Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #458: Change

Episode Date: August 4, 2017

In this podcast, I talk about the biggest constant of Magic—change.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast is an interesting one. So as we speak this morning that I'm recording this podcast, we put up my Metamorphosis 2.0 article, where I talked about the latest changes we're making to magic. Meanwhile, last week I put up a Mechanical Color Pie article, and there's a lot of discussion about why does the color pie even change? So I'm going to talk about change today, about magic, change in a larger sense, magic specifically, of what exactly is it? There's a quality to magic that I think a lot of people don't quite realize how important it is, which is the element of change. And so I'm going to talk today about this, that there's a lot of things that make magic

special. But one of the things that I think is a little less understood is the idea that it's sort of a living game, if you will. So I'm going to talk today about sort of where this came from, what it is, and how it sort of defines magic. The idea that change is built into its DNA. So when Richard Garfield first made magic, he was fascinated by the idea of making a game bigger than the box. That's the famous quote. That he said, you know, most of the time when you buy a game, all the pieces come to the game. You know, I buy Monopoly,

I get all the pieces and I get the same board and everything that is the game experience, I buy right out of the gate when I get it. And one of the things that he appreciated in, I mean, Magic wasn't the first game to do this. If you actually go back and look at a lot of other things, role-playing games, for example, were bigger than the box. That when you bought it, you bought a book or a couple books. And then the adventures that came out of it were not, you didn't know what they were just by looking at the books themselves. And then there was a whole series of books. It wasn't even like, you know, you were constantly exploring and finding new aspects to the game. Miniatures were very similar.

That when you played with miniatures, you didn't usually have all the miniatures. You kind of bought the ones you needed. And that, you know, the game experience. One of the things he noticed is that when you go into sort of what we call core gaming, that there were just examples that the sort of things that really led the genre, or led the category, miniatures and role-playing, I've talked about the history of gaming before, were interesting animals in that they were,

they didn't act quite like how normal games act. And so what happened was, actually, Richard and I never talked about this. I'm extrapolating a little bit here. But at some point, Richard made the connection that you could make a game out of trading cards. I'm not even sure what exactly led to that epiphany. My best guess is that Richard was looking at trading cards of some kind, I'm not even sure what exactly led to that epiphany.

My best guess is that Richard was looking at trading cards of some kind, baseball cards or something, and stumbled upon the idea that it was an interesting, like, the real interesting thing about magic was taking the idea of, okay, there's trading card games, or there's trading cards, and could you make a game out of them? What would happen? What would happen if you had a pack of randomly assorted cards, like how trading cards work? What does that mean for a game? And what Richard really early clicked onto was the idea that there is a sense of exploration that goes on. That when you buy whatever trading cards, usually the trading cards give you some hint of how big it is.

But they don't tell you everything about it. And you kind of have to track it down. Remember, when he made magic, this is kind of pre-internet. I mean, I guess the Usenet existed. But this is not... How we treat information has definitely changed over time. And one of the things right now, the world we live in, is that information is just readily accessible. And one of the things right now, the world we live in, is that information

is just readily accessible. And that the idea that I need to know something and I might not know something might seem quaint now, but back then, the idea that I have to explore and find things out, and that part of what Richard was hoping for was that exploration would come with it

that itself would be a component of the game. So Richard has a term he calls the metagame, which is different than you know, we now use metagame to talk about like, in any tournament setting, what are the right decks for that tournament setting. So if you want to properly figure out the metagame

for the tournament you're in. When Richard talked about metagame, what he meant was he felt that there was more to a game than just the game itself. That magic, for example, yes, there's the sitting down and playing magic. But if you counted up all the hours that you did magic-related activities, what portion was actually playing magic? Now, you know, there's a lot of community and reading about things and discussing things.

