Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #404: History of Standard

Episode Date: January 27, 2017

In this podcast, I look back to the early days of Magic and talk about how the Standard format came to be.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today is a history day. I'm going to talk all about how standard began. In fact, I'm going to talk about early, early magic and talk kind of how formats began. So today's goes way, way, way back. Today is an ancient history lesson, ancient history as magic goes. Okay, so let's start by going back to 1993. So in July of 1993, magic got released for the very first time. So when magic began, one of the things to keep in mind is, if you ever have read the Alpha Rulebook, which is online, you can go read it. By the way, the Alpha Rulebook, which is online, you can go read it. By the way, the Alpha

Rulebook is a hoot. One of the things that's really neat about it is first off, Richard Garfield wrote a short story that shows up in the very beginning between two planeswalkers battling. And then, it really is novel to see

the early rulebook, because the early rulebook was, like, one of the ideas whenbook, because the early rulebook was... Like, one of the ideas when they first made the game was that a lot of figuring out what would happen would be part of what the players would do. That, you know, the rule set when it was first made wasn't as ironclad as it later became. And it's like, well, if you have conflicts, hey, just figure it out amongst yourselves. Clearly, when Magic was first made, it wasn't... I mean, this is leading into today's theme here,

it wasn't really thought of as being a tournament thing. It was, you know, it was something that was fun, that people would play at each other's houses. I mean, it wasn't, Magic was really thought of as a casual game that you would just play with friends. And the idea that you would sit down against strangers to play wasn't really in the mindset of the game.

Like I said, the rulebook originally is like, hey, if you have conflicts, well, you know, figure it out amongst yourself what you think will happen. And a lot of the way early Magic cards were written and stuff were done such that like, okay, we'll give you the basic rules. But, you know, if things come up and they will because of the nature of a trading card game, you can figure it out. So when Magic first came out, in the alpha rulebook, you were supposed to build a deck of 40 cards. And there were no deck restrictions. You could have as many copies of cards as you wanted. In fact, there's a card in alpha called Plague Rats. It costs two and a

black for a star star creature, and star is the number of Plague Rats you have. So by itself it's a 1-1, and then it's a 2-2, and then it's a 3-3. But obviously there's 1-1-1, 2-2-2, 3-3-3, you know, it grows as you get more rats. They get more dangerous.

And that was clearly designed for someone to put a lot of them in your deck. It's funny because we later made, like, Relentless Rats, where we wrote on the card, you can have as many in your deck as you want. Plague Rat, we just kind of assumed that that would be true. It's not written on the card. The card actually is restricted to four because it's a normal card. But, you know, it would have been written on the...

If you were restricted at the time, Richard would have written on on the, if you could not, if you were restricted at the time, Richard would have written on play garage that you got as many as you wanted. That was the idea of the card. But the point was, at the time, so you could play whatever you wanted. So, real quickly, why? How is it that we weren't restricted in card things? So, number one, Richard did succeed. I mean, nobody saw the scope of how big Magic would become.

I mean, it's almost impossible to realize when you make a game that your game could get to the levels that Magic has become. You know, it is, you know, it was made to be a fun game that, you know, people could play. But Richard, I don't think, ever saw, I mean, not that he couldn't imagine the scope happening, but it's not what he anticipated. That's not what you expected to have happened. And the idea was, you know, how much cards do people own? You know, Richard made a lot of assumptions based on kind of like, well, how many cards would people own?

You know, and he sort of assumed the game would sell like a normal game, not like, you know, not like a phenomenon, but like a normal game. And so the idea was, the reason there weren't card restrictions was, if they thought something was problematic, mostly they moved it up in rarity. Now, obviously, you know, there are some cards that would go on to be problematic at low rarities. For example, there's a card that costs black, black, and destroys target land. What is that?

The sinkhole. And that's a common card, and that was problematic. But in general, the idea of the cards they really thought were problematic, they pushed up to higher rarities. And the idea being, well, you're not going to open that many, so yeah, maybe you have one, you know, but in your group of players, you know, there will only be one Ancestral Recall of all your group of players, because it's rare. group of players because it's rare.

