Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1371: San Diego Comic-Con 2026

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

In this episode, I talk about my trip to the latest San Diego Comic-Con.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, I just got back from San Diego. So today is all about San Diego Comic-Con, 2006. So for those regular listeners, you know I've been doing San Diego Comic-Con for a long time. I think since 2009, I've been doing a magic panel. but actually my earliest

I actually went to Comic-Con back in the late 80s early 90s when I lived in Los Angeles and in fact the very first place I ever saw Magic Cards was at San Diego in 93 so anyway I've been going off and on so I used to go to San Diego when I lived in L.A.

When I came up here to work at Wizards I didn't go for a while and then my friend Michael, the one who I Michael Ryan and I who did the weatherlights I got together, he invited me down. We had a great time. I remembered how much I loved Comic-Con. And so I've been going ever since.

So anyway, let's talk about this trip. Okay, so the way the Comic-Con works is there's a preview night on Wednesday, and then the Comic-Con itself is Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I traditionally go down for the preview night, and normally I come back on Sunday. Sunday's a little quieter and it lets me get back

so that I can go to work on Monday. So anyway, I arrive on Wednesday to go to Comic-Con. So preview night, normally preview night is a quiet night for me. I mean, I walk around. Basically what preview night means is there's a giant,

I'm not sure what to call, but a hall of different places. And it is huge. It literally is, every single, like, they have different rooms. It's the length of the entire convention center. So it's a giant hall. It's got like, I don't know, 42 or 45 rows.

And as you go along, like, there's different sections. There's some sections that have old comic books and some sections that are dedicated to video games. And there are some sections where, you know, the bigger places are showing up. Hasbro always has a booth. There were times in the past that Wizards had. a booth. But ever since we've become part of Hasbro, mostly we're a subsection of the Hasbro booth. So if you went to the Hasbro booth, which is pretty big, there's one section. We were

right next to D&D, so D&D, us were right on one section. At this convention, we were showing off Marvel Superheroes and the upcoming Star Trek. So the universe is beyond stuff, is a little more attractive at the show, just because, obviously, for those who don't know, San Diego Comic Con is all about pop culture, and so showing off some of the big brands that we are working with is very exciting to people. Now, normally, what I do on Preview Night is I walk around and see all the stuff that's there. But I was actually quite busy at this time. We had lined up all these interviews. And so I did, I think, six different interviews across the hall.

So Gavin Verhey was also at the event, but Gavin wasn't there. he got there later that night. And I think the original plan was I would do three and Gavin would do three. But because Gavin ended up not... I ended up doing all six. Which is, I mean, I'm fine doing interviews. But anyway, so I did a lot of interviews.

We went around. All of them were somewhere on the floor that night. And I talked a lot about The Hobbit and I talked about reality fracture and... And Marvel superheroes just about current and upcoming things. things. Okay, then Thursday morning, I did a thing called the Hasbro Press Breakfast. So it starts at, like,

8 a.m. in the morning, it's very early. And we're at, we're in a hotel. We're at the top floor of the hotel. And then every Hasbro brand, not every, but many Hasbro brands come and they come with their products. And the idea is the chance for, and press also means like influencers and social media people to come and see all the things that Hasbro is putting out. So in our little setup, again, we did Marvel Superheroes and we did Star Trek. We had all the... So when I say Star Trek, we have all the packaging for everything. The packaging actually is empty.

There's nothing in it. But we have all the packaging. So we've mocked up what everything will look like. And there's a wide suite of stuff. So you can see a lot of like, you know, here are the play boosters and the collector boosters and here are the commander decks and here are the... What else we have? The scene boxes.

and beginner boxes. Anyway, we have a lot of variety of different things, so we're showing that off. And the idea of the breakfast is that people come around, they take a lot of pictures, and then they can ask you questions. Also, there's a breakfast there, so you can go get breakfast.

