Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1302: 30 Years, Part 4

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

This is my fourth and final episode talking about 30 big design evolutions since I started working at Wizards of the Coast in October 1995. This is based on a three-part series I did in my Making Magic column.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay. So I've been doing a series called 30 years where I've been talking about the 30 design innovations that have happened since I started working at Wizards in October of 1995.

So when last we left, I was up to number 24, which is disciplined subgroups. And the very first one, I believe, was the Council of Colors in August. August of 2015. So, essentially, the way I first got to Wizards in 1995, and the color by was something that I was always fascinated by. But one of the things I noticed is, in one of the previous podcasts, I talked about how

the rules were sort of, every rule was made to make each card make sense in a vacuum, and that the six-edition rules sort of consolidated the rules. Well, there was something similar that I had to do with the rules. color pie which was kind of like color pie was chosen like in a vacuum like oh this card what's the flavor for this card okay i'll put it in that color um and there wasn't necessarily uh as much design cohesion as you would think now some colors definitely did certain things that you know this card tended to be in black see it in black but every once in a while you would see things in other colors and the idea was well as long as i flavor it correctly i can put it whatever color i

want. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, the really important part of the color pie was that there are limitations. Like, Richard really got that when he made magic. Like, he really, you know, he made the color pie to separate things. And in Alpha, things were pretty separated. But as people continued on, you know, that it wasn't any sort of, like, something was red because the flavor of the card was red, not because red definitely mechanically meant something. And that there was, there started be a lot of drift. There started to be like, well, you know, if I want to do direct damage, I can do direct damage in blue as long as it's flavored right, you know. And so I really became

a stickler to say, you know, we want to have mechanical consistency. That the color pie, I loved all the philosophical of the color pie, but we also needed to make sure that it meant something. Like, the whole idea of the color pie was that there are strengths and weaknesses. But if we kept broadening out what we could do, you undermine the weakness. especially. And in some level, undermine the strengths. Like, if every color can do something, it's not a strength of a color. And if a color can do everything, it has no weaknesses. And that, that, the core idea of why the color pie existed was for this diversity. And so, um, I, I spent some time moving things around saying, is this supposed to be there? Is this supposed to be here?

And, you know, there's a period in like, between 96 and maybe 98, where we start saying, oh, is this primarily supposed to be this color? Is this supposed to be that color? Should ritualing be in black? Is what's supposed to be the number one? Artifact destruction color? And like sort of did a lot of sort of experimenting around. I mean, I got buying from R&D and sort of started saying, okay, this color does this. It does not do that. And, you know, and also really started to solidify. Like, okay, red can't deal with enchantments. We should not make any cards that led red deal with enchantments. It doesn't matter if they're white. It doesn't matter if it's random. That's supposed to be an inherent

weakness of red. So anyway, I spent a lot of time on that. And then, mostly I was the person that was sort of doing the upkeep on it, meaning I was the one that cared. So I would read through files. Now, early on, this was easy. I was on every development set. So I was there to make the notes on stuff. As we started going along and I started not being on every development set, I had to start keeping my eye on things. And, you know, that wasn't that hard when we were making, you three, four sets a year. But as we started making more things and started making supplemental sets,

it began harder. And I started missing things just because, one, you know, just because I thought it wasn't right, I still had to convince the lead designer of that set like that it wasn't right.

I had to convince them. It wasn't like I had some authority to go, don't change that. And the other thing was, I just didn't see everything. There's so much stuff getting made. Now, at some point I became head designer. That gave my word a little more weight,

So it's a little bit easier to get people to change things. But still, you know, and I remember, like, it was like, what was it, Chaos Warp? I think Ken Nagel made Chaos Warp. And his heart was in the right place. He was trying to like, well, how exactly would Red get rid of Enchantments? I'm like, no, no, no, no. We're not trying to let Red get rid of Enchantments. It's not like Red can get rid of Chalmers.

Only if it does it in a really red way. No, no, no, that's an inherent weakness of Red. It's not supposed to be able to do that. And at one point, Mark Gottlieb, made a suggestion, he said, well, what if, Instead of you doing it, since you were very busy, what if we made a team to do it? And so we started the council of colors. And the idea was that each color would have a representative, a counselor of that color, meaning that any one person was only responsible for looking at all the cards of one particular color.

