Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1328: Nostalgia

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

This podcast is all about how Magic design interacts with nostalgia.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so the impetus of today's podcast is there's been a lot of talk online about bringing back blocks. Now, I've done an entire podcast about why I don't think we're bringing back blocks, why blocks basically ended up not working. But it got me under a different topic that I think. always an interesting happen. So it's inspired me to talk about nostalgia. And so what I'm going

to do today is talk about how do we design for nostalgia? What is nostalgia? And what are the pitfalls of designing for nostalgia? So first off, a definition of nostalgia from the dictionary. A wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period, condition, or setting. And the idea, essentially, nostalgia is that there is warmness, emotional warmness, positive memories

of the past. Now, the important thing, as the definition points out, it's not necessarily the past as it was. It was the past as you remember it. And that's one of the big challenges. Because mostly, I mean, on some level,

magic design, to do sort of two major things on this vector. We want to do new undiscovered things, things you've never seen before, and we want to bring back things that you love. So some amount of what we do is, look, we make mechanics, they're tools, we can do things with them. As we're making new environments, one of the ways to make new environments is to use old tools.

And one of the cool things about how magic works is that I can make a new environment with an old tool, but the new constant of the tool changes it. One example, for example, is proliferate when we first made it was made in Scars the Mirren block. And that block was all about the Frexians attacking Mirridon. And so there was a lot of poison made sort of its big return. There was minus one minus one counters.

There was a set that had a minus one infect. And so a lot of the idea of proliferate in that environment was you were spreading the disease and you were sort of, you would weaken your opponent, and then you proliferate to further weaken your opponent. Now, proliferate would come back and war of the spark.

That was the set all about a giant war between most of the plainswalkers and Nicole Bolus and his zombie army, the Eternals. There, the set had a lot of planeswalkers in it that had loyalty abilities, some of which didn't even have

plus loyalty abilities. So one of the few ways to click up was to do proliferate. And it had plus one plus one counters in the mass mechanics. It had a plus one plus one theme in it. And so the idea was that when you were proliferating in War of the Spark, you were sort of building your forces. And so even though proliferate is the same mechanic, how it felt in Scars of Mirridon and how it felt in War of the Spark were very different.

One was mostly about breaking down. One was mostly about building up. Same mechanic, but just what are you doing with it? How are you interacting with it? And so a lot of sort of making magic is going back and using old things. So there is, and then another big part of it is we do like to do returns. Like some of the monosets we do are brand new things. Hey, you've never been to this place.

You've never had this theme or never this theme exactly like. like this. But part of what we want to do is, you know, revisit things we've done before. You know, we've made really exciting worlds. We have very good world building. Ooh, those worlds are exciting. I want to see that world again. You know, we're coming up on secrets of Strickshaven.

Well, we went to Strickshaven. It was a good example where, hey, there's this fun genre we can tap into with a magical school genre. We want to do our take on it. You know, we liked the idea of a magical, college and we made a faction set out of with enemy factions built on their conflict. We were able to have a set built on instances and sorceries. And we just made a really cool environment that was uniquely that.

So it's fun. Now we've done all the work and we made it. It's fun to go back and revisit it. So there's a certain amount of nostalgia that is kind of baked into the system. We are going to reprint cards. We are going to reprint mechanics. we are going to reuse themes. We are going to revisit worlds.

There's a certain amount of magic that's just, we're going to go back and touch upon things that we've done in the past. So there's definitely a certain amount of nostalgia like natively built into the way we make magic. That we do things that work. We want to revisit things that work. And we want to revisit things that were successful in the past.

So that's kind of the low-hanging. fruit as far as nostalgia goes is, okay, we went to Shrigshaven at the time of the best-selling set of the time. And we're like, okay, well, people really liked it. We should go back to it. So we're revisiting it. But here's the tricky thing about nostalgia, as I said earlier, is nostalgia isn't necessarily about what was the past. It's about your memory and perception of the past. And that is where nostalgia gets a little bit trickier. Like, we definitely can revisit popular things. We can revisit successful things.

We, you know, the way we think of mechanics is they are tools. They are paints for our canvas. And if I'm trying to paint a new picture and there's some old paints that would work well, I'm going to use those old paints. So that stuff comes for free. Revisiting popular things, reusing popular things, reusing successful things. That, no problem. But one of the challenges is people will have positive emotions, positive memories of things that the first time around weren't necessarily successful.

