Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #473: Gavin Verhey

Episode Date: September 22, 2017

For the first time ever, I have a guest who isn't in the car with me. Thanks to new technology, I now have the ability to have a guest phone in. Gavin Verhey of Magic R&D tests out this new technology with me.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, guys, I got some technology working for me here. So I did a podcast a while ago about my podcast where I talked about I always hoped that I could phone in people and how cool it would be if I could talk to people on the phone while I drove to work. And somebody wrote in and said, hey, here's an app that can do that. So say hello, Gavin.

Hey, everybody. So I have a call-in guest. My first call-in guest that's not carpooling with me. So the idea is Gavin said he would test this out for a first-ever interview with somebody not in the car. So how are you doing, Gavin? I'm doing pretty good. I'm coming to you live from the Hell Vault here at Wizards. Okay, so let's start with Gavin. I know that before you worked for Wizards, you were a Magic fan.

So how did you get involved in Magic? Yeah, so I started playing Magic when I was 10 years old, a little kid. I was playing some other games at the time, and a store owner showed me Magic, and I was hooked immediately. I got my brother into it, and we spent all night, all day, all of our extra time basically just playing Magic against each other and getting the rules wrong, of course.

And then like any 10-year-old, you know, I was like, well, I figured this Magic game out. This is pretty easy. Why don't I try and get a job at Wizards? So when I was 11, I actually decided I wanted to work in Magic R&D and then spent a long time pursuing that. Okay, well, 11, that's a bold move at 11.

So how did it happen? How did you actually get a job in R&D? Well, yeah, there's a kind of long story, but the story I like to tell, my favorite part is I'm 11, and I decided I wanted to work at Wizards, and so I go up to Randy Bueller, who I'm sure, you know, you've heard Mark mention many times, the VP of R&D at the time, and he was at a local pre-release, because I grew up in Seattle,

which is very fortunate for wanting to work at Wizards, and I asked Randy, hey, I'm 11, I want to come work at Wizards, can you hire me, like, what's the deal, you know, and Randy looked at me really seriously, he's like, all right, kid, you're going to need two things. The first thing you're going to need is a college degree. And my heart just sunk. I was like, oh, my gosh, that's like an infinite time away. That's like 10 years, and I'll never get there. But then what Randy said is, we want you to be a pro player

or someone in the community that players know. And then that way we can reach out and hire you. And I thought, well, I don't know about the whole college degree thing, but a pro magic player, that's got to be easy, right? So after that, I kind of started on the playing competitively, working on the Junior Super Series circuit at the time, and eventually getting all the way up to the Pro Tour and played in a bunch of Pro Tours. And I started college early. I started college two years early,

so I got that part out of the way. I started college early, I started college two years early, so I got that part out of the way, I finished college when I was 20 and then after playing a bunch of Pro Tours, I was like, well, I'm still not at Wizards, what am I supposed to do now? And I basically started this project called Overextended, which kind of turned into Modern at some point, Wizards was working on Modern at the same time, now I was doing my own thing and between my results and the results that I was getting with Modern, the approach for Philadelphia was turned in from Extended into Modern.

And shortly after that, I got a Vapour Ops test. I've been working here ever since. I started in October 2001, and I've been here almost 60 years now. It's great. Wow. So I know when you started, you originally started in development, right?

Or no? Where did you start originally? Yeah, so I started in development. I started on Dave Humphries' team, working on, you know, the careful game balance elements of Magic. But eventually, I was kind of seeing that my talents were better suited for other areas, which is great. One awesome thing about Magic R&D is you kind of float towards whatever you're best at, and a lot of people will move around to find what they're most experienced at. And so I worked on the Kaijudo game for a while, and we were working on that,

and then moved into Magic Design. I've been on numerous sets and leading products, like upcoming Commander sets, Yooka-Bool's Arch Enemy, things like that. And then actually, most recently, I just moved over to the product design team, which is pretty exciting. Well, that's really cool.

So one of the things that people ask all the time is, when you first started working in Magic R&D, what was the biggest difference from what you expected working in Magic R&D to be like? Yeah, Mark, that's a great question. I think there were a lot of things that I expected and then a lot of things that I didn't expect, and it was all turn on, turn on, turn on when I came in. For example, one thing you have to get used to

is playing with playtest cards. In my head, I think magic cards have artwork. Magic cards are finished. It's totally fine. In Magic R&D, that's not always the case. In fact, that is almost never the case. You're printing out cards and playing with things that are changing that don't have art. You have to spend time stickering your cards.

