Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1305: Alara Reborn

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In this podcast, I talk about the third set of the Shards of Alara block.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to rather drive to work. Okay. So today is another in my ongoing series to talk about every magic expansion. So I'm up to Alara Reborn. So Alara Reborn is the third set in the Shards of Alara block. So let me talk a little bit about the block to set the scene. I had become head designer in the middle of Champs of Kamagawa block. So the first full block that I was in charge of was Ravnika. Then after Ravica was time spiral, then was Lorwyn. And then was Shards Valara.

So my boss at the time, Bill Rose, he wanted to lead a block. And when your boss says, I would like to do something, you say, I mean, Bill had done invasion. I mean, Bill, Bill was a very good designer, so it wasn't, it wasn't if he was asking something that he shouldn't be asking. So Bill really was the one that sort of planned this block. In fact, it's the only block during my time as head designer where I wasn't key. I mean, I was involved, but this was Bill's vision.

So basically, Bill, so there was a couple things ahead. Number one was, this was going to be our third. multi-color block. And so Bill was interested in finding a new space. The first multicolor block, which Bill had led, was Invasion. Invasion was very much play four and five colors. Then years later, we did Ravnika. Ravnika was me trying to play as few colors as possible to stay away from invasion.

So obviously it had to be two since multicolor. One wouldn't be multicolor. So we made the, you know, Ravenca City of Guilds and did two-color play. So Bill's idea, which makes a lot of sense, was, well, we've done. four and five, we've done two, let's do three. And Shards of a Lara block was the only

that was the first time we'd ever really done a three-color focus. We had like legends which introduced multi-collar had some three-collar cards and we we had made some three-collar cards but we had never focused on the theme. And this was the first set to really focus on it as a theme, this block. Or even just

sat really. Okay, and then Bill Bill has this idea that he wanted to do that. He also had this... So we have what we call gimmick sets. Something we don't really do anymore. The idea of a gimmick set is there's something bold

about the nature of the set. The most common gimmick sets are like, all the set is blank. For example, we did a set called Legions. The entire set was creatures. Every card in the set was creatures. So Bill came up with the idea of what if we did a set

that was all gold, completely gold. You open it up and fan it and it's nothing but gold cards. Now, I think Bill realized that you couldn't do a large standalone set that you drafted that was all gold. That this wouldn't work. So this idea was, what if we worked toward? What is the final set? The third set would be a small set, and it would have something you draft third.

So we'd have a lot of less responsibility to have themes in it. What if that was the all-gold set? And then Bill came up the idea of what if the middle set was play all the colors. So it was three colors, five colors, and then the idea of the gold set would be more two colors. Three colors, five colors, two colors. It was a very bold idea. I will admit, looking back with lots of years of experience, probably not really attainable. One of the things we've learned along the ways is it's very hard, it's really hard to get people play three color without getting them to play five color.

but then encouraging them play five-collar and then thinking to go back down to two-collar is just not the way people are going to draft. So I think this block definitely had some heady ideas and there's a lot of cool things. It's not that Alara were born wasn't a cool concepted set. But I'll get in today.

There's a bunch of trouble. And one of the reasons we don't really do gimmick sets anymore is they are a huge, huge amount of work. The way I like to say it is, we are building a house. We have all these tools to build a house. And it's like, well, what if we built a house and just didn't

use a saw or a hammer? Can you build a house? Like, well, you can. But, you know, saws and hammers are really useful to building a house. And so we give us up a lot of restrictions in sort of the gimmick sets, and it's not as if it excites players all that much.

It doesn't raise people talking about it. It doesn't raise sales, like it doesn't really have a lot of impact what you would hope it would have for all the work it is. And so, I think part of our goal is we want to make the best sets we can, like tying our hand behind our back just to say we could. I talk about this, one of my design truisms, that doing something just to prove that you can do it

is not inherently good design. It's kind of fitting the ego of the designer. We'll see if I can do this. Is there a reason to do that? Having restrictions is fine if the restrictions serve the set, if the restrictions are something that enhances what the set is doing. But sort of doing it to prove you can do it, just giving yourself a handicap to see if you can do it,

is not ideal design. Oh, the other thing about the block, the story of the block was, we've come to the world of Alara. Many, many years ago, through some events that I don't know the name of, the world got split into five shards. And each shard was its own sort of separate world, disconnected from the other shards of Alara. And each shard had the following principle to it.