And eventually what became clear was once Magic started hitting big, people really quickly wanted, like I remember for example, when I first learned to play, they were actually having a tournament where I learned to play. I was at a pre-release. Now, this was a

throw-it-together tournament and it was pretty casual, but tournaments started almost instantaneously. Like once the game came out, Magic actually lent itself quite well to playing tournaments. It was very portable. You could carry your deck around. And so tournaments started up right away. I actually played in tournaments, like I said, I didn't play a tournament the weekend I learned how to play, but I was playing in tournaments very short thereafter.

And one of the things for me was I didn't actually early on have a lot of people to play with. None of my friends played Magic. And as I talked about, I actually, when Beta came out, I bought two boxes of Beta starters and Beta boosters because I wanted to sell it to my friends to try to get more friends interested. And it turns out I sold a whole bunch of Magic

to a whole bunch of friends and none of them really got into the game, started playing. And then, I don't know, a year or two later, I bought all the cards back for them. And above what I sold them to, by the way. But anyway, so people started playing tournaments all the time. I mean, people just started playing tournaments. It wasn't something Wizards did. Wizards really hadn't... That wasn't quite how they had thought things originally. But what had happened was they quickly realized that there was a lot of potential once magic started hitting it big.

So they put together a group that at the time was called Events. Now it's called Organized Play. But at the time it was called Events. And Events was a small group. I mean, I think it only had, at the beginning, like two or three people in it. It was very small. And the idea was, okay, if we're going to have tournaments, there's some things that needed to get done.

Now, I think the reason Richard, I said early on that Richard picked 40 cards. Now, Limited still uses 40 cards, but Constructed uses 60. I think the reason that Richard chose 40 is the same kind of reason that 40 stays true with Limited. Is, I think Richard, like right now when we test, we have what we call Casual Constructed. And Casual Constructed is like, hey, you just built decks out of the cards you own. And the idea is that, you know, there are a lot of players that go track down exactly what they want for exact deck and such. But a lot of players are like, well, I'm going to play with what I own and that maybe I'll trade a little bit to, you know, move in a certain direction. But

I'm not playing a super well-tuned deck. I'm playing a deck kind of what I have. And I think early Magic, that's kind of what they were aiming at. Constructed was kind of seen as what we think now is casual constructed. And the idea was, because nobody had that many cards, they made it 40 cards so that, like, you could put a deck together. It wouldn't be that hard to put a deck together. The other thing to remember is

when Magic first got sold, it was sold in starters and boosters. So boosters, you guys know, 15 cards. Starters were a box that came with 60 cards that had enough land in it that you could play the deck right out of the box. So it's interesting to say, wait, but starters are 60 cards. Well, if starters are 60 cards,

why was deck instruction originally 40? And the idea was that if we gave you a starter, you could take some cards out of it to choose, like the starter had all five colors in it. But let's say you wanted to pick a color or two to pull out of your deck, it allowed you to sort of fine-tune a little bit. And the idea of 40 cards was, Richard assumed based on how many cards he thought people were going to buy, that 40 cards would let you have a little bit of ability to fine-tune. Also, like I said,

early on there weren't any deck restrictions. So, once people started playing in tournaments, once there started being, you know, Wizards decided they needed to get, they started thinking seriously about this. And what happened originally was, it wasn't done by Wizards, it was done kind of casually. There was two rules that started popping up.

So rule number one was the four of rule. I'm not sure really where four came from. My gut is it comes from playing cards, that if you look at a deck of cards, there's four of each thing. And so when you think of cards, I think a lot of times you think of four of just because the nature of card games. You know, in poker, you can have four of a kind. There's four of things.

I don't know for sure exactly where four of came from. That is my gut. Because it wasn't something wizards did originally. It was something kind of done casually. And once again, the other thing to remember about early Magic was Magic didn't really have a website in the days. There wasn't the duelist yet. There was nothing really on a national or global scale to sort of tie people together yet. So it was a very regional game. I used to tell stories about how I used to play in Los Angeles, and a few times I would venture elsewhere.

