Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #445: Frames

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

I talk about the use of different frames and walk through the many times we've used frames to aid the game mechanically.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking card frames. Okay, so and not just card frames, but sort of talking about the history of card frames and how they become a design component. So we will get there. Okay, so when the game first came out back in Alpha, Jesper Miraffors, who was the original art director, made card frames. And the card frames were meant to match the colors. You know, each of them had sort of a, like every white card had the same frame. Every blue card had the same frame. And so when the game started, there were five normal frames, one for each color. There was an artifact frame. There was a land frame. And I think that was it. I think when the game began. In fact, when I talk

about card codes, I remember like common white number one. The white actually refers to the card frame. That's why it's in the card code. Now, it happens to be the color and the frame overlap. But actually, the reason we reference it, and that's why land and artifacts have their own code, because they have a different frame. Anyway, so let's walk through the fun of card frames. So what happened was the card frames as we knew them

lasted from Alpha through 8th edition and then in 8th edition we made a new card frame and we changed up how they looked. You know, we changed the font in the writing and you know we just sort of changed sort of how the presentation of it. The earlier frames used to have white writing on the dark background, and the newer ones now have black writing on a lighter background, make it a little easier to read. And then in Magic 2015, we did a tweak on it. We added the little bubble, the security bubble at the bottom. So anyway, card frames themselves have gone through some changes, but what I'm going to talk about today is sort of functionalness of card frames. I'll talk a little bit about

aesthetic card changes at the end, but basically what happened was as magics progressed, we found need for other things. Now, so the Legends, which was the third set back in 2004, it was Arabian Nights and then Antiquities and Legends. Legends was the first set that had a new component that required a brand new frame, which was multicolored cards. It also introduced Legends, but legendary cards didn't require a new frame. But multicolored cards did because, oh, well, now you can't just use a red frame or a green frame if it's red and green. And that's where we introduced the gold frame. That's the first time the gold frame happened. To sort of say, hey, this is a different frame. It requires a different mana cost. You know, when you see it, it's not just red or just green. It's gold. And that tells you something different.

So we then chug along. So in 1996, I created a set called Unglued. And one of the things of Unglued was the idea that we wanted to mess around with sort of some of the fundamentals. And because the set was made, we individually designed each card. Each card was treated like a piece of art. So I had the flexibility to change whatever I wanted because each card was sort of independently designed,

which is different. Most of the time, the way we do magic cards is we just take the frame and drop it inside the portion where the frame goes. But Unglued was messing around. Things broke out of frames, and Lexivore ate its own text box, and stuff like that.

There were a couple cards that I was messing around with. One was, there was a card called Spark Fiend. And Spark Fiend, Spark is craps backwards, although with a K. So Spark Fiend had you play the game craps. We had dice in Unglued. And basically, you had to roll dice.

And essentially, you were following the rules for craps. But, I had to write it out. And so, I thought it would be funny if we made the text, the art box, really small, and the rules text really big. And so, the way it works is that there is a little, like the eyes, a little, tiny, skinny rules text with the rules text really big. And so the way it works is that there is

a little, like the eyes, a little tiny skinny rules text with the eyes of the creature and then this giant text box. Likewise, I had a card called Burning Cinder Fury of Crimson Chaos Fire. It was an enchantment and I thought it would be

funny to give it a super long name. Obviously Unhinged would go even farther with that joke. and I thought it'd be funny to give it a super long name. Obviously, unhinged would go even farther with that joke. So I turned it sideways. Enchantments don't need to turn, so it being sideways, you know, there's no tapping of enchantments. So I put it sideways, and it has a long thing-art and a long, you know,

thin rule text box because it's sideways. Anyway, I did a bunch of those kind of things where I would mess up and I would change around the frames to sort of allow myself to do something different and then in Unglued 2 also in Unglued 1

I made a card called BFM Big Furry Monster and it was a card so big that it had to go on two cards and so the idea was one card represented the left it had to go on two cards. And so the idea was one card represented the left half of the card and the other was

the right half of the card. And if you played them together, then you got to put them in play together and you would literally lay the cards next to each other and you would create a giant card.

