Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1344: Depth

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

In this episode, I talk about the pros and cons of the depth of Magic's gameplay.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today is all about depth. I did do a separate podcast of mechanical depth, by the way, which is how many cards you can make out of a mechanic. That's a separate topic. So today I'm talking about a different kind of depth.

So one of my favorite sayings is your greatest weakness is your greatest strength push too far. And the idea being that the thing that most makes you special and different and unique is also the thing that probably is your biggest handicap, that those come interrelated. And so magic's greatest strength, I believe, is it's depth. You know, if I talk a lot about when you play magic, one of the things that magic does, it allows you, the player, a lot of control, a lot of control, that you, that you, get to shape the experience you're going to have.

I mean, obviously, you're playing with other people, so they also shape some of it. But the point is, there's many, many pieces. Right now, I think there's over 35,000 cards. You can choose, depending on your format, 40, 60, 100, whatever your format is. But you get to choose what you play with. And you have a lot of choice.

I mean, so much choice. I mean, there's so many magic cards right now that you can't, you, I don't think the human brain can absorb all of that. I don't think one person can just remember all 30,000 cards. Maybe there's somebody out there. managed to do it. But, like, there was a point in time early in magic when I knew every card. I knew every cost. I knew every power toughness. I knew all the artists. Like, I knew, I could,

in fact, I could tell you a reminder text. Like, there's a point where I knew everything. And even though I live and breathe magic, even though I do magic day in and day out, there just came a point where I can't possibly keep up. I mean, right now, for example, I spend a lot of energy just trying to keep up with the mechanics. And even that is a challenge. Even just knowing all the mechanics is a challenge. And that is my job and what I focus on. And so, like, the thing that I thought, so my point here is that magic's greatest strength is that it allows its players so much freedom to have so much flexibility in deciding what

it is they want the game to be. There's a huge number of pieces that you can play with. And once again, you don't need all the pieces. Like, one of the cool thing about a trading card game in general, is that the pieces are modular, that they click together. That one of the things that's really neat is you can pick and choose whatever you want. And one of the fun things about magic is there's a lot of discovery. And the reason for that is the combinatorics of magic,

meaning the amount of interactions that can happen are some number that's so astronomical, it's hard to explain. And so the idea is that I can play magic and I can have something happen in my mind. game that not only has it never happened to me, I've never heard of it happening to anybody. Like the idea to come up with things that are unique and this special moment where this has never happened before, happens all the time in magic. And even, for example, when you play the same deck, you know, you're playing your commander deck with a hundred-car single-ton, you'll just have combinations that never came up because the number of combinations that can't

happen. And that's not even taking into account like your opponent's deck. Like, one of my favorite things in magic is when a moment comes up and something happens that seems too perfect. Like, oh, the fact that these cards are in play and these cards are my hand and my point it as those cards, that this shining moment of something happens. And those are some of the best parts

of magic when, you know, I never could have prepared. I never could have planned. But it happened. All these things came together at the right time and I was there and I was able to do something and I made this momentous play that I could talk about and, you know, that's one of the great things of magic.

And the idea that magic has this depth, the idea that there's all this, you can explore it, and you can, you know, that you, like, the other big thing is, I would talk a lot about customization. Like, one of the neat things about magic is people really want to express themselves and they want to do something that is uniquely their own. And magicless you do that as well. Like, if I want to make a deck unlike,

anybody else's deck. I can. There's ways to do that. I can make something that's not like anybody else. There's so many choices and options. Now, I mean, there's obvious things I can do, and I can copy other people. And if I want to do things that other people do, I can. That's easier. And if you want to do that, if you want to take a pre-constructed deck or copy a deck off the internet

or whatever, you can do that. No one's stopping you. Have fun. But if you want to make something that's uniquely your own, if you want to make something that, like, this is And that's one thing that's so much fun talking to players is every player has their own thing, their own identity, the thing that just makes magic magic for them. So the reason I'm starting by talking about, I want to talk about all the strengths of depth to begin with, because I think when I say it's magic's great strength, I'm not exaggerating. The like one of the other things that happens a lot is I remember there's a great talk I had

I've told the story before but it's a slightly different version of the story So I'm at DragonCon it's late night Like two in the morning and I there's this Middle Age woman who is sitting there reading a book And this is we're talking back like in when I first started working at Wizards Like we're talking like 96 so this is Seeing a middle age woman in the middle of of a magic tournament was, you know, middle of a magic event or a game event was not very common back then.