It only had three colors of mana. It had one color and its two allies, but not its enemies. So what kind of world where white was dominant, where white had its allies, but no enemies of white? What kind of world would create? That became banned. How about a world where blue is king and blue doesn't have to deal with its enemies, red and green?

Like white didn't have red and black. Blue doesn't have red and green. That's Esper. Black lives in a world without pesky white and green. That is Grixis. And then John lives in a world without blue or white, where red can shine. And then Naya was, where green gets to shine without black or blue.

And, I mean, conceptually, they were really cool worlds. The other thing that was really interesting at this time was, nowadays, we have a much, much bigger creative team. The reason we can build multiple worlds in a year is we have multiple teams that can do that. Back then, the team was like four people, I think. So the fact that they actually sort of built five unique worlds was pretty amazing, given the staffing at the time.

And so anyway, so the idea is the worlds are apart. Then Nicole Bowles comes around, and he decides that he's trying to get power because the mending, which is a big event drunk time spiral, he got depowered, he misses having power. He wants his power back. So he's trying to figure out way to do that. Part of his master plan is he does the thing called the Conflux, which is why the second says called the conflux, which smashes the shards back together and creates energy or something, which is why he's doing it. So the second set, that's why it's sort of five-core, everything smashed together. So the idea of the third set, Alarabor-born, was the idea that now we're going to come

back, we're going to check in on the world. Now that the world, they're interacting. For a longest Bant was Bant and Bant didn't know the other shards and just lived by itself. And now Bant can interact with Esper and Grixus and Jun and Nya. What does that mean? And so that was kind of the premise of the set. And the reason it's dripping in gold, I guess,

is just we're seeing all the different worlds come together. All the colors come together. The one thing that this set got to do, like the one playground that this set got to have, was that earlier in the block, especially in Shards of Alara, the shards are

separated from one another, right? Bant has the exalted mechanic, but only Bant has the exalted mechanic. If you have it exalted on a card, it like, canonically has to be from Bant. That's the only place that has exalted. So if you wanted to do, for example, artifact creatures,

colored artifact creatures, only existed in Esper. So you couldn't have a colored artifact creature that had exalted, because colored artifact creatures could only be an Esper and exalted could only be in Banned. Well, in Shards of Alara, those two things don't overlap. So you can never make that.

So one of the things that they definitely did in Alara Reborn is playing the space of, oh, we get to mix and match. And one of the things that's nice about that is you start making cards that different drafters want for different reasons. You know, oh, I'm an artifact creature, but I've exalted. Well, the artifact creature is something that, you know, Esper really wants, but exalted is something that, you know, Bant really likes.

and so it definitely allows different people to care about different cards. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Alara Reborn, since that is the topic of today. So it came out on April 30th, 2009. Aaron Forsyth was the lead designer, along with Mark Gottlieb, Alexis Jansen, who won the very first great designer search

and Brian Tinsman. The development was led by Matt Place, along with Dave Guskin, Alexis again, Eric Lauer and Mike Turian. Our director was Jeremy Jarvis. The set had 145 cards. It's a small set. 60 commons, 40 uncommons, 35 rairs, 10 mythic rairs.