So when I made, so Unglue 2 was a set that I made right after. Unglue 2 never got made, so for those who are confused what I mean. Unhinged got made six years later. Unglue got made the set that I made right after. Unglue 2 never got made, so for those who are confused what I mean. Unhinged got made six years later. Unglue got made the next year, never came out.

For Unglue 2, I liked the idea of doing the reverse. Instead of a card so big that it required two cards, a card so small that two cards could fit on a card. And I made the early version of what we've known as the split creatures. Split cards. I'm sorry, not split creatures. Split cards. So, Unglue 2 never got made, but when Invasion was made

many years later, I said to Bill that I had this card that was pretty cool that I had made for Unglue 2, and while it looked weird, there was nothing about it that sort of broke any fundamental gameplay. The gameplay was pretty clear and clean and, I mean, you had to make rules

for it, but it was pretty straightforward what the card did. So, you know, there was some hesitance. I did a whole podcast on split cards so you can listen to that podcast to hear the journey to get them made. But anyway,

we changed the card frame. We made a new card frame for them. And that was the first time in a Black Border card that we had made, I mean, we had made new frames like new gold frames, but once again, that was just us, you know, okay, there's new colors we have to worry about. That wasn't, this is like a,

I don't know if novelty is the right word, but it's something that just looks different. This was not the way a normal Magic card looked. Now, given each of the little cards kind of looked like a Magic card, but it's still, when you saw this for the first time, you're like, wow, this is different. And Invasion was really the first time where we, especially in Black Border, where we changed, we made a brand new card frame to enable a new mechanic. And the reason we did the card frame the way we did,

I mean, novelty was one reason, but a bigger reason was it did a better job of conveying what the card was. Oh, this is one of two cards and I can choose which card to use. Well, the way we laid it out enabled that. So one of the things you'll see today is over time we start to understand that using card frames can help you sort of, can help communicate how things are done, how things are made, how things are played.

And that it's, that card frames go beyond just being something that's ornamental to something that actually enables gameplay. Okay, so next we travel a few years later to Champions of Kamigawa. And there, we made something we refer to as split cards. Not split cards, sorry, flip cards. So what flip cards were is they were creatures, you would play them, and then

under certain conditions, they would change into a second form. So these are the precursors to double-faced cards. But the way it worked is the card had two orientations. So it had in the center it had a rule, had an art box and on both top and bottom had rules text. And it was a creature so it had a power of toughness box. And so you would play in a certain direction which was the direction that the mana cost was. And then when you change it you turn it upside down and the way the art was done

is part of the art was upright one way and part was upright the other way. So no matter what orientation you had it, you could look and you could see it

and you could see which orientation, well, there's art that matched that orientation. And so flip cards, once again, that wasn't something we could do.

The flip cards required us to make a brand new frame to convey what it was. It was a brand new thing. The idea of a card that had a dual state to change between the dual states. Now, as you'll see, that wasn't probably the best execution of how to do it. We learned later on better how to do it. But it was us experimenting in that space. So a year later was Ravnica and we introduced hybrid mana.

So hybrid is another example of kind of like the gold frame is we introduced a new frame that had a new meaning and we needed to get a new frame for it. Now interesting story about this one was many years earlier one of my problems with the gold frame for multiolored cards was it does a poor job of describing it doesn't really do a good job of describing what colors are on the card. That normally if I have a red card with a red frame

I can from a distance go, oh that's a red card. But if I have a red and green card that's gold, that's a multicolored card, you know, originally it's like oh it's just a gold frame. Like, I can look at the mana cost, but other than the mana cost, the mana cost was the only thing giving me any idea what the colors were. And we felt like it needed to have a little more guidance than that.