So roughly about a fifth of the cards, which was a more manageable task than me trying to look at everything. And we eventually made a colorist counselor that was kind of our training position. And we started to have a weekly meetings. And the idea is now there's a structure of, you know, there's certain times that you check in with the set and make sure the second's done. And there's people that are discussing this and having conversations and that instead of it just being on my shoulders,

there's not an entire dedicated team who's responsible for it. And by having a dedicated team, it says this matters. This is important. It's not just me saying something. It's this whole team saying something. And the other thing that I found really interesting is, you know, one of the cool things about having a team is I had opinions, but it's nice to get a lot of different opinions and sort of having a nuanced, more blended thing.

It's not sort of one person's take on it. It is a whole team's take on it. And from that idea, the idea of just having dedicated teams that meet weekly, it really proved to be valuable. We now have weekly meeting or sometimes biweekly on some of these. For Commander, for Universes Beyond, for casual play, for acquisition, for vision design. like the idea of people getting together that care about a certain element of magic and being able to talk through and just have conversations about how is magic affecting this particular thing

and having a group that can be dedicated and thinking about it and then that group can then take its information much like the consular color does and spread it out so that you can say okay we're doing something we're changing something you know or if people have a problem with something they have a team they can go to to help them solve that problem And so this idea of the discipline subgroup has been a very, very important tool, very useful. The idea of getting a bunch of people who all care about the same thing in a room together and hashing through issues, like, for example, I'm on the Universes Beyond team, right?

And we just walk through, you know, every week we get together, we talk through, what are issues? Like, what are challenges that are unique to do in universes beyond? Let's talk about that. Let's have discussions about them. And then we can walk through and figure out best practices. Okay, so that is discipline subgroups. Number 25, vision design, set design, and play design. So when Magic first started, design was done outside the building.

You know, Richard obviously made original alpha. He made Arabian Nights. Antiquities was made by the East Coast Playceptors. Legends was made by friends of Steve Conard, who are good friends of Pete Akison. You know, the dark was made by Ypres Mereforce. who was also within wizards. So the early magic was made by either people that knew richer who were early playtefters or people that knew richer

that were usually employees at wizards. But at some point, we decided that having external designs, so in those days, they would get turned in, and then an R&D group, a development group, would then look at it with a second set of eyes. Eventually, starting around Weatherlight Tempice, we decided to start doing design internal, but we still led to the idea that there were two sets of eyes.

So there would be design team and then at some point the design team would hand off to the development team and design would last about a year development was another nine months to a year and then at one point

Eric Lauer said that he thought that we were like Eric Lauer was really good at questioning things that we'd always done and go is this the best way to do it and there were a bunch of moving pieces going on at the time we were ramping up to do more sets one of my challenges was

I tend to do the early part of the design but design was a year long so they were stacking up and it was becoming harder for me to do so Eric Pitch what if we, instead of having it broke into three sections design development

it got broken into two sections into three sections vision design set design and play design Explor design which I talked about previously still existed it was separate from that process

but essentially there's now four stages For those that, my quick metaphor, for those that haven't heard it, we're building a house. Explority for design is what kind of house we want to build, what kind of materials we want to use, what's a good area to build in, meaning it's all research about what you want to do. Vision design is the architecture. You're building the floor plans, the blueprint. What are the themes of the set?

What's the structure of the set? What are the mechanics of the set? You're building the big picture things. Set design is the actually building of the house. That it's all good to have blueprints. but sometimes when you actually build it, you got to adapt a thing. Because things that you just didn't know that the architect didn't know until you actually go build the house.

Oh, there's sheetrock here. I can't dig in the, right, you know, I have to move the bearing wall. You have to make changes like that. And then play design is kind of interior decorating. Like, it's all the finishing touches to make everything as clean and smooth as possible. Play design is very focused on making it a fair design, balance design, and a fun design. But anyway, we made, sorry, I didn't. So the discipline subgroups, the consular colors,

was August 2015. So Vision Design, Set Design, Play Design started in Dominaria, which was April of 2018. And it really was a fundamental change of the way we sort of approached. I mean, it's not that the same basic things weren't getting done. It just got done in a slightly different structure with more different people taking a look at it and allowing so things lined up a little bit better.

