Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1260: The Juice Isn't Worth the Squeeze

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

In this podcast, I talk about an R&D expression, "The juice isn't worth the squeeze."

And what that means, it's time to drive to work. Okay, so today is inspired by an expression in R&D that I'm gonna talk about and explain. So the expression is, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. So what does that mean exactly? Well what it means is, there are things that we realize we are able to do, but what it would take to do it isn't worth the thing we are making.

That sometimes we make something and the thing we make has merit, it's interesting, but the things that we would have to do to make it happen isn't worth the energy and effort for the reward of what we would get. So that's what we're talking about today. We're talking about how the juice isn't worth the squeeze. So what exactly do we do? We're like, hey, that's not worth making. And the idea here is the core concept of today's podcast is that whenever we make something, there is work

that goes into making it. And that just because something is doable doesn't mean it should be done. Doesn't mean it's worth doing. That a lot of the job of design is figuring out, is sort of weighing the pros and cons of what will this add and what will it take? What will it require. And there are just things that require more than they're worth. And this concept is a tricky concept because we have to gauge, okay, how much work is this?

Is it worth the work? And the idea essentially is, remember that whenever you do something, there are, like, we only have so many resources available to us, a lot of balancing things is not done in a vacuum. It's not like if we had infinite time and infinite resources, would we do this thing? No, it's given the time and resources we have, contrasted against other things we could do, what is the right thing to do? And a lot of times, I think when people look at something,

they kind of think of it in a vacuum. Like, wow, if R&D just could, like, it's hard to understand that like, an important part of making a product, especially a product, you know, as a part of a business, is look, there are resources that go into it, and you have to understand, respect what the resources are. So for example, I'm going to go through a bunch

of different examples today of an area where the juice isn't worth the squeak. So I'm going to start with the rules. And I'm going to use a classic example that people always come to me and talk about. So in one of the unsets, I think in Unhinged, I believe, I made a mechanic called Last Strike. Get it? It's the opposite of First Strike. It's just like First Strike, but instead of striking before combat, you strike after combat.

Conceptually, it's a pretty easy idea, right? You understand how first strike works. You could take all the knowledge, you understand how first strike works, and this is just the opposite. Okay, if you have a three-three and I have a three-three, but my three-three is last strike, if I check into your three-three, what would happen?

Oh, your three-three does damage to my three-three before I do any damage, much like if your creature had first strike. So, that idea is very simple and the idea is easy. The reason I put it on a card in Unsets is it's not hard to understand what's going on. If you understand first strike, mostly you'll understand last strike. It is not, the core idea of what's going on is simplistic. But, and this is where we get into the rules.

The rules are written in such a way that there are two damage steps. There's normal damage and there's first strike and normal damage, right? Like double strike happens during both of those times. But the idea is that's the way the rules are written and that a lot of decisions and a lot of structure was made because those decisions were made. And this is true in general for rules. When you make rules you have to assume some things and in

assuming those things you then sort of form around them. And what happens is magic keeps building on its own rules. So we'll do rule A and then rule B is dependent on rule A. So rule B gets built onto rule A and that over time the rules start getting, you know, that there's a lot of contingencies to how the rules work. So if you go and try to change, let's say you have A and then B, C, D, E, F, C, H, I, J, like all sort of dependent on it, going back to change A is a big deal because you're not just changing A, you're changing B and C and D and E that it requires, there's a lot, And combat is a very complicated system that we

spend a lot of years refining. And so the idea of like just up-end it and you know, it will require not only redoing like the basic combat rules, but then everything that comes off of the basic combat rules. Now the question is, OK, so the idea essentially is, even though it's very simple to understand, I can explain to you. And then one of the things we tend to do in Unsets is Unsets is a great play for, it's easy for humans to understand and play with,

but it's complicated for the rule system to absorb. That means we kind of don't want to do it in normal blackboarder magic. But hey, it's fun for fun goofy magic because people will play it. The fact that it doesn't work in the rules is not really a problem for casual play. It's a problem for tournament play, it's a problem for digital. There's a lot of places it is a problem, but it's not a problem for light casual play.

