Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1190: The History of Magic Design, Part 8

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

This episode is the eighth and final part of my eight-part series where I go through the entire history of Magic design to talk about design evolution over the years.

I'm pulling away from the curb because I brought my son off at school. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the eighth and for now the final chapter of the history of magic design. I do plan, I might pick up this series later on as I have more years to go. Bye. Okay, so when last we left, where were we when last we left? When last we left, we were at Streets of New Cappenna.

So we're getting into the next magic year, which is Dominaria United, The Brothers War, Phyrexia All Will Be one, and March of the Machine. Okay, so after we had finished the Brothers War, we decided we wanted to do another multi-year story, but we decided that we didn't need to rush into it. We could take our time. We could sort of go slowly into it. And so the first year, which was the Throne of Eldraine year, and Therys, behind death, we freed Elspeth,

which she was a key part of the story. But other than that, there was no, we didn't really start, it wasn't until the following year in call time when Voroncleks shows up. Now, it was a pretty subtle, there was just one card in the set which was Vorenkleks. But, if you know the Phyrexians,

their fatal flaw was they cannot planeswalk and they were trapped on New Phyrexia. So when one of the Praetors shows up on another world, for those in the know, that should have been an important warning sign. And the Vorthoses out there did get the Vorenklik showing up was not good news. In fact, most of the Vorthoses figured out what had gone on that Tesseret using the planar bridge was able to transport the non-flesh part of the Phyrexians because they're like part metal, part flesh flesh and the metal part

was able to survive and then they just adapted to the world they were on which is what the Phyrexians do but we definitely did some slow rolling the next chapter was in Kamigawa Nyan Dynasty we Jin G Kataksis shows up and, uh, the next dangerous part of their plan, not only are they able to travel, but they figured out how to, um, frexinize planeswalkers. We see Tamiyo get frexinized and, and so Shrizanuka Pena, um, Ourobraf shows up. So we're starting to see more of it. This final year is the year where the story really kicks in. I mean, we've been teasing stuff, but up until now there were like, there are sets that matter,

but there are a lot of sets that are other storylines going on. But as we kick into the final year, this is where we start going strong. Now one of the things that we were careful with is the Phyrexians are one of those things that there are a lot of people that really, really love the Phyrexians, but they're a little ooky. We didn't want the Phyrexians, we didn't want them too big a footprint. So the idea was we're going to keep introducing them. So in Dominar United, Sjodred shows up, but not just Shildred, a faction of black

Frexians, since Shildred's the black praetor. But we get to see, we see the influence a little more. We see a second planeswalker get Frexianized in Ajani, and we realize that the stakes are high. You start to understand that we're starting to ramp up what's going on. Dominaria obviously has interacted with the Phrexians before. They're aware of the danger that is here. But this is a new Phrexia and they have access and tools to things.

The reason they were in call time, by the way, not only was Jig Attack's experimenting with being able to frictionize planeswalkers, but they really cared about the World Tree was the idea. So one of the challenges, as I've been talking about in previous podcasts, was we're trying to get the sort of rhythm in the new world. Mostly our sets are each set on their own world. They're actually this year there actually is two on the same world, although different than we've done before two Dominaria sets in a row. Well, I'll get to that. But the idea is that we

want to get ourselves to a big finale so that that in setting up the story, the finale of the Nicole Bolles arc was giant planeswalker war in Ravnica between Bolles and his eternal army and most of the planeswalkers. The end state of we went bigger. What if the Phyrexians invaded most of the known multiverse. And so the idea was we wanted to end on a big capstone event. We also knew that if we're going to do the Phyrexians, we need to deliver on the Phyrexians. So we knew we wanted to have a set on new Phyrexia so that we, for those that love the Phyrexians, hey, we deliver on, we give you the Phyrexian set that you're excited by. The other set that year, so we went back to Dominaria.