It's explained in the Conflux podcast. Charza O'Laur was the first set that had Mythic Rare. So this is the first block where people are even seeing Mythic Rare. Mythic Rair, the rarity didn't exist before that. So one of the... This was scissors of rock, paper, and scissors. This was scissors. So one of the cool little pieces of trivia about Allara were Born is that it is a set

made up almost exclusively of cyclone. In fact, it is a set of nothing but cycles with one tiny exception. One cycle, instead of having a full cycle, I think the Grixis is missing from it, there's four cards, and then there's a five-collar card. So I guess the trivia is, can you name a set in Magic that all but five cards in the set are part of a cycle? And that is a lot of war. Okay, so there were 16 ally-collar cycles, five enemy-collar cycles, five enemy-collar

cycles, five arc cycles, although one of those I think was used. The Grits' one might be missing from that. And then there was three cycles of hybrid mana. And the way that he worked was it was hybrid of two enemy colors, for example, white and black, and then the color that's the shared ally of these two colors. So white or black and blue. Blue or red and green. Black or green and red. Let's see what's left. Red or white and black or green

and red. Red or white and green red or white and green and then the last one was green or blue and green or blue is white. So the nice thing about the hybrid cards was

if you drafted them you could play. them in the three colors they were designed to go in, but because it was hybrid, you could play in any deck with white-blue or play in any deck with blue-black, for example, for the white-or-black and blue. So the idea is, no matter what you're playing, as long as you're playing either white or blue or white or black, if you're playing shards, you know, the three-color arcs, you could play it in your green-white blue deck or your blue-black red deck.

Also because of conflicts, you might be playing more than three-collars. as long as you had blue and either white or black, you could play it. Okay, so the mechanics returned. All the things is a block. So, Bant had exalted, Esper had colored artifacts, which at the time were brand new, other than us teasing it in FutureSight. We had never done colored artifacts.

Then Grixus was unearth, Jund was devour, and Naya was an unnamed five-power map. mechanic. All that got carried over. All of that was in Shards of Alara. Then also there was cycling in the original set and cycling was there. The one thing that Alara Reborn did, the Shards Allara and Conflict didn't, is there is hybrid cycling with hybrid costs. I don't think the first two sets had hybrid in it. A Lara Reborn made, like Alar Reborn was the first set that really made more wide use.

I mean, Shattermore existed and did stuff, but this was the first set that you really used. used hybrid as a tool to sort of fix problems. Like, one of the ongoing things about Alara Borg's design was it just was infinite problems to solve. There's a lot of things that magic does things a certain way. Okay. Like, one of the big challenges about Alara was we decided early on every single card, 145 cards in the set, every card had to be gold.

Well, for starters, lands can't be gold. So that meant you can't have land. Okay, but we need color fixing. How do we do color fixing? So we had to go with colored artifacts. Like there was a lot of solutions that had to get made to understand how to do things. And also making everything in cycles has its own challenges. It was definitely normally a small set I think it's 143.

And this was 145 because things really had to be done in cycles. So, okay. So it also had land cycling so you can go get the basic land you need to help do your fixing. That's another way to get fixing on a gold card, for example. But they wanted something new and exciting. And so there was one brand-new mechanic in it, which was a pretty, I admit, a pretty exciting mechanic, called Cascade. So the way Cascade works is Cascade had a number.

It could go in any type of spell. When you cast a spell with Cascade, what happened was you revealed cards from the top of your library until you revealed a non-land card with a mannavalue less than the spell with Cascade. Oh, I'm sorry, Cascade didn't have a number. Cascade cared about the man of value of the spell it cast. Cascade didn't have a number with it. It had a built-in thing I care about. The number it cares about is the man of value of the spell that had it.

And then, as soon as you find that spell, you can then cast it for free. And then the rest of the coverage, I think, randomly go in the bottom of the library. I believe they go to the bottom of the library. Not 100% rather than go to the graveyard of bottom of the library. The, we would later Redo Cascade is Discover.

Discover does a couple things different. One is, if you want to, the card can go to your hand rather than play it, because sometimes you get a conditional card. And the, so one of the big problems with Cascade, from a play balance perspective, is the idea of the time was, oh, well, you're randomly flipping out the top of your library. It's random.