And there's trading and there's all sorts of activities. and there is there's all sorts of activities cosplaying and there's all sorts of things that sort of revolve around the game that become a big part of the game like for example um a lot of people for example part of magic to them is interacting with the community and having discussions and doing all the stuff that's fun and what richard has said is that's part of the game. That the game is more than just the game itself. That there's more to the game. And Richard was, I think a lot of what he was looking at was this idea that something larger. Now, something else that came out of that was not only are trading card games sort of this unknown random thing, but they keep putting more

out. At least if you think of, like, baseball cards and stuff. I guess for a movie, maybe there's one version of it and then you're done. Maybe. Big enough movie, I guess it's not. But Richard has sort of said, okay, so we make this game, then we have the ability to put more out. Now remember, when they first made the game, the time frames were, I mean, no one predicts what Magic became. It's hard to predict that. No one says, okay, I'm going to make a game, you know,

like I said, the big stat is they made enough cards they thought would last for, I think, six months, and it sold out in like three weeks. Then they made, that's alpha, then they made enough cards for what they thought was going to be six more months. And a readjusted six months, right? Knowing what you knew about the first. Knowing that what you thought was six months sold out in three weeks. They then made a printing they thought was going to last six months. And that lasted a week.

That's beta. And magic took quite a while. The early growth of magic was super fast. So Richard knew he wanted to do this. He didn't know the speed by which it was going to happen. So that was kind quite a while. The early growth of magic was super fast. So Richard knew he wanted to do this. He didn't know the speed by which it was going to happen. So that was kind of a surprise. But he knew he wanted to put out more cards. And then one of the things that became apparent early on,

and this happened a couple of years in, is the idea of formats, of forming. Of saying, oh, well, part of what we want to do is we have a system where there's constant new things coming into the system. Now that unto itself is not odd about games. Most successful games, for example, will make expansions.

It's not that crazy to have you know, oh, it's, you know, I mean, take a game that has become popular, and most popular games then have expansions that get put out. You know, most games that become something big then go on to make mini versions of them. That's not that odd.

But Magic's nature, so Magic already, not only did Richard sort of create the system to explore, but also the nature of the game was that you had a lot of hand in crafting what it was the game was to you. I mean, I talk about this all the time, that magic in some ways, Richard created something

more than just a game. Meaning he created a set of rules and a set of cards by which people could play. And because people could sort of pick and choose what they wanted, because there was customizability built into it, that the game kind of from the beginning allowed players a lot more freedom

to determine not just what their specific deck was, but even what game they were playing. And we saw that early on that one of the things that Richard really embraced was the idea of limited play. It was the idea that sometimes you buy your deck, you bring your deck, and sometimes you make it up on the spot. And then from there, we started to see people play different ways. And even constructed, we started creating the idea of formats.

You know, we already came up with the idea of standard, called Type 2 at the time, or the idea of things fall out. But there just wasn't a constant ever exploration. So one of the things that I'm trying to get to today is I think that magic very early on set itself up to be something that sort of was constantly reinventing itself. That it was a game that gave players a lot of discretion on how the game was played. That constantly was putting out new material, and that new material was always pushing in new directions. So pretty early on, I mean, we realized this pretty early on,

that Magic has a quality to it that's unlike a lot of games. That most games, most of the time when you put out expansion material, you're building on top of the game. Meaning, well, here's the base game. I'm adding on top of that. Usually, the expansions don't replace the original game. Sometimes they do, I guess, on certain games. But oftentimes they build on top of it.

It's like, oh, now you have thing A, now you get A plus B. Now you get A plus B plus C. But one of the things Richard was interested in is because you already built into the game, is you had the decision of what you were playing, that when we added things, that it wasn't A plus B, it was now A or B, or A and B.

That you had some choice. That when we added stuff, it didn't require you to keep the previous stuff. That you could, you know... Like a lot of times the way expansions work is, some choice. That when we added stuff, it didn't require you to keep the previous stuff. That you could, you know, like a lot of times the way expansions work is here's the base game and here's our additional things you can do. Here's additional things you can mix in or additional things that you can add to it. It becomes much more additive. Where magic has this quality where you could not just add, you could replace. And so what started was that, I mean, we started realizing really early on that magic had this quality to it that was a different animal.

