Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1187: Foundations Starter Collection Design with Carmen Klomparens

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

In this podcast, I sit down with Carmen Klomparens, lead designer of the Magic: The Gathering Foundations Starter Collection, to talk about the design of the product.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for us to drive to work at Home Edition. So today I have a guest. I like to have a guest when I'm at home. So Carmen Clumpherens is going to talk about the Foundation Starter Collection. Hello. Woo! So it's everything you wanted to know. So Carmen, you were the one that put this together, correct? Yeah, yeah. This is something I put a lot of work into it, whatever. Just from the very beginning, I did a lot of work on foundations, not to scoop too much too hard, but I was strong second on the set.

I led limited. I led this part of the whole thing, and I was really on it from, I think, the second or third meeting. The foundations was even a thing that we knew we were going to be doing. Okay, so let's... I really want to focus on the starter collection. I have other podcasts talking about other aspects. Great. So let's start from the very beginning.

What was the point? Why does this exist as a product? So for a lot of us, I think we all had that older brother or the queen of the anime club or some cousin that had a shoe box of cards that they showed us and there was something in that shoe box that hooked us that we fell in love with or built a deck out of. And it was really important to make sure that when we did foundations that we were setting people up to actually have a path to become true magic players, right? I think a lot of core sets in the past just treat you like quote unquote a new Magic player the whole time. And this was sort of trying to have the shoebox of awesome stuff

to fall in love with that also helped you bridge the gap between I've played my first 10, 20 games and I kind of know the rules and then onboard you into or on Ramp, into, I can go to FNM and I can kind of hang and I'm a Magic player just like everybody else. Okay, so what were the parameters you were given for what this product could be? So there are a lot of different shapes that it could take, but the big thing that we really wanted to emphasize from the very beginning was that we were giving players freedom to kind of figure out what it

was that they wanted out of magic. So from the beginning, we knew that it was going to be something like the best deck builders toolkit of all time. So these are kind of old products that we did with some of the older core sets where it was semi randomized and came with some booster packs. And we wanted to do that, but pull out all the stops and make sure that you can build a bunch of different kinds of real decks.

That probably meant a few hundred cards. That probably meant more rares than we used to give you. I think we used some commander decks as comps for how many rares we'll normally give you on something. And I think we actually shot a little bit higher because this has so many more cards in it. I think the thing ended up having like 75 rares or something at the end and even that was pushing the upper bounds of what I was allowed to do. How many total cards are in it? How many total cards? I want to say it's north of 350 total.

So it is like 296-ish or 295 to 300 that aren't basics. And then I think there are about 95 basics in there. And then there's a dozen or so tokens that are all double-faced. And I've mapped all of those to work with certain cards in it and so on. Okay. So you're setting out to make the list of these cards. What were the things you had? I assume you had a checklist of things you had to do. Yeah. So there were a lot of things that were in the space of making sure that no matter what color combination somebody liked,

that they could probably build it out of this. So I wanted to make sure there were the 10 color pairs, No matter what color combination somebody liked, they could probably build it out of this. So I wanted to make sure there were the 10 color pairs, there were enough cards to build that, which some of it you get really crunchy and technical where you go, well, we need at least 36 spells you can put in a black white deck, because most decks are 60 card decks are 24 lands, 36 spells. And then you skin that to every color pair. We also want to make sure that you can play any mono color deck reasonably, which gets into some questions

of how you accomplish that. So there's some things that we were doing or that I did rather with artifacts or with a couple of hybrid cards in a couple of cases, which we can touch on a little bit later to make sure that even newer players who maybe just wanted to be a mono blue player could be a mono blue player out of the box. And I think a lot of the process for me was making sure that we could fit those constraints and we weren't having to sacrifice coolness too much. As funny as that sounds, there are some things where you want to make sure you're able to literally have enough cards to do the thing, but we're not trying to, or I didn't want to infantilize players at least. I wanted to make sure you're getting really cool cards. You get Savannah Lions out of the box and you get really cool rares and stuff as well that are just real