One of the old problems, for example, was development was in charge of art, but art had to happen so soon after development took over. that it was warping, like set design, the people who are going to do the art need more time before the art gets due so they understand what they're doing and not getting trapped into doing certain things just because the art is already forcing their hand. A lot of things like that. There's a lot of moving pieces, but it was just a cleaner, simpler structure. And it is now how we make magic. Okay, number 26, collation as a design component. This also happened Dominaria in April 2018.

So what collation is, is we got to print magic cards. And so the way we do that is we print cards on a giant sheet. The traditional one is 11 by 11, meaning 11 cards tall and 11 cards wide. They're different sizes with sometimes 11 by 10,

10 by 10. There's different sizes that can be. But the idea essentially is that's how you print magic cards. And one of the goals is, in order to maximize from a business standpoint, you don't want to make extra sheets. Extra sheets are expensive. So you want to figure out how many sheets you're making. And what those sheets are and how many cards on the sheet determines things like

how many cards that each rarity. Like you have to sort of match the sheets. So when we were making time spiral, I talked about us making bonus sheets where we made an extra sheet that had extra components on it. Then when we did double face cards in Inesrod, in order to make those work, those need to be printed on their own sheet. So each one of those was we made, we made things in their own sheet and they ended up getting dropped in their own slot because they were their own sheet. So for example, if you opened up time spiral, you would guarantee of getting one time-shifter sheet per pack. If you opened up Inestrade, you knew you were going to get one double face card per pack. And one of the things, so Dave Humphreys was the set designer for Dominaria.

And one of the themes of the set was had a legendary theme. Now we had done a legendary theme before in Champs of Kamagawa. But what we had done is we just made all the rairs and some of the uncommon's legendary, which was a lot of legendary cards, but it was hard for you to understand that. Like, we talk a lot about as-fan,

like how often when you spread your cards, you see something. Well, when cards are sitting at rare, you know, your ass-end is pretty low. You don't, you know, for example, if you open up Chamsa-Gama-gawa, you might not have even opened up a card that had a legendary card on it. Maybe your rare wasn't

a creature. You know, and you're uncommon, there's only a couple legendary creatures that are uncommon, it's not a lot of them. Like, you could open up a pack and there'd be no legends in it. And maybe open a second pack

and maybe the rare is a legend, but that doesn't necessarily tell anything. We make a rare legends, maybe just open up a legend. You know, you have to open up a lot of packs before you start to notice that pattern. So one of the ideas that Dave had in Dominaria was,

is there a way for us to drop a, like, could we make the theme of the second, something we drop. Could we have legendary creatures as an inherent drop? And the answer was we could. Like it required us doing some collation for it, but the idea here is that collation can be I always talk about as-fan where we're trying to get the rarities to do something. But the cool thing about dropping a card in a slot, meaning every booster has a card of this slot, that's an as-fan of one. You are guaranteed every pack has one of them, right? Because you're guaranteeing it.

And the idea that Coalation isn't just a tool to make cards, but a tool that design can use purposely to show theme was a really interesting idea. And it's something that, once again, a lot of what I'm talking about in this whole podcast series is we come up with something. We use it going to go, oh, wow, that's useful. We're going to use that again. And Coalation and the design tool is exactly that. That we found it was very useful. And it's something that we go back to it a lot now.

Okay, next. Batching. This is also in Dominaria, number 27. So, April of 2018. So I was trying to solve a problem. The set, we were going back to Dominaria after many years away, and we wanted to integrate it into kind of the modern take-on planes. Plains now had a theme. You know, Inestrade's the Gothic horror plane. Ravenica is the city, the city of Guilds plane. You know, Amuncad is the Egyptian mythology plane. Like, planes had a, clean, clear theme to them. You knew what to expect when you saw them. The problem with Dominares was, we had been on,

like, 40 sets that took place in Dominaria. Is it the, you know, the cold ice age plane? Is it the Ward Jamora plane? Is it the, like, there's all these different things that had happened there. So we was like, we wanted to consolidate and find some way to give it a theme. We ended up on the idea of history. This was a plane that had a lot of history within world,