And we got to talking. And she talked about her two sons. And, you know, I've told the story. So the venture point I want to get on this story is that one of her sons was very bright. And the problem that her son had was that he got bored easily, that he would pick something up to do. and he would do it and he'd get all involved and learn everything about it and then just he'd figure it out too fast

and that one of his problems that he was having in school was he was just bored he was just like his teacher couldn't keep up with him like he just was bored and she said that magic was his amazing thing that finally he found something bigger than him he found something that he couldn't

that it was so big in nature that he couldn't like he couldn't just crunch it all and that it was something that he desperately needed, that he really, that, you know, he was a smart little kid, and he really, he wanted to be able to go to town on something that was bigger than him. And magic was the first thing he came across

that was bigger than him. And it really, like, changed so much about how he functioned. The larger part of the story is she had two sons, and both sons were helped by magic. And because magic had been so influential with them, she promised them that she'd, you know, if they got good grades, she'd bring them to Dragon They did.

And it was really nice because the mother was talking about how, it was a great moment where someone was communicating me how much magic has changed her kid's lives in her life and, you know, obviously. But anyway, the interesting thing that I always stuck

with me is the idea that one of the cool things about the depth of magic is that it allows so much to happen. But, but! And the reason I bring this up is you know, there's lots of reasons for depth being magic.

strength. There's lots of things that come about. The fact that there's so much there is very exciting and it'll let you explore things and it'll let you customize and it does all those things. But your greatest strength, your greatest weakness is your greatest strength push too far.

So one of the challenges of magic is magic is intimidating. You know, like chess. Chess is intimidating to most players. Chess has I mean six unique different pieces.

And, you know, chess, the rules for chess fit on a card. I mean, the basic rules, there's some more advanced rules for chess. But the basic rules of chess are not, like, here are six pieces, the six pieces move accordingly, and here's a few basic rules about what you need to do to win. And that's chess. And chess is intimidating people. Magic, instead of having six pieces, has 35,000 pieces, has a rulebook, you know, that's hundreds of pages thick.

Like, the upside of depth is that there's so much to explore, but the downside of depth is, it is intimidating. So barrier to entry is the term we talk about of... The idea is I know nothing. I'm not a game player,

or I'm sorry, I'm a game player, but I've not played a game. So I know nothing. I've zero knowledge of the game. I have to learn enough that I can play the game. And so that that's barred entry. How much do you have to learn to go from I know nothing to I know enough to play. And games vary great much.

Some games, I use Jenga as my example, like you play Jenga once and you got it. You understand how to play Jenga. I'm not saying you've mastered Jenga. I'm not saying that there's not more to learn about Jenga, but I'm at least saying you understand the essence of what you're doing out of the gate. Magic is not that.

Even if I teach someone how to play, even if we successfully go through one game of magic and they learn the basics. They learn, you know, and the other thing about magic is there's a lot of moving pieces. You know, you have to learn about the mana system and how to cast spells.

You have to learn about creatures and how they interact with each other. You have to learn about the stack. You have to learn. I mean, there's so many things to learn about it. And I'm not even getting into like less, I mean, the other thing about magic is all sorts of weird things can happen.

Like, for example, I am, I've been playing magic since it came out in 19, 19, 19, 19, 1993, right? I've been playing for 33. I've been playing since album continuously. I've never stopped. I've been playing continuously since magic came out. I make magic for a living. It is part of my job to understand the rules of magic.

