Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1090: Lessons Learned – Unfinity

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

This podcast is another in my "Lessons Learned" series where I talk about sets I led or co-led and explain the many lessons I learned while making them. This episode is about what I learned leading the design for Unfinity.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today is another in my Lessons Learned podcast series. Lessons Learned, I talk about a set I led or co-led, and then I talk about all the lessons I learned from having made it. So today we're talking Unfinity, of which many lessons were learned. So Unfinity, for those unaware, was the fourth unset. So back in 98, I made a set called Unglued. And the idea behind it was it kind of did things normal sets couldn't do. Originally, the concept was it was meant to be non-tournament,

which at the time was all casual play. Tournaments were sort of more structured things. And so the idea for Unglued came about because I think Bill Rose and Joel Mick liked the idea of a set that you could make cards that we didn't have to worry about tournament considerations. And so we could do all sorts of weird and strange and crazy things. They didn't really know what to do with it. And I was the

I don't know, I was the out-of-the-box thinker, so they gave it to me. I ended up applying a strong humor to it, because comedy is my background. Anyway, Unglued came out. It was sort of, it was received well initially, but we didn't really know how to do supplemental

sets back then. We treated it like it was a small expansion, but it wasn't really. And so we printed too much product for it. Originally, it was going to be an Unglued 2, never happened, got put in a hiatus. for it. Originally, it was going to be an unglued two. Never happened. Got put in a hiatus. Then, I don't know, like six years later, in 2004, I was able to put out a second

one called Unhinged. And then it took 13 more years, 2017, is that right? Yeah, 13 years. 2017, to put out Unstable. But Unstable was actually a hit. And so, Infinity got put on the schedule. So,

the thing I had asked for for Infinity was, normally, I just lead the early part of the process. I lead exploratory design, I often lead vision design, but then I hand it off to somebody else to do set design. And so, I said, hey, if ever there's a set for me to do set design, it'd be a good thing for me to learn some things about set design. What if I do this set? And Aaron Forsyth, my boss, said, well, just make sure there's somebody on your team that's really good at power level, since it's not my forte. And as long as you listen to them and make sure there's someone who's balancing everything, thumbs up. You listen to them and make sure there's someone who's balancing everything.

Thumbs up. So this was a set that I led from the very, very first inklings of anything in exploratory design to the very end of the process, what we call polish, where you're just finishing up the set. So I was involved to hold up. So first and foremost, one of the first lessons I learned was it really gave me an insight into later in the process. I mean, not that I've never worked later in the process. I've been on development teams. I actually haven't been on a set design team.

I was on many development teams back in the day. So I've worked later in the process. But this is the first time that I was not just on a set design team, that I led a set design team. And there are a lot of things that happen later in the process that, while I was aware of, sort of to live through is a different thing um the idea of having to commission art and then deal with the art when it comes in and dealing with changes but

the art's committed and um you know there's a lot of things that happen where you have to make decisions and figure things out and there's a lot of for example one of the things that happens is you can you can sort of fix a few things. You have a little bit of art budget to sort of like, um, you can go back to the artist and change a few things on a few cards. And so figuring out where does it matter? Like a lot of what I spent that, that on was getting hats on things. Uh, cause hat matters was a theme in white and black and while black had plenty of hats, white was kind of shy on hats. So I had to go back and sort of add some hats into white.

Anyway, so the first big lesson was there's a lot of the process that I was less familiar with. Not unfamiliar with, but less familiar with. And it was really interesting sort of getting my hands dirty in stuff like commissioning art or in balance or in a lot of a lot of the time when you do play tests in early the early part of the set like vision especially early vision it's more about sampling things than it's about getting the environment balanced just because you don't balance the environment until you balance the cards and properly cost them normally the properly costing of cards happens after me. But in this set, I was... I mean, I had people to listen to.

I wasn't the one sort of making the call on power balance. But it was my responsibility to do that and to care about that and to care about environmental things. The other thing about this set is by the nature of... It was kind of done in between things. Our art waves, instead of a normal set, we'll have like two art waves.

