Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1197: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Design Evolution

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

There are two ways to begin a design: from the top down, where you start with flavor, and from the bottom up, where you start with mechanics. In this podcast, I talk about how these two design processes have evolved over time.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to let the drive to work Okay, so today's topic was requested from my blog I Was asked about the evolution of top-down and bottom-up design So the thing about so I want to go into what they mean and talk about where Magic Design used to be and where it is now. I think, okay, real quick, let me define my terms so people know what I'm talking about.

So a top-down design means that the, usually the beginning and the core structure of your set is built around flavor. The easiest way to think of this is if I took all the names off the cards, would the thing that holds the set together, would the connective tissue of the set make sense? Would you understand what's going on

without the names and flavor? A bottom up is a reverse, it's one where you sort of start mechanically and the core of what you're doing is mechanical. Let me give some examples. Innistrad is example of a top down set. Based on gothic horror and the themes of the set, caring about the graveyard, caring about monster typal, caring about death.

Those are all things that just play into the general theme of a gothic horror. But let's say I stripped all the words off the cards. I just replaced them with, you know, or they're just blank. And I took all the words that had a flavor like, you know, vampire and just replaced them with type one and type two and type three and type four.

You would look at Innistrad and you would sort of say, oh, I see there's, okay, there's connective tissues and there's some, the allies connecting away with creature types and okay, it cares, but when things die with morbid and there's stuff in the graveyard and maybe you would piece together a little bit like, okay, you know, maybe it's a graveyard set. I mean, but it, what makes it hold together is going,

oh, well the reason that this type has all the creatures and builds up over time is they're zombies. You know, the idea is that a lot of the flavor that comes from Innistrad, that the mechanics can have a flavor component and a lot of the flavor of how the mechanics work is all tying into this idea of gothic horror. That if you played Innistrad minus all the names, it would, it would not seem, I mean, it would seem a little more disconnected where something like original Ravnica, yes, there's flavor, like we flavored each,

but it's very clear that we're caring about two color pairings. And that, you know, if you look at sort of how it's structured, even if you don't understand the gills at all, you do get, oh, it's built around two color pairs. Now, the reason this, I mean, one of the things is I like to, you know, I've been talking about design forever and top down versus bottom up, it's just slightly different.

I mean, it has a lot to do with sort of structurally how we build things. And you know, back in the day, so the way when magic first got designed, the creative components usually were a bit secondary. Like you would make a set and make the mechanics and then after you sort of had the general gist of your mechanics, you would then flavor it. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't, you didn't tend to, um, and especially early, early magic didn't do a lot of, of top-down design a little bit like, um, Arabian nights was clearly top-down

design. He was, Richard was building to the story of a thousand one Arabian nights. Um, but mostly in the early days, um, most sets, I mean, I, I guess some of the very early sets had flavor elements. Legends was built around characters from their role playing games. The dark definitely was built around a mood and a tone. But a lot of early magic sets and early magic, there was a little less connective tissue. You know, nowadays, or I mean nowadays, starting around even Ice Age, this is the idea that, okay, we're gonna have mechanics they're gonna run through.

Like Legends had a few mechanics. I mean, they introduced stuff like gold and legendary, but as far as a connective tissue mechanics, it wasn't quite structured like that. Whereas you start getting to ice age where it's like, okay, we're playing around with the cumulative upkeep and more like we're building around mechanics and seeing what mechanics can do. And we're doing more of mechanical exploration.

So in early magic, a lot of what happened is the design team sort of did their design. And then later in the process, you would start building in flavor. Now it's not that, it's not that by the way, it's not that the design team was not thinking at all of flavor. I know for Mirage, which was called Menagerie

when they built it, and the idea of an African setting was pretty early on. Although you'll notice that the way Mirage works, it is not like the setting is organic to the mechanics. You know, mechanics are flanking and phasing. I mean, it's not, it was a lot more like, we're going to build something mechanically,

and maybe we'll think about creative, but the interspersing of the two in the early days of magic was not a big thing. Now it is true, when we were building Tempest, Michael and I had pitched the Weatherlight Saga. Now we had built Tempest without knowing what the story was. We just built it mechanically. But there was a period where I'm like, okay, we want to tell a story.