Probably the two biggest recent examples is Kamagawa and Lorwyn. So, champions of Kamagawa, the idea at the time was, this was the last block that Bill Rose was head designer for. Bill really liked the idea of a top-down block. Because we do a lot of blocks built on mechanics. And at the time, most of our blocks started by us figuring out mechanical core we wanted, and then we figured out flavor from there. But Bill really said, hey, it'd be cool to do a whole block where the flavor comes first. And it was the first time we had done a top-down block.

We had done like Arabian Nights, Portal for Kingdoms. And we'd done a little bit of top-down sets based on, something that wasn't our own thing. But this was the first time we were kind of doing a whole block like that. And Bill made some choices at the time. And once again, we hadn't done this before. So I'm not really trying to criticize Bill. Bill's philosophy at the time was,

let's figure out the flavor first and then do the mechanic second. Flavor will be king. We will make every decision based on flavor, and mechanics will be subserving. into flavor, was kind of the goal. And the problem that we learned, and once again, whenever you do something for the first time, you learn something. And the core thing we learned there was,

oh, flavor is way more flexible than mechanics. That when you lock in flavor first and then you try to match with mechanics, it's hard. Mechanics, and so a lot of what happened in Champs Kamagawa was very sort of stilted. like we sort of cram things, you know, like, for example, okay, what does samurai do? They're good with the sword. Okay, we'll make a mechanic called Bishito that represents the good with the sword.

And then every samurai has Bishito or every snake person, you know, locks things down. Every, you know, like all moon folk bounce something. Like, we made this world where the way flavor was definitely done mechanically was so exacting that like every single subset of this thing, must function this way with this mechanic. And even where we were successful. So, like, in Maitres Kamagawa, we did ninjitsu, which is probably of all the mechanics in Champions Block,

the most successful. But even that did this thing where we're said, okay, we're going to do ninjas. There's a lot of cool things about ninjas, but all ninjas, instead of necessary doing different cool things, we'll do this one thing. Okay, they're all sneaky. And sneaky's great.

Ninjas are sneaky, but there's lots of other elements of ninjas. and because it was one for one, we sort of made Ninja's very one note. And that is the most popular thing we did. That was the success. That's where we were successful. And we did a lot of other things.

The block was known as being very parasitic. What that means is that a lot of the things only worked with other things. Oh, I want to make a deck full of caring about samurai. Well, guess what? The only set that has samurai ever. So if you want to care about samurai, we got samurai. If you want to splice into arcane, well, guess where arcane comes from?

This set. And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of just very narrow kind of it only played with itself and it wasn't backward compatible. But anyway, the point is, we made a lot of decisions because we were trying to do something we'd never done before. And in many cases, it's not every case, but in many cases, we made the wrong decision. another example of something that happened at the time was I actually wasn't on the design team for any of the three designs but I was on the development team for champions of Kamagawa so it's one of the few sets where I wasn't on the design team but it was on the development team

and one of my through lines on the development team was the set was really all over the place mechanically and I kept sort of saying what is the set about like we have to focus what's the set about Like, mechanically, what is the set about? Obviously, creatively, it was topped on Japanese mythology. But mechanically, what's the said about? In one point, the development team said, it's about legends. I said, okay, well, it's about legends, and we need to be loud about that. And at the time, legends were really only something we did at Rare.

Mythic Rare wasn't even a thing yet at the time we did chant. Yeah, no, it wasn't. Mythic Rare didn't show up until Shards of Alara. Anyway, so, for what we did is we said, okay, here's what we did. we're going to do. To try to make this as loud as possible, we will make every rare creature legendary and we will even have some uncommon legendary creatures. Other than early, early magic, like early magic had a little bit of uncommon legendary creatures, but we hadn't really done that since early magic. But it turns out that, you know, like, and this kind of a lesson of Aves fan, which is,

okay, let's say I open a booster pack. How many packs have to open before I even understand that all the rare creatures are legendary. I open one pack. I might not even open a creature. The creatures are only 50% maybe are the rares. 55% probably. So there's half the time I'm not even going to open a creature.

But let's say open a creature, okay. I open a creature's legendary. Okay, I open legendary creatures. How many legendary creatures do you have to open before you start to figure out that, oh, that's abnormal that all my rare creatures are legendary? And the answer is a lot. You know, four, five.

I mean, you have to open up four or five packs of creatures that are legendary. And remember, half the time you don't get creatures. So, like, I'm opening up 10 packs. Like, that's a lot to then figure that out. It's just, you know, the idea of messaging and theme, I used to say if your theme's not a common is not your theme. Later, we realize if your theme's not at the right ass fan,

it's not your theme. There's ways to do that's not a common. But it does need to be something that's large. We would later do, like, dedicated slot boosters and stuff. But anyway, the point is, the set is trying to do a bunch of things for the very first time and we make mistakes. Lorwin is a different animal.