magic cards that people have played with before. Yeah, one of the things we've been talking a lot on Foundations is the idea that one of our big innovations with this product is, look, in order to make someone become a Magic player, you got to show them what makes Magic special. And all the products need to do that. So I know this product, it wasn't just a matter of having enough cards to play. We also wanted to wow you. We wanted to say, here's what Magic could be. enough cards to play, we also wanted to wow you. We wanted to say, here's what magic could be. Right. And one of the balances was not necessarily giving you the number one best version of every single deck that you could build out of the box, because that's not particularly realistic and would take 2000 cards and all this other stuff,

but it did kind of give you a taste of, hey, here's the beginnings of a vampire's deck. And you can kind of round that out with more vampires cards if you want. Here's the beginning of an elves deck or a cat's deck. And then a bunch of the gold cards in it can even kind of push you in other sorts of directions that teach you, hey, green and white decks are probably about playing out a bunch of creatures and going wide and attacking your opponent. And if you want to play instance in Sorceries, blue and red is probably the color combination for you.

And kind of having that sort of framework for setting expectations and engaging in magic and sending people on quests that weren't gonna be dead ends was a really important thing to me. And how many themes do you say you think are through the data? How many themes are you trying to touch upon? How many themes was I trying to touch upon?

I wanted to make sure that I could hit as many color combinations as possible and then basically reverse engineer the themes from there. I think you can build the five mono colors. I think you can build the 10 two color pairs. And I believe there are a few different ways you can build five color out of the box. So I have Mazes End as a deck in there, for example. So this is a mythic rare land that lets you return it to your hand in order to put dual land gates

into play over time and you win the game if you end up with all 10 of the gates in play. Just cool alt-wing condition from Dragon's Maze back in the day. That's just an example of something where finding one card could end up giving you a whole other theme on something that previously might just be, I put all my five colors of cards in the deck, and maybe it doesn't necessarily feel the most thematic. Finding ways to actually inject build around concepts into those color combinations, like even raises in in five color, for example, was one of the things

that I really wanted to hold myself to, because I think expression and resonance are one of the things that set really wanted to hold myself to because I think expression and resonance are one of the things that set Magic apart from so many other games. And I didn't want to lose sight of that while trying to fulfill all of the boxes' mechanical goals. Yeah, one of the things I know that the main set spent a lot of time on was trying to make sure they made a checklist of like,

what are the cool things in Magic? And then try to hit upon as much of those as possible. And that did a really good job of almost giving me a sort of roadmap. I know I kind of alluded to some of the the typo stuff that you can find in the in the starter collection before but a lot of that also just draws from the main set. So if you say got the beginner box and got this you'll probably be happy to see that vampires and cats, just like they're in the tutorial sequence, are also present here. There's a light angels theme in main set. So you can find Lyra Dawnbringer, who is a big awesome angel lord that just has a tournament pedigree behind her that pumps all of your

angels. Yeah, real quickly for the audience. Lyra Godbringer. No, go ahead. Three white white. It's a legendary creature angel. Five, five. It has flying, first strike, and lifelink.

And other angels you control get plus one, plus one, and half lifelink. Right. So that's a card where if you then from here, open up some packs of foundations, you'll find some angels because that's something that we thought was cool and resonant and one of the most exciting things in magic. So you're going to have that compatibility with the rest of the set. And I use that to kind of sculpt or at least give myself a sort of a square one to try and work from when narrowing down the themes that would make the most sense in this sort of box.

Also, I know you had mentioned this that it's even possible in the box to build a commander deck. I mean, you have a lot of options. Yes. Yeah, yeah, no. So if you want, you can touch on Ramos Dragon Engine is a five color commander that I threw in there just to say, hey, if commander's your thing, this might not be the strongest commander deck, but you can literally build a five-color commander deck out of the box if you want. So real quick, Ramos Dragon Engine costs six.