I ended up doing one interview. I've done the breakfast a couple times before, but I hadn't done any interviews at the breakfast. For the first time, I didn't interview at the breakfast, which is nice. Little quieter there than it was in the hall. Hall is really loud, but I guess you're mic down the hall so they can hear you. And then, so the breakfast is a couple hours, and like I said, I talked to a bunch of people.

Normally, the interesting thing about the breakfast is the toys and stuff get a little more attention than us. Just because it's, I mean, a little by little. The interesting thing about magic is, I've talked about this, we, Hasbro did a thing where they looked at the top 20 brands of Hasbro. and they looked at all these different vectors about the brands. And Magic was number one on revenue, but number 20 on awareness, which means that while Magic is a, obviously the biggest brand from a revenue standpoint for Hasbro,

a lot of people still don't know Magic. Obviously, you guys know Magic. You're listening to a podcast of the head designer of magic. But it's interesting that, you know, and I always tell the story about how, like, I went, when I first got hired at Wizards, I went to my high school reunion, my 10-year reunion. And I was all excited that I just got hired to work on Magic.

And everybody I met, I told that, and I just got blank stares. Like, okay, that sounds great. One person, one of my friends, her husband, played Magic. So she knew what it was. But it's sort of like I'm telling all these people. And obviously, magic awareness has gone up some. And the most interesting thing actually is, Universe is Beyond is doing a lot to raise awareness for us,

just because these big brands, other people, sort of hearing about it. In fact, while I was at Comic-Con on the Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon did a bit in the monologue about the fact that Magic's been doing so well. And not just one joke. There was an audience, I mean, it was a little bit of a cheesy thing. But anyway, nonetheless, it's important. Awareness is super important. Having, you know, the Tonight Show joke about us in their monologue is a sense of awareness that's really important. So anyway, I'm going off. So, I did the breakfast. And then, what else did I do Thursday?

So Gavin, I didn't end up going to this. Gavin went to, there was a Star Trek panel that Gavin sat in on, in which I think in that panel they announced. We had already announced that we were doing autograph cards. But for the first time in that panel, we announced that peckes. Patrick Stewart was one of the people. In fact, we showed a video of Patrick Stewart signing cards, which was really exciting. So anyway, Gavin went and showed off some stuff at the Star Trek panel. And that was quite exciting.

And what else went on Thursday? I did get a chance. I mean, one of the fun things is I love Comic-Con. I mean, well, as I love talking about magic at Comic-Con. I really do also enjoy getting to experience Comic-Con. There's a lot of fun things to do. But anyway, also, the other thing I did Thursday. So we had set up a giant tent.

So there's a parking lot right across from Petco Park. Petco Park is the stadium that's right near the convention center. So right across from Petco Park in the sort of parking lot, there was a, I don't know what to call it, but an area for stuff, we had a giant tent there. And so if you came, there were two sections in the giant tent. One was a learn-to-play and another was if you've ever come to MagicCon

we do this miniature golf what's it called Pupp-put-Tap or something So if you come to the to the Magi-Con I think we have nine holes. Here we had four holes but anyway you can come and do miniature golf each hole is themed to a different plane

but once we had here we had Bloomboro and we had Duskmore and we had Lorwin Shadamore and we, what was the last one? We had four holes. Oh, and we had Aminket. The final one's Amin'Kat. Anyway, so you could stand in line and come to play with a put-put or you could stand in line and do a learn to play. I think if you did either, we had a Loki promo from Marvel Superheroes you got and we

had, you got a welcome deck, one of the five welcome debts. If you stood in line to learn to play, I think you also got a comic book. There was a branded Marvel comic book that were inside. You can see people. I think it's X-Men playing Magic. Anyway, the idea that canonically, I guess the X-Men play, some of them play magic. Anyway, so that was at the tent. There also was events run at the tent.

And one of the events for Thursday, Friday and Saturday, at 2.30 each day, you could learn to play mood swings. So I was there teaching people to play mood swings. So you got a deck. And I think on you got a play mat. We had also a Mootswings Play mat. So the idea was that I, so the way I did it is I taught people four different ways to play for Moot Swings.