Like, I have to know if I can make a card or if I don't make a, I can't make a card. Like, I have reasons to understand the rules more so than the average person. and even I'll be the first admit I do not know all the rules I know a lot of rules I probably know more than most of you and there are areas that I'm well versed in that are part of my job like

I know what I call the online what we can do in Blackboard and what we can't like what is doable and cards that's something I have a much better understanding in the average person because I need to for my job but even then the point is I'm well versed in magic I played magic for a long time

there are a reason for me to understand the rules. And like I said, I've been a level four judge. My rules knowledge is better than most. But even given that, there's a lot going on. There's a lot, you know, I'm, like, I know some of the rules, but I don't, I have no illusion that I'm an expert on the rules. And that's saying a lot, you know, like, pick another game, you know, where I've been playing this game for 33 years, but I don't really know all the rules. How many games are like that?

You know? And so one of the things that has always been a challenge for us is, well, the depth is magic is great of strength. It also is the weakness, and it is intimidating. Like, that's the number one thing when we sort of did, we do testing on magic. A lot of people don't know much about magic. They just know enough to be scared of it.

Because they have their friends. I mean, if you can go online and watch videos and stuff like this, where, like, you know, the average player is like tries to describe magic to their friend, right? It is very complicated. And the funny thing, so anyway, part of my point today is one of our ongoing challenges has been how do we present the depth of magic. That has been, and for many, many years, our plan has been

when we introduce you to magic let's hide magic steps let's focus one of the things that we realized very early on is the basic game of magic the basic basic game of magic is not that intimidating if you are playing with

you know vanilla or maybe French vanilla creatures and you're playing with simple instances of sorceries especially sorceries. You know, there's the basic game of magic, like one of the things

that it's very interesting is I've taught a lot of people to play magic, a lot, a lot of people. And the most interesting thing when I teach someone to play magic is two things. One is,

they're always shocked by how fun it is. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure why that it is, but like, oh, this is really fun. The second thing is that it's never as difficult as they imagined it being. At least the base game.

Like one of the things I always have to explain to people. is I'm teaching you that the basics, it can get more complicated. There's more cards out there. There's things to do more complicated to things. There's mechanics that are more complicated. But the basic game, the actual basic game, is not that complex. At least not as complex as people think it is.

I'm not saying it's not complex. I have no illusions that magic is not a complex game. But the core basics of it are not as complex as people think. So anyway, we spend a lot of time in early days, or early and middle days, I guess,

our strategy for teaching magic had been, okay, let's just teach them the bare minimum we need to teach them to get

the game to work. Meaning, okay, what do you have to know? Well, you have to know how to cast spells. We probably got to tell you that. You have to know how creatures work.

But the stack, yeah, we're not telling about the stack. Or, you know, anything that sort of, look, come up right away. We're just not going to tell you. And so that was really our driving force for many years is

how do we make a simple form of magic? So the earliest sort of attempt at it we made, there's a thing called the arc system. What the arc system was, I did a podcast on it, the idea was it was a simplified version of magic. There were three colors, red, green, and blue, not five. I believe there were creatures. Creatures only had one number. so power and toughness were combined into one number.

I think there were only sorceries. But the idea was, here's the essence of what magic is, but as thin down as we possibly could do it. There were three versions of it. Two of them were licensed. One was Hercules, the TV show Hercules, and one was Xena Princess Warrior, those related shows. And the other one was IP that we made up,

well, in conjunction with Jim Lee, the comic book artist writer Jim Lee. called X23. So we had three three different properties you could play with. And the idea was that this was a separate game

that you could get into but learning this just made it easier to learn magic. That did not do well. It did actually spectacularly not well. The next version we did a thing called Portal. So Portal was the same idea but the cards were

compatible with magic. Meaning, if you wanted to put a portal card in a magic deck, it just worked. It had a magic back. Now, we did do a few things in portal. Like, Portal, again, it did a power toughness. But, for example, I think we just mostly had sorceries. We had a few sorcerers that kind of were incidents

that were secretly riddened to sorceries. But, I mean, there weren't artifacts, weren't enchantments. Like, we rarely narrowed down what it was. And originally, Portal wasn't. legal in standard. Eventually we made it legal in legacy. And Portal, we did three versions of Portal, Portal, Portal, Second Age, Portal