So we can give you a bunch of power, because you don't know what you're going to get. The problem was that because it's looking for a certain mana value, if you are very cautious about some lower mana values in your thing, it can become not random. You can design decks with cascade to be pretty not random. And remember, if you cascade into a cascade card, it keeps going. So a deck that has a lot of cascade and a few key cards at low mannavail

values, you have a lot more ability to sort of, to take what it was supposed to be a random thing and make it not random. In addition, there was another quirk. In time spiral, we made some suspend cards that had a zero, you could suspend them for zero, but they didn't have a cost. Like you, if you played them in front of your hand, you had to suspend them. Actually, it wasn't suspend zero. Suspend some number, obviously. But because they didn't have a mana cost because you couldn't cast them normally

they don't have a mana cost. Well, the rules say a card without a mana cost, like lands, has a mana value of zero, which meant that if you found one of these cards, you could trigger them, but they have larger effects. In fact, they have some pretty splashy effects.

The intent wasn't that you played them for zero, right? Because you can't. You have to suspend them. Anyway, Cascade definitely was, I mean, it was a, very popular mechanic. It was a very exciting mechanic. People to this day still enjoy it, but it wasn't the most balanced mechanic, I will say. Okay, so now I want to get into some cards, and while I'm talking about individual cards, I'll hit a few points about the set.

So we're going to start with what I think is the most famous card from the set, Blood-Braid Elf. Two red-green. It's an elf berserker, a creature. That's a 3-2. It has haste and cascade. So the idea of this card is, for starters, it's a creature, and it can attack right away. It's got haste. But the cool thing about four mana is if you're very careful what's in your deck that's lower than that, and it's possible that your three drops are also cascade. So if you hit a three drop, you continue cascade, and then your cheaper spells are things like the no-manna value time spiral spells.

So anyway, Blood Radil still gets played. It's a very powerful card. It's probably the most powerful of the cascade. cards. It's definitely the one that saw the most play. Next, Terminate. Terminate is black, red instant. Destroyed target creature. It can't be regenerated. One of the interesting things looking back at magic design history is early on, especially in

Alpha, like Richard will do something. And I don't think Richard's intent was this was supposed to be an ongoing thing. It's just like, oh, it made sense for this card. So like Terror was, Destroyed Target, creature. and it didn't care about hitting black artifact creatures, right? So for many years, we're like, oh, black can't hit black creatures. No, no, no, no, no. Just terror. You can't scare black creatures.

Not that you can't kill black's fine killing black creatures. Another thing that we did a bunch of is just things that kind of hosed regeneration, really, for no reason. And as it turned out, it wasn't like regeneration was causing problems. Like the whole point of regeneration is, okay, if you have mana up, you can save things. And so this is weird. But anyway, the interesting thing about Terminate was, I believe. believe it's the first time we just made a more straightforward

simple spell for two mana in the modern era, if you go back to the and there's sorts of pleasures and stuff, but like in the, a little past the early days of things being a little more chaotic, this is our first sort of two mana kill spell. And it's a gold spell.

It's sort of like, okay, you want to be efficient. We're going to make you go into two colors, but it has seen lots and lots of play. It's a very efficient spell. Next, time Sib. So blue and black, it's an artifact. Tap, sack five artifacts, take an extra turn. So this is a good example of us doing something, not knowing the future. So when we made this card, if you wanted to get an artifact on the battlefield, mostly, mostly you needed to cast those

artifacts or somehow do a spell that got them on the battlefield. Like you had to have five pieces of cardboard, there are artifacts on the... And so that's a real commitment. So sacrificing five of those for an extra turn was a big deal. But we started in Shadows of Inestrade, we invented Investigate, which made clue tokens. That went really well. Then in Ixelon, we made treasure tokens. Then in Throne of Eldrain, we made food tokens.