but a lot of history in the game. That when we talk about a lot of these stories, You were there, if you've been playing long enough. Like, you remember that happening. And so we wanted to play into the idea of history. The low-hanging fruit for history was the graveyard, but it turns out that a set before us, Aminket, and a set after us, there is beyond death,

we're both making use of the graveyard in a pretty big way. So we're like, let's not do the graveyard. So we came up with the idea of, well, what are things that feel like time, that feel like history? Okay, you can have objects, artifacts, often can be objects of the past and legendary creatures can be characters of the past. And sagas

which we made for Dominaria were like stories of the past. So what if we used those elements? So we made cards and we just list them out. Oh, whenever you play an artifact or a legendary item or a saga, do something. But the note we got from people was like, I don't get why these are together. They didn't

understand the thematic connection. And I remember Bill Rose played the set and his takeaway is, I just don't get that. And he said, you should take that out of the set. And I'm like, no, no, no. It's like the glue holding things together. And so he gave me a month.

He said, if you can't get people to understand this, so it's clean and clear within a month, we're going to change it. And it was really, really important to the set. So I'm like, I'm dedicated to figuring this out. So we tried a lot of things. We tried, like, you know, using the title to say, oh, this is Joyrah, lover of history. But the name didn't sell it.

We did ability word, historic, an ability word, but people still weren't getting it. So I tried something radical. We were done to our last week, and I said, okay, what if I don't, what if I just name it out, what if I use historic as the descriptor, and I don't

list them out? I mean, I'll list them on the reminder text, but, so whenever you play a historic card, you know, Joy rate draws the card. And when I stop, when I put it in the reminder text, when I just put it front and center to you as the word, people got it. Like, oh, it's just

what's a historic card? Oh, that makes sense. These are historic cards. Like, they approached it by going, what is this thing? And the word described it. And then when they looked at the list, with a mind frame of,

oh, this is the flavor. They understood it. So this is what we call batching. And the idea is we can take numerous things, super types, types, subtypes, and we can put them together. Now, in the case of historic, there literally is a super type and a type

and a subtype. Because Legendary is a Supertype. Artifacts as a type, and Saga's as a subtype. We've used them in different ways. Party sort of grouped together, batch together, creature types as an outlaw. Modified was sort of... It talked about things being enchanted or equipped

or had counters on them, so that's using a slightly different way to use batch. But the idea essentially is we can take a bunch of things, connect them together, use a word to explain it. And the thing that I really like about batching is it allows you the players to do something new like historic you now get to care about three things that you never cared about before together

but the point is artifacts exist artifacts existed for all of magic legendary creatures existed for most of magic sagas were new at the time although now there's lots of sagas but the idea essentially is yeah maybe you made a deck of artifacts maybe you made a deck of legendary creatures or something or maybe you made a deck of sagas

but now you can mix and match and then it just allows you do something you haven't done before and there's a lot of richness and a lot of flavor and it's something, there's batching coming up and, you know, we found it an interesting way to sort of convey some flavor. Okay, that was batching. Number 28 in October of 2018,

the creation of producers. So this is the only one under the 30 that's not what I call outward facing, which means when I explained to you what we did, you can go, oh, okay, yeah, I remember seeing that. You know, I'm talking about, like, batching. Okay, well, you've seen batching. You can see the things I'm talking about.

The producers are kind of behind-the-scenes thing, but it's important. So, for many, many years, the way that Wizards was set up is we had what we called product teams, which meant that R&D was responsible for designing Magic Car, or designing whatever. We already also designed other games like dual masters, but R&D was about designing things. We were the people that designed stuff. and other teams would sort of when I say hire is not quite the right word but use us to do the things they needed to get done for their product

so the products didn't live like the products lived across multiple teams that there was a brand team that was responsible for the business but then their R&D is responsible with the design and marketing you know is responsible advertising and stuff like that so when Chris Cox became the CEO

So he's our couple CEOs back. He came up with a new idea of how he wanted to do things. So instead of having teams based on what you did, he wanted teams based on the product, product teams. The idea being is magic has a team. So he took not just the designers, the designers, the creative, the editing, the people that do the layout, the graphics, the advertising, all the business. Everything about magic was consolidated into one team.

what we had at the time called Studio X. So the idea now is that originally was Bill Rose, now it's Ken Troop, oversees all of the studio. So one person who's in charge of magic oversees all the groups that are responsible for making magic. And that is a big change. So one of the things that happened during that change is we created this title of producer. So one of the things that for the longest time is if I was making a magic set, there was a lot of things that had to get done. And I, the person in charge of the team, okay, if we had meetings, I had to schedule the meetings. If we had to have a playtest, I had to print playtest cards.