Dominaria is very tied to the Phyrexians. Ajani was a big part of the story and he's from Dominaria. So originally, The Brothers War actually was pitched not as a premier set, but as a supplemental set. The Brothers War is one of the most famous storylines from Magic. It is the war between Urza and Mishra. In fact, the Brothers War was the very first Magic story told on Magic cards in Antiquities. Alpha and Arabian Nights told the story of Arabian Nights, but that really wasn't our story.

And Alpha, while it hinted at characters like Urza and stuff. It didn't, there's no story there. Where Antiquities said, okay, it's a story about archeology, we're digging up the past, and we're learning about the story. The Brothers War would then be getting made into a book by I believe Jeff Grubb, which was a very good book. But anyway, it's sort of the oldest story in magic. And so when Aaron was pitched the idea

of doing the Phryxian Wars, the supplemental set, he sort of said, oh, couldn't we just do this as a premier set? He came to me and said, what do you think? I said, yeah, we can do this in premier set. So he had me and Ari me, Ari won the, Ari won the third great designer search. So she and I put together sort of a, we made two decks that represented Urza and Mishra and I think Meld was in there and not all, I think Unearthed might have been in there, but anyway we sort of get a sense of what it could look like.

Aaron liked it, gave us a thumbs up. Ari actually led the vision design for that. So we'll go through this year. it, gave us a thumbs up. Ari actually led the vision design for that. So, let me go through this year. So, Dominar United was led by Ethan Fleischer, handed off to Eric and then Ian, Ian Duke. Once again, Eric Lauer was doing a lot of the mid, like he would take the set, adapt it, make sure it was a good place and then hand it over to somebody else in set design. The Brothers War was Ari handed over to Janis Kolmik. For actually all but one was me, handed off to Eric and then to Adam Prozac.

And then March of the Machine was also me, handing off to Dave Humphreys. Anyway, so you can definitely see we're trying to tell a story. One of the things that we're trying to do more though is adapt from the world where all the story takes place in the same world to arcs in which the story takes place in different worlds. So, for example, in Dominar United we see the threat of the Phyrexians, Ajani gets completed, Teferi basically realizes the danger they're in, he and some of the other planeswalkers figure out that they need to stop the Phyrexians and to do that they're

going to need to take the fight to the Phyrexians on New Phyrexia, but they need a weapon to stop them. They realize that the Golgothian Silex, which is the item that Urza used to end the Brothers War that they need a copy of it to try to stop the Phyrexians. So Tesseret goes back in time or kind of goes back in time so you can see. I guess he's visiting. He's not affecting things. He's just watching. But he goes back with Saheeli so they can figure out how to make a Goethic silo. And so that we see the Brothers War, and so the story gets to tell the Brothers War,

but Teferi and Sahelia, they're sort of, get the information they need. Then we take the fight to the Phraexians, and Phraexians all be one. Doesn't go so well for the planeswalkers. A lot of them get Phraexianized. And Jace is just about, so Jace has been infected as his last act before being taken over by the Phrexians.

His plan is to detonate the Phrexian, the Silex and destroy the Phrexians. The problem is because of the World Tree, there's gates that have already opened up that the Phrexians are using the World Tree to be able to make Omen paths to get to all the different worlds. And the act of destroying Phyrexiel will also destroy any world at which there's an open Omen path, which is a bunch of worlds. So El's Bath, at the last second, takes it from him and teleports away as it explodes. We don't know what happens to Ellsbeth, but.

And then the idea is we're leading into the big capstone set, giant event set. We were trying, the goal of March of the Machine was to try doing something on the largest scope we've ever done, which was literally a war taking place across the multiburst. The design thing I did was much like planeswalkers were the core of March of War of the Spark, planes were the core. So we invented a brand new a brand new car type battles and then the battles took place on many many worlds, some of which people knew well, some of which we'd only hinted at, a few which I think all the ones had at least mentioned before, but a bunch of them were not places that the average Magic player knew well.