So I helped a bunch of us, I was one of the people that spearheaded it, made a new frame of which, for two-color cards, the left side was one color and the right side was a different color. So, for example, let's say it's a red-green card. The left side was a red frame and the right side was a green frame. And from a distance, you're like, oh, well, that's red and green. We tried to get those to use for, to change to multicolor. We did not. It did not happen. But we did change the

multicolor cards. It's called a pin line. There's a line that goes all the way around the card. Before the pin line was gold and so we did is we changed the pin line so it's half one color and half the other on cards that are two color. So a red green card would have a left pin line be red and the right pin line be green to help a little bit. Anyway those card frames that we did not use for the multicolor cards, we ended up using for hybrid because when we needed to find a frame for hybrid cards, I'm like, wait a minute, we did make something and this does convey it is red and it is green in a way that's different. And we don't want people confused because if we gave it a gold frame,

you know, it would, a lot of people like, oh, I guess I play red and green. Well, no, no, no, you play red or green. You don't need to pay both. And so we use the hybrid frame, well, we use the frame that we originally made for multicolor cards to be the hybrid frame. So Invasion introduced the hybrid frame. That's an example of a little bit ornamental more than mechanical, although it definitely kept confusion from happening. And that's an important part of frames is communicating stuff. So they did say, hey, hey, hey, hey, I'm not a traditional gold card. I am a hybrid card. That's a different thing. Understand what I am. Okay, next in Lorwyn, we introduced a brand new card type. The planeswalkers introduced there. And so the planeseswalkers required a brand new

card frame because it did something, it just didn't fit in a normal frame. And we wanted Planeswalkers to feel special and different. So we worked really hard to figure out how to do that. And the idea we came up with was that they had a full frame. If you look at a Planeswalker, the art actually fills up the whole frame. Now some of it's covered up by text, but it is a full frame piece of art, which is a little bit different. In the actual, when we were playtesting Planeswalkers, the way we made them is we turned them sideways. So it had rules text, and then it had a little mini version of the picture on the side. But Jeremy, our art person, felt that that just didn't look good.

So anyway, he's the one that created the modern-day Planeswalker frame. And when we made it, we also actually asked for not just three ability Planeswalkers, but four ability Planeswalkers. We knew we'd eventually do that, so we designed both those at the same time. Okay, next happened during Innistrad. So Innistrad, we sort of redid what flip cards had tried to do, but slightly better, where we made the double face cards. Now the

front of a double face card looks a lot like a magic card. There's a couple differences. One is we wanted to convey the two states so there's a little bubble in the upper left hand corner that talks about which side it is. There's a sun and a moon on an Innistrad. We would change those later

as we do different things with double-faced cards. Also, when it's a creature, which is most of them, in fact, I think all of them in Innistrad were creatures, there's a little reminder of what the power and toughness is of the reverse side to give you a little clue. It doesn't tell you everything, but it gives you a little sense of what the thing's changing into. little clue. It doesn't tell you everything, but it gives you a little sense of what the thing's changing

into. And yeah, double-faced cards, like I said, is you start to see around Innistrad that we're starting to get a little more bold about using card frames.

I think that double-faced cards really opened up people's eyes because it was something that was very controversial when we made it and ended up being really, really popular once it came out. And I think people were getting a little more willing to experiment with that. Okay. And then, what's next? Next is...

Oh, Rise of the Odrazi. So, Innishrod... Oh, wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. I went out of order. Rise of the Odrazi. So, uh, Innishrod, um, oh, wait, wait, wait, sorry, sorry, I went out of order. Rise of the Odrazi is before Innishrod. Um, so Rise of the Odrazi actually had two frame changes. Sorry, I went out of order there. So right, right before Innishrod was Rise of the Odrazi. Um, Rise of the Odrazi

had two things. First off, we for the first time had a full colorless frame. Some of the Odrazi were colorless, and so we made up a colorless frame. Ends up, it kind of was similar to the planeswalker frame in that it's full art and that um there's text that go on top of it but the colorless frame is the land or sorry the art goes for the full frame of the full art of the frame the frame is um all art but then the text goes over it um and so we introduced colorless and we had the leveler mechanic, which was cards that would change over time.