That it was, I like to refer to magic as being a living game. And what I mean by that is, one of the things that's interesting about it is, it keeps changing what it is. Like, I talk a lot about my crispy hash brown theory. Some of those that haven't heard it real quick. The idea that what makes hash browns awesome is the

crispy outer side. The crispy outer layer. And that once you eat the crispy outer layer, you eat the rest of them because you're eating them, but the best part is that crispy outer part. And then in games that the crispy outer layer. And that once you eat the crispy outer layer, you eat the rest of them because you're eating them, but the best part is that crispy outer part. And then in games, that the crispy outer layer is the learning about the game, discovering the game, trying to figure out what makes the game tick.

That's the most fun part of the game. And at some point, once you eat through that, okay, like, take Scrabble. In Scrabble, at some point, okay, I now have to start memorizing two- and three-letter words. In chess, I have to start memorizing opening moves. There comes a point where you've had the exploration part, and now it becomes like, okay, I've got to study and learn what comes before me. For people that are good at them, what have they learned?

Then it shifts. And that magic sort of has this quality where it keeps regrowing its outer shell, where it you know, you can't quite master the game because the game keeps reinventing itself. And that, when you look at Magic, I think our average player now is, I don't know, 9, 10 years, which is pretty long. I don't think the average game lasts 9, 10 years. So the fact that our average, the average play length of our game is longer than the

average game lasts is pretty telling. And why? Why is it? Why does magic, you know, why? What makes people stick with magic? And the answer is this quality that I'm talking about today, I believe. And that it's constantly reinventing itself. That even if you think you understand magic, new sets can come out that change that.

That anything you think you understand, anything you think you've cracked, you've solved, can get undone and get changed. I mean, there are some general principles, I guess. There are things you can learn about magic and become better at magic regardless of the cards. That is true. But sort of any one moment, any one set of cards, that there's this constant re-exploration of that.

And the color pie, we've taken a similar approach in that there's two ways that you could approach how you do a game like Magic. One is, you could say, we are trying to find the perfect end state. And every time we do stuff, we only make changes when it moves us toward the perfect end state. Like for example, there's a period in time where we had this thing we call the ultimate base set. The idea was, what if there's just the perfect core set? And that our goal was, could we figure

it out? Rather than constantly remaking the core set, constantly then redoing it, could we just have, like, could there just be a single core? like, this is the best core set. This is just what people should learn magic with. It doesn't change. And for a while we tried making the ultimate base set, you know, what's the perfect core set, you know, and what we found was this idea of sort of having a locked end state didn't really service what the game was doing. I'll go off on the color pie for a second. So the color pie clearly has its ideals. The colors mean something.

Really, what the colors mean has not changed since Alpha. The colors' philosophies are, I mean, we've gotten a better understanding of them, and we've gotten a better sort of connectivity between them and why they're allies and why they're enemies. I mean, the basics were all there from the very beginning. We've done some nuanced work. Not really changing the core of what any of the colors are.

But even though the philosophy of the colors are pretty... don't really move. What the colors are has been pretty constant. How it's reflected in gameplay has been something that we've always, you know, sort of been working on. And once again, we could have taken the same attitude. There's an end state, there's a perfect color pie. Let's figure out the perfect color pie and just go to that state. Or we could do what we have and said, you know what?

That kind of is a living, breathing thing. That the game is going to go in certain directions. We're going to let the color pie fall suit of where the game is going. So here's a perfect example. So we don't dictate necessarily how people want to play Magic. Now, we offer certain things,

and we definitely design our games with certain formats in mind, but let's talk Commander for a second. So, Commander was a format I did a whole podcast on if you want the full rundown, but Commander was a podcast made by the players. By some judges, technically, but they're players. Wizards didn't make it. It's not a format we made.

It's a format that somebody else made that we embraced. We do a product that we call the innovation product, where we try something new and different. And one time we said, you know what? This format is popular. Let's make some decks for this format. Let's make some commander decks. And it was off the charts popular. And we're like, okay,

maybe this is something we should just be doing. Maybe this should, you know, this should just be its own product. And we started making Commander decks. I mean, as a regular thing. Actually, we made them once for, you know, originally for the innovation scheme. And the reason I bring this up is,

so the color pie was designed very much with two-player play in mind. And red, one of red's big things is red is the short-term thinking color. Red doesn't plan. Red acts in the moment. And one of red's strategies in sort of two-player play is it's the most aggressive color. It's the color that says, hey, while I save anything for later, I'm just going to try to beat them right away. And so red has become the king of, sort of the king aggro color.