Although most of the places we'd been in major sets were all there. And like I said, the we so the other big thing is we started moving, I tried being a little louder in some of our themes for the year. And what we ended up finding worked better was just being aware that when we make new themes that we think about themes that are in standard and make sure that we create synergies there so that there are, that when something new comes out, it's not just new in a vacuum, but it also can connect to things that are there before. So that standard is more than, you know, more than some of its parts that, oh, here's

a cool thing that standard did. Here's a separate set that did something related. And so rather than try to have a universal theme through the year, which is a lot harder to do, we just try to make sure that we had, that we were able to do sort of different synergies, but on a case by case basis. The other thing you could see is we're definitely experimenting a little more. The idea we really want sets like,

the Brothers War is a great example. Like we have an idea, let's retell a famous story. Okay, let's really incorporate. Here's a set that's set in the past. That's all about this thing that people know, but now put in a story for them. Like the Brothers War was interesting in that, yeah, there was a novel and yeah, antiquities kind of teased it.

And yeah, there were, you know, component pieces that got mentioned briefly in other places. We'd never really shown the war in any depth and not as a card set. So that was exciting. You know, in Frexie,ian All Will Be One I really messed around with counter economy. We brought in oil counters. We brought back poison but we changed how poison worked. We introduced toxic. And just really revamped the way trying to make a... Like, one of the challenges of the Frexians was some of the stuff we'd done with them in the past

had been problematic, like Phrexian mana, and sort of revisiting some of that stuff in a way that we could give you what you expect the Phrexians to be, but in a way that just sort of played better. Poison had been very siloed when it was in Scar of the Mirror. Anyway, just trying to sort of bring things back in a way and improve upon it. And then Marge of the Machine going big, introducing a new card type, playing around with double

face cards, you know, did a double face token for the first time. Just really sort of trying to innovate. And a lot of the goal of the era we are now, which is sort of the modern era, is that we want every set to stand that it had each set has its own identity that when you see a set you know what that set is nothing the sets don't tie into other sets nothing there's not storylines that are through it's not that the sets aren't connected we don't want magic to feel disconnected but we do want each set to sort of shine in its own way and the current model of sort of

every set gets to be its own thing. Now good example is we were on Dominaria United which is Dominaria and we stayed on Dominaria to go in the past for the Brothers War. Now that's a different sort of take. We were on Dominaria for two sets in a row not quite like what we did in Innistrad where you know they were two sets with different themes but they were story wise at the same time connected to each other. This was a little, I mean the story did connect, there's a reason we went to the past. But us trying a little bit different, like what if we stay in the same world but really

change the world in some way, in this case go back in time. Okay so the next year we have Wilds of Eldraine, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction. That's the next magic year. So Wilds of Eldraine was Chris Mooney. Chris Mooney, they had come in third in the Third Great Designer search. They designed it and did vision design and handed off to Ian Duke for set design. I led Los Caverns Ixalan. I handed over to Eric, which had handed

over to Jules. Murdered the Carl of Manor. I worked, I did a combo with Mark Gottlieb for vision design and then Mark Gottlieb stayed over for beginning part of set design and then handed over to Andrew Brown. And then Outlaws of Thunder Jun over for beginning part of set design and then hand it over to Andrew Brown and Then outlaws of Thunder Junction. I did and I hand it off to Dave Humphreys again, as you can see like I said that a lot of what we are trying to do now and as I talked about in sort of The third stage or the five-step third stage seventh stage the southern with common got like Neon Dynasty is we're really We're questioning a lot of things.

We're trying a lot of things. I think, for example, one of the things we sort of talked about, so for a long time, when we made commander sets, we were doing what we called cameos, which said, hey, if there's a cool mechanic that just needs to go on one card Hey, we should do that You know that we should just make the cards as we need and then the question finally came up Well, we're doing cameos for commander decks. Is there a reason we're not doing cameos in premier sets And we sort of said okay, let's set some parameters for ourselves

Usually cameos are at rare or mythic rare And we're careful about what specific mechanic we choose. I'm not sure when we're doing like one mutate card or something that's gonna be very complex. But the idea is, you know, sometimes there's something that's just really flavorful and we don't need to bring the whole mechanic back, that just, hey, there's one card design,

we're gonna do a singular thing. And so the idea of bringing cameos, hey, there's one car design where we can do a singular thing. And so the idea of bringing cameos, like we took something popular that was working somewhere else and just sort of said, you know, like one of the big things, so this is another big thing that happened over time. One of the things about introducing Magic is it has what we call a barrier to entry, right? That Magic is a complicated game. There's a lot going on.