Lorwin was more of us pushing boundaries a little faster than the audience was ready for boundaries to be pushed. Magic had a very tone, its audience was a little narrower, and so we were trying to broaden out like magic tones, kind of what we were trying to do. Like, magic normally is this tone, but does it always have to have that tone?

You know, we used to refer to as badass. You know, that's what brand used to call it. And we're like, you know, but there's lots of people that might enjoy softer things. It doesn't always have to be hard-edged, you know. And I think Lauren was kind of ahead of its time. So the interesting thing is, in its day, those two sets, Lauren and Shadowmore, not Shadowmore, Lauren and Kamagawa were the two worst-received blocks we had ever had. And by worst-received, I don't just mean they sold poorly, but they did.

Market research was bad. Just overall player sentiment, engagement, play. Like, we measure a lot of metrics. Like, one of the things that we have to do for our job is, okay, we want players to be happy. Well, how do we tell the players are happy? And there's a whole bunch of metrics that we have. Right, we can look at how things sell. We can look at how much people play things.

We can look at how much digital play there is. We can talk about talk online. Anyway, there's a lot of different metrics we can measure. And champions in Lorwyn on those metrics. And once again, I got to stress, everybody I talked about where I mentioned sales, like, all they care about sales. It's not all we care about. I mean, we do care about sales.

We're business. I mean, it's not like we don't care about sales. But there are a lot of other things we also care about. And the reality was even in market research, where we ask people, what do you think about the worlds? Champions of Comic Out was the worst rated world of every world we've rated within the context of us doing a rating.

So some of the early world, some of the early worlds didn't necessarily get these ratings because we didn't do it at that point. But ever since we, and we've, you know, since Champion Forward, I mean, maybe a little before Champions, we've done research on the world. Lowest, greatest world. Lorwyn, I think it was the lowest selling,

even worse than Champions. So, anyway, the idea is those sets in their day did a lot wrong and did a lot of things that people did not like. That's another thing about nostalgia. I'm not going to name the name, but I remember there was a pro player that came up to me. So back in time, I used to work at the pro tour. I recently did a podcast all about me working on the pro tour. And one of my jobs was I was sort of the liaison with all the pro players.

I did all the feature matches. I got to know everybody. And I got, you know, if I was the one that would talk to them and if they had feedback, I would communicate the feedback of the players to R&D and stuff. But anyway, so I had a good relationship. I mean, this is back when I was there all the time, with the pro players. So one of the pro players coming up to me and he goes, why don't you make cards like necropotence anymore?

And I see it as him, I go, do you, can we flash back five years? You know, back when necropotence was the thing. I go, you were one of the most outspoken haters of necropotence. You used to come and talk to me all the time about how much you hated necropotence. Why did we print necropotence? And then we put it again in fifth edition,

you were like, how in the world would you reprint necropotence? So the point is five years ago, there was no greater critic to necropotence than you. And now, five years later, you're like, what happened to necropotence? And he said to me, he goes,

maybe I was a bit harsh back then. That was in line to me. And so that is the tricky part of nostalgia. That a lot of what people are saying is not even that thing exactly that you did is the thing I loved. Now, I should stress, just because something's unliked when it first appeared doesn't mean it was an unlikable thing.

Lorwyn is a really good example. We were ahead of our time. We were pushing in ways that the audience wasn't ready for yet. That doesn't mean a future audience wouldn't be ready. And I think a lot of people that look back at Lorowin, I mean, Lorowin now seems pretty quaint with all the stuff we've done with magic. It's boundary pushing of mood and tone seems, like we've done a lot of other worlds that have, you know, that are softer in tone.

Bloomboro, Eldrain. You know, we've done other worlds like that that are not quite as hard edge of some of the earlier magic worlds. So you look back at Lorain and it seems like this cool world. Like, so that's a good example where some of the dislike had to do with the differential from the time. But as people look back on it, they can see some fondness there. They depreciate. Kamagawa was a slightly different thing.

The mistake we made of making all the rare's legends, which at the time was a mistake, turns out to be not a mistake in history. And the reason for that is after we made Champagawa a couple years after, the Elder Dragon Highland, who then to become commander, would get created. And they were desperately looking for legendary creatures, especially weird legendary creatures.