So leveler was before double face, which would become a set later. Leveler has three levels on it, so it looks like it has three different rule text boxes, each with their own power toughness. And the idea is you sort of mark it as it goes up. That was a more controversial one. It was a lot... It was confusing

understanding how it worked and it was a little more mixed of how people received it. Some people really liked it. The cards were fun to play but they were a little messy and looking and they didn't necessarily...

They didn't necessarily convey the... how it changed. Like you had to kind of convey how it changed. Like, you had to kind of learn how it worked. The best frames sort of teach you themselves how it works. Okay, but next was another Tinsman-led set, was Avacyn Restored a couple years later. We created something called Miracles. And what Miracles are are cards that the turn you draw them,

when you draw them, when you draw them, you can cast them for a lower cost. But they have to be something you just drew. So when playing that environment, you have to be careful when you draw a card because you have to reveal it's a miracle when you draw it if you want to be able to use it because if you put it in your hand, then it's too late. There's no way to prove you got it this turn. And to make sure it was very loud that people recognized they'd drawn a miracle, we changed the frames.

As you can see, we're starting to get more comfortable with changing frames for mechanical reasons. Like, hey, we want to make sure you notice you're drawing this. Hey, let's do something different. So the external part of the frame had a little, that's hard to describe, white streak sort of things to sort of say, hey, I'm a miracle, sort of help you with that.

And as you can see, you know, early days, we go a long stretch of time with a frame change. And back then, like frame changes only happened because they definitely needed to happen, because there's no way to convey the card. So we're starting to get into now where things where there was a way to do it, but we think there was a better way. We can help communicate stuff. So next we get to Battle for Zendikar and the Devoid frame. So the idea was we had cards.

We had made a card in Future Sight where the card was, it had a red effect and required red mana, but the card was itself colorless. And the... We wanted to convey that, but we didn't... So we wanted to make cards that had a color, that required a color, that were colorless in play.

And the game cared about colorlessness. That's one of the qualities that you cared about. So how do we make sure in your hand, we make sure you're aware that this requires colored mana, but in play it's colorless. So we made the devoid frame, which has color elements, like the title bar has color elements in it.

So the title bar looks like, you know, the box for the title looks like a box that would for a red card. But the main frame looks like a colorless frame. So it's sort of a merging between... It has a little bit of elements of colored at the top, but most of it is colorless. So in your hand, when you're just fanning your card,

it looks like a colored card. And in play, it looks like a colorless card. And in play, it looks like a colorless card. Then we get to Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon. So Shadows over Innistrad brought back double-faced cards. Oh, we had also done double-faced cards in Magic Origins before Battle for Zendikar. The only thing we changed is the front of the card was a normal card. It was a creature. but we changed the icon. So it

now was, the backside is a planeswalker. I'm not sure what we did for the front side icon. But once again, it looks like a normal double-faced card. We changed the icons a little bit. Oh, the other thing I forgot about double-faced cards is they required us to make a card, a replacement card, in case you didn't have sleeves, which each time we make double-faced cards, we have to make that. And that card's kind of a checklist card so you can check the card you're playing with and then play with that if you don't have sleeves

because double-faced cards obviously have no back. And then when you draw it, you then go get the double-faced card that you have on the side. I forgot about those. Those are also very functional. Okay, so in Eldritch Moon, we introduced a new tweak on double-faced cards, which was meld cards. Obviously influenced by Big Furry Monster. So the way meld cards work is there are two cards that when you transform them,

if you transform both of them at the same time, but they only transform at the same time, you then turn them up and they come together to make a giant card like BFM did. So there's a left half and a right half, come together to make a giant card like BFM did. So there's a left half and a right half and together they make a giant card. And there are three sets of those in Eldritch Moon. Okay, then we got up to Kaladesh. So Kaladesh introduced vehicles. So vehicles were a brand new artifact subtype, but some of the time they were creatures.