If we had, like, whatever it was, I was kind of responsible as the lead for doing that. But it's, there's a lot going on. There's a lot of moving parts. And the reality is that having everything responsible by individuals was problematic. So the idea of the producers was, let's get a team that's looking at the whole thing in big picture. And because they were there, they had the. the ability to start doing those functions. Well, it's a lot easier if one person schedules all the meetings rather than every individual

person scrambles, like, in the beginning of the month, you had to scramble to find your meeting rooms. And that was a real pain, but now say, okay, what if one person schedules all of them at once? That's a lot easier. They can do them in conjunction. You can make sure that room, you know, if people, if certain people are in the same meeting, you could put them in the same room back to back. Or if we're doing playtests or play days or, you know, there's a lot of things that kind of fell

through the cracks because, you know, there was no one specifically responsible for it. Or it just overloaded the designers like, okay, I have a playday tomorrow. Well, I got to spend two days doing nothing else but getting ready for the playday and printing cart. You know, there's a lot of stuff that I had to do. So bringing the producers and have people that were both looking at everything at once, meaning it's a lot easier to understand schedules when you're looking at everything rather than just your piece of it.

And just the ability that they can master and learn things. like the idea if we had to print cards everybody individually had to learn how the printers worked and all the how it took collation and like things are constantly changing so like it just you had to educate so many people about how things worked where when you had a couple people responsible

they could learn how those things worked and it just made everything so much smooth and efficient and MK and Nico are two producers Sam was filling in for a while and they get a lot done and they make our job so much easier they make design so much easier

And when I was making this list, the reason I decided to include it was the amount, like, the amount of improvement in design just from having producers was so high that even though it was not outward facing, even though you guys had no idea of being existed, I really felt it's important to mention it. Okay, number 29. I grouped these together. They're actually kind of free things, but I look at you 30. So Project Booster Fun, Collector Boosters, and Secret Layer. So I'm using Front of Eldra in October 2019. technically speaking that the booster fund is premiered and eldrain. Actually, collective boosters were a year or two earlier.

The idea that we had was that we do a lot of cool things on magic. Wouldn't it be neat if, like, if you're really excited in getting the harder to get stuff, we can just sell you a booster pack that's a little more expensive, but has a lot more of that hard-to-get thing. And the reason I bring booster fun here is it's not really to a booster fund kicked in that really collected booster started to shine. Early collected boosters were mostly about getting premium versions. But now

we have a lot of, like, the whole idea of booster fun is, look, we'll print the normal versions of cards. But we then can do extra fun versions. That part of, you know, magic is a trading card game. Yeah, yeah, it's a game, but it's also trading cards. There's things you can trade and it's fun to collect. Like, collecting

is an important part. And we spent a lot of time really, in fact, we started a whole division on collecting. That's separate from sort of the making of magic. Now, they don't do just for magic. They do a bunch of different things. But the idea of there's a lot of elements to how to make magic a fun of collectible as possible. Look, it's still first and foremost a game. We make sure that all the major pieces of the game are accessible. And so, but the idea is that

there's a lot of fun things we can do. There's a lot of neat things we can do to cards. In front of Eldrain, we did the storybook frame for all the adventures. So anyway, we started with this idea of There's lots of fun and different ways to do things. One of the parts of magic is that magic is all about sort of expressing yourself, right, of showing who you are, that you get to build your deck. But not only can you build your deck where you pick the pieces of it, but we can allow you to have different versions of cards so you can pick the things that are most exciting. And then Secret Layer got on the idea of, you know,

maybe we can do some things that aren't big enough that it makes sense to send to stores. One of the challenges of going through the stores is there's a lot of stores, that the volume we have to produce something to be viable to do in stores is pretty high. And Secretar came along and said, oh, well, there's not enough people that we can make this to go to stores, that there's not enough demand for that.