There's a normal two-player play, which I've taught them. Then I have teach them four-player play, so they could play of four people, like free-for-all. Then I would teach them a team where it's two people against the other two, and then I would teach some draft, which is a two-person draft. Just to give them a lot of idea of how you could play. So I did that every day that I was there. Also, I did not go to this, but in the Marriott,

there was a place that you could line up for that showed off some of the new Star Trek cards. Also, Lego had done a thing where you could sit in like a Lego captain's booth. and if you went there and got your picture, one of the things you got is we were giving away a Kirk promo card for Star Trek. The first, I think, printed Star Trek promo card you could get. It was a minor red Kirk card.

So anyway, there were a bunch of magic cards to get at the convention. Oh, the other thing we did is on the main strip, like right in front of the convention, there's a place, a booth set up, that you go and get popsicles. And so the popsicles,

the outside of Popsicle looked like the Marvel Superheroes booster pack and then when it opened up you got one of five flavors in the magic colors and then you got a starter deck

well and then okay then your popsicle may or may not have had something on it if it didn't you got a starter deck matching the color of your popsicle and if it did have something then you got the promo card at least how it worked there so we also did that and

we also one of the trains, I'm not sure the right where we skinned it. One of the trains had our advertising on it. So if you watch the trains going by every once in a while, one of them, one of the subway trains had our stuff on it. And if you went into the gas lamp, which is the area right by the convention center where a lot of people eating stuff, there is this signage everywhere, you know, advertisements for Marvel Superhero.

So we went pretty big. There's a lot of, like, we're doing a lot of stuff. So you could see it all around the hall. There were places to get things. I think also, by the way, there was also in the Marriott, there was also a second place you could play. There also were events being running the Marriott. So,

there's a lot of magic, a lot of magic throughout. The other thing that's really interesting to point out is one of my signs of the awareness, like as magic's awareness grows, one of the things I find interesting is, how often do I get how often do I get recognized at Comic-Con? Now, if I

to a magic con, you know, stopped everywhere. They're all magic players. And obviously, if I go to, okay, go to the tent where we're teaching people how to play magic, there's magic players there. They recognize me, obviously. But just on the floor, it's interesting. And normally, if I go back, like, 10 years ago,

I got stopped once or twice. Like, occasionally people will recognize me. There are magic players there. But those number keep going up. I got stopped a lot this time. And so, just you can, I can sense that magic's awareness is just going up. Just a number of people

where you can even get magic cards is going up. Like, there's someone there who sells magic cards that I'm friends with who, like, ever since I've been coming there, he's been there selling cards. We take a picture together every year. So anyway, okay, that is Thursday, which brings us to Friday. Friday was probably the time I had the Friday morning. I actually went and watched some panels just to do some Common Kind stuff, which was fun for me. Then I did more of Moot Swings teaching. And then after that, I did a podcast.

I did a video podcast, which was super fun. And then, I think then I went home and collapsed. So the other thing to remember, a little side note here is I was, the week before MagicCon, I was in Amsterdam. I was in Amsterdam from MagicCon, Amsterdam, which I also did a podcast on. So I was home for under 48 hours before I left again to go to San Diego. So I was, I don't think I was quite over the time change yet. My body still has some jet lag. So I definitely had some long days and I definitely was tired.

But anyway, that gets us to Saturday. So Saturday, like I said, I have a bunch of friends that. I went to some panels to watch some friends talk. I had lunch with a friend. Then I went and did more mood swings. And then Saturday at 6.30 p.m. in room A, B.C. So that has been our room to do... That time slot and that room has been magics for over 10 years now.

Like, I always put in my request for the room, and they just sort of, like, I've been doing it long enough that's kind of locked in. Like, whenever they say, when are you going to do it? I go, well, I haven't officially heard yet, but I will tell you, it'll be... 630, 730, room 8. ABC. It's kind of our slot in room and day, which is good. It means that because I go home on Sunday, it's the last thing I do at Comic-Con is run the panel. And that is always fine.