But they weren't always creatures. So the problem was we wanted to show you power toughness, but make sure we communicated to you that it wasn't just a normal artifact creature. So we made a special frame for them so we could communicate, hey, these are vehicles, vehicles look a little bit different. And so they have a quality so you sort of read from them, they're artifacts, but they look different so you're like, oh, these are special artifacts. These are vehicles. And then, a set later, sorry, a block later, in Amonkhet, we have the Aftermath cards.

So the Aftermath cards were kind of like a cross between Split cards and Flashback cards. Oh, Flashback cards, by the way, it's not a frame change. We did have a little icon we used during Odyssey that showed you they were active in the graveyard. I'm not sure. I mean, not really a frame change, but anyway. Aftermath cards, so the problem was we wanted you to cast it from your hand and then be able to cast it from your graveyard. If we made them look like split cards, then you thought you had a choice which side you could play, but you don't. So we oriented one face up that looked at you so when you fanned you could read it

and another that was sideways so the idea that when you put it in your graveyard you could turn it sideways to signify to you hey I have this spell that I can cast on my graveyard that frame a little more dubious of a fan reaction it's functional it's not as pretty as some of our other frames and one of our goals is to be as aesthetic as we are functional

and so I'm not sure Aftermath I mean it fills it's functional role maybe it could be better I think it could have been better aesthetically at least from the reaction we got from the fans okay now those were all the mechanical frames that were changed for a mechanical reason but there are some other frames that we changed for more aesthetic reasons.

Okay, so first up is Full Art Land. Those first appeared in Unglued. I think I talked about this before. But anyway, Chris Rush, the guy who illustrated Black Lotus and Lightning Balls and a whole bunch of cards, he had suggested the idea to me. He used to work at Wizards. I was making the wacky unglued set. I put them in there. Very popular. When Unhinged came six years later, I put them back in there. We were doing Zendikar of a land set. It seemed like a great land theme, so we put them there. Battle for Zendikar. We were back in Zendikar.

We did them there. And then we did aar, we were back in Zendikar, we did them there. And then we did a cycle for Amonkhet, because people really thought they were cool. So it's definitely something we're doing a little bit more. People really like them. Lands don't need to have the text on them. That just the name sort of has rules baggage. So literally just saying you're a plains, you get a tap for white. It's all built into the rules. So Fort Orland is something definitely that we have gone from being a novelty to being something that's more of a, I don't know, something that players are really drawn to.

I mean, I guess it's mostly ornamental. There's not a lot of rules function to it. But it's pretty and people really like them. It lets us show off, you know, the art of magic is awesome. So it lets us show off all the art. And land cards in particular, you get to show a lot of really cool stuff. Next, the Time Spiral block. So Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight.

We did what we call time-shifted sheets. Each one had cards that reflected either the past, an alternate present, or the future. So Time Spiral was about the past. Its sheet had cards. This is post-8th edition, so it had its cards use the pre-8th edition frame, the original alpha frame, to show the past. Then Planar Chaos used alternate reality cards, which were, the idea of Planar Chaos was it was a present but an alternate reality present. We were showing things that might have been. So what we did for that is we took the old card frames.

We made a new card frame that had more elements of the old card frame. So it was kind of a different way that the card frames could have gone. And then for Future Sight, we made a more futuristic-looking card frame. Then incorporated some things we might have done if we started Magic all over. Just things to make it a little bit easier to reference your cards. We were also trying to make them weird and different looking.

But anyway, those three sets, each of those sets had cards and the cards were more oh, the way it worked was the cards in Time Spiral were old cards we were printing. The cards in Planter of Chaos were reprints of existing

cards except they were color shifted into a new color they'd never been in before. Like Damnation was Wrath of God but in black. And then Future Sight were cards you've never seen before that were hinting at the future. And some of them we've actually put in future products. We joke that they were whating at the future. And some of them we've actually put in future products. So we chose what we call preprints. These are where they originally came from

since those were cards from the future. We have also done textless promos, which are cards in which we don't put any text box. That is just all art without a text box. Those caused some problems. I mean, when we put them on really simple things, oh, I forgot, sorry. Time Shifter cards in Future Sight, we had done some full art, not land cards, full art creature cards on vanilla cards because there wasn't a lot of need for rules text, just the creature stats. So we did full art creature cards. And then Texas Promos are us doing full art everything cards.