And I figured out how to interweave our story around the components that I knew existed. You know, the slivers became a component of the story. Um, shadow that meant something. So we met it. We meant it make, we made it mean something in the story. Um, so it definitely, Tempest was the first that I can remember where there was a conscious story, uh, and the same people that were doing the mechanics were interacting with the story, me being the major person.

So Tempest definitely was the first set that at least tried to make sure the story reflected what was going on in the mechanics. That things that show up in the mechanics at least show up in the story. Now the Weatherlight Saga is sort of behind the scenes, I've told this many times, there was kind of a schism. I was the liaison between the story and the mechanics and when I got sort of disconnected from that there was a period of time where we would design stuff and then they would make whatever creative they wanted. Like there was a lot more disconnect. And then they would make whatever creative they wanted. Like there was a lot more disconnect.

The classic example is Urza Saiga, we made an enchantment based theme and the creative team called the year long cycle the artifact cycle, the artifact saga. So there's some disconnect or artifact cycle. There's some disconnect there. But so when we get around that age, what started happening was we would talk to the creative people, we would understand the basics of what was going on, and then we would make sure that we'd make the characters,

we'd at least do a few things that hit upon the story. But it was very, it was very light. Mirrodin, I mean, I guess during the actual making of Tempest, when we were making Wrath, Wrath, the setting of Tempest, um, for the first time ever we brought in a team, um, and there was a lot more working between that team and the story team at the time, because I was involved. Um, then there was kind of a schism, there was less involvement. Uh, I think the next big time is in Mirrodin.

We sort of got a new creative team, Brady Domerif, actually, apparently Tyler was in charge, but Brady Domerif was there. And the sort of modern world building, as you will. Mirrodin clearly was the example where I'm like, okay, I want to do an artifact set. The idea of Mirrodin was we the example where I'm like, okay, I want to do an artifact set. The idea of Mirrodin was we're going to do a block that was tied to artifacts. And I said, I went to them and said, okay, let's go build a world.

Let's get off this plane. Let's go build a world. And the idea is, hey, the set is going to be about artifacts. Let's build a world that reinforces that. And so for the first time really, the sort of modern back and forth that happens between creative and design, where we would say something and we'd get feedback. And so, now that was the earliest version.

I think a lot of mechanics was sort of locked in on Mirrodin But we did go back and forth and talk a lot about what the creative can show Then after Mirrodin So Bill Rose was the head designer at the time Bill really says hey so much of what we do now is we build mechanics and then figure out flavor afterwards What if we built flavor first? So the idea of champions was They spent some time figuring what they wanted I think we narrowed it down to Japanese mythology or Egyptian mythology and have gone with Japanese mythology

At this point Brady was in charge of the creative team Brady and his team did a lot of research into Japanese mythology, and they built a cool magic world influenced by Japanese mythology. And then, after that was built, they built the world first. The design team led by Brian Tinsman then sort of crafted a mechanic, or crafted a mechanical identity tied to the flavor. And the lessons of Champs the Kamigawa was, oh, it turns out that creative is just way more flexible than mechanics. And if you look at Champs

Kamigawa, it's very what we call parasitic. That the mechanic, a lot of the way the mechanics ended up is this is a samurai all samurai have the machida mechanic this is a snake one of the snake people were called they had the thing where they when they deal damage they didn't tap the next turn and the moon mist bounce things to your hand like they're very much was like these things are all create are all connected creatively and so mechanically will'll give them all the same mechanic. And it definitely was a bit limiting. It didn't do a great job of,

I mean, the original Champions block has some mechanical issues. But that's the first time, I mean, outside of like Arabian Nights clearly, but as far as building our own world, not adapting an existing world to somebody else's. Even Legends sort of adapted to the D&D games

that they had played. Champions was the first time we said, okay, we're making a brand new Magic World, it's uniquely a Magic World, it has the properties we need for a Magic World. We have a thing when we design worlds and that we call the grid. And what the grid says is, hey, you know, our, our, our, the, uh, we have a thing when we design worlds and that we call the grid. And what the grid says is, Hey, in all the colors, do we have all the sizes?