Like one time I took a trip over to San Francisco, and just the culture in San Francisco, what they were playing, their metagame, was radically different than L.A. Once upon a time, like now the Internet's going strong. Like when Magic first came out, the Internet existed, but it was really, there wasn't yet, the World Wide Web didn't quite exist yet, or it was in its early, early, early stages.

There wasn't really a graphical interface. Most of the people were communicating through Usenets, which was like bulletin boards, a chat, chat writing, I mean, not live chat, but sort of like a, I don't know, bulletin board is a dated term itself. But the idea is, you know, I would write something and other people could come along and write something and, you know, that is kind of how people communicated. And early on, there wasn't a lot of deck tech share. That wasn't something that people tended to do.

Wizards, in fact, I've talked about this early on, Wizards prevented, like, we didn't tell people about decks. We withheld the live information, because we didn't want to warp what people were doing. In fact, when I reported on the very first World Championship, I didn't list his deck. I

wrote it down, and later, once we kind of changed the philosophy, I later put it in the do list. But, at the time, you know, I told you what was in his hand, and I walked you through it, and later, once we've kind of changed the philosophy, I later put it in the duelist. But at the time, you know, I told you what was in his hand and I walked you through it. And like, what I had done was I wrote an article about it and then I also did a play-by-play

for the duelist companion, which was like a newsletter that we sent out to people that were really, that were in the duelist, the duelist convocation, which was the play group that we sent out to people that were really, that were in the Duelist Convocation, which was the play group that we had started. And people had to figure out, like people had to,

because I showed every card that was in hand, every card he played over the course of all three games. So it didn't have every card in his deck, but it had enough that you could start piecing together what you thought was in his deck. And people poured for that. And I talked a little bit about his deck in the Duelist article,

even though I didn't give the... I talked generally about it without giving specifics. But between that and the Duelist companion article, people started kind of piecing together what his deck was. But anyway, magic back then was a very different time. There wasn't net decking. There wasn't a lot of deck sharing, at least on a national and global level. It was on a state level or of a regional level.

But anyway, so the four of rule came about and it's kind of casual. Like I remember playing in tournaments where like people would say, oh, we're having a tournament and they go, you know, four of rule in effect or something. Oh, another thing that happened. Okay. So there are a couple. So first off, the four of rule in effect or something. Oh, another thing that happened. Okay, so there were a couple. So first off, the four of rule showed up. Second thing is there was a no anti rule. So when Magic first started, for those who don't know,

the way that Magic worked in the rules in Alpha was I would draw my seven cards and then my eighth card would be turned face up and put aside. And that was my anti card. be turned face up and put aside. And that was my anti-card. Each opponent did it. The winner of the game got the anti-card of the loser of the game. That was originally built into Magic. And I've talked about this a little bit. I mean, one of the things that Richard was trying to do was,

given a world where people didn't spend that much money on Magic, he wanted to create some flux in the cards so that many games could change and stuff. And so, inspired by marbles, Richard actually played a lot of marbles when he was a young kid, he made the ante rule. Well, the ante rule was unpopular to say the least. It was abandoned very quickly, but whenever there would be tournaments, they would always stress that there was no ante. That was another big tournament thing. Because that causes a lot of problems.

Now, for those that have ever heard me talk about the story of the Ice Age pre-release, that was actually a tournament run with an ante. A pre-release tournament

run with an ante. And that caused all sorts of chaos. Because what happens is if you lose a good card sometimes, you literally have to change colors

mid-tournament. So, or sometimes you would win cards and then you literally have to change colors mid-tournament. Or sometimes you would win cards and then you would get really good cards in colors you weren't playing, and I, oh, maybe I want to play that color. So, anyway. So what happened was there was four of a card, there was no ante, and the other thing that came up pretty early on was the idea of, once they said four of cards, they sort of moved up to 60 card decks.