We just kind of piggybacked on like five different art waves. Now the set did have world building and did have, you know, a world guide. So the way, real quickly, how that came about was, I had two main goals for this set, which might seem to slightly contradict, but they don't in my mind. One was that I liked the idea of taking something we've done in Magic that's proven successful and apply it to an unset. So unstable was me doing a factioned set,

like we had done with Ravnica or the many faction sets we do. And so I made an unset that was a factioned set like we had done with Ravnica or the many faction sets we do. And so I made an unset that was a factioned unset. This time I wanted to do a top-down set. I wanted to take a set where flavor was going to drive a lot of the design, the structure and the design. So what I did is Dawn Mirren was my art director for Unstable, who we got along really well. She enjoyed doing Unstable, so she signed up to do Infinity. And I said to her, look, I want to do top-down, but I want to do something we're just not going to do, like a normal magic set isn't going to do, or at least not for a while. And so we each went off and came back with a theme that we wanted to do. I was really intrigued by, like, circuses and amusement parks.

The idea that it's something that has a lot of, there's a lot of really resonant concepts there. But it's something just a little bit silly that I didn't think we'd be able to do. that I didn't think we'd be able to do. In fact, in the third Great Designer Search, one of my challenges was designing for a circus set just because I didn't think we'd ever make a circus set. Anyway, Dawn came back, and the thing she really wanted to do was retro science fiction.

So science fiction seen through the lens of like the 1950s. So we said, hey, why not combine them? So we ended up making a retro sci-fi space carnival circus amusement park. And so we sort of combined those together. It's interesting, by the way, volleyball, as we've announced, is going to be set in space.

So I think we got, I mean, I'm not sure how soon for us doing a circus set, but we got to space faster than I thought we would. So that was interesting. Unstable, for example, also did a, what word do I want? A steampunk set when I thought steampunk was way far off. And then we ended up doing Kaladesh quicker than I thought. So sometimes things you think are farther off are not.

That's another lesson. The other, my other impetus when I was designing this set was we do what we call hackathons where we take a week off and we work on new product ideas or new mechanic ideas. And I've been in a bunch of hackathons. And two of my hackathons have made use of stickers. And I was very intrigued by the idea of stickers. Like one of the things that the unsets want to do is kind of be experimental space for new technology. Try things that maybe other magic would want. And stickers felt square in that category.

Now, people might ask, you want to do a top-down set? You want to do stickers? Stickers feel pretty bottom-up. The reason I felt okay with stickers is stickers are very loose in what they are. There's a lot of things they can represent. There's a lot of things you can do with stickers. Stickers, in my mind, are as much a tool as a mechanic. And so I knew we had a lot of flexibility. So if they contradicted, if I tried to do our top-down and stickers just didn't work, I would have abandoned stickers. But because stickers are pretty versatile,

I wasn't super concerned about that. Okay, so let's get into, I think stickers, I have a bunch of lessons. Stickers are one of my bigger lessons. So the idea with stickers is we spend a lot of time saying, what can you do with stickers? Where can you put them? You can sticker cards. You can sticker people.

You can sticker things outside the game. And we came up with a lot of fun and cool things to do with stickers. In the end, what we realized is the most interesting thing to do is sticker cards. And we found four things that you could sticker. Names, art, abilities, and power toughness. Now, the interesting thing is we did a lot. We had a little bit more time to design the set just in the nature of how it got made. It was stretched out a little more.

We knew stickers from the very beginning. We played with stickers for over two years. In general, stickers played very, very well in playtests. Now, let me give the caveat here. We didn't have the actual stickers. Some of the times we bought stickers and used physical stickers. Sometimes we just used post-it notes. Like we tried to replicate what we could, but the thing that's very hard, and this is something that normally when you do playtesting in Magic, you want to play with what the audience will actually

do. If we make double-faced cards, we make sure they're literally double-faced cards. We stick them on both sides of the card or we print them on both sides of the card. Or sometimes these days

we print two different cards and put them in a sleeve back-to-back. Or if we have a play-aid, we'll literally make a copy of the play-aid and have people play with the play-aid.