Three Kingdoms. Although Portal for the Kingdoms was mostly enough for the Asian market. And Portal we also changed some vocabulary which wasn't a great idea. Like you didn't block, you intercepted, anyway. Portal was not very successful.

We then we tried what we called the starter deck where we made a deck that was made for beginners and then we when you opened the deck, we had a sequence that we walked you through. Some version, we did videos along with it. We did CD-ROM with some of it.

Eventually, we did a comic book with it. That proved to be the most successful. And the idea is, I'm going to walk you through your first game because we get a deck. Don't shuffle it. They always didn't. And we ever did the focus testing. You would open the deck,

and the first card would say, don't shuffle. And the number of players that would shuffle the deck was really high. Anyway, so we did a version. of that where we're trying to teach you and I remember there was a really I don't know this was a while ago

but we're having, we're doing a focus so when we do a focus group what that means focus testing is we sit down and we get two players that don't know magic depending on usually like game players but don't know magic something like that different focus testing

we could test different things maybe people that are light and franchise game players, pairs that are heavier game players that just haven't played magic and people that have heard of magic but never played people that have never heard magic. You try different people. And what you do is you put them in a room and you give them the game with the instructions to the game. And we're on the other side of this two-way mirror. They can't see us. We're watching them. And their job is play. We're not giving them any instruction. Sometimes somebody comes out and gives them some instruction. Usually if we're trying,

in starter games, where we're trying to figure out if they understand how it works, we don't want to tell them anything because the players, the consumers won't have anything. And so we give them the resources and say, okay, play. And then once they are done, after we watch them play, we will have somebody come out to usually a marketing person, and they will ask them questions. And there's a lot of the key to how you do that. There's a very precise way you do that because the goal is you don't want to lead them.

You want them to get the answers that they're going to give, and you want to make sure that different people don't influence others too much. There's a whole thing about how to do market research. But anyway, we were doing market research on one of our beginner games, and one of the questions we always ask, which, by the way, if you're ever doing playtesting, is probably the most important question, which is, do you want to play this game again?

And if your audience says no, you're in trouble. Like, if your game has any chance of success, when people finish your game, what they want to do is play it again. That is the sign of a successful game. If you finish the game, they're like, okay, I'm done. Not a good sign. Anyway, so one of the questions we always ask is,

would you like to play this game? Because we want to know that. And so we asked these two guys, and the answer they say is no. So whenever somebody, whatever they say, you want to know why. Oh, so why don't you want to play this game again? And one of the guys goes, it's just too boring. And we're sitting back there like, we spent so much time and energy trying to like simplify things so they can understand it

to the point of which they, like, magic is many things. I'm not, I mean, there's plenty of flaws to the game. point out flaws. I don't know boring. Like I said, depth is magic strength. And what we realize is we stripped so far down that we kind of removed something that was important. And it really, it really majorly affected how we thought about introducing the game to people. And then another thing that happened was commander happened. And commander, normal magic, you play 60 cards and you have four ofs. So in a normal, you know, once you discount land in something, like, you know, you, I mean, assuming you're willing to play four, like, maybe you have 12 unique cards, you know, maybe you have up to 20 unique cards. But the point is, you only have so many unique cards in a standard game.

And in limited, you have even less, although limited, you tend not to double up. So maybe you have more cards limited. But anyway, but Commander, you have a lot of cards, and they're singleton. And, like, Commander is just very complicated. There's a lot going on. You have more than one opponent, and just the very nature of being at 40 life means people set up for things, and there's more, there's just a lot more going on. The board is a lot busier. And Commander is the most popular tabletop format.

