battlefield and make a roll, maybe you should have an archetype that's about multiple things entering the battlefield in the same turn. And yeah, I think we're always on the lookout for limited strategies that we've never done before,

because not only does it create novelty in the limited experience, but also sometimes we can get a, like, you know, a small constructed package out of it that people can put together kind of casual constructed with that strategy and play something that they've never gotten to play before. Yeah. Red-white in particular is tricky because red-white tends to be our aggro archetype. And it's a lot harder to twist the aggro archetype because the aggro archetype is so fast in nature. So whenever we can find a way to twist it,

it's nice. The funny story, real quickly, is that's Cinderella. Red-white, we did Cinderella. We knew we could do Cinderella. We kept putting Cinderella in different places. One of the things that to me is funny is we listed all the different fairy tales we could do, we kept putting Cinderella in different places like one of the things that to me was funny is we listed all the different like fairy tales we could do

and we had more than 10 and then it was just like some of them like like Hansel and Gretel being black and green like that was like cemented like day one it was just so perfect

and there's stuff like Cinderella that we're like well I could go a lot of places you know it was pretty open-ended I think it ended up in red white because not a lot of ones made sense in red white and we're like well she has a yeah there weren't there weren't as many options for red white and I think it ended up in red white because not a lot of ones made sense in red white and we're like well

yeah there weren't as many options for red white and I think in general right one of the some of the stories were in that space of depending on which characters you focus on and which story moments you focus on you can really like shift it to all sorts of different

colors but we enjoyed one of the things that you know we talked about this when making the set was uh uh woe comes right after mom and march of the machine was a very heavy you know planar scaling war where you saw like all your favorite characters get phyrexianized and stuff it was very like heavy and intense and action-packed and so we were looking for in in wilds of eldraine can we uh have the archetypes be more on the the whimsical side right yes i'm not i mean some of them ended up darker than others certainly but cinderella was definitely one where we were like hey like this is one that we can just play up like all of the people who are attending the ball and you know

in this version i uh you know um instead of just a dress she's got like you know battle armor she's like a warrior and she wants to like prove herself as a combatant and so we liked the idea of just um having an archetype where some of the characters would just be a guy who was at a party and and it was fun to have some of those in Eldraine, which is a plane that leans more on the whimsical side. Not everyone has to be fighting for their life all the time. I call Eldraine the Sorbet of magic sets. Like, oh, we need a change of pace,

something to lighten your, you know, so that's the... Right. We put it after the big finales and be like, hey, here's something that's a little lighter. So, okay, real quickly, we're almost out of time here, but what color pair do you remember as being the most troublesome as finding the fairy tale for? Oh, um... I have my pick, but I'll see if you pick the same thing I pick. So, in my head,

the hardest one was red-green to me, because I think that we weren't... So, it ended up being Little Red Riding Hood, which is also what we handed off. All the ones we handed off turned into... Like the 10 we handed off are the 10 that stayed. That's right. That's right. But it was challenging just from the standpoint of...

I think Red Green, we weren't exactly sure what the limited archetype would be, which made it difficult to say what story would fit best with the gameplay. And for a long time, I think we tried to make it about food, because we were like, well, Little Red Riding Hood, she has a basket of food, and the wolf

eats the grandma, and there's a lot of food going on. But I think eventually we said, hey, let's do Power 4 Matters, which is a tried and true red-green archetype that we use often uh plays well with roles because the roles can make your creatures bigger to to hit the power threshold um and we sort of leaned it more towards oh it's all of the the there's it's not just one wolf

there's a lot of nasty creatures in the woods that little red riding hood has to contend with um but that was the one i remember being the the most difficult fit yeah my pick was green blue like for a long time green blue i think was little mermaid oh that's right we did try to do little mermaid for a while in green blue yeah um yeah i think that um green blue was tough but in my memory maybe i had more faith in the jack and the beanstalk direction because so one of the things that um so blue green a lot of the times in limited is like a slower ramp style deck um and it can sometimes be difficult for us to come up with themes that really fit for blue green just because uh it can be it's just a challenging archetype to pull off something that we sometimes try to do is say like

oh this should be a deck that rewards you for casting big spells um but the problem is that you can't put that many big spells in your draft deck it's just it it you have a limit on how many you can have um but i was really i really had a lot of faith in that archetype because adventures one of the things that adventures do is they allow you to oh you can have all of these big beefy creatures in your deck because they have adventures that you can cast on the early turns and so you're not really playing a bunch of six drops you're playing a bunch of two drops that you can cast later um and so i had a faith in that and i felt like once i had faith that casting big spells should be the the limited archetype

then i also had faith that jack and the beanstalk was going to fit really well because you had all the giants. And Creative also came in with, they were like, oh, we really wanted to do storm giants. We wanted them to be blue. And I was like, great, blue-green it is. So that was a nice little bit of alignment on Creative had an idea they wanted to do.

Mechanically, we had an idea they wanted to do. And so I think it came together in the end, after a little bit of hemming and hawing over what it should be. Well, anyway, Chris, I can see my desk. So that means we have to wrap up. But I want to thank you for joining us. It was fun.

I know how excited you were. So I'm so happy that the sets turned out so great. So awesome first lead. Yeah, I'm very excited for it. Awesome first lead. Thank you. And thanks for all your help and all the help of everyone else on the Vision team.

It was a very well put together crew, and I think that it shows in the final set. So to everybody else at my desk, 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. So I want to thank Chris for being with us.

Thank you. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.