So the next thing we have to say is, okay, wow, this would be a real under-case. This is not a simple, easy thing. This is a massive, complex, really a lot of work. And it's like some fixes are like, okay, maybe I take a day and do some work and fix it. This is the kind of thing that would take months, maybe many, many months. It's a very complex thing. So the question you then have to ask is, OK, let's say we did this, what do we get out of it?

OK, well we can make all these cards with Last Strike. Well, it turns out, Last Strike is really a giant negative. It's a really, really big negative. I made, there's a zombie called Very Slow Zombie, I think it's called, in Unhinged. And it's a 3-3 with Last Strike, I think for two mana, and it sucks. Two mana, three, three with last break is a bad card. It is not very good.

And what that sort of realizes, I don't know how often we'd want to use it. It's kind of one of the worst kinds of drawbacks where it doesn't look like that big a deal till you play with it, then it's a huge deal. And so it is just something that is not that fun. I don't know how many cards we'd use it on. Probably the most interesting thing about Last Strike is not even Last Strike itself,

is it allows the creation of Triple Strike, which is exciting, I admit. But Triple Strike is also pretty powerful. We can't just do Triple Strike everywhere. So there's just not that many cards. That's the point. We wouldn't make a lot of individual last-frag cards. We wouldn't make a lot of individual triple-frag cards. How many total cards do we make with it?

The answer is a small amount. So OK, so we're completely re-hauling the rules and months and months of work. No. In fact, it's not even remotely close. Sometimes we have things like, is the juice worth the squeeze? And we only have to think about it and walk through it. And other times like this, it's like a huge, giant amount

of work, and we can make a handful of cards. So not worth it. And the rules are definitely, like whenever people talk to me on my blog, and I talk about how the rules can't do something, the answer usually is not that rules can't do it, is it's not worth what it would do to do it. Sometimes it's because it creates contradiction with another rule that there's not an easy answer for.

I should take that back. There are other things that rules possibly can't do. You can't create a paradox. So it's possible you have two rules that can't coexist with one another. So there are, I think, some things the rules sort of can't do. But most things aren't can't. Most things are do we want to do it? What would it take? What would it entail? And there are things that are very exciting that we take a lot of effort to make happen. It's not as if we're not willing to really do a lot of work in the rules if we think there's enough payout for that work. Especially if we believe we're doing something that we think there's lots of design space. Not just one set, but something we come back to again and again. You know, there's more value there. But that's the intention is sort of, how much work does it take, and is it work that works? Is the value of that?

And that's something that the rules were constantly evaluating. And here's the other tricky thing about the rules is, it's not as if we definitively know how hard something is to do. I mean, if we've done it before, we have working knowledge. So, if I'm making a mechanic that acts a lot like a mechanic we've already done, okay, we have some confidence, but we're like, okay, we can sort of model up that mechanic.

Sometimes, actually, sometimes we have brand new things, and the rules people are like, the rules already handle it. Maybe no card is done yet, but the rules are structured to already handle that. We don't have to make rules at all It just works. That's great. Sometimes it's like okay. There's a little bit of work. We need to do not extensive. We can do it Then there is and then there's sometimes that's a huge amount of work We know it's a huge amount of work probably we don't want to do that Maybe if it's the payoffs that we will consider it. And then, the more troublesome area is,

it's not a small amount of work, and we don't know quite how much work it is. It is a mystery. Like, it is different enough from what we've done before, we know it'll require some work, but you don't always know how long it takes until you start to do it. And there are definitely things that are like, wow.

So sometimes what will happen is we'll try something, we'll get into it, and the rules people will say, the rules manager will say, well, let me do some preliminary work on it. And part of that is just let's understand the scope of the problem. How many cards does this affect? If we make this change, how many other rules, what dependencies exist? A lot of that is figuring out what are the implications. A lot of times when we're making or we're considering a new thing, it's sort of the rules manager figuring, okay, how big a task is this?