There's instants and sorceries and there might have been a few creatures. But anyway, if it was a really simple card that was iconic that people knew that didn't have a lot of text, they were okay. But we started doing, I think we did like a cryptic command that doesn't have text and like, that's a complicated card. So we sort of started pulling away from that they got kind of functionally problematic um so we then made a product called plane chase and plane chase has uh had planes in it they were giant size cards

they represented um planes or places in the universe they. So different places on different planes. They were sideways. And then we made, in the next plane chase, we made something called Phenomenon, which were oversized cards that forced something to happen. And so they were sort of a different thing that went into the plane chase. So we have both planes and Phenomenon. Then we made a product called Arch Enemy. And Arch Enemy had giant cards that were called schemes that were basically spells cast by the... Arch Enemy, the idea

is one super powerful player takes on many players. In fact, by the time you hear this, Arch Enemy, Nicole Bola, should either be out or be coming out very soon. That's a chance to play Arch Enemy. Again, we haven't had Arch Enemy in a while. And so you can either play Bolas or play three members of the Gatewatch. I think it's Gideon, Nyssa, and Chandra, I believe. And so you can play one of the Gatewatch members or play Nicol Bolas, and it's all three Gatewatch members against Nicol Bolas. And so the Arch Enemy was something that was sort of fun, and we wanted the large cards to represent the deck of the Arch Enemy to be different, so we made them giant.

We have, by the way, promotionally speaking, made different size Magic cards. We make what we call Buy a Box promo. That's a larger card, kind of the size of Planes, Phenomenon, and Schemes that are Magic cards for collecting purposes. We've also made even larger than that cards as promotional things way back in the day. And those were about maybe a foot high, maybe slightly smaller than a foot high, but 10

inches. But anyway, those are just magic, giant sized magic cards. So we've made different sized magic cards. One day I hope to make a little miniature magic cards. I think that'd be really cute. Anyway, next was conspiracy so conspiracy had cards that were affected in the draft um and so we we gave them special treatment so you understood that these were cards that were different that you had to care about when you drafted them

um and also i think there's some conspiracies that don't... I know that there's some talk, by the way, that the cards that you couldn't... Like, certain cards from conspiracy are just banned in eternal formats. And there's some talk of giving them a unique frame, either a silver border frame. Like, so, if we're talking about borders, there's four different colors we put on frames. Black border are cards that you could play anywhere, or, I mean, there's legality issues, but normal cards are black bordered. White bordered reprints the cards in the core set for a while. We ended up stopping white borders.

Silver borders are from unsets and holiday cards and a few promotional cards we've done. They're not tournament legal. Silver Border cards are not tournament legal. And then we've made gold cards that had different color backs. We've made decks, World Championship decks. And we made, in early Magic, there was a product called Limited Edition. That was one of every card, but it had gold borders on it.

So it wasn't a... You couldn't play them in tournaments. But anyway, Conspiracy, we were talking about maybe, should they have a silver border or should they have a red border or something? We ended up putting a black border on them and just banning them in internal formats. I'm not sure if that was the right call or not internal formats. I'm not sure that was the right call or not.

Actually, I don't think that was the right call. When you change the borders, there's some printing issues, so making them have a different border might have changed things. It's the reason, for example, that the Black Border land in Unballuted and Unhinged was on a separate sheet from the Silver Border cards. unhinged, was on a separate sheet from the silver border cards. Okay, the big final thing we did, happened in