Legendary artifact creature Dragon is a four, four, has flying. Whenever you cast a spell, put a plus one plus one commoner on Ramos for each of that spell's colors. Remove five plus one plus one commoners from Ramos, add white, white, blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, green, activate only once each turn. And it's got a five color, for commander players, it's got a five color commander, you know, color identity,

so that you can. Right, exactly. So it just has that sort of thing where it gives you that open ended sort of quest where it's telling that open-ended sort of quest where it's telling you you want to play a lot of colors if you're playing this card which kind of signals you that maybe commander is what this is about but it isn't trying to be too restrictive in how you do it. I think in a lot of our main sets we can send you on really specific quests for really powerful rewards but keeping stuff open-ended and aspirational was a really big deal here. rewards but keeping stuff open-ended and aspirational was a really big deal here. Okay, so what do you think was the biggest challenge in putting this together? Biggest challenge in putting this together? Making sure that everything was appealing enough was pretty hard. So sometimes, for anyone who isn't familiar with me or my history, I come from a more competitive

background. I used to play in the Pro Tour and stuff like that. So it is very easy for me to see why something that is technically strong might be appealing. But I can struggle a little bit sometimes where something might be strong but not actually read that cool. And so there was some amount of give and take where I would have people play test out of the box where a play test instead of having them play games, I would go drop the starter collection on their desk and go hey build something out

of this and then see what everybody would build and if nobody built red white ever, then that meant that maybe the red white cards weren't actually that cool. Or if nobody built green black, same sort of story, I would want to make sure that there was actually enough appeal behind the cards and that they were obviously cool enough. I wanted to make sure that when someone opened the box, you could gravitate in any direction and people who maybe would otherwise like say red green, we're gonna feel left out in the cold because their cards didn't read as cool as all the other ones. Okay, so this is a design podcast. So I'm gonna get into

the nitty gritty. What were the troublesome color combinations? Troublesome color combinations. Hmm. Let's see here. So in terms of balance right out of the box, I would guess that the hardest thing for me to do anything with were control decks in general. So these are things that are light on creatures, a little bit more reactive, fighting the balance between this is strong enough if somebody maybe wants to be a spell slinger and play things that sweep the board a lot and win with a big finisher, that this deck is something you literally are allowed to play, but it's not so strong that if you and I both buy one of these, you are a fool if you play with creatures against my control deck. That was pretty challenging. I hope we got it to a good spot, but

that one is such a finicky balance. Okay, so that's like white blue probably being the... Yeah, white the big one. For any of the old heads that might be checking this out, Mystical Teachings is actually a card that I have as one of the uncommon gold cards, sort of gold. We could touch on Mopi Cutler here in a second. For anyone who isn't familiar, this is an instant. It costs three and a blue to cast. Search your deck for an instant card or a creature card with flash.

Reveal it and put it into your hand. Then it has flashback for five and a black, which means you can cast it from your graveyard, but it's exiled whenever it resolves. So this is the kind of uncommon that sends you on a quest to build a certain kind of deck, in this case one with a lot of instance or a lot of tricky flash creatures. And that's something that's naturally going to gravitate towards that sort of controlling deck, maybe a lot of counter spells, a lot of card draw, etc. And even was really strong when it was in standard, but it costed a lot of mana. Nothing that played out, sort of fine, whenever it got paired against some of the super aggressive

cards in these decks. Every color has a playset of a card that is indicative of what that color is about a lot of the time. So any deck that has four Lano or Elves or four Burst Lightning, these are decks that generally lined up pretty well against decks that had too many expensive spells in them. Okay, so there's two things you brought up, mystical teachings, two things about this card I wanna ask. So first off, let's talk a little bit about flashback. So what were the rules for you about, obviously evergreen mechanics were clearly allowed and the foundation set itself actually has a bunch

of deciduous mechanics in it, flashback being one. What were the rules? What were you allowed to use? So I was basically allowed to use anything that was in the main set. I don't think I have anything that goes that far out of what is in main set. It's possible we de-keyworded a few things to add them to the starter collection. At one point we had a couple of cards with Ferocious, but we didn't actually have Ferocious written on them since that's more of a flavor word than an actual mechanic.

