Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1285: Top 20 Most Influential Expansions, Part 3

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

This is part three of three going over my talk from MagicCon: Atlanta looking at the top 20 most influential Magic expansions of all time.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. Okay. Well, today is part three of a three-part series based on a speech I gave at MagicCon Atlanta on the top 20 most influential magic expansions of all time. So, we are up to number seven future site. It released in April of 2007. I led the design for it.

Mike Turian led the development for it. So it was part of the time spiral block. So the time spiral block had a past, present, and future flavor. So the idea of time spiral came. We hinted at the past. We had a bonus sheet that showed old cards in the old frame.

And then we had planar chaos. It was about the alternate present. And so it's bonus sheet showed cards, but in different colors. Wrath of God is now black and it's damnation. And then we get to FutureSight. So FutureSight's idea was the showing cards from the future, which at the time caused a lot of confusion because it's very easy to say these are cards from the past.

They're literally cards from the past. Okay, I got it. Okay, these are cards from an alternate reality. Okay, well, it's an alternate thing I've never seen before. But the idea that these cards are from the future, well, what does that mean? They're in the packs right now. Right now, I can buy their cards of the present. Why are they the future?

And the idea that these cards hinted at things we could do, the idea that these cards were from potential futures, was definitely a very complicated thing. One of the things that's really interesting is we would get holes on the time-shifted sheet and then we would say, we would open up. Normally when we have holes, we open it up to R&D to say, oh, we want to fill the holes.

And there's people outside of R&D that do it too. but there's certain people that sort of sign up to be whole fillers, to design cars to see if they can design something that'll make sense. None of the whole fillers the time shift sheet. It's such a weird concept I ended up having to make them. And the idea, the idea behind the future shift sheet was really,

here's something we don't do that one day I think we will do and we will hint at things. And so there's a lot. I mean, the future site was interesting and the number of things it sort of teased. For example, it's the place, well, there's some things we've premiered here that we pretend like we're teasing the future, but really premiered here.

So, for example, a lot of keywords were here. Death Touch, LifeLink, Reach, and Shroud, or the Shroud, would later become hexproof. We're all teased here for the first time, aka used for the first time. Plainswalker, the tribe, which later become kindred, also teased here, although not in the set. I mean, it was the set we were originally going to show Plainswalkers for the first time, but we ended up having to push them back to Lorwyn. But we did tease them in Tamergoff's reminder text, which cares about car types.

Tease two car types that didn't even exist yet. There are mechanics like Delve, like Chromo, although that didn't have a name. There's mechanics that would later be mechanics from sets that you saw for the very first time. You saw the first enchantment creature, the first colored artifact. There's just infinite things that I'm like,

one day we'll do this. And so we'll tease it here. There are also a lot of individual cards like Narcomiba, things that... Like, for example, whenever a designer starts on a set, one of the things they always do is go look at the future shift and go, could any of these be here? We've reprinted a bunch of individual cards

and a few mechanics. Like, it really was telling. And the other thing about FutureSight is it hinted at, for example, sarcomite mirror, which was the first artifact, colored artifact. It showed a mirror that had been phrexianized, which was us teasing, not even that subtly,

that maybe one day the phrexians would invade Mirren, which at the time we knew. The Fomori get mentioned for the first time here, and the card I talked about, there's a card called Ghostly Flame. So Ghostly Flame, first off, hints at DeVoid, something we would eventually do, because it's a direct damage spell for red mana

but it's colorless. And then the flavor text written by Matt Kavada talks about Ugin and the eye of Ugin. You have to understand when Matt wrote a piece of flavor text, none of that was a thing.