40 cards, when you only could play four of a card, or even with a four card limitation, 40 cards was a bit, you a little too consistently got what you needed. And so pretty quickly, it casually changed to 60 cards. So the idea was, so the three things that were pretty universal, I mean, it spread from region to region, but tended up becoming kind of the standard was, instead of 40 cards, there were 60 cards, there was four of limits and no ante. And so when the duels convocation started, and they started up the events, and they started doing official rules. So for time-wise, I think the duels convocation started up in like, it's either January

or February of 2004. I'm sorry, 1994. So July the game came out. Alpha came out in July. Beta came out in September, like late September early October. And then Unlimited came out

in December and January. Around the time of Unlimited, like after Unlimited had come out, that's when the events started and the duels complications started. The first duels would come out I think in late January, February. So that's when they started thinking, okay, we're going to start running events. And that's when they started making rules. Now, early Magic, there was no formats. The format was Magic. You play whatever cards you had.

But they started running into a problem. And R&D realized that they needed to get a solution. So here was the problem. Okay, they made Alpha. They made a limited edition, Alpha slash Beta. They then did Unlimited. And then Arabian Nights came out. And Antiquities shortly thereafter came out.

And the problem they realized was, if you had access to any cards you wanted, and all the cards were available to the format, there was going to become a problem. Because obviously, they wanted to put expansions out, and they wanted the expansions to be fun, but what they didn't want to do was, they

wanted everything to keep it an even keel. In fact, there was a belief that Alpha in certain ways was too strong, and they needed to pull back a bit. And so, they, oh, I didn't get into, I'll get into the restricted list in a second. And so, they realized, let me jump to the restricted list, because the restricted list actually started chronologically.

When they first came out with rules, there was a ban in restricted lists. So when they made a no-anti rule, the anti-cards got banned, so you couldn't play with the anti-cards. And then they didn't want to keep people from playing with cards so they made what's called the restricted list which is okay you can have one of them and what they did is they put cards on the list that they thought were causing problems now if you look at the early restricted list it's a little silly

I think what happened was the people who ran the events team it wasn't that they didn't play Magic but it wasn't like there was no experts on Magic at the time. And that they, you know, most of the people who ran events at the time were not even competitive players. You know, they played Magic, but casually.

And so a lot of times they were trying to solve problems, but R&D wasn't the ones that made the early list. It was events that made the early list. And so, for example, there was a deck. I talked earlier about the two-drop card called... What did I say it was called? What was it called?

It was BB, Black Black Destroy Target Land. I named it earlier in the show. And it, along with some other cards, made a very, especially with stuff like Dark Ritual, made a very devastating land destruction deck. I think the deck had... I'm blinking the name. I just said the name of the card. It had the land destruction card.

It had Dark Rituals. It had Non-Expectors. It was a mono-black deck. And it basically just denied you of land and denied you of cards. And one of the ways that it sometimes would kill you, some of the land-structuring decks would put

in, I'm doing good in remembering card names today, there was an artifact that whenever a land went to the graveyard it did two damage to you. Ankh of Mishra. And so one of the ways that a lot of the kill condition for a lot of land destruction decks would be Ankav Mishra.

Because while they were denying you land, it was doing two damage a pop for you. And so, for example, in the early list, they banned, or sorry, they restricted Ankav Mishra. Because they're like, well, land destruction's a problem, and here's a card that's killing you. But Anka Mishra was not the problem. And so one of the things that they, like,

if you look at the early list, there were a lot of things on it that were kind of silly in retrospect. But anyway, early on, when they first started, the ban restricted happened very early on. Okay, let's back to our story. So they're trying to figure out how to make new sets and R&D realizes that the problem is if every set that gets added like for example when limited edition came out well there was one set so all of magic was made up of one set. Then Arabian Nights came out now all of magic

was two sets. Then antiquities was now now three sets. What happened was, as you have more sets, each set is a smaller percentage of the whole. And if we wanted to make sure that the new cards were exciting to people, then we wanted to make sure that you could play them in tournaments. But in order to do that, the problem was, you ran into this problem of, if you kept an even power level, it just meant that each set that came out was less likely to have any impact on the format. And so we knew that, like, long term, either we'd have to get into a power creep situation,

where the way we get people to play cards is we make each one more powerful, you know, each set is slightly more powerful, but that's a power creep situation. And the problem with power creep is, you're eventually going to crash the game. If each expansion that comes out is slightly more powerful than the one before it, eventually it becomes unwieldy and the game breaks. And so R&D didn't want to do that. So the idea they came up with is, well, what if we had a format where it rotated, the idea of a rotation?