Do we have small, medium and large creatures? Uh, and then in the appropriate colors, also flying creatures. Like we fill this grid out, like, Oh, does the world have the things that set will need? Um, but okay. So we learned from champions, the big lesson from champions was, okay, look, you can't, you can't, you have to be more, more back and forth that you can't do creative first and then just do mechanics after it doesn't, it doesn't work well. So after champions of Kamigawa is Ravnica. So the interesting thing there is,

I think Ravnica, so when Bill Rose and Randy Bueller gave me, made me the head designer, so when I got promoted to head designer, Bill felt it was really important that I not only be head designer, but that I oversee the creative team. So when I got made head designer, I, in addition to my head designer responsibilities, I was put into, I managed, I was made manager of the creative team. I think Bill's philosophy was,

hey, he saw kind of what happened in Chimskamagawa. He's like, look, I guess if we're going to, if we're going to make it work, if we're going to make sets sort of really sing, we need the creative team intricately involved with the design. It can't be after the fact. So Ravnica is a really, really good example, probably the first major example where the creation of the world and the set started from back and forth between design and creative now that was aided by the fact that I was leading the design and I oversaw

the creative team so As built as bill envisioned I guess um and I'm like I said, I'm very proud I think Ravnica so the key of Ravnica was Me coming to the creative team very early and saying hey here's my initial idea. And I mean, obviously, regular listeners have heard this story infinite times. The real short version is Invasion had done,

was the first multicolor block, the first sort of themed block. We wanted to go back and do multicolor again, very popular theme. I didn't wanna be Invasion. Invasion was all about playing all the colors with domain and such. So I'm like, okay, I want you to play

as few colors as possible, but still be multicolor. So that meant two. So I went to the creative team and said, look, here's my parameters. I want to play with all 10 two-color pairs and I want to treat them equally. I don't want to treat ally better than enemy, which is how we at the time did it.

That was the only, that's the only thing I said. That's the only, I went to creative and said, okay, let's start with that premise. Brady then absorbed it, went home, like exercising one day, came up the idea for the guilds and the idea of a city, guilds in a city. And so the idea that Brady brought forth, which was pretty groundbreaking in a city. And so the idea that Brady brought forth, which was pretty

groundbreaking in a lot of ways, but the idea is, okay, I was saying, hey, let's have ten component pieces. Brady was, let's make those factions and make them flavored. That each faction will have a flavor and because we're using the color pie and that the color pie has a lot of flavor, okay what happens when you join white and blue, blue and black, black and red, red and green, green and white, white and black, blue and red, black and green, red and white, and green and blue. What happens when you join those together? And that each one of those could have an identity.

Then the interesting thing, so what was happening there is, while this is all going on, we are doing design work. So one of the early things we did was, I knew I'd come up with hybrid during like, I mean, exploratory didn't exist yet, but I was doing a lot of thinking before we started the set on my own. And I came up with Hybrid Man, but I was doing a lot of thinking before we started the set on my own and I came up with Hybrid Manor, which I was very excited by. So I put, so the very first playtest was all 10 color pairs and Hybrid Manor.