Well, it turns out when every single card you make is legendary, some of them are the weird cards because some rare cards are weird. And normally, we hadn't made the weird card legendary because we were trying to play up the characters, and so we were doing more top-down to match the character. And so just the weird, like the weird build-around cards often weren't legendary. So when the commander first started, before we were making things with commander in mind,

the place to find the weird legendary build-around creatures was in this one set where we happened to make every creature rare, every rare creature legendary. And so Kalagawa kind of got the second appreciation because something we had kind of done accidentally turned out to be super useful. And another thing, I think champions like Lorwyn was a little bit ahead of its time. One of the challenges at the time for champions

was we leaned very hard on Japanese mythology, but not a lot of our audience knew Japanese mythology. And so it came across more as just weird, more so than something that was resonant to people. Now, over time, Japanese culture has gotten more and more exposure, especially through pop culture. And so there's a more awareness of it. So at the time, less people sort of clicked and understood it more due now.

So there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of things that didn't make sense at the time with time can do that. But the real challenge, and Kamagawa is a perfect example. We went back and looked at Kamagawa and said, okay, if we're going to revisit Kamagawa and we want to like kind of mechanically represent Kamagawa, how do we do that? And we looked at all the mechanics of Kamagawa, and like I said, we didn't do a great job.

Okay, we had ninjitsu. And even then ninjitsu had a problem of, it was like one for one tied with ninjas. And we're like, well, maybe we wanted to do ninjas and do other things and other cool stuff. And, you know, do we, you know. So like, we didn't, we were even sure we were going to do ninjitsu. That's one of the successful mechanics.

Like we brought back channel, and not that channel is successful. was like, well, we do channel. We don't call it channel, but we could call it. Like, if we're trying to be reminiscent of a time, we could bring it back. There's nothing mechanically wrong with channel. It's just something we do all the time that we don't really give a name to. But there's just all these mechanics that we look at.

We're like, well, we don't really like how this plays and that plays. And, like, we really had to come back and revisit Kamagawa, but in a way that wasn't really mechanically doing what Kamagawa did. Now, one of the things that we learned is there's, different places you can lean on nostalgia. We couldn't mechanically very easily lean on nostalgia. We did in a few cases. We did two, channel, whatever. But we did a lot more leaning on individual cards.

Here, a card, like once again, because of Commander and all the legendary rare, there were cards that people had fondness for. A lot of people built a certain deck with this Commander. Kiki Jiki also, you know, there were cards that ended up being bigger players in larger formats. And we could tie into some of that.

So a lot of what we were doing when we did nostalgia in Neand Dynasty was trying to look for individual things people liked. And again, it wasn't that we had to recreate it exactly. It was sort of like, well, what do people remember this for being? And a lot of that was us saying, okay, we're going to sort of figure out how to capture that essence,

but in a way that is a more modern take. Lorwin was a little bit differently. The one thing that went on with Lorwin Eclipse is, A, we were borrowing from a set that mechanically did a little bit better, that a lot of Lorwyn's problems, I mean, it had some mechanical problems. The biggest mechanical problem of Lorwin Block was the thing that led to New World Order. It was too interconnected, and it was too much on rails. So draft meaning in limited formats, once you picked a creature type, you were locked in that creature type. in constructed formats. There was a lot of synergy that was a little much.

But there's a lot of, I mean, there was a lot of popular memories people have of playing certain kinds of things. And because there were four sets we were representing, being played in one set, we luckily, I mean, Shams Gantawa had the same issue. We had three sets in one. They're just, even looking at three sets,

there wasn't a lot to salvage. Lorwin Block had a lot more to solve. salvage. A lot more mechanics that were like, oh, maybe we in fact want to do this mechanic again. Strick's Haven was in a similar place. A lot of the structural components we definitely wanted to keep. And there's a lot of things we did mechanically that really worked. So like, Champions is kind of the one where we had least mechanically to do. Lordham was kind of the middle. Strick's Haven was on. We had a lot that we could keep and use. And even then, we found new things not, you know, part of doom and return, part of nostalgia is not just nostalgia, but kind of reinventing.

things and bringing back things people love, but with a modern sensibility. And that's another really important part of nostalgia is we are not trying to bring back exactly what was, but we were trying to bring back something that evokes what was. The other thing that's really tricky is nostalgia is not the same for people. One of the things you talk about is, what was your favorite time in magic? What was magic's best period of time, if you ask somebody that?