So this year was interesting. I'm tucked in between two things. We did a giant preview panel in Amsterdam the week before, and there's a lot of stuff that's going on at GenCon because all the top stuff's happening in GenCon. So I was kind of in the middle. I didn't have a lot of new stuff show because we just done all the stuff.

So what I actually did instead is I went through all the stuff we had shown in Amsterdam. I went in a little more detail. I explained some stuff, a little more behind the scenes things. And then I did a little mini talk talking about where the Plainswalkers came from, how the Plainswalkers first got made. There's a lot of stories how we decided to make the Plainswalkers. I talked a little bit of the evolution of Planeswalkers in Magic. And then I talked sort of about how we ended up making cards out of how the car type came about.

And then there was, let me quickly tell the shortened version of the story. Since you guys are listening, I can tell you the story. So basically, Plainswalkers first showed up. I mean, in Alpha, you hear of Urza. I think the rule book, the Alpha rule book, didn't mention the word Plainswalker. I think Plainswalker, that's the first time you saw the word Plainswalker, there's a story that Richard Garfield wrote of two Plainswalkers fighting each other. And I'm pretty sure the word Plainswalkers is in that Alpswocker.

Aalpa book, I believe. But, so Alpha mentions Erzo, doesn't anyone in the car say he's a planes walker. Then Erza obviously shows up in Antiquities. The Brothers War is the first kind of story. Although Antiquities doesn't tell it exactly

as hints at it and tells elements of it, like you're digging it up, like you're, like you much like Erza's digging things up, you're digging things up, and as you find artifacture, they're learning about the story of the past. I talked about Arena, which is the first book came in 1994. I believe that's the first time in the story outside of Bridger's little thing. They talk about Planeswalkers.

The main character, I believe, is the Plainswalker. And then, so it takes a little while. We eventually, like in Erzo Saga, there's a card called Blindseer, which represents Urza in disguise, but it's a creature card. The reason we headed on Plainswalkers early on was, early in magic, they were just so powerful. They're almost like gods. And they're just hard to have a card

to represent godlike power. And so, during time spiral, we created an event we called the Mending. And the idea of the Mending was the multiverse was falling apart and it was up to plainswalkers to heal it, but they had to use their sparks to heal it. Basically, the end result is

we kind of reset the power level and made what we think of today as the modern level planeswalkers. And it was during that. So FutureSight was the third set in the... So it was Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Site. So Mac Cavada, who at the time was in charge of names and flavor text. I had hired him to be on the creative team back when I ran the creative team.

And he now works for... He does art direction for universes beyond. Does major work there. Anyway, so he came to me. and said, look, we're doing all this stuff with the mending to sort of be able to use planeswalkers and, you know, like to reset the power of the planeswalkers. Could we make cards out of them? We should make cards out of them.

And I thought, like, oh, that's an awesome idea. So we were doing this thing in FutureSight, which we should call the Future Shifted Cards, where they were cards from the future. So I'm like, oh, maybe this is the perfect opportunity. What if we show you a brand new card type you've never seen before? And then we'd follow up later by actually having the card type and sets. But the premiere would be in FutureSight. So we tried really hard.

We were going to have a black, a blue, and a green plan. We're going to have three Plainswalkers. And in fact, I showed off one of them. I have the playtest card for one of them. I'm literally drawing it. It's sideways. It would end up being Garrick. By the time, it's called Fendari, was what I called it.

And he made little one-ones rather than four-four beast. That would come later. But anyway, the idea we had when we were working on it was this idea that chapters isn't really what we called it at the time. But on your first turn, you do number one. On the second turn, you do number two. On the third turn, you do number three. And then on the fourth turn, you go back to number one. So the idea is it sickles through these abilities.