Ugin wasn't a character. The Eldrazi weren't a character. The I of Ugan wasn't a thing. All of that came out of that sort of flavorful hinting at something and became major storylines, major sets, major characters. And that's kind of the thing

that Featocyte did that was so amazing is we did all this sort of plotting and planning and mapping out of space on some level of kind of like exploratory design except we printed it. So it's a very influential set. There's a lot of things. Now, some of it was us guessing we were going, but still, there's so much that we did there. Another thing that it did, it did what we call mix and match. So for the magic invitational, I decided, I used to do a thing called the duplicate sealed, where I give all the players the exact same cards. And then they, it's sealed, but because everybody has the same cards, there's an

extra layer of skill to it because you're like, okay, well, if I know that everybody else has the same card pull as I do, what's the best thing for me to build? And at one point, I decided to shake things up. Early on, I just, I would change mana values of stuff. Here's some famous cards that are powerful, but now they're weaker. Here's some weak cards, but I made them more powerful. So I finally got permission to make brand new cards. But the rule that I was given was don't make cards that magic would actually make. They don't steal actual design space. So one of the areas that was very fruitful

was, well, if I took two mechanics that were not every green mechanics, if I took, you know, phasing from Mirage Block and then combine it with shadow from Tempest Block. I'm like, well, we're not going to use that card again until we make a set with those two mechanics in our line, which was very unlikely. At the time, by the way, we weren't really repeating.

Once a mechanic and if it wasn't, an evergreen. In the early days, it's like, oh, we've used it, let's move on. So I was using stuff from different blocks that never would have overlapped. So when we got to FutureSight, I really liked the idea mixing and matching as fun, mixing mechanics. And so, what I did at the time

was Zvi-Mauschwitz was, in fact, an intern at the time. He's a famous pro player in the Hall of Fame. And I said to him, here are all the mechanics that exist, all the keyword mechanics, make me a list. And what he did was, he put them into five categories. Category five,

this is sweet. These are amazing combos. Number four was these are really good, not as good as five, but you're worthy. Three is like, these are okay. Two is like, eh, these are not too memorable. And one are like, these don't even work. These are nambos. They don't work together. So the idea was we got all the fives in the center.

I think I've got most of the four, maybe not all the fours, but all the fives and almost all the fours, I think. Anyway, it's super fun. We start doing mixing and matching a lot more in base sets where we can. With cameos returning, we now have able to to do it in ways that it didn't before,

and stuff like Modern Horizons very much make use of it. Also, I would say that Time Spiral Block very much, very much, was the influence for modern horizons. In fact, when Ethan and I first pitched the idea, we really pitched it as an extension of Time Spiral Block. And so the idea of what we call decadent design and really flavorful, like playing up, you know, things of the past, but using all the mechanics in a way that's,

that's extra complexity, but really fun for the franchise player. Okay, that is why FutureSight was number seven. Number six, Kamagawa Neon Dynasty. This came on February of 2022. It's the second most recent one on the list, the most recent being Lord of the Rings. And I was the vision designer for it. Dave Humphreys was the set designer for it.

So this set had a really interesting story. So, basically, we did Kamagawa. Original Champions of Kamagawa Block. And the way that came about was Erza Saga Block had just happened. It went not well. Sorry, I'm jumping at. Not Urza's Saga Black specifically. Bill had done a bunch of different mechanical things.

Invasion was his first sort of saying, here's the theme. And then we did Graveyard and Odyssey. and we did typo and onslaid, and we did artifacts mirrored in. He's really looking for something a little bit different. And so the idea was, let's do a top-down block. Now, we had done, you know, Rabid Knights, we'd done Portal Three Kingdoms. There had been a little bit of top-down, but nothing like a whole block.

And so he was very interested in doing mythology of some kind. So he narrowed it down to three types. We could be influenced by Greek mythology, by Egyptian mythology, or by Japanese mythology. And in the end, we narrowed down to Japanese mythology. Obviously, we would do Greek mythology in Theros. We would do Egyptian mythology in Aminkets. So both those would eventually get done. And the idea was a set where flavor came first.