And then there's a weighing of is it worth it or is it not worth it? And there are definitely things we've done in the past where we thought it was worth it and maybe after the fact we're like, well, I'm not sure. A classic example is we made a card called pink glacial worm, where it has an effect when you search the library, when you find it when you're searching the library, it has an effect. I don't know if that effect actually works. We thought it worked at the time,

then realized that it caused a bunch of problems, and we sort of vowed not to do it again, and sort of it exists, and we sort of work around it the best we can. But that is the issue is that sometimes we think we got something, and we make them, and then realize, holy, like a classic example of this is, when Magic first got made in alpha, Richard made clone and stupid doppelgangers.

He made cards that could copy other cards. And for a while, like early on, we thought, oh, it just copies it. And then as we started to dig deep into it, it's like, oh wow, this is a can of worms. And for a while, we weren't allowed to make copy effects because we didn't know how they would work. And eventually, we did solve it.

We came up with a cleaner solution. We worked it in. Now, copying is something that rules an extremely clear understanding of. Now, we can do copies all the time. But there's a good example where there's a period where we didn't know that we could do it and we weren't doing it. The other thing about rules is as you solve problems and find new technology, sometimes you find answers to old problems

that you didn't know the answer to, but now this new solution can help you with that answer. So sometimes there's things we can't do, but later on we can do. I told classic stories of where I tried to do something and I'm like, oh, we can't do that. And I come back years later and they're like, oh, yeah, we can do that now. Okay, next, after the rules, is templating. One of the challenges of doing something is we have to actually describe it to you such that you, the player, can do it.

And we have to write it in technical language that the game understands. And when I say the game, the way I like to think of it, this is the way I process it. In order to do digital, we had to program digital. And when I say the game, the way I like to think of it, this is the way I process it. In order to do digital, we had to program digital. So there is a rule system that's clean and clear program. So imagine we wanted to do something.

If the digital program can't understand it, that's a problem. That's the way I like to think of the rules. I like to think of the rules as a computer program, and that everything has to have an answer. We do not want to have things that don't have answers. That causes endless headaches. So and that everything has to have an answer. We do not want to have things that don't have answers. That causes endless headaches. So everything we do has to have an answer. The rule system has to build a parsing. And literally, for digital, we have a rule system

that literally has to parse it. You know, and so that is, it's an interesting, one of the things is we have meetings with digital, we'll walk through concerns about digital, and digital's really good at understanding what the rules can and can't understand from a parsing standpoint. But we'll get to that at digital. So in templating, a lot of times we come up with an idea that's really cool.

And when we write it in like vision design, exploratory vision design, we just write what we want it to be, right? I mean, we'll make an attempt to try to write it so it sounds like other Magic cards, but a lot of times when you're making a new mechanic, there's language that hasn't been invented yet. So you're, it's just the idea is, I'm going to give you the gist of what I want. This is what the card does, you know, and I want to make sure that people playing the card in play tests get the gist of what the card is trying to do. But at some point, and it depends how big of a set, if it's a really big part of the set,

we'll talk to rules and vision. If it's a smaller part of the set, maybe that discussion happens in set design. And like for example, if it's mechanics, vision tends to talk to rules. But if it's individual cards, set design tends to talk to rules. And so, sorry, and that rules, template,

I'm talking about template here, talks to the editors. We have an editor who's associated with each set, we have the editor signed during vision, and often when we come up with mechanics and vision, we're like, okay, you want me to stab, and it's not a finished polished version, it's just sort of, gives a rough idea of what we're looking at.