Like, we want the play tefters as much as possible to be experiencing the actual physicality of what the players will be doing. The problem with stickers is we didn't have the actual stickers. The stickers come late in the process. Now, one of the things I worked with the production department, we had done stickers for other products, not for magic, but for other products. So they understood how to do stickers. I had two asks for stickers. One was, I mean, I guess the asks that are connected. One is I didn't want the stickers to permanently go on the cards.

I didn't want to harm the cards. I didn't want to be using stickers as I'm defacing the cards in a way that now my card is forever defaced. I didn't want to do that. There was a sticker team, sorry, a hackathon team that played in sort of the legacy space of making games where the game changes over plays, and so things they do in the first game affects how it plays in later games. And that one had stickers, and the stickers stayed on,

and the cards changed. I really wanted to use stickers as a tool for within the game, but at the end of the game, they come off. So I wanted the stickers to not harm the card so they could go on and off. And ideally, I wanted you to reuse them between games. So I wanted stickers that went off and on without harming the card and that could be reused. A lot of that comes down to the glue you use.

I think in production, they call it tackiness. How tacky is the glue? If it's too tacky, it doesn't come off. If it's not tacky enough, it doesn't stay on. And so we were trying to get that. The tricky thing about it from a production standpoint is we had one test. They had one chance to test it, bring it in, and we could try it. And we did spend a lot of time putting it on and off cards and seeing, you know, did it work? Did it stick? Will it stick multiple times? The

problem is, the thing we didn't do in retrospect, that we should have done, is we didn't sort of play a whole tournament with them. Like, we did a lot of testing right there in the moment. And the reality is, they stick and not stick pretty well close to when you unstick them for the first time. But if you give them time, if you put them on a card and leave them there for 30 minutes and then unstick it and then put it back on your sticker sheet and then 30 minutes later put it on another card, like a lot of real use cases with the stickers

ended up being more problematic. And like I said, I erred on the side of not harming the card. I think that the tackiness of the glue was probably slightly less tacky than it needed to be. Anyway, the big lesson here is when the actual product came out, stickers had a bunch of problems. So let me walk through the sticker problems. sticker problems number one was um we chose to make stickers legal um so the so another lesson here is one of the challenging things about unsets is when unsets were originally made and unglued basically any casual game could use them just very like oh you're playing, standard or vintage, what we call type 1 and type 2? Or vintage with type 1, standard with type 2.

Oh, were you playing one of these two formats? And all the rest wasn't that? But when Commander kind of became a thing, the people that popularized it were judges. So the list they used to sort of what was legal was the legacy list. they used to sort of what was legal was the legacy list. And so there were a lot of cards that were literally geared toward the exact player that the commander players

are, but the cards were banned. And like in Adventures in Forgotten Realms, they did blackboard standard legal die-rolling cards. And so I was looking at my set saying, I have cards that are just legal,

the rules work, and there's cards like them that are just literally legal, but somehow the cards I'm doing, you can't play anywhere. Not because the cards, like, they worked, it was just, well,

they happened to be in this one set. And it happened to be in this one set, like, if I put a sticker card in Dungeon Dragons, it's usable. I put a sticker, not a sticker card, sorry, a die-rolling card into the D& Dungeon Dragons, it's usable. I put a sticker, not a sticker card, sorry, a die rolling card into the D&D set and it's fine. I put it in my set and then you just can't play it.

And so we made a call. We made it a little bit late. In retrospect, the lesson here is these are the kind of decisions you've got to make earlier. It affects, you can't mix and match borders on a... Well, you can, but it changes how you print them. So you can't... The only way for us to print intermixing

cards that are eternal legal and not eternal legal on the same sheet was to use the acorn symbol. We couldn't do black border and silver border. If I had more time and I could divide the setup... The way we did it is we designed the set solely to be an unset. We couldn't do black border and silver border. If I had more time and I could divide the setup, like the way we did it is we designed the set solely to be an unset. We weren't worrying about eternal legality. And then what we did late in the process, we just went through and said,

does this work in the rules? Is it okay? And basically if it worked in the rules and it wasn't causing problems for legacy tournaments that we could see, we let it be eternal legal. But because that was done so late in the process, we didn't have the time to change the printing such that we could do silver border and black border. A big lesson there. I think silver border did a lot

to sort of add to the product and communicate sort of non-termite legality. And anyway, it did a lot of things. And I think the acorn was not good at that. And I heard loud and clear, players did not like the acorn symbol versus the silver borders. I do think the silver borders

have a lot of aesthetics to them. Anyway. Now, should I have made that decision? Should we have made cards eternal legal? I believe yes. The data seems to be on my side. The set, by the way, is the best-selling unset of all times.