So one of the things we sort of had to ask ourselves is, are we being too afraid? Like I said, depth is the strength. But the interesting thing was we weren't selling depth as the strength. We weren't saying to people, come play magic, magic is deep. Now, what we were saying is come play magic, and we'll give you the simplified version of it to show you that it's not too scary. We were sort of so afraid of it scaring people that I think we kind of missed the most important thing, which is, for example, I think the thing that we kept trying to do

is make sure that at the end of the game, you felt you understood what you were. was happening. That was our goal. By the time you finish playing the first couple games, you're like, whew, I know what's going on. I can play this game. And what we learned is it's not important that people understand everything. It's just not. The most important thing is are they excited to play again? Meaning, did the game present something that makes people go, oh, I am, I need to see more of this. Once again, when they finish playing the first game, did they want to play the next game?

And the thing that was really interesting to us is players are more excited by, or are just to say, are more driven by excitement than they are pushed away than they are afraid. Meaning if I make a game and there's something cool there, either you don't understand it, you're like, well, there's something.

I want to figure it out. This is a maxim that I have in design, which is mechanics can be complex if they're worth their complexity. And what that means by that is, are you doing something that excites players enough that they want to understand and figure it out? That magic is not at its business.

best if everything is absolutely as simple as possible. But you want to make sure, like the big thing about complexity in general is complexity for the sake of complexity is bad. But complexity used properly, complexity used in a way where you're creating something that excites people can be and is a valuable tool. And that was the big takeaway is I think that for far too long, if you, asked me magic's greatest strength, I wouldn't give the answer depth.

I would have said other things. But now, as, you know, the more I work with the game, the more I interact with it, the more I started to realize that that's the thing, that's the exciting thing, that the thing that, you know,

that woman's son so many years ago that drew him into the game is the same thing that draws a lot of people into the game, which is, I sense, I play it for the first time. And like I said, it is fun. It is a very fun game.

You play, you go, this is fun. And then, like, once your brain goes, I'm doing this and they're doing that, but, wow, there's so much, there's so much I don't know. There's so much to explore. There's so much, you know, like, that is exciting. And that's what we realize is our first game of magic was not about making you feel safe. Of, okay, I know what's going on. The first game in magic was about making people feel.

excited that I want to say here's this a crazy, interesting, fun world to explore. And you know what? There's no way. There's no way after the first game you're going to understand it. That is the strength that you are going to be, if you start playing today, you can explore this game every day for the rest of your life. And you will not explore at all. You cannot explore it all.

In fact, it's a game that constantly changes. even if you understood everything, even if you absorbed everything, which I think is impossible, but even if you did, we're going to make more things and those new things are going to change the old things.

That's the other really exciting part about it is that there are cards that were very, very good and now aren't so good. And there were cards that weren't so good that are now very good. That context matters, interconnectivity matters,

modularity matters. And that is what we sort of realize is that magic's depth, it's kind of funny that another thing, for example, that we spent a lot of time is for many years we were worried that the non-digitualness of magic would be to its detriment, right?

Like everybody's playing on computers and screens and who's going to want to play, you know, with actual paper cards anymore? And it turned out that society is so inundated to the screens, that every part of your life is so full of your face in the screen, that the idea of getting your face out of the screen has become exciting to people. The idea that you sit down and actually interact with another human being face to face,

all of a sudden is a huge plus. And that's been, I think, one of the big sort of epiphanies of the last maybe decade of magic design is there's these things that at some point we thought were sort of problems, and have come to realize, no, no, no, no. They are part of the game's greatest draw. And the reason that I want to talk about depth is, it's not as if depth doesn't have downside. It does. It does.