But there isn't enough demand if we do direct to sales that we can, there is a big enough audience for that. And it allowed us to, once again, really start exploring and really having fun and go to do different kinds of artists and styles and we can make cards that look like movie posters or cereal boxes or hot wheel cars

or, you know, we can just make things look like lots of cool different things. And so, like I said, we introduced, thrown out and introduced boosters fun. Collected boosters were slightly before that, but I think sort of really boosher fun and collection boosters went together so well. And then Secret Lear was somewhere around there, where we started sort of getting people access to really cool and different things. Anyway, I think it's been a huge, huge success.

And one of the things that we really think about in design now, is when we're making things, we do think ahead about what's the cool elements and we sit down and have meetings with the graphic people about what we think, you know, what are the cool parts of the set and what do we think there really are neat executions on to do fun things. And, you know, with Universes Beyond, we're doing a lot of source material. Anyway, there's lots of fun and cool things we get to do. Okay, which brings us to number 30, speaking of Universes Beyond. Universe is Beyond.

So I list here, the first official Universe is Beyond, was the Walking Dead Dead Secret Land on October 2020. Actually, it started a little before that. I mean, first and foremost, we did a Dungeon Dragon set, which is the first time we'd ever done, I mean, I guess, sorry, if you go back to early magic, the very first expansion of magic

was Arabian Nights. That was Richard taking something that was not a magic creation, that was a pre-existing story, and making a magic set out of it. Then, Portal Three Kingdom, which was the third, third portal set. Henry Stern took a classic tale,

the tale of three kingdoms, and made a set out of it. So we had played in the space before. We also had done a thing called the Ark System, which was kind of like an early magic, it was pre-Portle. And that had all the, there were different, we made, I think, a C-23

that was a comic book that Wizards had done. And then we had Hercules and Xena that were TV shows. that we made out of. So, like, the idea of having trading cards, I mean, trading cards and pop culture go together.

So cut forward many years, and Aaron Forsyce notices how when he goes online, how many people have fun sort of expressing their favorite pop culture through the lens of magic. Like, on my blog, I was getting questions all the time about, okay, what colors would these characters be, you know, and I would have fun and go, oh, I think this or this or that. And Aaron realized that there just was a lot of pent-up demand for expressing other things through magic. Magic is a lens by which, you know, in some levels, there's a lot of tools in making a magic cards.

We really can express a lot of different things. It's a very robust system. And so what we did is the first thing we tried after Dungeon Dragons is we did for Ixelon, this is back in 2020, we did a parallel, some of the cards had alternate art, that was Godzilla. We actually worked with the company that made Godzilla.

It did actual Godzilla cards. Now, those were all skins, meaning there was an existing magic card and then the Godzilla version of that card is Godzilla art. But we renamed. And so we tried that. We did the skin again once with Dracula.

We started putting in parallel stuff like Transformers and Jurassic World. We've tried different things of that. And then we got the idea of, well, what if we did secret layers directly to you? So, in fact, the Walking Dead Secret Lair, I actually designed the cards. There were six or seven cards. What happened was they were starting to do, Secret Lair was trying to do this, start playing with other IPs. And so we were designing some original cards.

And what happened was Brady Bell, who at the time was one of our producers. He's still at the company. He just doesn't do this job. He's now doing other stuff. He came and said to me We really need a design Walking Dead I think you're the only person R&D that really, really is a fan of Walking Dead

or the only one that he... Anyway, I'm a fan of Walking Dead I read the whole comic I watched not all the TV series but I watch a lot of the TV series and so I actually designed the cards The idea is and it was really, really fun

there's something really neat about I need to express something like in the card the villain of Walking Dead or one of the villains is named Negan, and, you know, I had to design a card for Negan, and I really wanted to capture this exact moment in the story that it had occurred both in the comics and the TV show.

And I made a card that I would never have made otherwise. Like, it's a really cool design that I really liked. So, well, I don't even get it in that. But anyway, so we made it. I will say, when Walking Dead came out, it was very controversial. We had done two things at once, by the way, which is, for the very first time in Secret Layer,

we made unique mechanical cards, which we then promised we would make sure to make them somewhere else so that the only way to get the mechanical cards wasn't just Secret Layer. And we did another IP. I mean, we had done Dungeons, we had done skins, but this is like, this card exists and only exists as this IP. It was controversial at the time.