And that knowing nothing to knowing enough to play can be quite intimidating. In fact, one of the common things when we talk to new players is usually people have heard of Magic before they play. Odds are they know somebody who's played. And it's intimidating. The way I sort of explain it is,

chess is intimidating. Chess has six pieces Magic has over 27,000 pieces. So, you know, and the game is 30 years old and there's a lot it definitely I mean the funny thing when you learn to play when you teach someone how to play is the core basic game is actually not That complicated much less than people think but It can get complicated. It's not hard to add things on to it. And so But it can get complicated. It's not hard to add things onto it. And so for many years, in trying to teach people how to

play, our strategy had been simplify, simplify, simplify. Make the absolute most simplified version that we can. And we tried a lot of versions of that. And the idea was, hey, by the end of the first game, we want you to feel confident that you know what you're doing. That was kind of for a long time. And eventually, through a trial and error, looking market data and stuff, what we eventually learned.

Because one of the things that happened was the two big ways that people learn magic nowadays. One is you can learn on Magic Arena. There's a tutorial, which is very good. Which, by the way, if you have friends that you want to play, suggesting they play on Magic Arena on the tutorial, it's free. It does actually a pretty good job. And because the computer is not a human, it's a computer. The idea that one of the problems you learn how to play is you feel that you don't know enough stuff and it's kind of embarrassing. But the nice thing about the computer is the computer doesn't judge you. And so it's a great place where you can learn at your

own speed and not feel any pressure because The computer is not going to say anything if you want to take your time take your time. And so That's been good but the other way people are learning how to play a very popular way is through commander and Commander is far from the simplest way to play magic in fact one would say is the exact opposite it's one of the most complex way you can use all the cards from all of magic and there's a hundred different cards and it's definitely complicated so what we realize after you study the data is that

um what makes people want to play the second game is not that they understand magic it's not like I played a game I not that they understand magic. It's not like I played a game, I think I understand things. Okay, I'm comfortable now. Let's play a second game. That's not what made them want to play a second game. What made them want to play a second game was they were intrigued by the game. It was interesting to them. And what we realize is that what we want to do is be flavorful and that even if magic is a little complex, magic is a little complex, magic is a complex game, we don't need to completely shy away from the complexity.

What you want to do is make sure that the complexity they see in their first game is very, very compelling. That we, and you'll see this in Foundations. Foundations is not about being the simplest it can be, but it is about being the flavorfulest it can be. Is that a word? That we want you to see it and that the idea is, magic strength is its depth, right? Magic strength is, oh, I enjoy this game,

but, you know, like the game seems fun, but are the things that really draw me in? And what we've learned about magic is, once you find the things that speaks to you oh my goodness I love thing X oh look at all the cards that are thing X ooh I could build a thing X deck that's what pulls people in that something excites them it's one of the reasons universes beyond has been so so successful which is part of getting people to learn is getting them passionate about something oh are you

passionate about Lord of the Rings? About Doctor Who? About Fallout? About Assassin's Creed? Like are you really excited about something? Well, we can pull you in and we can use that excitement to teach you the game of magic. And once you learn the game of magic, you learn, wow, magic is a really good game. And then you explore other things. That once we sort of get you in the door, like a lot of the beginning of magic is getting you comfortable. And the way to get you comfortable is we have to make you want to learn. It is not about spoon feeding you the simplicity as fast as we can.