When I say people are intimidated, they are intimidated. Bared entry is a real thing. There are plenty of challenges to magic being as deep as it is. But, but I think I've really come to really come to real. realize that, look, it is our greatest weakness because it's our greatest strength. You know, that your greatest weakness and your greatest strength are the same thing. That's really my lesson of the day. And that we need to be careful. And I'm one of the biggest believers of the reason I find resonance so important. The reason I find intuition so important is

I need to give you tools to brave the wilderness. We're going to give you brand new things constantly, and I need to give you handholds to make sure that you can understand what's going on. So the lesson of depth is key, and depth is important, is not just not worrying about complexity. That's not it at all. It has allowed us, like, the average complexity of the average set has gone up because we sort of realized that, like, there's a point in time, maybe Ixelon at the pinnacle, we're like, we were trying to get things as simple as possible, and we went too far. I think one of Aixelon's problems was there wasn't enough depth, for example, to it.

And like I said, there's a lot of things, like, a lot of what we're, like, one of the big pushes right now is we're trying to make sure there's more space for flavor tax. They're trying, like, we, there is a lot of creep and complexity and things to worry about that we're, we are on top of because we, it, it does matter. And I don't want to say depth being its strength means that we don't have to worry about depth being its weakness. We do. depth being in strength means depth of its weakness. But, but I think we've really embraced it in it. Like cameos are a good example of this. So cameos are what we call a mechanic where we bring back mechanical

like just one or two cards. The idea is there's just a perfect opportunity to make a call-out to Magic's past. And for a long time, we didn't do that. You know, we didn't just make a one-of card. And then we started making commander decks. And in making the commander decks, like, well, Commander's all...

It's a format all full of this kind of thing. And so we started making original content for Commander where we would do those one-ofs. And then we made stuff like modern mafters, or not modern horizons, but modern horizons where we gave herself the freedom to like, hey, you've access to all the mechanics, and you just want to make one card

with one mechanic, you can do it. And what we realized is there was so much fun there. People really enjoyed it. And what we said is, look, in small doses, probably at high rarities, you know, That is something that we can. Even Premier sets can do that. We want to be careful how we do it, where we do it.

Residence matters. Complexity matters. I don't want to just use one mechanic once that no one understands. You know, the classic example is in Infinity, for example, there's a car called T-shirt, something T-shirt. But originally, it had the ability branding. And it just had the ability of banding, but I called it branding, was the joke. And I wrote out banding.

and nobody in the playtest could understand how it works. So I took it out. It's like cameo. I guess cameo banding just not a good idea. So we have to be careful. But the rise of cameos

is just making my point, which is that I think when we say, look, we have to be careful and judicious about where we put it. There are opportunities to sort of bring extra charm to the game. Like one of the amazing things

about magic is we have 33 years of history. We have 35,000 cards. We have, I don't even know how many mechanics, but hundreds, maybe thousands, hundreds of mechanics, hundreds of mechanics, hundreds of name mechanics. And so, we have so much

texture to work with. A lot of times I talk about making magic as being craftsmanship. And the reason I talk about that is that part of being a good magic designer is being aware of all the tools available to yourself. And even then, like, one of the things that's really fun for me is, you know, whenever we do an exploratory design or vision design, like, I'm constantly bringing up things we did from the past. Like, here's something we tried, you know, and oftentimes

it's something we tried that didn't work out. Not that it was a bad idea, not that it wasn't fun, it just didn't work out where we brought it up. And when most people don't realize, although maybe you do if you listen to my podcast, like we, we make a small percentage of things we try, because we're trying to make the best version of something. And so we'll try hundreds of things and use a small, you know, three, four, five. Like, we don't use a lot of it. But we do take that and push it forward. There's a lot of times for some cool thing.

It didn't, you know, like, for example, Omen, the mechanic from Kaldheim, was kind of inspired by, we had made way back in the day a trading card game for Star Wars that Richard was a lead designer. I was on the design team. And we made, there's a mechanic in that game that we really liked. So I adapted it. It's called Layaway, and I tried to put it in a set, and it didn't end up fitting in the set. But I always sort of kept in back my mind every once in a while.