The color that just sort of trying to, you know, I will throw away whatever resource I need long term to get the advantage short term. You know, I want to beat you. It doesn't matter if I have an advantage in the game. You know, if you have the advantage on turn 10, it doesn't matter if you're dead on turn the game. If you have the advantage on turn 10, it doesn't matter if you're dead on turn 8. It's kind of Red's philosophy.

That Red really has this sort of quality. Then two-player, that's how it plays out. But here's the problem. In multiplayer, in Commander, which is mostly multiplayer, the game goes on longer. There's a lot of politics. Sort of throwing away all your resources to take one person out is not a great strategy in Commander.

So one of the things that people have come back and said, hey, wow, Red sucks in Commander. So one of the things that we've done is said, okay, is there a way to be true to Red's color pie? Is there a way to find spaces to let Red do stuff, but integral to what Red is? And so we've started adding things, you know, like Impulsive Draw, which is the idea that you exile cards that you then can play until end of turn.

Or that we moved Polymorph off into red. So red now can sort of change things as long as, you know, also we're letting red get into the sort of cast red cards off top of your library, but if you don't know what they are. That we're sort of taking the chaotic element of red and

the speedy nature of red and finding ways to weave that into some longer term sort of mechanics. Things that would matter in a longer term multiplayer game. But we're doing that in a way that is true to what the color is. So we're not violating the color but my point is we didn't know 10 years ago that the commander format would exist. Whatever amount of time before it existed. Maybe it existed 10 years ago.

Whatever, go back enough time. We didn't know it existed. So the idea that the color pie now, one of the things shaping it, is trying to reflect this new thing. Well, I think that's one of the strengths of the game. I think it's one of the strengths of the color pie. The idea that as the game evolves,

I mean, I've said this time and time again. To me, the color pie is the core of the game. It's the center of the game. It's where the mechanics come from. It's where the flavor comes from. And that one of the things about Magic being a dynamic game is that its core needs itself be dynamic. And then a lot of what I'm trying to say today is, you know,

let's talk a little bit about MetaMotion's 2.0. So the article went up today. I've only read say today is, you know, let's talk a little bit about Metamorfosis 2.0. So the article went up today. I've only read a little time, but literally, like, it went up 10 minutes before I left to go on my turn. So I always start at the very, very initial. Pretty positive, though. At least the first 10 minutes were. But a lot of people are like, why this change? And as I say in the article, we iterate.

It's how we make magic. It's how I make a set. It's how we make cards. Is that you make something, you play with it, you get feedback, you use that feedback to make new changes, and you continue the loop. Well, there's no reason we shouldn't be iterative in how we make magic. And that, for example, we spend a lot of years doing things a certain way. But one of the things that's cool about it is that we don't just say, you know what, that's just the way it is.

That we're willing to say, hey, is that the right way? And maybe, by the way, it was the right way for some amount of time. But as we sort of change things around, like one of the things we realized was we weren't maximizing, and this is going back to Metamorphosis 1.0, we weren't maximizing one of magic strengths, which is its change. Like one of the cool things is, and this is not true for most games, like once a year, go back go back before Metamorphosis 1.0, once a year, everything changed. The world changed. We're somewhere new. And, you know, that the game kind of,

there's not that many games that just say, hey, things are different. Like for those that play Mahjong, you've heard of the game, the game called Mahjong, that's a tile game out of Asia.

It is, in a lot of ways, the tiles are like a deck of cards, but there are tiles versus cards, but they're similar. They have some similar qualities to cards. There's suits and things. But anyway, American Mahjong, they do this cool thing where every year they change their

scoring card. So how you score points changes from year to year. And what they did is they took a game that's this ancient game and sort of found a way to just freshen it up every year. Not a lot of games do that, and Magic does that to the nth degree. It's not just like, oh, the scoring's different. The cards are different.