In fact, the idea that Bill had was we would build the set first. The creative team would build the world before any mechanical stuff was done. And then we would mechanically adapt to the world. Now, that had a bunch of problems at the time. It turns out the mechanics are not nearly as flexible as creative. creative. And so it made a little, there were a lot of ham-fisted qualities to Champagawa. It was very parasitic. So it, anyway, Chams Kamagawa ended up being a not popular block. It didn't sell particularly well. It was the lowest rated world. In fact, I think it still is the lowest-rated

world since we started measuring players' reactions to worlds. So for a long time, it was pretty toxic. It's like, we're not going back there. But along the time, you know, as time went on, Japanese pop culture got very popular, and we were playing a lot more in genre space, more so the mythological space. What we found with mythological spaces, with maybe with exception and maybe Greek mythology, most people didn't know much about the mythology, so there wasn't a lot of resonance there. There was a lot of imagery and things to build off of, but it wasn't very resonant. And when we did pop culture things, it was super resonant because people, you know,

things they knew. And so we said, you know what, let's make a pop culture, a world, inspired by Japanese pop culture. Now, the original idea would just make a brand new world, but on my blog and Bloggahtag, I talk to the players every day, and there was this really the number one request I got in Bloggaug

was, let's go back to Kamagawa. It turns out, the one of the gimmicks of Kamagawa was, it had a legendary theme, so all the creatures at Rare and some of the Uncomins were legendary. At a time in the early sets, maybe three cars would be legendary, it was a lot of legendary characters.

So when Commander became popular, a lot of people went and started looking at all the rarers from Champs to Kamagawa. So it kind of raised in appreciation. And also, this Japanese culture got a little more, people got a little more aware in general because of, probably because of Japanese pop culture. But anyway, I realized that we had an opportunity to return to Kamagawa. So what I said is, at the beginning of design, I said, here's what I want to do. Let's not name it.

Let's just build the most awesome world we're going to build to play into Japanese pop culture. and we'll decide later whether or not it's Kamagawa. And then, while working on it, I designed a structure that kind of made it have to be Kamagawa. And we came up this idea of modernity versus tradition. You know, the idea that it's the new ways versus the old ways. Well, the new ways, that's all the pop culture stuff. That's all the new stuff.

But in order to have tradition, well, if we went to a world we'd already been to and we played into things we'd already done, it really leaned into the tradition part. And half the set ended up being sort of Champs of Kamagawa and half ended up being sort of new Kamagawa. Anyway, it went on to be really popular. Probably the biggest thing about it. I did an article talking about the stages of magic.

And I dubbed this the start of the seventh stage, or the current stage. Although at some point I'll have to figure out what the eight stages. But anyway, the... idea that things that didn't work the first time, I had already talked about in the podcast, talking about Odyssey, in part two, I think, how we took Kroma and we redid it, made devotion.

Well, this was the same thing, but on a world level. We took a world that really kind of had failed the first time out, you know, and figured out how to sort of make it something that, you know, lived up just, like using our modern, modern sort of design and creative skills to upgrade it. And it was a giant hit. It's one of the best-selling in multiverse magic sets of all time.

And so, I mean, that really sort of set the guard. I mean, it taught us a couple things. One, the idea of how we can remake something and make it his own. The interesting thing about it is, well, we did a lot of nod to original Kamagawa. I think there's only two mechanics that we brought back in, full, which was ninjutsu, which is probably the most popular mechanic from original block.

And they brought back channel, which, to be honest, we do something that all the time. It's just labeled and, okay, we'll label to play up the flavor of coming back to the Kamagawa. But mostly, mechanically, we redid most of what the world was and people still really loved it. So they loved the aesthetic of it, not necessarily

the mechanical execution of it, and that allowed us a lot of freedom to do something cool and new. We also did this neat thing where we had an a range where the conflict of the world, one side of the conflict was one magic thing, the other was the other. That tradition was enchantments

and modernity was artifacts. And so we had a spectrum where the two sides were playing against each other, and in the middle, couldn't care of on having both, which was kind of neat. A cool technique we'll use again. We did a lot with sort of bringing creatureness to sagas and to equipment.