And then in Crimson Vow, we made blood tokens. And anyway, we've started making a lot more... artifact tokens. And so the idea of getting five artifacts on your battlefield, five permanents, that are artifacts, is just not the challenge it once was. It is not that hard to get a whole bunch of, like, treasure on the battlefield. So the challenge of this card is just not as high as it once was. The idea of sacking five artifacts, with five artifacts had to be actual physical cards was just a much higher bar. That's why this card, I think, sees a lot of play now. Is it just a lot easier to do that. And that's one of the... I mean, I don't... Look, I don't begrudge. One of the fun things

about magic evolving is it's fun to go back and say, oh, well, that thing that once upon a time was really hard to use, oh, it got a little bit easier. But that... That's always fun for me looking at cards and saying, oh, we would never make this card now, only because we know... we know things we didn't know back then, but we didn't know that back then, because we really weren't doing that stuff yet. Okay, next, Mailstrom Pulse. One black green, Sorcery, destroyed Target Permanent, and all other permanents with the same name. So in... What set was it?

I'm trying to remember what set it was. It's a set that I did. Was it Erza's Destiny? I'm not sure what's that it was. I made a cycle of cards. I made a card in Tempice called Lobotomy, where you got a card out of their hand, and then you eradicated all copies of that everywhere, which I really liked. And then I made another set, which

I'll callers is destiny, I might be wrong in this. Where the idea was I made a cycle of spells that, like the black spell killed a creature and then killed all creatures with that name. And then the red spell destroyed artifacts and destroyed all artifacts with that name. And we made a whole cycle of them. I think the blue one was a counter spell,

but most of them destroyed permanence. Anyway, this was just trying to like capture that was a fun cycle. I was just trying to capture that in one card. I was like, okay, I mean, the only does permanency doesn't do spells. We put in black and green because black and green can destroy any permanent type. So that's why it has it.

So anyway, one of the reasons I like making these kind of spells, little bottomies and the whole cycle, is normally in magic, especially in constructed magic, there's a lot of pressure to just play the absolute best card. So most of the time when you're making a deck, we're making a 60 card deck, you'll have, whatever, 36 lands. So you have 24 spells.

So it's like, oh, okay, well, I'll just take, you know, I'll take the best spells I have and I'm sorry, it's 20 for that. So it's 36 spells. So I have 36 spells. I'll just take the best nine spells I have access to and do four of those nine spells. And that one of the things that's nice

when making cards that sort of punish repetition is it just says, oh, maybe instead of doing just four, just four, maybe one do three and one of another one or do two and two of another one. It just sort of encourages a little bit of diversity. So I like a little bit of pressure in the system

says there is a punishment if you just sort of optimize constantly. And that's why cards like this. I really like cards like this. Okay, next. Mage Slayer, one red-green. It's an artifact. It's an equipment. Whenever equipped creature attacks,

it deals damage to a defending player equal to its power. So the idea is it's an equipment, but it gets better the bigger the creature it goes. Oh, it's equipped three, by the way. It gets better the creature it goes on. So obviously, the reason it's in red and green is that Naya and Jond are the two places that are the biggest creatures. Naya specifically has a five-power matter theme. But the idea is if you're playing red and green, probably you have some bigger creatures.

Wow, this really wants to go on bigger creatures. Not that it can't go on smaller things. I mean, it still does some damage, but it really shines when you put it on the biggest creatures. Okay, next. Lord of Extinction, three black, green. It's an elemental for star star, its power and toughness are equal to the number of cards in all graveyards.

So in Ice Age, there's a card called Lurgoiif, that was star, star plus one, star being the number of creature, I think it's, yeah, creature cards in all graveyards. So this is kind of like a splashier version of Lurgoiv. Lurgoif just cares about creature cards. This cares about all cards. Now this is a little bit more expensive,

and in two colors. But the idea of just, oh, I get to be as big as, you know, and in multiplayer, because it comes to all the graveyards, it can get pretty big. The one thing we did, the advancement of time, is they made it star, star plus one in Ice Age, a little life. And what kind of what we realize is just doing the math of like, oh, it's just easier to be square-statted. Obviously, you can't play this card if no cards are in the graveyard. But do you want to play this card? is no cards in the graveyard? Even if you had one card in the graveyard,

play with it as a one-on-one. It's not particularly interesting. So just making it square stat, it's a star-star. It's a lot easier. Wall of denial. One white blue. It's a wall, obviously, a creature.