You know, these cards, you know, especially if you experience Magic Unlimited, it's 100% different, or almost different. Not that we don't repeat things, not that we don't do things people understand, not that there aren't staple effects that show up every year. I mean, magic is magic. There's a court of magic that goes beyond the cards. But every year, different world. And what Metamorphosis 1.0 said is, you know what?

That's one of the strengths of the game. The fact that we change. Why do we change once every year? Why don't we change once every year? Why don't we change every six months? And we tried that. And that went over like gangbusters. People really liked that. Now, there are other issues. I bring up the article.

And, you know, one of the things of iteration is you try things and you learn from them. And sometimes what you learn is, oh, I made a path that's not the right path. I chose something. Like, we got rid of corsets and kind of realized, oh, we kind of need corsets. And we said, well, what if we think about them a little differently? What if we treat them differently? Maybe that we can serve as what we want

if we sort of take a different approach to them. But the idea that we said, no, no corsets, and they go, ah, corsets, it's not a... The iterative process is trying things and experimenting with things and seeing how things turn out. And that, you know, in a lot of ways, Metamorphosis 2.0 is saying, you know what, this, the major thing we changed is the idea of going to two, two new things a year. And kind of what Metamorphosis 2.0 said is, okay, that's the coolest part, that new thing.

And we did a lot of research and we found that, you know, the second part. Now, there's people that love the second part, that we have the twist on the mechanic or other things that we do. And I'll be honest, we're going to have to figure out how to imbue some of those qualities in how we're doing things now. But people like drafting things alone, that usually when you mix something in, for most of the drafters, it wasn't as fun experience for them. And we have created a structure that was very tight, that by pulling back a little bit,

we could loosen things up. So now the rule is, we're going to stay in worlds as long as we want to stay on worlds. But every set set in that world is going to be its own large set. I'm open to the idea that maybe mechanics in the same worlds can cross over, although as with any sort of mechanical reboot, I'll make sure that it's its own thing. Our goal here in Metamorphosis 2.0 was to try something new. And like I said, the crux of this is I really believe... I mean, okay, so this October of 22 years. And I get asked all the time, like, don't you get bored doing the same thing for 22 years?

My answer is I'm not doing the same thing. You know, right now I'm working on archery. And I'm doing exploitary design on baseball. And those sets are unlike anything I've worked on before. I mean, are there similarities? Of course there's similarities. I'm making magic, so there's similarities. But each set provides its own challenges. I had a blast making Kaladesh, which was really different than making Amonkhet, which is very different than making Ixalan, which is very different than making, as you guys know now, Dominaria, right? That there's a lot of different things that go into making magic sets. And part of what we like is

we want you to constantly be exploring new things, to try new things. We want the game to live, to breathe, to be something where you don't know exactly what it's going to be. And here's one of the cool things. Not only do you not know where the game is going, on some level, we don't know where the game is going.

I mean, we know more than you do, obviously. But, for example, when we build environments, you know, when our play design team builds environments, what they're trying to do is make a fun play experience. But if they're able to figure everything out with the number of people we have working at the

company, then the millions of Magic players overnight, in minutes, would crack it. So we have to make something that pushes in a certain direction, that we like the general directions going, but something in which we allow exploration. You know, we don't know. That's one of the beautiful things about this game. We don't completely control where it goes.

You know, the audience has as much say in kind of where the game goes as we do. Because the audience, like, one of the things, the reason I'm on all the social media I am, and Twitter, and Tumblr, and all that stuff is, we want to know what you like. And we try things, and then we let you guys

experiment with things, and we see what you guys are doing with it, and then we use that to make choices. The fact that Commander was a format made by the players and became this thing has forever warped how we make magic sets.

And not just that, just how draft has evolved. How standard, modern, vintage, legacy, every format that sort of takes shape has some impact on how we make magic, how the community functions, how people talk, cosplay has impact, like, just the way we make costumes now is different, because we know people are going to dress up in the costumes, and that has affected how artists, you know, how we do some of our character design. That one of the neat things about the game is that we like the fact that we allow a lot of input from a lot of places.