And after the playtest, Henry Stern, so real quickly, Henry Stern came in second at the US Nationals in 1995. He came in third at 95 World Championship and the 96 World Championship. He was top four back-to-back years. So Henry was a very good player. He was the first sort of pro we hired. At the time, we didn't even think of hiring him as a pro at the time. That was later. We said, oh we should hire pros at the pro tour. He was just he was looking for a job. I thought

he'd be good at magic. We were friends. I recommended him to Bill and Randy or I think Bill was before Randy wasn't here yet. I recommended him to Bill. Anyway, he came to me after the play test and said, Mark, Mark, I, that made my brain explode. The number I had to have piles for every two-color pair, every mono color, every hybrid color, artifacts, like, he's like, I don't even know how many piles I had. And he goes, look, I'm, I, you know, I, I came in second at the year's Magic Championship. I came in third at back to back worlds. I'm a very, very good Magic player.

This was beyond me. There was too much going on. And so I'd gotten that information from, from the play test that we just had too much going on. And then Brady came back with the idea of what if we made factions? And those two things together made me come up the idea of what if we don't put all of them in the same set?

What if a set just had some of the factions? And that's when I came up the idea of doing originally the four, three, three. Large, small, small. Large set would have four guilds., large set would have four guilds. First small set would have three guilds. Second small set would have three guilds. But my point here is that the only reason I was able to come up with that idea was I

was bouncing off of Brady's idea of the guilds. And really what happened was, and this is a great example of how the process works now We had a mechanical component Creative came back with a creative like creative responded to our mechanical component We then mechanically respond to their creative component and we started this whole message of back and forth Now Technically speaking if you look at original Ravnica, it was my example of a bottom-up set, it is mechanically built around factions, mechanically

like the way you build a Ravnica set is you want each of the factions to overlap mechanically with the factions that share colors that are in it because we want the ability to go I'm gonna draft blue cards. Which guild with blue should I play? Should I play both of them or one of them? We want to give you options of where to go. And so at its core, the way Ravnica is structured happens to be mechanical. The core is mechanical. So it is a bottom upset. But, but, and here's where this is important. As we start getting into Ravnica, the idea of what is a bottom-up set and what is a top-down set,

before Ravnica, it was pretty obvious. It was very loud whether we were bottom-up or top-down. Because that, like, usually when we were doing top-down and bottom-up before, before we got to Ravnica, it was like one team did its work first and then the second team adapted to the work of the first team. When Richard was building Arabian Nights, the world was fleshed out for him. So he was trying to mechanically capture the world of Arabian Nights.

Or when we did Chances of Kamigawa, we made the world first and then mechanically tried to capture the world and Mirrodin was a nice example where Building the world the least took into mind the idea of what mechanics were but I think Ravnica is really the idea where there's back and forth and I think the nice thing about Ravnica is it's not like there's not infinite flavor in Ravnica. It is not as if the mechanics don't really carry the flavor.

But so anyway, let's advance through time. So Innistrad is another good example. So Innistrad, we decided we want, so Innistrad was inspired by the making of Odyssey. Brady and I talked during the making of Odyssey, and this is when Brady was an editor, not in charge of the creative team. We talked about how it was weird that the Odyssey was all about the graveyard, but the story, which was about Oteria and people fighting for magic in the pits, anyway, it had nothing to do with the graveyard.

I mean, literally nothing to do with the graveyard. I mean, literally nothing to do with the graveyard. And I think Brady was like, you know, we could have made a whole set that really reflected the graveyard. We could have made a horror set. That the genre of horror in the graveyard seemed like a perfect pairing. And I kept that idea with me,

and it took a while to get made, but eventually we made Innistrad, and I did exactly that. Innistrad is, I I think the modern day, like the sort of, sort the stake in the ground of the first modern top-down set. We're like, okay, we're going to take this idea of what we want, but we're, from the earliest possibility,

we're going back and forth of building the world. And the perfect example was, we realized early on that we wanted monster typal to be a thing. And originally we were gonna do vampires, werewolves and zombies, those are the three that came to mind. And then what we realized was, as we were trying to plot out where to put

the different creature types, we liked the idea of zombies being in blue and black because there's two types of zombies. There's things you use necromancy to raise from the dead and there's like Frankenstein, like science, you use science to raise them from the dead. And one felt black and one felt blue. It's like, okay, we can put zombies in black and blue. And we liked the idea of vampires in black and red, they're like blood hungry vampires.