Ferocious is checking if you have a four power creature and then doing something. Yeah, so the deciduous mechanics that are in the main set, I'll name them off, I don't know if you remember off the top of your head, but are in the main set, I'll name them off and I don't know if you remember off the top of your head, but we allowed the main set, the main foundations main set to have flashback, kicker, landfall, morbid, prowess, raid and threshold. So those are all deciduous, they're not evergreen,

but we let them have those. Did you use most of them probably? Yeah, I believe I used most of, if not all of those. I'm looking to see what mechanics that I might have used that aren't on that list. Changeling, I believe, is one that I picked. I'll have to see if... So Three Tree Mascot is a card that's in the set. This is a two mana artifact creature out of Bloomburrow that has Changeling, which means it has all creature types. And that was just a card that was admittedly a kind of hacky way to get around all

of the different creature type decks that I was trying to support here, since this can go in an elf deck or a cat deck or a vampire deck and have a home. Yeah, I think that's cool. I mean, one of the challenges of making this kind of product is each card has to have so many functions to it that it gets tricky, right?

Right, exactly. Okay, so the other interesting question from Mystical Teachings is flashback cost is in another color. So let's talk a little bit about representing, like Magic does multicolor in a lot of different ways. Let's talk about representing multicolor. Yeah, definitely.

Maybe this is actually another mechanic, depending on how you slice things. I have some hybrid cards in the multicolor section here. And hybrid cards are, for anyone who might not be familiar, these are mana symbols where you could pay with one of two kinds of mana. So most frequently in this, there are a lot of green and white multicolor cards that have hybrid mana symbols. Each of that can be a green or a white mana that casts it. So something that I kind of touched

on a little bit earlier was that this is meant to be a path between your first 10 games and you can hang with everyone else at FNM. Something between those two points is being able to engage with other sorts of standard sets. And we represent multicolor in so many different ways from set to set, whether you're on Ravnica or Strixhaven or Time Spiral, whatever it is. And so it was important to me to kind of use this for that expectation setting and say, hey, this is something that is going to come up in magic. And it's better if you learn about it when you are sitting across from somebody. Because some people cannot be the best about the, oh, we've got a reader type of thing when it comes to people not knowing mechanics when they sit down and having just a little taste like one or two

hybrid cards, changing card here or there, the off color flashback showing the breadth of how we can represent multicolor was something that I ended up feeling like this was a good way to do that, given that it is a pretty limited quantity. I'm excited to see how it plays out in the real world, if I'm being honest, because I could have gone either way on it, but ended up leaning this way, because they gave us some cards that I think are pretty cool.

How much traditional multicolor did you use? So when you say traditional multicolor, do you just mean regular gold cards? Yeah, just regular gold cards. Yeah, great. So I have 20 multicolored cards below rare. And if I'm looking at the list right now, one, two, three. three of them are quote unquote weird multicolor. So 17 out of 20 are just normal gold cards. And then I have 11 at rare or mythic. And out of those ramos, which we've already talked about, which is kind of an oddball multicolor card. And then I have one hybrid green white creature. But other than that, it's just normal gold cards.

Okay, so let's dive into some individual choices. So let's just talk about some cards that you were really excited that you're glad you got into the product. So pick a card and we will talk about it. Okay, great. So Darkseal Colossus is actually... Okay, let me see what it does and then we'll talk about it. I can share a little story about it as well. I have a story about Darkseal Colossus as well. Darksteel Colossus costs 11. It's an artifact creature golem, 11, 11, is trample indestructible, and if Darksteel Colossus were put into, be put into a graveyard from anywhere, reveal Darksteel Colossus

and shuffle it into its owner's library instead. Okay, so this card originally showed up in Mirror and Besiege, they believe. Is that correct? Darksteel. Oh, Darksteel. Oh, showed up? Dark Steel. Oh, Dark Steel. Oh, short of a Dark Steel. Oh, I'm sorry. Right. Sorry. Blightsteel Colossus is the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. The riff on it is in Mirrod and Beseige. Sorry. Yeah, you're totally right.