What if not everything was in the format? And the other thing it solved, I mean, the card balance was one problem. The other problem was the idea of Magic was a collectible, and the early sets had sold out so fast that getting your hands on some of the early cards was really hard.

And so they also didn't want to make it unapproachable for new players. So one of the ideas was, well, you know, and there they also didn't want to make it unapproachable for new players. So one of the ideas was, well, you know, and there were also, the ban restricted list had gotten pretty long because there were a whole bunch of cards in alpha that ended up being a bit more powerful. You know, modern day development wasn't quite there yet. And so by making a format A, they could sort of keep the power level down.

B, they could rotate cards and cards would eventually leave the system. So some of the broken things would eventually leave the system. So some of the broken things would leave and the ban of strickless wouldn't be so unwieldy. It also allowed new players of access because they didn't need to get cards that were really, really hard to get. Because remember, early Magic almost sold out over, like, things would come to the store and it would be gone before the day was out. And I would wait in line when the store opened to make sure I could get my cards. And so some of the older cards were just really, really hard to get. That would lead to us putting more stuff in the core set,

to us making chronicles. It led to decisions that ended up coming up in the reserve list. And anyway, that's a whole different podcast. So what happened was they decided, okay, we needed to make a rotating format. So what they did at the time was they decided, okay, we needed to make a rotating format. So what they did at the time was they said, okay, we're going to keep the existing format. If you like playing with all the Magic cards, we'll keep that.

We're not going to get rid of it, but we're going to make a new format, a format that's a rotating format that only uses two years' worth of cards. And so at the time they decided to call it Type 1 and Type 2. I know, very exciting names. Type 1 is what we now know as vintage. Type 2 is what we now know as standard. So the idea of Type 2 was Type 2 would use two years' worth of cards. Now, when we announced this, one of the things is, ever since I was at Magic,

although actually this, the Type 2, I'm trying to think whether I was there for the announcement of Type 2. It might have been, I think it was before I started. I think the announcement was before I started. Although I was very much on the Usenets and paying attention. And even at the time, I at this point was the puzzle guy on the duelist. And so I did a lot of interacting with the public and chatting with people. And I did a lot of rules. I did a lot of interacting with the public and chatting with people. And I did a lot of rules.

I answered a lot of rules questions. Tom Wiley would go on to be the first rules manager. Also was on the Usenet, not even as an employee yet, just as somebody who had a good handle on the rules and would answer rules questions. And so Tom and I used to answer a lot of rules questions. Tom would do the more difficult ones. But my rule knowledge was decent at the time.

I mean, still decent. It's just not. There are people who know the rules way, way better than me, but my rules knowledge at the time was among the top. I mean, not as good as Tom, but anyway,

so I was around when Type 1 and Type 2 got announced, or Type 2 got announced, and so the reaction was bad. Because when you first hear about a non-rotating format, when all you know is a rotating format, when all you know is a non-rotating format, it's just like the idea that I have cards and I want people to play my cards.

And we're like, look, if you want to play your older cards, there'll be formats to play that. There'll be type 1, vintage. But we want to create an even keel, something that we can design to, play your older cards. There'll be formats to play that. There'll be Type 1, you know, Vintage. But, you know, we want to create an even keel, something that we can design to, something that allows us to make cards at the right power level, something that allows us to make it easier for new players to get in the game.

And there was really resistance. I mean, when I, we first announced that we were doing Type 2, it was about as negative. I mean, there's been things in Magic where we've announced things, and there has been

negativity. And this is up there. This is up there with one of the harshest responses. But, what happened was, Wizards really said, you know what, we really think this is important. It's for the health of the game.