Our bar for what is an amazing-selling set is just higher these days. But it did sell very well comparative to previous unsets. And part of that was the eternal legal... the eternal legal... That's hard to say. Eternal legality. That is hard to say. And there were a lot of

people who said to me that they had wanted to play with previous Uncards and couldn't. And they were able to play with these. And that was a big deal to them. And so I am glad. Whether stickers should have been legal or not is interesting. I do, in fact, wanted Commander players to play with them. I had no problem with that. We made a card called Blink Goblin that

ended up becoming a Legacy staple. We tried to price the card so that it wasn't true. And there's so much flux in sticker cards because you bring 10, randomly choose three, that I didn't think it would be consistent enough for Legacy. I mean, we, there's other people involved in this, but we were wrong. So it'd be nice if the most casual format in the world and a super competitive format didn't use the same list, but they do. So, I don't know. I'm mixed on that.

I am happy that people playing Commander could play with the cards. So, the big lesson... The second problem I was getting into was... Oh, sorry. So we made them legal. There are people that really think stickers shouldn't be legal. The irony of it is I think the unsets carry a certain feel to them. That if we had made a set that was just another set that had stickers in it that wasn't an unset,

maybe people would be like, well, hey, it's in the set. It's eternal legal. Unsets have the ability to not be eternal legal which no other set has. So the idea that if you dislike something we could have flipped that switch. I'm not crazy that playing Goblins

in Legacy in the sense that there's a lot of baggage that comes with stickers and stuff. So I'm a little bit torn on that. But anyway

my point was the fact that we made it eternal legal there were people that really felt like it crossed the line. So there's some bit torn on that. But anyway, my point was the fact that we made it eternal legal, there were people that really felt like it crossed the line. So there's some negativity stickers on that. The second thing was, the big thing I got into is logistically, stickers had a lot of problems. They didn't, you know, they, yeah, they stuck to the card the first time. Yeah, they came off, but they didn't go on and off as easy as they should. If you stuck them too many times, they could fall off. They didn't stick back on their sticker sheet well.

There just were a lot of small issues that were not the gameplay, the actual gameplay of putting any one sticker on any one card in the middle of the game. Generally, people seemed to like that. The gameplay was fun. I mean, they act a lot like auras. Auras are fun. the gameplay was fun. I mean, they act a lot like auras. Auras are fun. But the third category is, I think we pushed a little too hard on the different kinds of things we can do with stickers.

We had four different kinds of stickers as far as name, art, ability, and power toughness. We had lots of different cards. Like, this card wants to be big, and this wants to be small, and this one's card starts with the same letter. I think we did a lot of things that just push stickers in a lot of different directions. And the idea at the time was we divvied them up by draft strategy. Oh, you want to play art stickers? Well, blue-red's all about art stickers. Oh, you want to play ability stickers? Green-white is all about, or was green-white power toughness? Oh, no, green-blue was power toughness. Green-white was ability, and then name was white, blue. So the idea is, oh, we want to care about names, just focus on names. But the reality is, people open up lots of cards, and

we, you didn't, you didn't draft your sticker sheet, you just kept your sticker sheets. We tried drafting, it was too complicated. And so basically what ended up happening was, And so basically what ended up happening was I think there was too much going on and that even if you were drafting the art matter stickers, well, I'm still playing a sticker deck, and why wouldn't I play cards that care about power, toughness, or ability? Like, there was overlap between them. And so, for example, if I'm playing stickers, which is red-blue, blue also cares about name stickers and cares about

power toughness stickers. And so, like, there's just overlap, and so you would play them. I think there's a little bit too much going on. We don't get to make unsets all the time, so I was very focused on trying to make sure that people had access to all the different fun things you could do with stickers, but I think it was a little bit too much. In retrospect, probably name stickers. I would probably not do name stickers. There was interesting things to do with name stickers, but it definitely was the most complicated to explain, and it was the hardest to design around. Power toughness and ability stickers very much are auras. I mean, they're very similar to auras. They were the most functional.