And one of the things you learn when you contemplate things is there's a big difference between casually saying it and technically saying it. And sometimes technically saying it is wordy. The classic example of that, and this is a mechanic we did make, although with 20-point hindsight, suspense. So, suspense was a mechanic that was in Time Spiral Block. So the idea of Suspend is you trade mana for time. So the idea is normally this spell would cost four mana,

but I could do it for one mana if I have to wait three turns or two turns, whatever. Like, I get this spell cheaper, but then I have to wait for the spell. That's the idea's effect. And conceptually, it is not, the idea behind is not that hard from a conceptual standpoint. Oh, I can cast this spell for four mana, or for one mana and two turns.

I could spend turns as a cost for my spell. The problem is, the way that it actually has to function is, I have to take the spell, I have to exile it, I have to put some number of counters on it, marking the turn, and then every turn, I have to remember to take a counter off it. Now there's a logistics issue, which I'll get to later, but just the templating of it, it takes,

I don't know exactly, four or five lines, it takes a lot of lines, it's wordy. And so one of the things we make mechanics is we have to look at the words. Now, much like the rules, some things, like sometimes we make a mechanic and the response from editing is it doesn't fit. There's no way to make this fit. And there's some tricks and stuff that editing can do, but there are mechanics we've made where it just doesn't fit on the card. Or, well I guess it doesn't fit. That's kind of the rules, like it just doesn't work. Then there's it fits, but it's very long. Maybe it's five lines long. What does that mean?

That means you don't know a lot of space for anything else to go on the card. Yeah, maybe you can do an every wind ability or something, but you got one line or two lines of text. Your design space will be very limited if you make this mechanic. If it requires you to... Now, something like suspend, okay, a lot of the nature of suspend is the value if I get it cheaper. I still need to do something with the car. There is a challenge of I have to do effects that fit on the card. And so

maybe if it's really wordy, I don't could do as big of an effect or effects that are just longer word-wise. But it's just a matter of like how, how ugly is it? How complicated is it? And is it worth it? Sometimes you have a cool idea, but when you actually write it out, it's so ugly in its templating that you're like, ah. Suspends are a really good example where in the vacuum of ideas, it's a very cool idea. But in the execution, it ended up being very clunky.

And I think that the way players react to suspend is not the idea in a vacuum. It's the actual, OK, here's cards. Read the cards. Understand the card. Play the card. Here's the actual designs we can make with it. You have to sort of weigh those things.

And so when you look at templating, that's another sort of thing. It's like, OK, here's the cost of templating. And that there are ugly templates. There are wordy templates. There are confusing templates. Sometimes it's not even a matter of word length. Sometimes a matter of, wow, there's no way to write this that's not somewhat ambiguous.

And we have very talented editors. In all these cases, by the way, this is not that the people working on the game aren't very talented. They are. Magic is complex. The rules are complex. Editing is complex. All these things we're talking about are very complex. I've worked on magic for 30 years and I'm okay at templating.

Like I can, I know enough templating that I understand things I can't do, but I mean I'm not good at templating and I'm working on magic forever. It's a very complex thing. And there's a lot of give and take. And so one of the things is sometimes you have an idea, and when you sort of execute it and you see how wordy it is or what we have to say or what we have to do, and like I said, sometimes it's not even, is it worth it, it's sometimes it's like, I don't think we can do this in a way that will be viable.

So that is templating. Okay, next up, let's get into digital. So we make magic. When we make magic in Tabletop, we also make magic in digital. Not everything that we make in Tabletop is made in digital, but all the things that are our premier steps, the standard legal sets, do go through.

And there are other things that sometimes go through. There's some things like unsets, like specifically don't go through. And there are other things that sometimes go through. There's some things like unsets that specifically don't go online. But there are definitely cards that people, when we make cards, especially in certain sets, we know that there's going to be a digital version of them. And so one of the things is we have to talk to the digital team. It's the same issue. Okay, how much work is it to do this? And it's quite possible, there are cards, like for example, and this is something that did get done, Mindslaver takes over a player's turn.