And that we are constantly adapting. Because, and I think in some ways this is Magic Strengths, is a lot of times things outgrow their usefulness. You know, that if you look back in time, like for example, there's a great story about Kodak, which is, you know, Kodak was the masters of film. You know, when you heard the word Kodak, you thought of film. And once upon a time, you know, when you were going to take pictures, you went and bought some Kodak film. You know, when you heard the word Kodak, you thought of film. And once upon a time, you know, when you were going to take pictures, you went and bought some Kodak film. That they were synonymous with film. And then the world changed in which there wasn't film

anymore. And it is hard for a brand to adapt when the thing you're identified with is something that kind of the world leads by. That is a hard thing to adapt to. Now, some brands have managed to do it. Some brands, like, one of the things I find interesting is the brands that tend to do it have a quality to them that are able to incorporate. Like, Lego is really interesting. Like, I played with Legos as a kid, and

on some level, the Lego brick that my kids play with is the same Lego brick that I played with. At least the core brick, obviously. But Legos managed to do all sorts of things and reinvent themselves and really become a modern company in a way that's very different from where they

were when I was a kid. And Magic is a similar quality, which I think will help it a lot, which is... So there's a term called the zeitgeist. So zeitgeist... I almost named my improv troupe the zeitgeist. Zeitgeist talks about how... what the people as a whole want, what the community wants. That there's something that sort of...

You sort of move in certain directions. There's something of people just want a whole want, what the community wants. That there's something that sort of, you sort of move in certain directions. There's something of people just want a certain thing and that certain thing kind of creates itself because there's momentum within people. It's why there's trends in movies. It's why, you know, it's why there's things in which something seems to happen for a while and that people sort of get into that thing and then they move. something seems to happen for a while and that people sort of get into that thing and then they move. One of the

things about magic being a living, breathing game is we want to sort of surf the zeitgeist, if you will. That we want to always be relevant because we're constantly sort of evolving what we are. And then I go back and I look. It's funny. As a historian, especially

a magic mechanic, I go back and I look at some of the stuff we did in the early days. Like in Tempest, so Mirage had a card, what was it called? Keravec's Torch. It was a common X spell. Common X spell. And it was causing all sorts of tournament problems. So in Tempest, I made, what did I call it?

I made an X spell, which is still common, but I? I made an expel. So it's still a common. But I put two red in its cost. So it would be harder to splash. And the thing that's so funny looking back is like, okay, I recognize the common expel was a problem. Okay, good mark. You recognize the common expel. Can you fix it?

Yes. I'll make it harder to splash. No! Wrong fix. Wrong fix. You know, and eventually we're like oh that's supposed to be rare that you know that it's such a dominant thing and limited it the as fan corrects for that right like eventually we'll figure that out um so but it's so fun looking and seeing like or for

example um strip mine was a problem so i'm like okay i can fix strip mine i'll make a strip mine that only affects non-basic lands so that it doesn't hurt your basic land growth. And I made Wasteland. And Wasteland in some level went on to be just strip mine 2.0 because there are formats in which who plays basic lands.

But in some levels, it was an evolution. You know what I'm saying? That I look back and some of those things I was iterating okay okay I didn't get the final iteration I got that but I was making steps that I was pushing towards something

that one of the things and I talk about this that when I studied film in college and that you watch a lot of early films and the first reaction watching early films is like boring until your teacher says no no no

no let's walk through what they did that hadn't been done before and you start to realize that the the craft of you know this is the first time they did thing x the thing that is so ingrained in you it's so part of your film you know um your vocabulary for film, that it's invisible to you. You can't even see it was a thing. That, you know, you look at it and you're like, okay, this thing is invisible. It's so ingrained, it's so the way films are made, that you don't even realize someone had to do it. What I always call the paperclip moment of somebody had to say, hey, is there a way to

put papers together and invented something so clearly simple to do that you're like, well, how else would you put papers together? You know, there's that thought process that how else would you do it?