Blightsteel Colossus is in... Okay. So, let's talk. What is your story about how did you first encounter Dark Seal glasses? So this is one where for a lot of this I actually couldn't just ruin my own journey as a magic player where I made it to Wizards of the Coast via a competitive background. But even before I played competitive magic, I was just a super casual player for 10 years when everyone else was playing the strong fairies deck. I was playing mono green tree folks. I thought they looked charming and dark steel colossus was the first card I ever saw at a local game store that I just

thought oh my god that is so cool you can just do that and I just thought it was so it was huge it was epic all I didn't know what I was supposed to do with it. But it was the first time I could ever remember see just having to go build a deck and figure out how it is I could just clobber someone to death with this card. So on the other end, real quickly, the design story behind this card is I'll bring it. We were making Darksteel and I was trying to come up with something because it was the artifact block. So I was trying to come up with a cool tweak on artifact.

So I said to myself, what are people most dislike? If you want to play an artifact deck, what most annoys you? And I'm like, oh, people blow up your artifacts. So I pitched to Bill because Bill led Darksteel. Okay, I have a mechanic for you. It's indestructible. It can't be destroyed. That was the selling point.

And the idea was, hey, you know, and so Bill said he liked it. So I was trying to do proof of concept. And so I said, okay, well, let's just make a big indestructible creature. That felt like really cool. And I remember we were trying to weigh like how big was it supposed to be. And I had made a 12-12 in Mirage. It was a kind of in-joke between me and Bill because we had this little period of time

where we kept one-upping ourselves. It's an eight-eight, it's a nine-nine, it's a 10-10. And so Bill said I could make a 12-12 in Mirage if I could make something exciting enough. And it ended up being Frexing Colossus, which he liked. So I was doing a riff on Frexing Colossus and so I was joking around. So instead of

being 12-12 I made it 11-11. It wasn't quite as big as, that's why I chose 11-11 because it wasn't quite as big as Frexting Colossus. And the idea was just, hey, what would Timmy Tammy like more than a giant creature you just can't destroy? And that's where it came from. So. No, I mean, you're totally right. And that's something where even in my competitive days, I was so timmy-tammie

about, you know, I played a lot of Infect and Boggles and Chaments and things where you're just playing pump spells and auras and just play out a big creature and figure, let, let the battlefield sort the rest out. So I really love this card. It was so excited to be able to get it in the product. And I hope that other people love it as much as I did. Okay. Pick another card. I was so excited to be able to get it in the product and I hope that other people love it as much as I did. Okay, pick another card. Okay, so all of these cards are standard legal for minimum five years. So there are some things in here that I won't say was a fight. That's not true, but we're a sort of negotiation with the tech leads over in Standardland. Those

are Jading Clem Perrins and Andrew Brown. And one of the cards that I was really excited to get in, because I think it's just a casual All-Stars Basilisk Collar. So this is an artifact equipment. It costs one to cast and two to equip. And it's just Enchanted Creature has Death Touch and Life Link. It just randomly combos with a ton of creatures. It's really satisfying to play with. It lets you gain some life. It's a card that just makes you feel really safe whenever you have one on your side of the battlefield. I'm really excited that we were able to get it.

And it turned out to be fine whenever we playt tested with it in standard. I mean, strong sometimes, but for the most part, just pretty fun. Yeah, you bring an interesting question, which is how much were you also trying to expose them to all the different like subtypes and like equipment obviously being something we do in Magic? No, that's actually something that was at the forefront of my mind.