And the thing people will point out usually is the point where emotionally it was their favorite time playing magic. Because whatever was going on in the cards, they have such strong emotions and connections to it. And that, you know, there's a lot of love for that. Case and point. The retrofames. So Magic did a sense. certain frames, and then... When did we change the frames?

At Mirrodin, or... Was it right before Mirrodin? I think the course is right before Mirrodin. We changed the frames. To... The old frames... The problem we had with the old frames... Well, we actually changed frames a few times.

But the thing with the old frames was... They were not optimized for... What's the right word? For function. For example, the titles were hard to read, and the frames had, like, there was, there was texturing that was kind of cool in a vacuum, but didn't necessarily communicate a lot of the stuff we were trying to do. We wanted the art to be bigger. Like, we wanted to redo the frame and make it more functional. And so we did, and it is, you know, you have more room for art.

It's easier to write rules text. It's, you know, we just cleaned things up. It's easier to read the card from across the table. But whenever you change something, there's people that have fondness for what was. You know, I think magic art technically has improved a lot since the early days of magic, but people have fondness for the nostalgia of the early days of art. I think the frame has a lot of improvements, but people have fondness for the frame. So we started doing the retro frames, which is us just taking modern cards and putting them in something that approximates the old frames,

not 100% the old frame. And we found is a really interesting thing. Some of the audience adored the retroframes. They think they're amazing. They constantly say more, more, make more retroframes. Make retroframes of every card I own. And other players are like, oh, can you stop doing this? These are so ugly.

And what we found is it just has a matter with, does the frame emotionally mean something to you? And mostly what that meant is, do you have cards with that frame that you played with? you know, does that frame bring back positive memories for you? And the answer is yes, the frame is amazing. It taps into this time that you loved

and it brings you back. But if that's not a time period of your front, if what you know of magic is the more modern frame, they just seem like this weird, like it is not a positive experience. And that's one of the reasons why we do them in small months is, look, the audience that enjoys them is a smaller audience. They really enjoy them.

We will make them. But for most, like I said, it's a nostalgia thing. Meaning, the reason of joy that you're going to get comes from this emotional connection that if you don't have, you're just, it's not going to be nostalgic for you. Now, I mean, there are some people who weren't playing then, who are collectors, you know, who collected a lot of old cards, and the old cards are in that frame. And maybe, you know, they represent the older cards. I mean, there's reasons you might like the retroframes, even if you didn't play with them.

but our market research shows the vast majority of people like retroframes are because they have memories of the retroframes and like I said that is one of the biggest challenges

I mean I talk about this all the time I'm not designing for one audience I'm designing for many audiences well nostalgia hinges upon what are your emotional touch points and they're not the same for everybody now part of doing that is

let's say we go back to Kamagawa or Lorain or Strict Savin or whatever we're trying to get a modern sensibility. We're trying to do cool things that I hope even if you have zero memories of Kamagawa, Neon Dynasty was a fun set. If you have zero memories of Lorwyn,

that Lorraine Eclipse was a fun set. Like we're trying to make things that, hey, if you don't know anything, this is fun magic, so you should enjoy it. And there's something about the original that people love that we're trying to tap back into that even if you don't know it, hey, it's a cool thing.

Why do people like it the first time around? or why do people like it in memory? Because there's something fun about it and we can tap into that. But that is one of the tricky things about nostalgia is it is a moving target. Meaning, if I do something that's very nostalgic of Alpha,

okay, what percentage of our audience even knows Alpha? And people that played Alpha, like myself, are a small group. People that know of Alpha, a little bit bigger, but even then, like one of the things when I do this podcast

or my articles or my blog or whatever is, I try to always explain things because things that some people just know, a lot of people don't know. Like a lot of magic terminology, for example, is just named after the first card that did something. But if you don't know that card, sometimes vocabulary seems random.

You know, before we made a keyword out of Mill. If you don't know that Millstone is the thing that, you know, mills cards, well, why milling? Milling is like crushing wheat into bread. You know, it's like it's a form of crushing things. Well, why is crushing things losing cards off the top of your library? And if you remember millstone, it's sort of like, oh, this millstone, the sound of the millstone drove people crazy. And what's losing cards at your library is going crazy.

Not milling, you know, not the act of crushing, you know, it was the sound of the millstone. Anyway, and that's one of the through lines to remember as we do nostalgia. is that we need to have a balance between things making sense if you have the emotional underpinning of what it's tapping into versus it's just being cool because you don't know anything. And that's one of the tricky things of trying to do a Kamagawa or a Lorwyn is we have less to lean on that is like successful. And once again, Lorwyn had much more than Kamagawa did.