I think about it, and we were working on calls on, I'm like, well, here's an idea of something we had. And we ended up tweaking a little bit. Omen is not exactly layaway, but it layaway was like the jumping off point to get there. And whether, I mean, energy took 13 years to find a home for, you know, devotion was us trying something and it going wrong, or us doing chroma that didn't work, and later trying to find a way. Like, there's lots of discovery and, you know, that one of the great things about designing magic is we're constantly figuring out what we can do. And every time we make something that's successful, we add a new, you know, a new thing to the bucket. And now we have new things we have access to.

In fact, a lot of my job and, you know, the job of the exploratory and vision design and vision design teams is filling up our buckets, finding cool things. And even if those cool things aren't right now, one day they will be right. You know, I say magic is a hungry monster. But anyway, I'm almost to work. A little extra traffic days. You got a little bonus. A little bonus talk today because I have some traffic.

But anyway, that is my thought of depth. Why I want to talk about depth today is I do think that depth is magic's greatest strength, but it is also its greatest weakness and that there is an interesting balance to be made. I will say that the embracing depth as its strength has been really empowering to us

and one of the things about magic in general is there's ebb and flow I think we we lead a little bit to complexity we're pulling back a little bit like we there's a magic that is ever changing and ever you know in a constant state of flow and I think right now

sort of behind the scenes we are trying to figure out about, you know, where we want depth. We think depth's important. We think depth makes the game better. Where and when, you know, where do you add that extra depth? Where do you put it? Part of it, by the way, is the nature of magic.

Just a modular system of individual cards that all work in the same game does that. So there's a certain amount of depth that's just inherent to the system. But there's a lot of interesting questions of, with insets, how complicated should mechanics be, how complicated should individual cards be? You know, and the other big thing about depth, I should stress, is I talked about this early on. Magic is all about exploration. Magic is a big game of exploration. And so one of the other things that I'm very interested in when talking about depth is I love depth.

I talk about lenticular design. I did a podcast of this. It's a term I coined talking about how some designs you can hide the complexity. So for the beginner, they don't see the complexity, but for the more advanced player, they do. And there's a lot in... We've been spending a lot more time trying to figure out how to make things lenticular,

how do we find complexity that won't be apparent at first. I love making cards that there's like a low-level strategy, but then there's a higher-level strategy. I love making limited environments where there's obvious things to do, but then there's non-obvious things

to do. And that's a big part of making magic magic is we want the depth to be there, but we want the depth to come as you explore. And I guess maybe that's funny. Sometimes I do these podcasts, and I don't quite know my point, but I like to talk about it. And I think as I drive into the parking lot, into our parking garage, this is my thesis of the day, which is...

Depth is our strength. We want depth. We don't want to be afraid of depth. We want to make sure that players can see the depth in the game. But depth for depth's sake, depth just to be complexity, is not inherently good. That you want to figure out how that part of crafting magic to be the best design it can be is learning how and when and where to apply depth. that means being careful with it, placing it carefully, doing a lot of lenticular design,

so a lot of it is hidden to the people that aren't ready for it yet, and it's just being judicious in where and how we use it. Saying depth as its strength is not saying we should put depth everywhere. Saying depth as its strength is saying we should be very aware of how the game is deep and where that depth is used as is best and maximizes depth. where is depth its strength and lean into that and where is depth of weakness and be more careful with that? And so that's a lot of what recent design has been

is figuring out sort of how best to use depth. That depth has positives and depth has negatives. But we really are embracing it and understanding it is that if you lean into the positives and are careful with the negatives, it is the thing that really makes magic magic and makes magic shine. So anyway, I'm just, I guess there's some aproponists that I went into more depth on the topic of depth because I had extra traffic today.

But anyway, I am at work, so we all know that means that means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys all next time. Bye-bye.