0-8. Defender, flying, Shroud. So Shrard was an ability that's kind of like hex-proof, but nobody can target it. I'm not even you. We originally had Shrodd. When FutureSight came around, FutureSight introduced a bunch,

took a bunch of effects that we did all the time, finally keyworded them, Life Link, Death, Touch, reach. And one of the things we keyworded was Shroud. Turns out everybody played Shroud like it was Hexproof, meaning people thought they could target their own creature.

So we eventually changed Shroud to Hexproof just to make it work the way people thought it worked. But this is before that happened. And this is just a good example of, it's a 08 wall. Really the idea of it is I'm just blocking, usually your biggest thing, unless your thing happens to be Ader Power or more.

you know, but every turn I get to block your biggest thing. And so it doesn't stop you, but it slows you down, which is kind of what a white-blue card should be doing. Next, behemoth sledge, one green-white. It's an artifact equipment. Equipped creature gets plus-2 plus-2 and Lifelink and Trample. Equip 3. This is a great example of kind of what we like to do with multicolored cards.

LifeLink is an ability in white and black. Trample's ability mostly in red and green. So it's not easy. It's not easy to make a card that's plus-2-2, lifelink and trample. There's no one color that can do that. But there are two colors. In fact, there's a combination of two colors. So having green and white-green

provides trample, which is primary, and white-provide and life-link is primarily nice. And so it allows you to make something that you wouldn't normally make. This is another car that definitely likes to be on bigger things. LifeLink and trample while they aren't synergistic with one another, they are synergistic

in the sense that they both really want to be on a high-powered creature. The higher the power of the creature, the more life you gain. and the more damage you do, because you get a breakthrough for more damage. Next, Nemesis of Reason, three blue-black. It's a creature, a Leviathan whore, 3-7. And when it attacks,

defending player mills ten cards. So this is before the mill keyword, so it actually doesn't say mill on the card, although if you've ever reprinted it, it would. The interesting thing about this card is the idea that it's a 3-7, it's hard to kill, and it's not that this creature is probably going to kill you with its power, it's only three-power.

And you'll probably block it a decent amount of the time, But the mere attacking mills them 10 cards. And so in limited, that's very threatening. In constructed, it's more scary in 60 card, obviously, than 100 card. But 100 card games go longer. And you have more choice of who to attack so you can make sure the creature doesn't get killed. So anyway, it's an interesting card. Next, Maelstrom.

Remember I said there was one five-car card? This is it. In fact, it has a Wooberg Manacost, meaning one. white, one blue, one black, red, red, red, green. It's an enchantment. It says, first spell each turn has cascade. The designer would be always read stuff like that and go, Danger, Robbins, it's in danger.

Normally when we grant an ability to a creature or spell, we get to design it so that we can balance it because we know the creature has that spell on it. There always is this pressure whenever we make one of these kind of effects like cascade. Ooh, what if we just let anything have cascade? And it's really fun. we do like to design them. They are pretty difficult to balance.

Because you just don't know, like, Magic has 30,000 cards. Okay, all of a sudden, any of those cards are going to cascade. Would that cause problems? I don't know. There's no way to check all 30,000. Like, there's no way to sanity check that. There's no way to go, well, we've checked, like, it's just not worth our time to check every possible combination.

And that would take weeks. I mean, it would take a long time to do that. So, we make it, we check things. that we think might be a problem, probably in standard, maybe in limited, but it's just a dangerous thing to do. Not that we don't do it, and we do make dangerous cards, but it is something we've become more cautious of, especially on sometimes to make the rules work, it needs to be very exact in how you reference things, like backup from March of the Machines, a good example. It ended up being that we couldn't grant backup to other things, that you had to sort of define what is being granted,

and that if by cards that had backup, we could define what that thing was, but it got dangerous. If you stuck out on things that weren't backup cards, it was less clear what was being granted and it got much muddier. Okay, Quasali Pride Maid, Green White, is a creature, Cat Wizard 2-2,

has exalted and one sack destroyed target artifact or enchantment. So that's a really good example of something that has nice functionality. It's an exalted card. It's cheap. It can get in. It can attack the three by itself.