So another card that's an artifact in here is Cultivator's Caravan. I really wanted to have one vehicle in the set. So this is a three mana artifact vehicle. Its stats are a 5-5, but that doesn't quite count yet because it's a vehicle. It taps creating color of mana. And then it has crew two, I believe, or is it crew three? Crew three. My fault, sorry. But yeah, no, exactly like you said, so much of this, just like with the multicolor thing we talked about before, is just getting players ready for whatever

we're going to throw at them in a standard set, they're going to be ready for it. OK, pick another card. Pick a non-artifact this time. OK, great. No, sorry. My first few sets were near them blocks, I could go on that or any of the others.

Let's see here. So in every color I have a card that is a quote unquote CCC card. So these are cards that are three of the same color mana. Because I know for a lot of newer players, learning how learning about Goulance is not necessarily one of the most fun parts of magic. And you just want to jam all your fun cards in the same deck and get to cast them on time all the time. So having cards that incentivize you to do that was important to

me. Ball lightning is one of the oldest cards that I have in the whole thing if you want to lead that one on. Yeah, Ball Lightning is red, red, red, creature elemental to 6, 1. It is trample and haste, and at the beginning of the end step, sacrifice this creature. So this is before I worked at Wizards. This is from the dark. So this is super early magic. The dark was the fourth ever expansion for magic. I came on the fall of 94. Yep. Yep.

And yeah, this is a real quickly, there's certain cards in magic that just have become like touchstones for designers. And we just keep redesigning it. Ball lightning is one of those cards. We just made, we've made infinite ball lightnings. It's just a very popular card to rip off. Okay, so let's talk about ball lightning. No, it's so cool. It's exactly what you're saying. There are a few cards in here like

this one where we riff on it a little bit and giving you that sort of baseline understanding of, hey, this is something that's going to come up. You're going to play against it. Almost for sure. You should learn this is kind of what red is about. This is something that is technically a creature, but doesn't play like other creatures. It just gives you it teaches you so much about how magic works in a way that I think is really satisfying. And having that many pips in the top right corner,

at least when I was newer, was so loud to just say, hey, this is what red is about. This is what red does. pips in the top right corner, at least when I was newer, it was so loud to just say, Hey, this is what red is about. This is what red does. The white member of this cycle is, or sort of cycle is Lyndon, the steadfast queen. So this is one out of Eldrean. I'll let you go ahead. Okay. So Lyndon, the steadfast queen, white, white, white, legendary creature, human noble three, three, uh, she has Legendary Creature, Human Noble, 3-3. She has Vigilance, and whenever a White Creature you control attacks, you gain one life.

Right, and this is something that says, hey, if you have all these symbols of the same color on a card, you probably wanna really just try and have a bunch of White Creatures in your deck, or a bunch of White cards in your deck, so this'll trigger more. And it, again, sort of just tells you what white's about.

You want to be attacking and you want to gain life. These are things that you want a lot of white creatures. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Trying to find these things that are really satisfying and fun to play with was really just, just the thing that I hoped to have been able to capture in a way that's fun to a lot of people. The blue member of it is Arcanus the Omnipotent. This is another kind of oldie but a goodie, but was one of my first favorite cards actually.

Yes, Arcanus the Omnipotent is three blue blue blue legendary creature wizard tap draw three cards to blue blue return Arcanus to its owner's hand, and it's a three, four. So I'll quickly tell the story. I designed this card, so I will quickly tell the story of this card. So we were in Odyssey, and the pit fighting was the story of Odyssey.