And then as I started realizing, we were trying to put them in different categories. And I'm like, oh, well, you know, we started realizing maybe we could do a theme, a typal theme where we run them through ally color pairs. And when I was working with werewolves, everything wanted to be black, but everything couldn't be black, right? So I'm like, well, werewolves are really about

sort of this idea of, of repression of that. I have these feelings and emotions, but I have to lock them up. But at night, my monster comes out and I do the things I do. And I feel like the idea of the werewolves is being unrestrained. And what like, make him green and red vampire. I mean, vampires werewolves, probably unrestrained and like make them green and red. Vampire, I mean not vampire, werewolves probably in a vacuum would be green and black. But we're like, okay, look, we have a lot in black.

Let's try green and red. So we went to the creative team and I said to them, hey, it's two things. One is we needed something for, if we put the humans in green and white, the idea for white and blue was, okay, what if we do ghosts or spirits? So like, okay, we need ghosts. And then we sort of said, hey, here's where we need them color pie wise.

And hey, we need werewolves in green and red. So the creator turned like, okay, let's figure out how to express werewolves in a way that really plays that up. And it really took the theme we were talking about, about repression and like the idea of, you know, becoming your werewolf is you just living life as you want to live it rather than how you feel you must live it. And that red and green very much are the two colors being opposite blue. Blue is all about planning and thinking things through and red and green about acting, living on impulse, on instinct.

What if werewolves were all about impulse and instinct, just doing what they wanted to do? And that felt really cool. But it meant the creative team had to respond to that, right? And so we started getting in a pattern where the idea of building something is not, it's not one team works first and the other team then responds to it. It's a lot more of there's back and forth that goes between the two teams

and the teams riff off one another. And that general consensus has held the idea of like, for example, there is now world building exploratory and there's design exploratory, exploratory design. And that a lot of the, what both want to do is understand that the core dynamics, like a lot of exploratory is let's design figures out what design needs, world building figures out what world building needs. And then we come together and say, well, design, we're thinking of this and exploratory world

building as well. World building, we think we need this. And each side can talk about the things that they need. Um, now the biggest wrinkle, cause one of the things that I think is, is tricky is the, the reason this podcast topic came up is the question they asked me is, wow, everything's top down now. You're going to do bottom upsets again. Uh, and what I realized was it wasn't that we aren't doing bottom upsets. The question they asked me is, wow, everything's top down now. You're gonna do bottom up sets again?

And what I realized was, it wasn't that we aren't doing bottom up sets, it's that the nature of how we do things and how we market things has changed. So back in the day, the way we would plan future sets was I would do something where I would make what's called the five-year plan, which sometimes a six-year plan, sometimes a seven-year plan, where I would say, hey, as the head designer, I was plotting out sort of where I thought there were fun design spaces. And some of the time I was thinking, like, some of the inspirations did have a creative element to it, like, we're going to do a set based on horror. And sometimes it's very mechanical. We're going to do a set based on land mechanics.

But it was very high concept. It was very much going, okay, I think the through line of design will be this thing. It was very, very design oriented. Not that I didn't keep in mind what creative was doing. And part of the process was, when I would make my initial paths, we'd show it to the creative team. And sometimes the creative team would go,

hey, we just can't do that. The classic example was, I had a world where we visited the first set was prehistoric, the second debt was like same world but jumping ahead thousands of years was like medieval, and the third set jumping ahead thousands of years was like as futuristic as magic wanted to be at the time. And like Brady said look we can we can't do that. That's three worlds. That's not, you know, jumping head thousands of years between a prehistoric and a medieval world. I mean, maybe there's some slight through line because it's the same world, but as a general rule, we're building three worlds. Our team's not built up to do that. So we