The problem we found was, like, one of the ones we ended up making close to Garrick with, like, oh, make a creature. Double the number of, make a beast. Double the number of beasts you have. And, you know, for every beast you have, make another beast. And then all beasts get plus three plus three and trample. Well, if you make a beast and your point it destroys it, turn two, double your beast, we don't have any, so nothing happens. Turn three, all your beast can plus three plus three and trample. We don't have any, so nothing happens. So it made it, it made it feel kind of dumb at

times, like it just wasn't really smart. So we ended up not putting it into future site. And in fact, what we did, that funny story is, I had made a card called Tarmogoyth, because I thought it was very funny that we were, we could make reference of car types that didn't exist, that maybe in the future they would exist. But when we ended up doing plans walk, we were like, well, even funnier than mentioning a cart tip doesn't exist. How about we show you a cart tip it doesn't exist? But when we ended up taking them out, the green slot went back to Taramogoye.

But the interesting thing is when I first made Taramogoye, I made it two in a green for a star star, star, star, star plus one. When Mike was putting, Mike, Turinan, when Mike was putting it back in the file, he did it from memory. And so he made it one in a green rather than two in a green, and he made it star star star plus one, because Lorgoi is a star star plus one,

of which this was riffing off of. So it ended up, Taramagovov became much, became much, much better, probably because Mike just sort of forgot exactly that he had done from memory. So anyway, the Plainswalkers not being there in time made a juiced-up Tarmagoye. So anyway, Loran comes around. We're still not sure about whether or not we're going to get them done in time, so we don't put them in the story. We don't involve them in the story at all. So when we're talking about reality fracture, how the Lorwyn-Win 5 show up in the story for the first time, they do.

They've never been together in the story because Lorwyn, when they showed up, they weren't in the story at all. They didn't even mention the story. Okay, so in Lorain, so Brady Donovan was in charge of the creative, like he was the creative director at the time. He mostly came up with the main five characters. He had input for the rest of the team. So what we did is White was a Johnny. The idea that I know Brady loves the idea that his magic was sort of selfless and that he couldn't use his magic on himself. He could only use it on others.

And that's kind of a Johnny. And Johnny's all about inherently help out of it. We wanted each one to be the embodiment of their color. So being a... My white magic is only about helping the group and not about helping me, the individual, felt really cool. And Brady really wanted one of the five

not to sort of be human. And I think the team really liked to lean in, so we ended up choosing to make a Johnny sort of the, you know... I mean, it's humanoid, but the non-human. Jace... The idea of Jace that we were playing around with that is...

is a telepath, right? He can read other people's minds. So there's an archetype in the idea of the amnesiac. I'm somebody who, I'm special, but I don't know why I'm special because I don't have memories. It's like the born identity, stuff like that. And so the idea is, here's somebody who knows everybody else's secrets, because he can read their mind, but he doesn't know his own. And that felt like a really cool thing. And then we gave him illusion powers because one thing that's really cool is we wanted him to be someone who his smarts was like he was really smart and illusions are really interesting power set right illusions don't actually do anything they can't actually like in order to use illusions in ways like you have to be smart with them because they don't

actually do anything they're not actually there they have no you know people see them but they have no substance and anyway we thought that was really good so the idea of his mental powers with illusion felt like a good package um lillianna and a vest, which does anagram to a villainess, although Brady swears that wasn't on purpose. The idea we liked about her was she's a necromancer who's afraid

of death. That she became, as we learned later on, that if her brother dying, that sort of led her to necomancy because she was trying to save him, and then when she couldn't save him, was trying to bring him back. But this idea that even though she harnesses death

and she's familiar with death as a tool, she herself is very afraid of dying. She made deals with demons and all this stuff to sort of, you know, to keep herself alive. And she obviously, she's very old. We thought that was pretty cool. Chandra, Chandra was always sort of meant to be the heart of the team,

being very red. The idea that was really fun was that she was someone, along with the Johnny, I guess, who was the most constructive of the people. That really her goal was she wanted to help people and she wanted to make things better. But her power set is destructive.