I think you want to do art stickers because I think just the fun of stickering pictures is huge. So I think I would have kept those three. I think in retrospect, I wouldn't have done name stickers. The other thing is we would have designed stickers differently

if we had a better understanding of sort of the functionality of the stickers. Maybe they would have been punch out cards and not stickers because then you wouldn't, they wouldn't sort of inherently fall off in the same way. Maybe we would have designed it so you use external pieces and what you're stickering it onto is game pieces rather than the actual cards maybe. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not 100% how I would have done it differently,

but there's no doubt that one of the big lessons is there's a lot more to your cards than just the play. In play, an actual play test where people were playing with the idea of stickers and the concept of stickers, and it was more about

how do they play as a game piece? They did really well, and people gave them high marks. And I think stickers played well. Assuming stickers worked the way they were supposed to work. Assuming they stuck the way they were supposed to stick. Assuming stickers were in perfect form logistically, the actual art, the mechanics of them, the gameplay, I think was very fun.

And I got pretty high marks on that. But the lesson here is things aren't in a vacuum. That I can't avoid logistics. I can't avoid what it means to have stickers even if the actual act of the sticker itself was fun. And it's kind of a meta lesson of that your game mechanic isn't just the gameplay of the mechanic in a vacuum.

It's what do you have to do to play with it? How do you play with it? And the other thing is concentration of idea. I think that I needed to be a little bit more focused on what there was. The idea of making like maybe art stickers. Maybe I should have done a lot less of art matters in some way and just be more about, well, you want things to be stickered and it might as well be an art card. I think we forced a little bit too much in that space. The other thing is,

I think the cards that cared about stickers in a way outside the norm, I think it's okay to have a few basic ways stickers work. Like caring about vowels and stickers was the big thing we did to Common. I think having a few key things was fine. I think the one-ofs that make you just think orthogonally to them, I think they should exist.

Probably the as-fem should have been a little bit higher. Maybe they were supposed to go at rare, so that in most you have one or two of them. A lot of them said it uncommon, because we treated them as draft build-arounds. But then you get a bunch of them interacting with each other, and it just makes you have to focus on so many different things.

The other thing that was a big part of the set was attractions uh we had spent a lot of time on attractions early on we were trying to keep them from being too similar to um contraptions because they were also a separate deck in the end what we realized was that they played better like there's a lot of decisions we made for contraptions that just made the cards play better and you know what we realized was that they played better. Like, there's a lot of decisions we made for contraptions that just made the cards play better. And you know what? It's okay that, you know, we make mechanics that are similar but not exactly the same.

The fact that you didn't know what was going to happen each turn, unlike contraptions where I plot and plan it out and I know exactly what's going to happen each turn, was a pretty big difference. Contraptions were very spiky execution of an extra deck and attractions are very Timmy Tammy execution. The idea of things are going to happen but I don't know what's going to happen versus I'm planning and plotting many turns ahead. And I think one of the things about that is extra decks are fun. Different players like different things. And I think contraptions were a really fun spike mechanic. But

if you want things a little bit more random, a little bit more... And I do think there's even a spike that enjoys reacting to randomness rather than you know, that there's some fun... There is a lot of skill testing to attractions,

even though you don't quite know what's going to happen each turn. I think attractions have a similar quality to stickers in that we really were... We experimented... I mean, maybe this is a lesson for Infinity as a whole. I was trying... Because we don't get to make a lot of unsets, we do them pretty infrequently, I was just trying to give people get to make a lot of unsets we do them pretty infrequently

I was just trying to give people a lot of different kinds of tools I wanted people to be able to explore for a long period of time and so in stickers, in attractions I made a lot of different kinds of things and I probably went a little overboard