ended up audibling and did Theros instead, for example. But what has happened over time is we now have what we call an arc planning group. I'm not the sole person making suggestions of what to do. I'm part of the team but we have more members of the team. We have Doug Beyer who represents the creative and Jackie that represents Jackie and Doug together. We have Roy that does the story, Aaron's in these meetings. We have people representing the franchise. We have people that are rubbing all the different facets

of what makes Magic Magic. It is not, it's far from one person saying, hey, what about this? It's a whole team. And the other thing that we do is we do a lot of research now. We don't just pick a thing in a vacuum. We take it and we'll run focus groups

and we'll see what people think of the idea. Like we do actual market testing on the ideas to see what people think. And the other big thing is when you're doing market testing, it is a lot easier to market test creative elements than it is mechanical elements. And the reason is, it takes a long time to make a mechanical element.

Like if we want to make something, we have to work on it for months and months and months and months, sometimes years, to get to the final version. So it's kind of hard to test mechanical things. We don't have the finished mechanical property, where it's a lot easier to test creative things, you know You get an artist to draw a picture You know and that it just takes a couple pictures to get to get the essence of what we're going for from a mood and tone and the other big thing we've learned over the years is So there's two big parts of magic sales what we call sell in and what we call the tail

of magic sales, what we call sell in and what we call the tail. Sell in means how much we sell originally, like when the product first comes out, we sell a certain amount of products to all the stores. Usually the line share of how a set does is based on the sell in, right? When we sell the product, how much gets bought? Like in the first couple of weekends, how much gets bought like in the first couple weekends how much gets bought when the set first comes out? And why why that like that's that's when all the marketing happens It's when I mean it's when the key exciting the pre-release happens It's when there's a focus on the new set right and obviously when there's a focus on the new set

It's coming out and all eyes are pointed toward it. That's the time period that it's going to do the best and all eyes are pointed toward it, that's the time period that it's gonna do the best. Tail is how well it does over time. Like when we make a product, we print it for several years and so people can order it again. Once you sell out, you can order more. So a tail has to do with how well it does over time.

What we've learned over many years is that the creative component is more responsible for the success of the sell-in. Are people excited by the idea of the set? And that if the idea is enticing and exciting, that tends to be the thing that greater dictates how the set sells initially in selling. The tale of the set is very, very tied to the mechanics of the set.

Do people like the set? Are there cards people wanna own in the set? Like a lot of the tail is how successful the set is mechanically as a set. Do people enjoy playing it? But since we've learned that the selling is a lot more about sort of the flavor of the set and the tails a lot more of the mechanics, our marketing for the sell and our marketing

for the release has gotten more and more about the flavor and less and less about the mechanics. Like once upon a time when we advertised the new set, we're like, here's the new mechanic. We'll show you a car. Like that's how we advertised it and what we realized over time is what really excites people in the selling has to do with the concept what is it um and a lot to do with the art you know so um what that means is as we do planning right now we're very very conscious of what is the concept of the set that when we go to sell you a set that there has to be something that has a visual component that you can

understand you can grok now will you mechanically make that true when we make the gameplay match the flavor of what is being sold by the flavor absolutely but because the flavor is sort of how we lead in our marketing, we now sell sets more on flavor in their initial thing than we do in mechanics. It's not that we don't mean we tell you the mechanics, we show you the mechanics, we design sets such as mechanics will be exciting. My team's entire job is to make exciting magic sets. And I mean, all of the design, all of the design, the goal is to make exciting magic sets. We I mean, all the design, all the design, the goal is to make exciting

magic sets. We want them to play well. And a set that looks really cool, but doesn't play well is not great. And the one of the reasons that people feel the people that they can look at the flavor and get excited is, Hey, we do a good job of delivering on what we're doing. If magic just made clunker after clunker after clunker, people start getting skeptical, oh, this looks cool, but oh, magic keeps putting on clunkers. Like we have to keep delivering. So it's not that we can't mechanically deliver every time. It's important to us, we do.