Battle for Zendikar, was we wanted to do some cool promotional thing, so we did this thing we called Inventions. What was it called? Battle for Zendikar Invention. Sorry. Battle for Zendikar Expeditions. And what we did is, we put

at a really high rarity, some old cards, all of which were land, because the land theme of Zendikar, that you could get in a special full art frame, but a special frame unique to that product. And how many did we make total? There were 25, I think, in Battle for Zendikar. Is that right, 25? It's like 25 and 15. I might be messing on the numbers. But anyway,

it was a special promotion we did in Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch, and they were special, full art, all premium, and just, they occurred at a real high rarity. But, they were unique cards that all existed elsewhere, you know. Five of them appeared in that product,

and all the rest were from previous sets in which, you know, you could play them in any place those cards were legal. That was really popular so a year later in Kaladesh we introduced the Masterpiece series and so the Masterpiece series is the same basic idea of Expeditions is they're at a rarity, which is the same as Expeditions, and they had some theme to them, and then they'd have an alt frame, they were all premium, and they were super collectible. For Kaladesh, we did an artifact theme, because it was the Inventors' Fair, and so we took a lot of old artifacts that people liked and reinvented them, redid the art.

These also had all brand new art. Expeditions also had brand new art and these were done as if they were part of the Kaladesh big fair and then we made a special frame for them that had a sort of a filigree element to them to match sort of a look of the artifacts on Kaladesh. And then it was premium, so we put it on a special treatment to them so that the kind of brass frame really shined. They look really pretty if you've never seen them. And so we made them.

And then, just recently, we had Amiket. Amiket had a Masterpiece series called Amiket Invocations. That one was a little, the theme was a little fuzzier. We originally started out trying to do instants and sorceries. And between things that made sense for the world, because we were looking for cards that kind of had a little bit of a bolus meanness feel to them, and that we could dress up with an Egyptian feel to them.

And so we ended up going a little broader. I think our theme ended up being, right, I know, our theme ended up being gods, their spells, and their creation. So it was more god-centered of the gods in Amonkhet. And it had a very different frame. The way the frame was made was it was supposed to look like hieroglyphics and that you're supposed to go,

oh, this is a foreign language card, much like we made a promotional... We used to do pre-release cards. I had a podcast on this recently where we did pre-release cards in other languages. We once did a promotional card for Elish Norn in Phyrexian. And the idea was it was supposed to look like a foreign language card. And then, under close examination, the little Easter egg was,

wait, those hieroglyphics are actually English letters and you could read it. But it turned out they were readable enough that people figured out that they were English and then just thought it was hard to read. And they were done to look like you were looking out a window from inside sort of an Egyptian tomb. Anyway, the cards are very, created a lot of opinions, very polarizing. I think they look a lot better in person than they did on the screen. Some people really, really like them.

Some people hate them. It definitely is, like I said, a very polarizing thing. But, once again, that's a good example of us sort of experimenting. I mean, I like the fact that we're trying bold

and different things. Even some of the people that didn't like the frames liked the fact that we were being experimental with them. And so as I wrap up today, because I'm almost to racial school, one of the things that I'm

trying to show today is that early on, the frames were, we very rarely added new frames. Oh, I forgot Theros, didn't I? I did. The one last frame I forgot, when I was going through, I skipped over it, was Theros, was enchantment creatures were a thing, and, was Theros was enchantment creatures were a thing and we wanted you to identify the enchantment creatures. So we put a special Nyx treatment on them, sort of a Starfield treatment so you could recognize the enchantment creatures from the non-enchantment creatures.

I almost forgot that one. I had it on my list. I just somehow jumped over it. I'm not sure why I jumped over it. But anyway, as you can see, we've definitely, we're a lot more willing now to use frame changes, A, to either do things we couldn't do without them, or B, help you communicate what we're doing and make gameplay easier for you. So really what I wanted to do today was sort of talk through frames,

show you a lot of cool things about frames, and sort of say that it's become's become an element of design uh and an element of gameplay where we're trying to do things to help you and then there's some future frame stuff that's really cool that i can't talk about yet because you guys don't know about it yet but there's some future frame stuff we're getting bolder and bolder with what we're willing to try with the frames and it's really opening up a lot of cool design space but anyway i'm now at racial school so all that we so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.