It's more about saying, hey, I know I don't know everything, but I'm excited. I want to see more. And magic is a very good game. We know magic is a good game. Like a lot of the secret of magic is we just got to get you play enough till you're comfortable and that you can sort of and see what magic is. Anyway, that philosophy has definitely changed how we've made individual sets. I, the complexity level has gone up some. I mean mean there's interesting questions and we definitely ask ourselves, like whenever the pendulum swings, you know, there's a tendency

of pendulum to go a little farther than we mean. So we're spending a lot of time and energy figuring out what the right level of complexity is and we are having cameos now. We definitely let ourselves, like when the pendulum was at the far end of simplicity, which was Ixalan, it was problematic. People basically said, even though they liked the world, the gameplay just wasn't compelling enough to them. And they wanted more. That was sort of a note of Ixalan.

It was like, it left them wanting more. It was too simple. And so we're trying to find a sweet spot. And a lot of what we've been doing these last bunch of years is experimenting and trying things and figuring things out. We definitely are leaning into the idea of every set wants to be something and the other challenge that we're running into is magic's 30 years old, 31 years old. If we want to surprise you, like the simplest space, a lot of that has been mined. I wouldn't say all of it, but a lot of it's been mined.

And so a lot of what we're trying to do is figuring out what are cool things that really introduce something you haven't seen, but themselves isn't too complex. And we're dipping our toe and experimenting with things like the ring, the ring tempts you, you know, or dungeons. And I'm not saying that space that magic wants to go all the time, but it is an interesting space that allows that anyway. So we are exploring, we are looking at things like wilds of Eldrin, for example, played around with the idea of roles. We had done a lot with artifact tokens. Let's experiment a little more with enchantment tokens. And like I said,

one of the lessons there we learned is, and this is a logistics thing, people generally liked roles, roles were popular. The biggest knock against roles was, I'm playing limited and I don't have access to them. I only opened up so many things in my butcher pack and I didn't get enough. And so that's something we were spending time and energy on.

Lost Cameras Ixalan played around, you know, so another thing that we are trying to figure out in Lost Caverns and Murderous Carvalho Manor, a good example of this is early magic, the way we thought about resources is they were disposable. We make it into a mechanic, we use it, done, move on to the next thing. Not really thinking like, hey, at some point maybe we need to reuse those mechanics. Eventually we got there. We're like, oh, you know, these are good mechanics. We shouldn't throw them out.

We can reuse the mechanics. I think we started thinking the same thing about worlds, which is that magic worlds tend to be very intertwined with their mechanics. But do we want to, like, do we need to constantly be reinventing worlds or is it okay to sort of go back to a world and have that world not be exactly what it was

last time you were there? What we refer to as a backdrop set. So we had done a backdrop set with War of the Spark and it had gone very well. Although we, before we did that, revisited the world, gave you all the gifts that we, we filled you up with what you would want from that world before we did that, we visited the world, gave you all the gifts that we, we filled you up with what you would want from that world before we visited that world.

Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Merge the Curl of Manor tried in different levels to do a backdrop set. Lost Caverns leaned a little bit more into, well, we're in Ixalan, we're underground, so we're slightly different, but there were dinosaurs there, there's dinosaur typal, the other creature types, vampire and merfolk and pirates did show up.

Only dinosaur really was main type. I guess we've done a few type of higher rarities for constructed. And we did stuff like tie pirates into outlaw later on, stuff like that. But the idea was in all those Thunder Junction We some portion of the set was hey, we want to feel a little bit like about Ixalan A bunch of it was underground and crafting different stuff

But there was enough sort of Ixalan there that it did still feel like Ixalan Where murders of Carl of Manor we kind of went all in on the murder mystery and we didn't, we didn't do a lot. We did a little bit, but didn't do, I think enough of Ravnica and that I think we can do backdrop sets, but when you're on a world, there is some responsibility to feel enough like that world. And I think Murders of Karl of Manor didn't like, we just index too high in murder mystery and too low on Ravnica is my looking back. But I mean there's a lot I mean a lot of what's going on like I said it's experimentation

is like can we go back to a world and can we use worlds as a resource that's not just a revisit. And we're still figuring that like I said we Carlyle of Mander did not go very well. Lost Caverns did go well. So like, it's us experimenting, trying different things. Another thing we overindex on a little bit is all magic sets are based on tropes. All a trope is, hey, we're making a set about thing X. What are the things people associate with thing X? That's what a trope is.