Saigas, for the first time, we had sages to turn into creatures. we'd reconfigure on equipment. Anyway, we just did a lot of things and really sort of took something that really was considered to be toxic, something that we weren't supposed to touch and turned into gold,

something that really people really appreciated. Okay, which brings us to number five, Mirage. So Mirage was October of 1996. Phil Rose was both the lead designer and the lead developer. So I talked with this in the previous podcast. Richard met, had some playtesters. One of the groups he met was through his Bridge Club, which we'd now refer to as the Bridge Club playtesters.

And they put together a set they called Menagerie, which later would become Mirage in Visions. So Bill obviously had led that when he was outside of Wizards, and then when we were the development team, he was the lead part when we were the development team. Not a lot of sets are designed and developed by the same person, but Bill did do that for Mirage. Mirage did a lot of things.

And so one of the things interesting about Bill is, like I said, Bill's one of the original play chapters. Bill was really interested in, like, he used to play a stratumatic baseball, and in it there's a way to draft. You draft your players. And Bill was really intrigued by the idea of drafting. So one of the things Mirage ended up doing is it really said, hey, we're going to make, we're going to think about drafting. We're going to think about limited in a way that previous sets did not.

At the podcast, I talked a lot about, like, you know, how many white creatures in common. an alpha could do damage to the opponent. And the answer was four, only one of which had two power, three had one power. How many red commons in legends could do damage to the opponent? One, raging bull.

In Ice Age, how many common flyers were there? Three, a one-one in white, a four, a four-four in blue, but with cumulative upkeep, and then a red, I think it was a one-one that you could pump it, like plus two plus-o and flying.

But then it died at the turn you did it. That's it. lying in common. So the reality is a lot of early magic did not lead itself to playing limited formats. Not that the people didn't play limited formats, we did, they just sucked. And Mirage was the first one to say, you know what, we're going to build into our

process. We are going to make creature curves. We're going to have the right removal. We're going to do all, we're going to put all the pieces we need to at the right as fan, at the right rarities so that this is a fun, limited environment. And I remember when I was at there was a pro tour in Atlanta where players had to play

like it was a pre-release pro tour, the only one we ever where players would get packs of Mirage they'd never seen before and had to build decks with them. And everybody was walking around and talking about how amazing their deck was. And the reason was, well, the last format they played was Ice Age, where, like,

you were lucky if you got, like, eight creature. I mean, it just was so hard to get creatures that were viable. So anyway, oh, Mirage also, in top of being the first set was built for draft, which is super important, was the first real block.

I mean, we sort of retrofitted Ice Age with alliances, but Mirage was the first actual block. We are making a block. There'll be three sets in the block. The block will introduce two mechanics, flanking and phasing, and that's going to run through the course of the entire block. Also, the other big thing about Mirage is just there are a lot of base staple things

that Mirage introduced. So anyway, Mirage, number five. Number four, cons of Tartar Keir, September 2014. I was a lead designer. Eric Lauer was the lead developer. So the idea of this world was it came about because I was trying to do a unique block structure. We were going to have two

large sets in it. So it's going to be large, small, large. The fall set would be large, winter set, small, spring set large in northern hemisphere seasons. So the idea was what if the first large set drafted with the middle set and the last large set drafted in the middle set, but they didn't draft with each other. And we needed a way to do that.

In fact, that led us to do our first, but will now become exploratory design with the winners of Great Design and Search 2, Ethan Fletcher and Sean Main. And we came up with this idea of a time travel set where the character, Sarkin, goes back in time, to save the dragons, which he does. So there is a new timeline. The third set is this new... So the first timeline is... Sorry, the first set is the main timeline.

Second set is the past, where he goes, and the third says a new timeline when he changes the past. Brings the dragons back. Not dragons. Instead of the cons of Turk here, it's the dragons of Turk here. Cons, originally, by the way, had four factions in it. There were going to be two, two-color factions and two-three-collar factions. And the creative team came up with a fourth, a fifth faction they wanted to do. So since there were five factions, we had a map to the color wheel. We'd never done wedge. Shards O'Lara had done the shards, the arcs, you know, color, and its allies.