Now, Walking Dead did go on to become the best-selling Secret Layer of all time. universe is beyond I will say it definitely I mean whenever we do something new there is a lot of reaction and this is one

I mean I've done podcast and articles on some of the things that have spawned a lot of audience interaction and universe is beyond is interesting

in that it has been quite successful and when I say successful I mean a lot of people are buying the sets A lot of people are playing the sets.

A lot of people are enjoying the sets. When we do market research, people are really liking the sets. That it's not as if I'm saying we're doing something, you know, but there is a group that does not like them. It's not a very big group proportionally, percentage-wise, but there are people that really feel like it's fundamentally violating something that matters to them about magic. And that is the hard part.

One of the challenges, and I talk about this all the time, which is I'm trying to make a lot of people happy. what do I do when I make one group very happy and another group unhappy you know for example there are people that really really don't like us doing dark thing on magic cards that do not like horror on magic cards that really really dislike it

and I've gotten letters from people saying can you please stop doing this I really think it's wrong that you're doing horror it really takes away from the game of magic to me but the problem for me is there's a lot of players that really enjoy when we do horror and magic that's their favorite genre that's really fun for them And that's one of the tricky things is, you know,

we're trying to make magic for all the people to play magic. So what do we do when we make something that's really, really enjoyable by one audience and not enjoyable by another audience? And the answer kind of is, well, I mean, if I use my buffet metaphor, it's like, we're making seafood for the people that like seafood. If you don't like seafood, okay, don't eat the seafood, but there's people that really, really enjoy the seafood. That's why we have seafood.

Universe is Beyond falls in that. I do think if you are a fan of magic, that Universe is Beyond, there's a lot. of good that it does for you, even if you don't actually like the particular properties. So here's the biggest things that it does for us. One is, from a creative standpoint, it just forces us to design things I think we never design. A lot of neat, innovative things have come out of us trying to match things. The other big thing is one of the biggest problems with magic is what I call barrier entry. It is hard to learn to play magic. Knowing nothing

to knowing enough to play magic is a big leap. One of the ways we've discovered that helps people get there is if you do something that they're passionate about, that they're excited about, they are willing to spend the time to learn. Universe is beyond has been that. A lot of people who previously have said, I'm not playing magic, I said, well, if you're doing this thing, I really like that thing, I guess I'll learn. And that once someone learns magic, magic is so much fun. It's such a good game that they get sucked in. And, and it's also have been great for bringing back players, for players who, like, elapsed players, we call them, who played magic and then drifted away for whatever reason, and all of a sudden,

oh my God, you're doing this, and they come back and they get reinvigorated and play magic again. And there's also a lot, a lot of players, right? The vast majority of people who buy Universes Beyond are not new players, are not lap players. They're existing magic players. There's a lot of people who really do enjoy the properties that we find, and they have a lot of fun playing with them. I know there's a lot of beliefs of the idea that, like, Universe is Beyond, Like, it's doing so much to grow magic, so much to raise awareness of magic. Another big thing we talk about is, when I say awareness, is how many people, if you go to the average American and say to them, have you ever heard of this thing?

They say yes or no. And then that's your awareness score, right? Magic is like high 50s, low 60s, like, well over a third, you know, slightly over a third of Americans. I'm not talking about playing magic, not talking about knowing someone who plays magic. have never heard of the game of magic. And that's insane. You know, Monopoly's awareness is like 99%, right? Like, everyone's heard of Monopoly.

So one of the things that, like, Universes Beyond is doing is spreading the message of magic, making more people aware of magic, raising awareness of magic. It is doing a lot of good. And from an R&D standpoint, I think we're doing some of our best design. I think it was really, I mean,

obviously we're trying to do really awesome in multiple universe design, which we are. But we're also doing really cool design, you know, universes beyond. So I think we're, making a lot of really fun stuff, and I think it's been a big boost to magic. I know, right, in this moment, that might seem a little controversial to some people, but I truly believe that.

So anyway, guys, that is, in just four podcasts, the top 30 design innovations since February, since October of 1995 since I started working at Wizards. So I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. And once again, there's a three-part series that I wrote in my Making Magic column, if you want to see this but in written form that exists. But anyway, I hope you guys enjoy it, but I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.