I think the probably put, like, I think the complexity of the system that if you play the cards, especially in limited, this is where it shows up the most, is I had a little bit too much going on in too many different places at low rarities so that if you're playing limited,

I mean, it makes the set have a lot of depth. It means that you can play the set a lot of different times and there's a lot of depth. It means that you can play the set a lot of different times, and there's a lot of fun things to do with it. But I think that it adds, because if you get pieces here and there, like part of our thought process is, oh, well maybe

you focus on stickers, or you focus on attractions. But if I focus on both, it just, it created, there was a lot going on. I think the people that just like having infinite things to think about had a lot of fun, but it was a little overwhelming. Unsets aren't really geared toward beginners by the nature of what we've

learned about how Unsets work, but it is something in which I think I pushed a little bit too hard. I think Unstable, I pushed a little bit Unstable, but I pushed a little harder here, and I think Unstable was closer to the right amount than infinity was. Also, since I had to do set design and balance,

I think in retrospect, we made the attractions slightly more powerful than we intended. I think attractions are very powerful. And I think in limited, I think, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but if I had to draft, I would draft attractions over stickers. If I had to focus on one or the other, I think, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but if I had to draft, I would draft attractions over stickers if I had to focus on one or the other. I think attractions are stronger. And there was a lot of balance. Like I said, there was a lot of balance issues. The other thing that was interesting, that was, I mean, sort of a positive lesson.

I guess not all lessons are negative lessons. I had a chance to work with a guy named Ari on the names and flavor text. I was very involved in all different parts of the process. I really liked a lot of the processes you use for flavor text. I think the names and flavor text were top-notch. I think the art direction and the art was top-notch.

I do think there's a lot, a lot of fun gameplay. If you've never played Infinity, I think it's a very fun, limited environment. I think it's a lot a lot of fun gameplay if you've never played Infinity I think it's a very fun limited environment I think it's a little on the complex side if you've never played Infinity

and you're playing for the first time and complexity isn't your thing I would hardly recommend going either stickers or attractions and not doing stickers

and attractions I think if you enjoy complex play, those do work together and you can play them together. I think there's a lot going on. The other thing that I realized is that I think I added some elements in.

Like, for example, there's a cycle of cards that come and they care about things in your environment. Can you see this? Can you see that? I would have taken those. One of the things that I think is, I think there's too many things

to care about in general. And I think it common, there's a few one-offs, like how many fire extinguishers can you see? I would have taken those out in retrospect. I think that there is a little,

in general, my lessons from this set is one of the fun things about unsets is it makes you care about things you don't normally care about. But there's only so many of those I can make somebody care about at one time before it's just a little bit mind-numbing of what you're caring about. And I think

common had too many one-of care about this thing that no other card is asking you about. I would have got those out of common. I would have really limited those at uncommon. I think having a few draft builds around is okay. And then I would have really limited those at uncommon. I think having a few draft builds around is okay. And then I would push a lot of things up a little bit

and make more of the rare cards, mythic rares about, here's a weird thing that all of a sudden you're caring about, but normally you don't care about. I think those needed to live there. I would have done, I mean, some of these are hard.

If I had to do all over again, I would have done silver borders, mixed with black borders, but. If I had to do all over again, I would have done silver borders mixed with black borders. But I would have had to make a decision earlier than I did. So I couldn't have chosen to do that. But 2020 hindsight, you know. I mean, I wish I had tackled the legality issue way, way earlier than I did. I think it was a bit out there at the time for me. And it took me

a little mind like I sort of thought this is a cool idea but we can't do it and I had a conversation with somebody late in the process like why not do it if you're ever going to do it now's the time to do it and like okay I said that's right we should do it but I think if I had come to it earlier it would have been easier to make some

I could have changed some things in slightly different ways I am pretty I mean there's so much about Affinity that I really do enjoy I do think the gameplay

is a lot of fun I think limited is a lot of fun I think there's a lot of neat things you can build a lot of cool decks I think we made

some internal cards that I'm proud of Saw in Half for example is a really cool card I wish I had rounded down and not up that's proud of. Saw in Half, for example, is a really cool card. I wish I had rounded down and not up. That's a mistake on Saw in Half. Originally, it did fractions, and when we made it to Eternal Legal, we took

away the fractions, which wasn't a giant loss or anything. A little bit of flavor loss, but... Anyway, final thoughts. It was definitely a set where looking back on it, there's a lot of things that,

I mean, Unfinity, what happened was, it was supposed to come out April 1st, and the company that provided the glue for the stickers went out of business. And so we had to delay it, because it was the middle of COVID.