We really need a rotating format. Oh, the other thing a rotating format did, a lot of pluses are in the format, is it also allowed the metagame to change. The problem was, if you had a non-rotating format, wow, it was really hard for the metagame to change. Once there was a good deck, you know, I mean, every once in a while some new cards would come out,

and maybe that enabled the new deck, but, you know, the mean, every once in a while some new cards would come out, and maybe that enabled the new deck, but you know, the really good, and usually the really good decks just got more pieces and got even more fine-tuned and got better. And so what happened was, there was not as much flux, where on standard with a rotating format, there was constant flux. Things would rotate

out, so all of a sudden decks that you would play, now you'd have to make a new deck, and so what happened was we started making standard tournaments, and early on, once again, decks that you would play, now you'd have to make a new deck. So what happened was we started making standard tournaments and early on, once again, they're called Type 2, early on, there's a lot of push on our behalf. One of the things that's really interesting is, and note

by the way, Limited wasn't a thing yet. Limited wasn't something, I mean, it was something we acknowledged existed and we definitely encouraged people to play Sealed, but it really hadn't yet taken off and we definitely encouraged people to play sealed, but it really hadn't yet taken off, and we hadn't yet pushed draft. The big push with draft wouldn't happen until the Pro Tour started in 95. But anyway, we announced it, and it was very negative.

So we start starting our organized play system. And we really pushed standard. And we made standard the format that got played in nationals. And it got played at any tournament. We encouraged people who were running tournaments at the time to try to play more standard. And everybody sort of realized that it was just a better tournament format. Having a rotating format meant there was more flux in what happened and there was more options and having the power level be a little lower

meant it wasn't, did you draw the singular card that spun the game? That just didn't happen as much. And eventually what happened was little by little, people started warming up to it. When it first came out, like I said, people were just dead set against the format.

But as we started playing around a little bit and people like, you know, another thing to remember was that this is the dynamic of early Magic. Magic was spreading like wildfire. So when Magic first came out, it mostly was a West Coast thing in the United States. And then it started spreading.

And what happened though was every time we print something, we sell out of it. And so as people started playing, and not just, I mean, the other big thing happened, it started spreading around the world. You know, it started in America, but spread to Europe and spread to Asia and spread to South America and spread to Australia and just started spreading around the world. And what happened was the, some of the early cards, there just wasn't access to it that there just wasn't you know um that because things sold out so fast that it was hard to get earlier cards so another thing that we were trying to do is just make something where people could

play with stuff that was available um and anyway we started running running type two tournaments. And little by little, they started becoming popular. And in fact, it's funny that what happened was, like when it first came out, people were like, boo, hiss, hiss, hiss. And then eventually, it got to the point, and not even too long, but maybe two years, where our number one thing, the thing that we did more than anything else, was the Type 2 slash Standard tournaments. And it went on to become the most popular format. It is funny.

A lot of the history of Magic is we introduce something, it's different, it's new, initial reaction's kind of poor, and then with time, as people start to get used to it and understand it, people warm up to it. And Standard is definitely one of those things that took a little while to get going. But once people really sort of warmed up to Standard, it quickly became the format people preferred. And once again, we let people play both Type 1 and Type 2 at the time. So it wasn't like we didn't let people play Type 1.

That was something that was available to people. But eventually what started happening was, you know, early Magic, for example, had some really powerful cards. The Power Nine, for those that haven't heard of it. So the Power Nine is Black Lotus, which is a zero drop artifact that you can sacrifice for three mana of any color. The five Moxin, so Mox Pearl, Mox Sapphire, Mox Jet, Mox Ruby, Mox Sapphire. Those are zero-drop artifacts you tap for one of the colors. Mox Pearl is white, Mox Sapphire is blue, for example. Then there was Time Walk for one and a blue that allowed you to take an extra turn. There was Ancestral Recall for a single blue, allowed your target player to draw three cards,