There was one designer that just as a passion project took many, many, many months to program so it would work. But this is somebody on their own sort of extra time, as something they were just wanting to do, and it took a long time to do it. That is not something we can just expect constantly. And a lot of times when we have a digital review, they sort of walk through what can and can't be done in digital. And then the things that can't be done, it's like, well, what do we have to do to make

it viable to do it? And obviously, we do new things. It's not as if digital doesn't have to deal with new rules or do programs. They do. It's just a matter of is it worth it? Now let's say we're doing a brand new mechanic that's a big splashy thing. Okay, probably that's worth it. But let's say we have one card that's not even a major constructed card, just like,

it's a card that exists. We're like, oh, it could be a different card. Like is this card worth hours and hours and hours and hours of programming time? Or could we just tweak the card to make it slightly different and not have that? Like how important is that one card? And most of the time if it's just one card, we are not going to make digital do crazy much of the work for a singular card.

For a whole mechanic, yeah, that's the major element of what's going on in the set that makes sense. For one individual card, especially individual card that's not high profile, that makes a lot less sense. At some time, so my classic example here is, I was working on a future site. And so there's this cycle of cards I made in, unglued, the double cycle, where you did something right now,

and you did something at the start of the next game with the same person. So the idea is, if you're in the middle of a match, and this is game one, and you haven't played game two or three yet, or it's game two and you haven't played game three yet, the next game in the middle of a match and this is game one, and you haven't played game two or three yet, or it's game two and you haven't played game three yet, the next game in the same match, the effect happens at the beginning of the game.

And I went to Digital and we do have normal review, and Digital's like, look, this is not just, we don't know how to do it, it is not viable. And the reason was, the way the computer functions is, it doesn't keep track between games. The way it's programmed. So there's literally no way to say this game affects the next game. It just wasn't doable. I had to kill it. It wasn't programmable. And it wasn't programmable. It's not even... Sometimes it's like, well, it would take a lot of work. And this was like, no.

Games don't even recognize one another. So anyway, very interesting. Like I said, sometimes you just literally can't do it. And sometimes it's like, it's not worth it. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's more about, yeah, we can do it, but I guess if you just can't do it, I don't know if that juice isn't worth the squeeze. There's no juice. There's no juice. We can't get the juice.

Okay, next reason why we might not do something. It might require too much structural support. My example here is in aether drift, in the handoff and vision design, we had energy as a component of the set. We were an audience car, you know, and energy as a fill in for fuel made a lot of sense. So like, there's a lot of, like, we were in the right, we were on the right plane, we had a theme that sort of worked with it. Like, oh, this makes a lot of sense, let's do it.

And the answer was, energy is a very greedy mechanic from a set structure standpoint, and that it really requires a decent amount of structure to really commit to, and in the end, it just wasn't worth that commitment of structure. Now, that also ties into another thing, which is resources. So for example, when we make a magic set,

the way to think of it is we get so many people hours. We get so many people, we get so many designers, we get so many exploratory designers, vision designers, set designers, play designers, so many editors, so much editing time, so much digital time and rules. We get so much time, it's allocated. And not that there's not some flexibility, there is. But the reality is, look, like we get so much time. It's allocated. And not that there's not some flexibility there is, but the reality is look, there's only so much time we get. It's not

infinite. We can't do infinite things. And so sometimes it's like, oh, okay. Like I already had the problem that broke things. You guys all know the name, I'll tell you guys in a second. But we had the cards you started outside the game, that if your deck management requirement, you could bring them into the game. And we had mutate, where you could match features together. Companions. Companions is the name. Both companions and mutate were complicated mechanics on every vector we're talking about. Complicated in the rules, complicated in the templating, complicated in the play design, the balance.