She burns things down. And this idea of someone who's trying to do better by the world and improve things, but with a power set that is difficult to do that with, we thought it was cool. Also, we're playing into a trope of the idea of red is the color of emotion. We like the idea that's one of the characters

that sort of, like her heart was in a really good place, but man, she's spontaneous to a fault at times. And having fire, you know, having, being, I mean, there's the archetype we're playing into. It's like, oh, the fire. fiery character, who literally creates fire, we thought was pretty fun.

And then Garrick, the idea of Garrick really liked, we'd like the idea of this giant person who is really intimidating, but he just sort of, he's a loner, right? Like, he sort of, he comes from a place where he feels at home in nature and he feels at home with animals, but he doesn't really feel at home with other people. And the idea of having someone who had to interact with other people that really was not a people person, we thought was pretty cool. And he was a giant and he bore the mask. You know, there's a lot of part of them we thought was a pretty cool look.

That was something a little different. Anyway, so I gave that talk. And then I talked about that. And then I answered questions. Usually when I do, I call it Blogga Tag Live, because most of what I'm doing is answering questions. And as I point out, on my blog, I do answer questions every day. But I get to pick, I get to pick what I, you know,

I pick the questions I answer. So if I don't want to answer something, I don't answer it answers questions I want to answer. But one thing about blogging live is, well, the Atlanta to ask me questions. I answer the questions asked me. So maybe ask some questions that I don't normally answer online. So I got a lot of people asking questions,

and it's always fun. I love doing Q&A's, and so super fun. And after that, that was my final act of Comic-Con. Oh, the one thing I did not mention on Thursday night. I also, Thursday night, we had partners that I went to dinner with schmoozing the partners of talking and getting to meet the partners. I don't interact with the partners

as much as other people. There's other people in the company that do that all the time. But it was really fun. Anyway, it was just fun to sort of get a chance to do that. Like I said, the interesting thing is there have definitely been Comic-Con where my amount of stuff, like, I always do

the panel, and I always do some interviews, but you know, a lot of times I just have less going on. But I was pretty busy. I mean, doing magic stuff this time. So between all my interviews, the press breakfast, doing the podcast and doing all the demos for mood swings. Anyway, I had fun. I had a blast. I mean, the interesting thing for me is that Comic-Con is a very familiar show.

Like I said, this is, I don't know exactly, something like my 20th Comic-Con. I went to the first ones in late 80s, early 90s. I went there after I first started Wizards, I went there a little bit. And then there was a gap where I didn't go before Michael invited me. And it is so much fun. It is, I mean, first off, as you guys know, I'm a comics fan. So it's fun to go and see comic stuff, which I really enjoy. I also enjoy pop culture, so it's fun to go see different shows and, you know, the fact that I get to see some panels and stuff.

And it's just, the other thing is fun. It's just, I mean, like I said, the number of fans I ran into on the floor was higher than it's ever been. I really do think that magic is starting at this tipping point. Maybe I'll talk about this on another podcast because it isn't really like San Diego Comic-Con but it was interesting watching magic's growth over the last couple of years we're starting to get an awareness in places we had not gotten awareness before,

meaning more people are learning about magic than had never ever heard of magic before. And that is really excited. But anyway, I guess that is a topic for another time. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my recapping of San Diego Comic-com. on, 2006. If you enjoyed this, I do a podcast every year on San Diego, and I've done one for many years.

So if you want to hear more, I've done that. But anyway, guys, I'm now here at work. And so I've been to work for two weeks, mostly. So I need to go and do some stuff. I got some projects to make. So instead of talking magic, I got to be making, oh, sorry, I didn't do that in the order. We're all here.

We know what that means means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you guys for listening today. Like I said, Sandino Comic-Con, it's always fun to go-do and fun to talk about. But since at the end, it is time for me to bid you a do. So everyone, I will see you all next time.

Bye-bye.