And so it's kind of like, one of the fun things for us is, okay, if we were going to do this all over, if we were making it now, what would we do? And that is another interesting part of nostalgia is to try to say, how much of the old thing do I need to make the new thing feel like the old thing? And the answer is not a lot. That's the secret answer. A dash of nostalgia goes a long way. and then a lot of what we try to do is, you know, I mean, one of the things about magic is there's many different layers that we can do things. We can make nods mechanically,

we can make nods in art, we can make nods in names, nods in flavor. There's a lot of ways for us to make a subtle nod to things. And a lot of what we do is make nods that if you don't know, you don't know, it's still a fun card in vacuum. You don't need to know it to appreciate the nod. But if you get it, wink, wink, wink, nudge, isn't that fun. And I talk a lot about lenticular design and the idea of sometimes you design something where you hide the complexity. Well, you can also hide the reference, if you will, that a lot of fun nostalgic designs are about the thing makes sense even if you don't understand the nostalgia design, but there's this extra layer if you do. And that is a lot fun.

And the idea of lenticular stuff so that we can make nods, but one of the important thing is, is this card can't only make sense if you know the reference. Time Spiral made that mistake, where Times Spirel just made too many cards that if you didn't understand what we were referencing, it just felt like, what? What's going on? Like, we would throw two cards together and mash them together and like, oh, get it? It's this card and that card.

And if you got it, even then, I don't know if the joke was good enough. But if you got it, at least you understand what we were doing. If you didn't, it just looked like random craziness. And we've learned a lot that the key to the statement, is using the right amount in the right dosage, structured in a way that it is there to see for the people who need to see it, but it's not in the way of the people that don't know it.

And that lenticular quality nostalgia is very important. So anyway, guys, I have now, I'm now at work. I like doing these podcasts from time to time where I'm more just, there's a topic at hand, and I sort of want to think about it, like just to capstone. I understand the current sort of desire for blocks in the sense of magic keeps changing and there's a lot of disorientation to change.

And magic is, I mean, magic has gone through a lot of changes. The changes came about because there are things that there's an audience that was really hungry and excited for. But especially players that have been playing for a longer time, look, the change of pace is disorienting and that I understand wanting to hearken back to a simpler time to when things

weren't quite so fast and didn't change quite so much and I understand the emotional attractiveness of blocks you know I understand that like the story could evolve slower and have your little three-ext structure to it and you know

you had time to get used to the world and there's a lot of things that I get the nostalgia of it I get the warmth of it I get the the hearkening back to it. The problem and the challenge is the actual 3-X structure, it had lots of problems.

And I did a whole podcast and why it had lots of problems. So the real question is, how do we hearken back and capture some of that old timiness that people are wanting? That, like, the, I believe the rationale

behind the desire for blocks, there's a lot of actual yearning that we need to figure out how to address. I don't think blocks is the answer because blocks, even back then functionally really didn't work and didn't do what we needed them to do.

And we tried for a long time to make them work. But I acknowledge and understand that there is a yearning for something that is important and that we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out how do we... And part of it is we're going back to Kamagawa. We're going back to Lorwyn. I don't think that those kind of revisits

to worlds that didn't work the first time were something we would do in a world where we weren't trying to find places to have that nostalgia. And so I do believe that there's things we're doing that I think are making the nostalgia fans happy partly as a response to trying to find those touchstones to the past. We will continue to do stuff. We're always looking. Kind of what I'm saying today is I hear the desire for what people are asking for

when they ask over the turn of blocks. I hear the problem at hand. and as I said in my GDC talk, players are really good identifying problems and aren't the best at solving them. Most of because it's not your job to solve them. You don't know all the moving pieces. It is kind of our job to solve them.

But you identified a problem. There's a desire and a need for nostalgia and there's a time to harken back to the past. Can we do that in a way that helps meet some of this need? And like I said, us going back to Lorwyn is part of us trying to capture this.

So we are working in this direction. But anyway, I do hear people. Honestly, God, I'm not trying to dismiss people who are asking for something. Mostly what I'm saying is I hear it. I think I understand the core of what you want. The solution you're providing is not a viable solution, but you are presenting a problem that we need to spend time to think on. I just want to acknowledge that.

We hear that. We're thinking about it. I don't want to dismiss the audience is identified, or some of the audiences identified a problem. it is our jump to figure out how to address that problem. I hear you. But anyway, guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means.

It means at 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.