And the reality is, what we should have done at the time is that, look, we can't do both of these. They are too much. In fact, we now have a rule sort of like, we only put one thing that is sort of an extra challenge. So the play design can have one meaty thing to deal with, but we try and have to do two in any one set. We have other sets, we'll put it later. But so sometimes something can cause structural issues, sometimes it can cause resource issues, sometimes those are interconnected. Something that requires too much structural support essentially requires too much, like

part of making a set work and be balanced is getting the right balance, you know, is getting the right number of things. And so when your structural support has problems, it also causes balance problems. So having enough resources and having enough structural support are interconnected. That's why I talk about them together. There also is logistics. If I'm going to do something, a lot of times there's more that comes with it than just that set.

If I'm doing double-faced cards, we have to print that on a special sheet. You can't print double-faced cards on the same sheet of single-faced cards in the same sheet of single-faced cards. If that requires like in like roles in Wildsail Drain, that requires some support. We had to make cards. We had to figure out how to get the cards in the bootstrap pack and then enough volume. And even then we probably didn't get a high enough volume.

You know, if you're making a specific token, if you're doing anything in which there needs to be play aids outside of it, the speed mechanic in Ather Drift, if we're doing anything, or the ring mechanic in Lord of the Rings, the dungeon mechanic, if we're doing something in which there's a play aid that's necessary for the functionality of doing it, we'd have to take that into account. And there are budgets we have to meet. For example, we have a certain amount of money we can do to do extra things in any one set.

That could mean doing more art for tokens. It could mean doing double-face cards. It could mean doing pre-release boosters that are themed. Like, each thing costs something, and we have some ability to do things, but we don't have instant ability to do things. And so sometimes it's like, well, hey, we want to do thing A, we can't do thing A and thing B, which is more important, thing A or thing B. Sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze is, oh, we'd rather do A. We can't do B, because we want to do A, and A is going to take the

resources that B would take to do. And that's an ongoing constant thing that we have to think about because I know from an end user, from the players, like resources don't mean anything, right? We make magic, it comes out, magic is made. But for the people making it, look, we only have so much of everything, including people hours, including, you know, there's certain resources that whether it's extra sheet or you know, parts of the budget or whatever it is, that there are things and it's not that we can't occasionally go to the powers that

be and say I have a special thing and I want to do this and every once in a while we get special exceptions but the reality is we have to do within the constraints sometimes it won't work. Now also sometimes we want to do something. And so there's sort of two different types of logistics. Out of game logistics, in game logistics. Out of game logistics is like, oh, it requires extra sheets for printing. That's out of game logistics.

In game logistics is, OK, in order to play with this, what do I need to do? And sometimes when we actually make it and we sort of figure it out, we're like, well, that's a little bit too much. There's just a little, um, much like suspend had a lot of busyness and it's like, suspend not only were the rules, the template and very wordy,

but the idea that, okay, I play this card, I put it aside, I put counters on it. Each turn I have to remember to take a counter off it, you know, and I have this sort of, this little processing that I have to do every turn in the middle of doing other things and that there's a weight on that. That adds weight to the game. And so we want to make sure and understand, okay, is that worth it?

The amount of energy we're making someone do, is it worth it? Another good example there is stickers. I think in infinity, if stickers had just sort of worked the way we needed them to work. If they just stuck on the card and easily peeled off and easily peeled back on the sheet and the overhead of logistics of stickers was low, probably stickers would have been fine. But once you're like, oh, it doesn't quite stick and it doesn't come off easy, like, oh, I lost my sticker. All of a sudden something that could have been elegant and easy and not kind of gotten your way becomes this huge barrier to play.

And that's a real thing, that's a tangible thing, that we have to sort of be aware of the logistics. And that we try as much as possible when we play Magic to sort of mimic the logistics so that we, the people playing it, are going through the same thing that you, and we, the people play testing it, are going through the same things that you guys will do while playing it. Oh wow, that's kind of a pain to do.