That vocabulary is so clear and crisp. How else would you shoot films? But no, no, no. Somebody had to make that. And as somebody who's worked on magic a long time,

the funny thing is I feel like I was there for the early days, a lot of those early innovations where we did things, I was there, I did them, I was one of the people that was doing it, and I can watch just, not just magic's evolution, my own evolution, sort of just how we've changed how we make magic,

it is very funny, like part of me says, you know, if I could go back in time and just, so Tempest was my first set, and just said, let me just imbue on the Tempest designer some modern design technology, you know. I mean, the world wouldn't be ready, and obviously, you know, don't mess with time.

But there's some quality of seeing the change that's happened. But I really think that the, I look at stuff like the fact that like magic, you know, last year was the most successful year ever had. And that's like, I don't know, eight years in a row or nine years in a row that magic has gone through this horrible growth spurt, wonderful growth spurt in this last eight, nine years. You know, three, four times as many people play magic as ever played Magic. And the idea that in this middle of this great renaissance of Magic, we are willing to do

Metamorphosis 1.0 and 2.0. That we're not like, well, Magic's going good. Last thing we want to do is shake the boat. No, no, no, no. I often talk about how the greatest risk to Magic

is no risk at all. That Magic is a game, you know, it's a shark that has to keep on swimming. I'm trying to get as many metaphors into this podcast as humanly possible. What makes magic tick, what makes magic magic, is that we do things, we push boundaries, we push places we never have before. And it's funny, the number of things, like, for example, when I originally put double-faced cards in Innistrad,

there were people inside the building that felt like I had crossed the line, that I was doing something to magic that should never be done. And now, every set, I have people coming to me saying, ooh, can we put double-faced cards here? Because the answer, by the way, is every set could have double- to me saying ooh can we put double-faced cards here because the answer by the way is every set could have double-faced cards

if we wanted them to there's logistical reasons and all sorts of reasons they don't want to go on every set but the idea is that we went from a world where people

are like oh whoa whoa whoa you can't do that to hey hey hey you should use this more often like you know what I'm saying like you do an innovation you see how it happens

you see the public reaction like that is an interesting thing in how magic functions that there's things often. You know what I'm saying? You do an innovation, you see how it happens, you see the public reaction. That is an interesting thing about how magic functions. That there's things that I fought for that really people were resistant to that now are such fundamental parts of how the game works that people forget that magic didn't do that for a long time.

And that is why it's fluidity. That is why it's constant change is a cool thing. It means that we are learning and exploring. You are learning and exploring. That we are constantly trying to stay relevant and stay new and fresh. And that quality to the game, the quality that magic is forever becoming something new, that it's always sort of reinventing

itself, I'm not going to say there isn't issues. It makes my job hard. It makes it interesting and fun, but it makes it hard. But it really, and it's like, there's so many things you can ask about what makes magic magic.

And I've done lots of podcasts on them. This is one thing that I talk a little less about, but I really believe is part of the special sauce, as they say. The fact that magic is this living, breathing thing is this awesome thing, is this exciting thing. And in some level, I'll be honest,

when I think about magic, I think this is how most R&D thinks about it, but how I think about it, I see it as an entity that I interact with, you know, I have some influence on, but I, it is a thing, it is its own thing, it does its own thing, and I, you know, I get to shape it some, I get to sort of interact with it, I get to have an influence on it, but it is not my game, it's not anybody's game, you know, it's kind of the anybody's game. It's kind of the community's game. It's kind of the world's game.

And that I'm along to sort of help see where it goes and sort of massage the corners as it changes, as it evolves. But that I'm not really evolving it as much as I'm watching it evolve. I'm part of the evolution, but I'm as much a

spectator on some level as you guys are, even though, obviously, I have a little more input into the inner workings. But that is one of the most exciting things. It's why I've been doing this for almost 22 years, and why I will do it probably until the day I stop working, because it is fun and it is exciting. But anyway, that is today's podcast podcast all about magic and change so anyway

I hope you guys enjoy this but I'm now at Rachel's school so we all know what this means this is the end of my drive to work instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys next time