So we made a pit fighter for each of the five colors, and so we're like, what's the most awesome thing we could do in blue? And we're like, it taps and steps for a recall. And like, but that's not enough! What if we also also it's hard to kill like that we were just trying to make the most awesome blue creature we could and that's what that was arcane so no it's cool it's ancestral recall plus morphling like that's just it didn't

even have a creature type at the time which is i think that's one of the only this is from that was from back when legend was just a whole creature type and i think it's one of the only cards that became less cool when you gave it a creature type. Where like the flavor text was just like, who am I? Let my record in the pit tell you or something like that, where it was just mysterious and awesome. And I don't know. It's something else that I think is very blue, right? Like you said, it just casts an ancestral recall. So let's say about what's the black one of this

group. Okay so the black one is actually huge it's myogen of night's reach this is one out of champions of kamagawa. Okay hold on where is it? I'll save the name one more time. Sorry. Myogen of Night's Reach. I cannot find this. So, remind me what this one is. Okay. So, it's five BBB for a legend. So that's eight total mana for a legendary creature spirit. It's a five two. It enters the battlefield with a divinity counter if you cast it from your hand. It's indestructible as long as it has that divinity counter. And you can take the counter off to make each opponent discard their hand at any time, even during their draw step.

Yeah, and this is from Champs County Gallblok, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, the divinity counters were... We didn't quite have God yet as a creature type. And so this was kind of their version of the gods, but we didn't have God yet. And so we gave them the divinity counter to make them feel like special, you know? Yeah, black was one of the hardest ones to kind of nail down here. At one point, this card was underworld dreams. I assume you're familiar with OG. That was legends. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, band at one point, but it was right. Yeah, super's from Legends. It was banned at one point. It was, right. Super cool card. I was a little worried that since that's been uncommon the last couple times that we printed it, people might be a little bummed to see it at Rare. Getting to make your opponents all discard their hand is just the kind of thing where you read it and just go, Whoa, that's thick. Okay, before we wrap up for today, let's do the green one since we've done all the other colors. What was the green?

Predator ooze out of dark ascension. Okay, so it's, I say same one more time? Predator ooze out of dark ascension. Oh, Predator ooze, okay. So this is green green green creature ooze Indestructible whenever this creature attacks put a plus one plus one counter on it whenever a creature dealt damage by this creature this turn dies Put a possible counter on this creature and it's a 1-1 Yeah, I think this is we were trying to do the blob

So Listen it's gonna keep growing. Yeah. It grows when it eats stuff. If you chump block it, it gets even bigger. It's just one of those cards that's really satisfied to just get to keep attacking with and finding different expressions of green making big creatures was something that I've always liked as a magic player even outside of this project and finding the cool ways to show it off was something that was a real joy when working on this. Yeah, the core green thing is growth. That's what Green wants. He wants growth. So this creature, you don't get a creature much more by growth. It just keeps growing.

Right. Yeah. I mean, and you can even see the gigantic, the texas gigantic, that's the promo. That's just anyway, sorry, big creatures are just something I totally adore. Okay, so we're almost out of time here. So any last thoughts on the making of Starter Collection? Oh, God. I could ramble about this for days, but really I'm just excited that I got to do it. I've done a lot of work in my free time just kind of perfecting little biodomes, which are things like cubes

or my own custom limited formats, trying to figure out how to map certain number of cards to a certain number of archetypes. And it really was fun getting to kind of mix all the old cards that I know with those sorts of skills that I normally don't get to flex in the office since usually we're making new cards, which is fun. But getting to apply it in this sort of way, it was just truly a delight and something that I hope I get to do again. I mean, it'll be a long time, but I, I thought this was a lot of fun. I, yeah, I, I hope a lot of people like this as much as I do, which is, you know, at least a little, uh, the Obama giving self-medal meme, but I do truly, truly love this and I'm really excited to play with it myself.

Okay, well, thank you so much for joining us today and talking all about it. So for everybody out there, I always want to remind people, Foundations is four different things all together. So that's why I wanted to spend a whole podcast on this product, because this is really a cool product and that, hey, right if i love your shoe box analogy this is a shoe box that anybody can just go and buy so uh thank you so much for joining us and walking us through it and to all you out there i hope you guys have a chance to experience it so thanks Carmen yeah thanks for having me i appreciate y'all so everybody else i am now at my desk so we all know that means i mean 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 want to thank you guys for being with us and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.