I wish it had been released, it had a little more space when it got released. The correct call, in my mind, in retrospect, would be to hold off on it, wait to have a better slot, and put it there. It literally came out the same day as Warhammer 40,000, which meant it wasn't even the only Magic product

released that day set in space. And that did not help the product. And it just came out at a crowded time. I mean, the set really thrives in the limited I think one of the reasons that Stables succeeded was it came out during the holiday season and there really wasn't much else going on so people really had time

to experience it that might have been maybe we should have put out the holiday season rather than in October anyway there's a lot of what of could have should have when I look back on Infinity. Um, and some of which lie on me and decisions I made from a, from a standpoint. Some of them are, I wish I had known about thing Y or thing, extra thing Y that I didn't.

Um, and a lot of these factors I don't control when it comes out. So a lot of these factors that I, I might want to be different, it doesn't mean that I control them. I don't. Um, and that's another, I guess, big lesson is there's lots of factors you don't control. Part of making a magic set is there's things outside of your control. I mean, I'm frustrated about stickers,

but stickers couldn't exist until stickers... Like, they happen late in the process. And maybe we could have playtested with them a little more. I don't know. There's not a lot I can do to fix the sticker issue. There's a lot I could do, now knowing what I know about stickers. Um, but it wasn't something that I had access. I mean, maybe I could have got rid of name stickers.

That could have been on me. But, like, knowing how they logistically work. Anyway, that's tricky. Anyway, guys. Um, I am proud of Infinity. But Infinity definitely had some missteps. And did not get the reaction from the audience across the board that I would have hoped. Like I said, I think mixing legality...

Interestingly, I think mixing legality made it sell better and had more people buy it, but it caused more ill will in the community. caused more ill will in the community that a lot of the people that were upset by it I don't know if they had any intention of ever buying an unset but it created a lot of ill will. Anyway, this could be multiple podcasts.

There's all sorts of issues to deal with in the set. But anyway, there were mistakes made. There were things we could have done differently. There were things with hindsight. I mean, there's things I would have done differently with 2020 hindsight, which I didn't have at the time. But anyway, like I said, sometimes when I look back, there are clean lessons and sometimes there's a lot of like,

I'm not even sure if I, you know, if I could relive time, if I could, you know, go back at the beginning of the design. I know everything I know now. What would I do differently? There's lots of things I would do differently. I would make the decision to do legality much earlier so I could keep silver borders, so I could segregate them on printing sheets. I would either not use, I would use punch-out cards instead of stickers,

or if I did stickers, I would go into stickers understanding their liabilities. I would lower the amount of as fan of things that matter that are outside of the things you care about. Like there's themes that you care about. That's great. But there's like a lot of one-offs. I would pull those up in rarities or just pull them from the set altogether.

And I don't know. Anyway, there's things I would do differently. So it was a learning experience. It was a lot of fun. I am proud of the stuff that came out, even if there are issues. But anyway, guys, that is it. I'm now at work. I've actually been sitting here for a few minutes because I had more to say.

But anyway, guys, I hope you guys enjoyed these lessons learned. It's an insight to understanding sort of what goes into making something. And a lot of times you learn things and you don't always know the great ramifications. Like, learning things doesn't mean you know the easy answers to how to solve them next time. But you have learned problems that you have to think through. So, infinity is a lot of that.

There's a lot of, like, I'm not quite sure how to change it. But the definite things I learned that I have to sort of think through. And if I have future opportunities or something similar, things to think about. Anyway, guys, I'm now at work, which we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.