and then it was Time Twister, which was two and a blue, which made everybody shuffle their hands into the library and then draw seven new cards. Those were known as Power Nine. Now there were also other powerful cards. There was Soul Ring, which was an artifact for one that caps for two, two colors. There was balance. There was balance. You take all the... Each player goes down to the lowest number of lands of creatures and of cards in hand. There was a card called Mind Twist that allowed you to make a player discard X cards

for a relatively inexpensive amount, like XB, I think. There was... Anyway, there's lots and lots of cards that were really, really powerful that were just early, early cards that was harder to get. And so, another thing Standard had done was

it was kind of frustrating playing against people who had these really powerful cards when you couldn't get your hands on the really powerful cards. And so, and, you know, the idea of splitting into two formats, a lot of people who wanted to play

with the Power 9 and such still could in Type 1. But anyway, Type 2 sort of caught on. And over the years, obviously, we started making more and more formats.

At one point, we made a format called 1.5, which was in between Type 1 and Type 2. Later, that would get changed into Extended. And Extended existed for a while,

and what it was was a format where the cards would rotate at somewhere between 5 and 8 years. So it was like Standard, but much bigger. And then Standard ended up sort of getting morphed. Well, Modern came along, and Modern overtook. Sort of the desire to do that ended up... They were close enough that people preferred Modern, which was a non-rotating format. But for the first early years of it, it functioned a lot like Extended because it fell in the same gap.

And anyway, there were a lot of casual formats, Commander and Pauper and all sorts of different things. Commander and Pauper and all sorts of different things. But sort of the point of today's chat was that early on, like a lot of things that people give for granted, a lot of things that, you know, when you think of the idea of standard or 60-card decks or four-card limits or abandoned restricted lists, you know, there's all these things that are, or even a sideboard. When Magic first started, the idea of a sideboard was something that I think Wizards came up with. I think R&D came up with it.

Of a way by which, because Magic had a lot of interesting cards that were situational. And we decided that would be more fun instead of making people have to sort of guess ahead of time, that we give you a little bit to adjust it while you were playing. And we ended up making a sideboard. It was always 15 cards. So the idea, for those that never played in a tournament, if you, when you go to a tournament, you have a 60 card deck, or minimum 60, it can be over 60, usually it's 60, and then you can have up to 15 cards.

And the idea of how a sideboard works is, in between games, you must play the first game with your deck as you brought it, and then for later games, you can exchange cards in your sideboard one for one for cards in your deck. So you can say, okay, I'll take this card on my deck and put this card from my sideboard in. And it allows you to sort of adapt to other decks so that, oh, I know people are going to play a certain kind of deck. Well play some cards that, while not good standard, are a good answer to that deck,

and you put them in your sideboard. But because you have 15 cards, you really have to kind of figure out what you expect to face because you can't put everything in there. But anyway, all the things I'm talking about, this all happened along the way. Now, again, a lot of this happened early in Magic's life. A lot of the stuff I'm talking

about happened in, like, 94, 95, so pretty early in Magic's life. But still, it didn't'm talking about happened in like 94, 95. So yeah, pretty early in Magic's life. But still, it didn't start that, you know. One of the things that's interesting when we talk about the history of Magic is there are so few things in Magic that like a lot of things evolved along the way. And that one of the reasons I love doing history stuff is making people understand that things you take for granted, things that just seem, you know, things that now are just in the rules that are just standard part of the way the game works

weren't always the case, weren't always that way. And standard formats, deck instruction limits, all that, all that is something that came about and was relatively new.

So that, my friends, in 30 minutes or so, how long was today? In 33 minutes or so, was how standard came to be. If you guys like this, I, from time to time, like to do history sort of podcasts

about early stuff. If you want to know about how certain things came to be, let me know. I'd love to do other history podcasts on topics that people recommend. So what's something in magic you always wondered how it came to be?

Let me know. It's something I can do for you. But anyway, I'm now pulling up to Rachel's school, so we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of it came to be. Let me know. It's something I can do for you. But anyway, I'm now pulling up to Rachel's school, so we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.