So, hey, it's murder mystery world, but what would people associate with murder mystery? And I think that we, at least in the year of 2024, after Al Asante Junction, we have Bloomberg and then we have Dusk Mourn. I will get there in a second. Especially in Murder Scarls of Manor and Al Asante Junction, I think we, one of the things we've learned is tropes are important. Tropes are the paint. Like if we're going to go to a place that has a theme to it, look, we have to live around the theme. We have to give you what you expect. But the thing we're learning over time is that there's a certain amount of magic's take on it. We learned this with Throne of Eldraine, um,

that we could go back and give you Goldilocks. It's just Goldilocks as you've always seen Goldilocks. Or we can say, in our world Goldilocks is a bear hunter. That just we can put our stamp on it. We can do our take on it. And I think the note that we've gotten, and it's pretty loudly from this year, is we were a little too on the nose when it came to our tropes. Not that the tropes shouldn't be there. And I think we get a little bit of on the noseness, but I think what happened was and part of it was I think murder code manner we index a little too high on detective stories, which isn't really environmental.

One of the things we've got to look for is make sure that our themes are more environmental. I think the mistake of murder mystery is murder mystery itself is more plot based than it's environmental and so the things we had to lean into it just didn't make as much of flesh out world. It's why we put it in a Ravnica but then we didn't put enough Ravnica into it so there's a lot of lessons we learned there. Outlaws of Thunder Junction were something similar. Mechanically I think the 7 is very strong. I think it has a lot of like I'm super proud of it Mechanically, I think the set was very strong.

I think it has a lot of like, I'm super proud of it mechanically, but I think it's a little bit flat. The other question, I mean, looking back in this like, you know, 2020 hindsight is the set was trying to do two things, villain and western. And I think that western was more environmental and sort of took over,

but western has a lot of problematic things to it. And looking back, I wonder like, should have been Western, should we just have gone all in on villain and not done Western. Western is just really tough. It was created at a time where there's a lot of things baked into it

that just aren't acceptable anymore. And so Western just has a lot of minefields in it. Anyway, I think both murders and outlaws were a little too surface and not much our take on it as it needed to be. Also from behind the scenes, we were shy on resources and so we didn't have the ability to put out some articles and stuff that would help. Like there was a lot of work done on both sets that I think the audience, had we done more stuff, let them see it, would have helped. I'm not sure we solved all the problems, but it would have helped. Okay, so the last two sets, catching us up to where we are right now, is Bloomberg that

Doug Beyer did the vision design for, handed off to Ian Duke, and Duskmourne, House of Horror, which Annie Sardellis did and handed off to Jules Roddins. And I think you can see in Bloomberg and Dusk Duskmore, I think these are slightly better examples than the previous two, of like it's not that Bloomborne is any less tropey than Murder the Carle of Manor or Outlaws of Thunder Junction. The material that it's taking from, it is taking from and part of it is maybe people don't know that source material quite as well so it seems more novel. Oh it's a mouse with a sword who's ever seen that before? But I think we did our take on it better. I think we we put

the magic spin on it better and I think we were more environmental and did more world-building and we put out the articles and like I think that it just it was more magic's take on it rather than magic mimics it or like that is the big note from this year is We have to sort more bake our tropes into our own spin on the tropes rather than just sort of blah bank tropes rather than just sort of blah, bank tropes. Dusk Mourn was interesting, I think. I mean, Dusk Mourn is an example where we made a really interesting world.

I think some of our tropes we entwined better than others. Some of them are a little more surface than probably in retrospect they wanted to be. Although Dusk Mourn is getting much better received. Anyway, so just sort of recap here since I'm I am at work, but let me let me do my wrap up here to my eight podcasts. Um, magic is in a place right now where I think that we are trying things. There's still lessons to be learned. There's still mistakes that can be made, but I think each time we do

something we absorb it. We are trying a lot of things. We are being adventuresome. For example, even like Bloomberg, like for a long time we're like, okay we have to have humans. Like we did Lorwin and didn't have humans. And I, one of the things I talked about is I think there's things that we'd taken as a given that we just had a, like whoa whoa whoa, do we have to have humans? Let's make a world then. Bloomberg didn't want humans and the fact that it didn't have humans made sense.