Yeah, I spent a lot of time and energy. I and many other designers spent a lot of time and energy on that. But I think what happens is, because the focus is a little bit more on the flavor and how we sell it It feels more like every set is a top-down set because top-down sets are about flavor and we're selling the set on flavor The reality is how we build the set what the core structure of the set There are some sets that have a core structure that are flavor

There's some that have a core structure that are mechanics. We still do make top down or bottom up. My point though is it's really, really hard to tell from the outside. My classic example is Bloomberg. Bloomberg early on was like, okay, we're going to do this anthropomorphic animal set. We understood our inspirations, but the way we structured it was to make 10 two color pairs built around the animals. Now that's not to say that we didn't choose the archetypes carefully. It's not to say we didn't try to pick mechanics.

It's not a mistake that the go wide, make a lot of tokens animal is the rabbit. That makes a lot of sense for the rabbit. The sneaky one is the rat. We were very careful of making sure that the animal we did in the gameplay lined up, but the core, the way that Bloomberg was built is let's make 10 factions and then make sure the factions interconnect so that you can draft well. It's a very, very mechanical structure. So Bloomberg is very much a, a bottom up design, even though the set is super flavorful. And that's where I think a lot of the confusion comes from is we've just gotten really, really good at the back and forth between creative and flavor to the point at which it is hard

to understand whether something's bottom up or top down. I mean, if you really get into it and you look at it, I mean, there's some clues and such, but we build such a way now that it's just not easily apparent what it is. That if we do our job correctly, hey, maybe you shouldn't even know if it's top down or bottom up. The reason that term exists is me explaining to all of you

how we make things. Like it's a design term. It is not really a prod consumer facing terms we don't sell a set you know or these nowadays we don't sell said this is a top-down set this is not how we sell sets we sell it on the flavor that it is regardless of whether it's top down or bottom up and I think that's a lot of the confusion is that it's not that behind the scenes that we don't do things in a way that can be divided up. It's that from the front facing, it's hard to tell that.

So it's not that we're not going down in the number of bottom upsets. Probably it's about the same. I mean, I will admit early in magic, we did a lot more bottom up just because we weren't doing a lot of top down and we do more do more top-downs 50 50 ish these days But that is what's going on. It's not really that we've changed how we make magic It's not different how we structure things the idea of top-down idea bottom-up still is sort of true But a lot it's it's subtler and it's not as easy to understand Like the finished product hides it a lot better than it used to. The finished product's gonna be super flavor, the mechanics and the flavor are gonna intermesh so much

that it's going to seem like, oh, it's all top down. Look how much they mesh together. That's just how we do things. Even bottom-up sets will mesh them together. And that's really my topic for today is, it is not so much that we've changed how we make magic sets structurally. I mean, we have changed how we interact with the creative team.

We've changed. So, I mean, we have changed how we build sets. There's a lot more back and forth and the creative elements are taken into account much earlier in the process. But that said, the core structuring, I mean, that part is not necessarily change, but the end product and the way it looks to all of you have changed. So that is my note of today is that top down and bottom up does technically exist, but in a real technical sense in a way that I'm not sure it means as much anymore.

I don't know the audience being able to identify the difference means anything. I mean, you have to be pretty into dark like really into magic design understand the core magic design to understand the differences there or be able to recognize the differences, so Anyway guys that is my topic today the history of top down and bottom up. I hope this was interesting But I'm now at work. I've actually been working for a few minutes here But I I got in and I was excited in what we were saying. I do that from time to time. I talk to people, sometimes they'll see me.

My car's parked and I'm just chatting, they're like, oh, he's doing this podcast. Anyway, guys, I am at work, so it is 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.