It's only one attacking, obviously. But late in the game, it allows you to have utility to deal with pesky artifacts and enchantments. And the cool thing about that is, when we make spells a desk deal with artifacts and shamments, you tend to put them in your sideboard. You don't want them to be dead cards in your deck. But the thing we've started to do more of

is giving you utility effects that are stapled to something that has a more general usefulness to it. Like, okay, if I don't need a stray artifact and shambments, this card is doing something. But if I do, it's there when I need it. And so it helps us have more answers to problem, things like that. Next, Wargate, X-Green, White, Blue Sorcery.

You search your library for a spell, man-of-value-x or less, and then you get to put it onto the battlefield. Let's search for a permanent, say, a permanent with man-of-value X or less. The idea here, which is kind of fun, is green can go get creatures out of the deck, white can go get enchantments out of the deck, and I think Plainswalkers, blue can go get artifacts out of the deck. So, like, it was sort of,

this is kind of what it's fun to do with multicolour where you find a bunch of things that different colors do something similar, but slightly different, and then get to push them together. And now here's a cool thing where you can go get something out of your library. You can go any permit that you want.

Anyway, a pretty fun card. So I, by the way, I'm at work. Let me, let me, I guess I should wrap up here. A Lara Reborn was an important set in the sense that it taught us some important lessons. The set, like I said, we made this gimmick set. I don't think, not that there weren't individual cards that people liked, there were, the sort of gold gimmick didn't quite have the splash we were hoping for.

And one of the, like, the reason we did that, the reason Bill put it in third also was that we had at the time we called the third set problem, where we make a block, people would get it. get really excited for the first set. By the second set, they're like, oh, okay, they're not as excited. By the third set, they're ready to move on. And that's why the sets sort of always went down in sales over time. Now, the second and third set usually were smaller. But even if you account for the number of cards in it, it went down even proportionally.

We also kind of learned, like, this was kind of the nail in the coffin of gimmick sets. It's just, like, one of the things about designing the set, like Aaron led the set. So I asked, I went to Aaron, I said I was doing this podcast, and Aaron was like shaking his head. Like, that was a hard set. And he was proud of himself. They found a lot of clever solutions to things. But in the end, like, could you make a better set if you didn't have the restriction?

Yes. You know, and was this restriction, did it make it overall better? The belief was no. That, you know what I mean? And what we learn now is it's okay to just have more than normal. Like, if this set just had more gold cards than normal, that could be something that we could support and have the tools for and still be splashed.

like the alness of it just isn't that important. The idea of just doing something different that has something unique to it. I mean, and once again, it's not that we can't and shouldn't ever do something different if there's a strong reason to do it, but kind of doing it for the sake of doing it, we've kind of learned that's dangerous

and we shouldn't do that. So I look back, there's a lot, like I said, going through some of the cards, there's lots of fun cards from it. I think it was a very bold experiment. I kind of admire the challenges and the things we did given those challenges but I look back at Alaraborne as more a learning lesson,

us learning sort of about things. And in some ways, a lot of magic's evolution is not just us doing things that work. I mean, obviously, us doing things works, we learn things and can redo those things. But another big part is we do things that don't quite work, and we learn from those as well. And in some ways, learning what not to do often advances you quicker than learning what to do. Because what not to do really, like, when something happens and doesn't do what you want, it really makes you be reflective

and learn in a way that when things are successful sometimes doesn't. I often say that success breeds repetition, right? Oh, that worked, well, we'll do that again. And it's not that you don't learn that something works, but you don't, you kind of learn a lot more when something doesn't quite go the way it needs to go. And this, this wasn't a, I'll call Laura Reborn a very informative

design. So anyway, guys, I hope you like listening about Laura Reborn. But anyway, I'm at work. So we all 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 all next time. Bye-bye.