I think we're trying to be a little more of, let's stop taking some assumptions that we've made and really reinvent them. And Bloomberg, for example, like it's interesting that Kamigawa and Bloomberg, which both sort of had us go against the grain of some stuff we'd sort of learned over the years that I think had changed and us embracing it and just being really, really popular. That part of the new world of Magic right now is, well, I think a couple things. One is there's a huge audience out there and that magic is an amazing game.

And that really the next barrier for us to do is we need to convince people, A, magic's awareness could be higher. Like magic's awareness right now is like 65%. Meaning in America, for example, if you go to random person on the street and go, hey, do you know what magic of the gathering is? Only two thirds of go, yeah, I've heard of that.

And not even played it. I mean, I just mean heard of it. Just I heard of that name. Right now, one third of all people in the US, if you ask them what it is, I have no idea what that is. And if you talk about other games awareness, you know, Monopoly is 98%. Even Dungeon Dragons, I don't know the exact number of Dungeons Dragons, but it's, my guess is low 90s, but it's up there. People heard of Dungeon Dragons, and so, A, we gotta get magic awareness up, which we're

working on, but we also want to just expose magic to more people. One of the truisms we've learned is when you experience magic as a game, it is compelling. Why? It's a very, very good game. Some, like me, might might argue the best game ever made and so a lot of what we want to do is get people in front of magic and that and the other thing we want to do is There's a lot of ways to play magic one of the things that one of the challenges that continues to be the challenges

Magic is not one game it is many games with a shared rule system and shared component pieces and that we want to make sure Magic can shine in as many different places as it can and there's a lot of moving pieces to that. There's a lot going on. We're trying to make sure that standard is exciting for people. Obviously, we want commander, we want modern, we want pioneer, we want limited and draft and there's just so many different things out there that people are playing and enjoying. And I'm not even proper, I mean there's all sorts of formats people enjoy.

And that one of the challenges is we want to make sure that we are constantly advancing, we are learning from it. A lot of the talk right now is we're taking a lot of data of what are people enjoying. We have more data than we've ever had right now on literally what are the cards. We have a lot of digital data, for example. What cards do people play? The one I think about digital versus tabletop is we can get really crunchy data that's a lot harder to get from play.

We know what people play because of some self-reporting and stuff in tabletop, but we know people play in digital because we can see what they play. So anyway, we're using a lot of data, we're trying to figure things out, we're really trying to, I mean there's some real hard lessons we've learned from 2024 about how to execute on things and how to build worlds and how to use tropes and stuff like that that we're taking to heart. But anyway, Magic is constantly reinventing itself. That is the nature of what it is.

One of the coolest things about Magic, like I said, it is almost my 29th anniversary working on the game and next year is my 30th year working on Magic. Why aren't I bored yet? And the answer is Magic is so dynamic that it keeps changing and that the technology of how we make it keeps changing. I mean, it's, I have been here for a long time. Like we keep changing the tools and things we do and we keep improving and we keep iterating on it and that we're not, we're not stopping. We continue to do it. We keep having meetings about how to make things even better. And you know, I'm in a

thread, a really interesting thread right now talking about just like individual colors and like how do we maximize what's exciting and, you know, and we're spending some time looking at like, does each color have enough exciting things that we can do at higher rarity that are really compelling that people go, oh, I really enjoyed that thing and do we need to look for more space? And anyway, we're having a lot of those interesting conversations But anyway guys, I hope you enjoyed this Eight part series. I haven't done a lot eight part series looking through

The history of magic and all the cool things and anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it Maybe a couple years from now when I built up some more stuff to talk about I'll do another one of these But anyway guys, I am now at work and I'm done talking about the history of magic So we all know what that means means the end of my drive to work So instead of talking magic the history of magic it's time to be making the history of magic So I'll see you all next time. Bye. Bye