We'd never done color as enemies. So we found a way to make it fit. We ended up using that two, two, two, three-three model for original. excellent. But anyway, we adapted it. And a lot of the adaptation came from Eric doing all the development. I mean, I did make it a wedge set and such. But, I mean, my team made the mechanics. But Eric really worked on the structure. And the structure for Convent Kier has become the go-to structure for three-color sets. Streets and Nuka Pena and Tarkir Dragonstorm literally both used it as a starting thing. Charger-Lara, obviously, the first set that had three-color,

but it was pretty messy. Eric really figured out how to structure correctly, how to build the mana correctly, like did a lot of things that were really crucial because three-color blocks are very hard to build. And Chargen-Lara did not really do it right. I mean, it was novel in that it had three colors, but it didn't support it in a way that we ended up that Kans did.

And so Kans really did a really good job of structuring and cementing that. Also, I mean, there's a lot like prowess got introduced, That's a deciduous mechanic. And morph was in it. And Eric figured out what we now call the morph rule. And the idea is if you, if your two-two is going to fight another creature and survive, like when it, sorry, if you have a morph creature and they have a morph creature and they fight each other, if you turn your morph creature face up, if you un-morph it, as we say, that's not the technical term. then you if you defeat it

meaning you kill it and you survive then you must cost at least five mana that's the morph rule we stick with it even when we did disguise in murderousal manner like that they become a default rule and it sort of taught us that sometimes you need structural systems and you

need rules that we then can structure around Eric was really really good at making rules a lot of a lot of the way development or sorry play design is done right now is using a lot of metrics, and not all of which Eric made, but a good chunk of which Eric made.

So anyway, that is why cons of Turk here is number four. Number three, invasion in October of 2000. Bill Rose was a lead designer. Henry Stern was a lead developer. So Bill had just become head designer shortly before that, and Bill was looking at the blocks.

And the way blocks used to work is you would pick two mechanics So Mirage had flinking and phasing Tempice had shadow and byback Erza Saga had cycling of echo Mercantia. They weren't named, but it had sort of rebel mercenary and spell shapers And Bill really said You know those what if we made it

What if we're starting to make a lot more sets A lot more blocks we want blocks to start having an identity to them So what if we gave them a theme And so he started with what he considered to be the most popular theme multi-color. And the fact, the way you can tell Bill was planning on this is there's a bunch of, like, 50 multicolored Mirage. I think it goes down to 16th and Tempest.

And then Erza Saga and Mercantia Mass, there is zero. There is no. Bill really withheld it, because he's like, I'm going to, we're going to build up and do something really special. So Invasion A introduced, I mean, it's the start of the third age of design, and introduced themes to blocks. And also, there's the very first set of any sort of block structure. structure. The idea that we're going to do the allies in the first two and then save the

enemy for the third one is the first time we ever saved something for later than the block. In fact, it would be my touchstone when I become head designer where all the blacks get planned. I mean, invasion did it and then the next couple sets didn't do it, but once I became a designer, I'm like, we're all, every set's going to do this. The second and third set will be spelled out before we get there. We're not just going to throw the, you know, well, here's some ideas, figure out what to do. We're not going to do that anymore. But invasion, really was my model that encouraged me and made me realize we could do that. Invasion also introduced kicker, which probably the most versatile mechanic of all the time. Regular listeners might know

my only problem with kickers, it's so versatile. It's a little too versatile. There's a lot of mechanics that really are just an offshoot of kicker. But it is a very, very useful mechanic and a staple. I mean, obviously, deciduous not. It's something we use all the time. So anyway, InVasion really, like I said, it was, it also introduced the split cards, which was the first time we did Ultimate Frame in a non-unset and really introduced the concept of what we could do. You know, it was just shockful of a lot of really important things. And that's why Invasion is my number three. Number two, Indistrade, September 2011. I was the head designer.