Oh yeah, we really need this to help us. We have to figure out what's going on. And that when we are doing something a little different, we like to lay it out and try to actually play with that to get a sense of what that is. And that's an important part of it. Other things we have to care about. Sometimes we do something that requires an element. Maybe it's a symbol. Maybe it's a frame. Well, there's a team that has to do that, and there's a certain amount of resources for that. Are we doing other frame stuff in the set? Are we doing other symbols?

Like, you know, and when you introduce a new symbol new symbol, it's a lot to introduce a symbol. We don't really want to introduce lots of symbols at the same time. So if you're making a new frame or a new symbol, it's kind of like, well, what else in the set needs a new frame or a new symbol? And not everything necessarily gets that. So sometimes this is a cool idea that requires its own frame. Oh, we have something of higher importance that requires a frame, and we don't have the energy or the resources.

For multiple reasons, we don't want to do multiple frames within the same set. Maybe it's confusing. Maybe the one frame is teaching you something, but doing a different frame would make you think something different about it. So it would cause problems. Maybe it's a matter of, you matter of we only have so many resources. Anyway, there's lots of different things. We have to think about stuff like that.

We have to think about complexity. The set as a whole only gets so much complexity. I always talk about complexity points. Not an actual thing we do, but it's easy to think about it that way. Well, let's say I have a mechanic that I really like. I'm putting mutate in the set. Oh, goodness.

Mutate is sucking up the oxygen. That's a very complicated mechanic. So if we're doing something complicated, it means the things around it are going to be not complicated. So sometimes it's like, oh, this mechanic is fun, but it's too complicated for where it needs to be. There's something else in the set that needs that complication points more than this does.

Maybe it is a tournament thing. We have a lot of people play Magic in tournaments, so we have to go to our organized play, and they look at things, and they give notes, and make sure that we're doing something that is viable and doable in organized play. Maybe that needs extra resources, or maybe if we do one thing, it keeps us from doing another thing. Once again, the theme of today is every choice you make has to be weighed against every other choice you're making.

And sometimes, it's like I can have A or B, but I can't have A and B. And turn-inments are simple. We get to do something that's kind of problematic or we get to do something that a turn-inment has to work extra hard on. But doing multiple things usually is a problem. And finally, my last thing of today is maybe it's just not fun enough. And this is actually a really important one.

Maybe we do it, and there's aggravation to doing it, and we play it, and we're like, you know what? Man, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. What this entails us doing just it's not fun enough for that if the thing was like one thing I will say is we will go to great lengths if something is super fun if something is super fun it requires rules or templating or extra pieces or digit or whatever if something is just like for, double-faced cards were a giant

ass of everybody. They had major revocations in the rules, in how we contemplated things, in tournaments, in digital, in logistics, like everywhere. It was a giant ass, but we said, you know what, this was the slam-dunk thing of Indistrad. This was the thing that was like, we built Indus Rod around. This is what is going to be the most exciting thing. Let's make it happen. So it is not as if things aren't, there is juice that is worth the squeeze. Today's idea is that not all juice is worth the squeeze.

Some juice is worth the squeeze. And so if it's worth it, we will make it happen. And we have very talented people that will figure out things if we think it's worth it, we will make it happen. And we have very talented people that will figure out things if we think it's worth doing. But the point of today is it's not always worth doing. Just because we came up with an idea, just because it's a concept that we can do, doesn't always mean we should do.

And sometimes we shouldn't do it here and now. Sometimes it's like that's a great idea, but not for now. Sometimes for example, I'll find something and go, wow, that is an intensive idea. Let's find a place where it can live and breathe on its own. Energy was a good example. We pulled energy from Meriden. There's a lot going on. And I'm like, okay, this really deserves to find the set where it is the oxygen on the set.

And then along came Kaladesh 13 years later, and it was. And so a lot of today is about there are a lot of things we have to balance. We have to keep those in mind. And in doing that, sometimes we have to say the juice isn't worth the squeeze. So that's today's topic. I hope you guys enjoyed it.

But anyway, I'm not at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you guys enjoyed it. But anyway, I'm not at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make a magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye bye.