Eric Lauer's the head developer. So basically the idea was when I was originally doing Odyssey, Odyssey had a graveyard theme, the whole block. I remember I was talking with Brady Donovan. At the time, he was an editor at the time. He wasn't running the creative team yet. He and I were talking, he said,

wow, man, it really missed the mark. You don't want what a graveyard set wants to be? Gothic horror. And I'm like, that is an awesome idea. We should do a Gothic horror set. So I'm like, I'm going to do that. And it took a while, because a lot of time went by.

And I kept pitching in this idea. Finally, Bill wasn't, Bill was worried that we wouldn't get a whole block out of it. I was kidding, as we could, but Bill was worried. So originally the plan was, Bill Fine, said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do large set, small set of something. And then the last step, which will be a large set of a brand new world, will be Innestrade. So Inestrade will have a large set, but just one large set. That's probably all, you know, how many Gothic horror cards can you make?

And then he had a worldwide, not worldwide, a company-wide contest, mostly entered by R&D, of make a brand new world. There's this giant contest. Brian Tinsman won it for this pattern-matching world. And that was the original plan. There's going to be pattern-matching world, large set, pattern-matching world, small set, in the stront with the latter set.

And then somebody said, you know, the large set comes out right around Halloween. Are we missing a golden opportunity to have the fall set be a horror set right around Halloween? And so they decided to switch. And because they switched it, that meant that it needed to have a large-

set and a small send. Once again, Bill says, okay, can we do two sets? Yeah, Bill, we can do two sets. It's rich. Many, many, the horror genre is, look at TVs, look at movies. In fact, the thing that finally, I didn't mention this in my talk, the thing that finally got Bill on board with doing a horror set at all was the popularity of Twilight. I could point to Twilight, go, look, Bill, this is like the hot thing right now. You know, we could have sexy vampires. We could do that. And that's the thing that it made Bill realize the potential that there were a lot of people that really liked horror. So if you ever want to know what Twilight did for magic,

it got his inner stride. Anyway, then again, like I talked about in Ferros, Brady Domit, at this time, was in charge of the creative, came and said, look, we're not staff to do two different worlds. Let's do one world. We'll do a big event. Something will happen that allow us to do a brand new world with new mechanics, which ended up being, obviously, getting released from the Hell Vault.

But anyway, so Indistrite ended up becoming the whole block, but it did not start that way. So the reason that Indistrar is on the list is a bunch of things. One is, it really is the modern-day top-down set. Yes, we had Arabian Nights and Portal Three Kingdoms and the Champions of Kamagawa block, but this is the first set that really integrated the mechanics and the flavor at the same time. Like, let's figure out what we need to do flavor-wise and what we needed to do mechanically and build them together, interweave them together. they seem like a seamless thing.

You know, what came first? The flavor of the zombies or the horde attacking strategy? No, they happened together. You know, they were combined. And so it really is a modern sensibility. Once again, a lot of how other things, like, this is the set that we model

top-down sets off of. It might be, by the way, this one, or number two and number one is my best set that I personally did of all time, just from a structural standpoint. The other thing is, and this next part is more Eric me, Eric really understood, and this is the first set, we really get the idea of their 10 drafting archetypes, 10, two-color drafting archetypes.

While we didn't have gold cards yet, Eric did sort of weave things in with the way he did flashback costs, so there really was this inherent sense of, you can draft one of these 10 color pairs. The set introduces, what else is? interstrad do uh hold one second i'm i'm perking my car so i think even one second uh interstrad also introduced the i oh the idea of uh light typel the idea that you can have typel be a component and not not just maybe like type was the wrong word that you can have typel be an element of the set um but not be defined like a lot of our previous typel things like we had and like it defined the

whole set this was like it was a component piece typo can be an element of the set now we had done single, I guess like Typele is more, we did the single thing, like I talked about Zendikar, where we had Alice as one thing. This said had five different things. The structure was built around the typel, but it was much lesser. It's like, if you wanted to play zombies and do zombies, you couldn't, you weren't

forced to. There were other strategies you could do. And there wasn't a lot of cards that made you care about zombies. There was a little bit, but it was a much lighter touch. And a lot of future sets, like Bloomberg, oh a lot to sort of the later touch version of Typle that Indistrade introduced. Industrade had morbid

this idea that I care about the state of where you go and once again trying to care about something that normally happens in the game morbid as something we brought back a bunch of times obviously well we brought back a flashback but that flashbacks credited it more to Odyssey then I'll give it to that

but anyway Innestrade was just a really well-structured set okay which gets us in number one Ravnika City of Guilds October of 2005 I led the design Brian Schneider led the development

man Ravnik did so many different things we actually had a panel once at MagicCon about all the influences of Ravnika it's really big for starters one of the biggest things is this was a set where we finally had what I call color balance early magic did not treat

ally and enemy colors the same there were significantly more ally colored cards the ally card cards were stronger and I finally said no we got to stop doing this I said, for this block, let's just treat them all the same. And it really became just like us realizing that capturing the flavor of an enemy was not as important as making the game fun to play. And so this is where we put the stake in the ground and said,

we are just going to treat all the color pairs the same. We had not done that before. Ravnikov also, this was the beginning of the fourth stage of magic. This is once again when I took over as head designer. Well, Inesrod might have hinted at the idea of what we could do with block structure. Ravnik is beginning of true block structure. The first set does this. It has these four guilds. Then these three guilds. Then these three guilds. It's past. It's present. It's future. Like things start getting mapped out in a way where we plan ahead what we're doing. The small sets aren't just at the mercy of, okay, do something that we care about them and we purposely plan what they're up to. Also, it was the set that really reinvigorated how multi-color was done. Invasion had multi-color, obviously. But a lot of the lessons we learned about how, like the right source of mana and how to, we even into drafting started from Ravnika.

It introduced it hybrid mana. That was something that got introduced, and now it's become a major, major tool that we use all of a time. The idea, oh, factions, factions, I mean, there have been some light factions before, but the idea is factional identity, where each faction gets a

mechanic, and it's the structural support of a set came from here. It's something so big we do it all for time now, whether it's Strixavin or Drag of Tarketer or, I mean, or the courts in an eldron. Like, it's just become a staple

of kind of how we build things. And sometimes, sometimes there's mechanical definition, sometimes there's less, but it's just become a big thing of, like, how, you know, who are you, what are you doing? What do you, what do you belong to? This was a set that

really, even though Ungluid introduced watermarks, is the set that really brought watermarks in a major way into normal sort of blackboarded magic. I mean, the thing about Ravnikov was, there's just so many different things, you know, iconography, the idea of really giving symbols, which we tied with the watermarks. It's when we finally changed the gold card so that we put pin lines on them so that you could tell what colors a card was if you couldn't see the manna value.

There's just a lot of improvements. And Ravnik in Minoway really was the stake in the ground. And anyway, that's why Rabnika is my number one. It just influenced so many other things in so many different ways. So anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed it. So a quick recap, a recap, the top 20 most influential sets of all time. Number 20, Lord of the Rings. Number 19, unglued.

Number 18, tempest. Number 17, Mirrodin. Number 16, Magic, 2010. Number 15, alliances. Number 14, antiquities. Number 13, War of the Spark. Number 12, Dominaria. Number 11, Theros.

number 10, legends, number nine, Odyssey, number eight, Zendikar, number seven, Future Sites, number six, Khamaguanian Dynasty, number five, Mirage, number four, Kandar Kansitarkir, number three, invasion, number two, Inestrade, and number one, Ravnika, City of Guilds. So anyway, guys, I hope you've enjoyed my speech concentrated down to three podcasts. It's been fun to do, and I added a few things that weren't in my main speech, but if you want to see my main speech, that's up online on YouTube, just look for a Mark Rosewater is the 20 most influential

expansion magic expansions of all time and you can see the official version of the speech I gave it's a little bit different than my podcast so anyway

I recommend you go watch that if you enjoyed this podcast anyway guys I'm now at work so I don't know what that means it means the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me

to be making magic I'll see you guys next time bye bye