That's an unusual thing you have to get used to. But the biggest mindset change, I think, for me, as an experienced professional player, was moving from playing to win to playing to learn. Because when you're playing to win, you're sitting down, every part of your brain is focused on how to crush your opponent. But when you're trying to design a game, that's not necessarily what you want to be thinking about. You want to be thinking about, is this fun? Am I having a good time? Are any of these cards coming down too soon? How is this mechanic playing?

That's a totally different mindset that takes some time to get used to. And that's probably the thing that I had to get used to the most. Okay, so what was the first card you ever designed at SoftPrint? The first card I ever designed at SoftPrint was in Return to Ravnica. So I came in right at the tail end of M13 and Return to Ravnica was kind of underway. And then Gatecrash is the first set that I worked on. So my first card was in Return to Ravnica

and it was Havoc Festival. And also Price, actually, they're in the same set. But Havoc Festival I designed first. And this is a six-man enchantment that halves players' life totals every turn. And so it's kind of a card I collect because of that, my first entry into Magic. Yeah, it's funny because anybody in R&D, the first card they designed was,

everybody knows, like, it's just something you remember. And I've made thousands and thousands of cards, but I remember the first card I made just because it's a big deal when it happens. What was the first card you made, Mark? I actually made three different cards at once. They were in alliances. I made

Soldier of Fortune, which was a little 1-1 guy that shuffles the library. You tap him to shuffle a target player's library. I made Goose's Scepter, which was an artifact that you could take cards from your hand and sort of exile them and then later get them back. And I made Library of Platinum, where your opponent chose whether or not you Ancestor Recalled or Demonic Tutored.

Oh, I love Library of Platinum. That's actually a card that I've always really enjoyed playing with. I didn't know you made that one. Super cool. Those are my first three cards. The first card that I kind of, well, the first card that I made, well the first card that I made meaning chronologically I made it the earliest that would C print would be it was in what was it in

Stragnoff was that Tempest? Tempest right the 3-4 uncounterable guy yeah so I always thought blue needed an answer like counter self needed an answer so I made this little needed an answer, like counter-self needed an answer, so I made this little pro-blue can't-be-counter guy. And so that's the card I made earliest that later would see print,

although the other three cards are the cards that saw print first that I made. Scragnoth, of course, famously referenced in Future Sight as Quagnoth. That card is super fun. Yeah, actually, it was called Gleese Weasel in design. That is its design name. But I made that card long before I came to Wizards. In fact, I made that card, Morrow, I made before I came to Wizards.

The story of that was we had a hole in the file, and I go, oh, I have a card we could put there. But I made that card long before I came to Wizards. So I definitely did some design. So you, obviously, at 11, you wanted to work in Wizards. So were you making your own cards and stuff when you were before you came to Wizards? Did you do that?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, when I was 11 and 12, me and my friends would get together for, like, my birthday, and the activity I wanted to do was, okay, we're all going to design our own cards, and then we're going to throw them together and play with them. And so that's what we did. My favorite card design that I've ever seen print is not necessarily the most iconic card. It's a card from Remembrance from Gatecrash. It's this uncommon, shuffle three cards from your graveyard into your library,

nothing fancy, but it was a card that I made when I was 12, and I actually had a box of all the ideas I wrote down when I was 12 at home, and I went home for a Christmas vacation one year and saw this card, and I was like, oh my gosh, most of the cards I made back then were ridiculous, right? They're like four mana 10-10s and a zero mana card says you win the game, so I'm a banana. But there was this one card, and I'm like, oh, we could actually print that, and it would fit really well in this set.

So Serena Remembrance and Gatecrash is kind of this love letter to, I made this when I was 12, it worked perfectly in this set, and it's this young Gavin reaching out to future Gavin. So I've always kind of been interested in designing magic cards, and I'm glad I get to make them for real now.

In fact, fun story, so I grew up living half the year in Seattle and half the year in Phoenix. Complicated situation, but basically that's how it worked out. I was still in school growing up, so it gave me some flexibility to move around. And Eli Shiffrin, who's the Magic Rules Manager right now, I met him when I was about 13 or 14 years old. We were good friends. And he would actually help template the Magic Cards that I made up.

So now I'm working in Magic R&D, still making Magic Cards, and Eli is now hired making the rules for the cards that I made up. So now I'm working in Magic R&D, still making Magic cards, and Eli is now hired making the rules for the cards that I make. So some things never change, I guess. Okay, so here's the question for you, which is, I was thinking about this the other day. When was the first time you and I met? And I believe we met way

earlier than I remember, because I think you met me when you were pretty young, right? Yeah, I met you a couple times at various pre-releases, local things like that. I spell something against you because in Seattle, we used to have these big pre-releases, right? And of course, because Wizards is new to Seattle, everyone would come down from Wizards. A lot of people would come down and you would spell something. We played a few times. But the first time I really remember getting a chance to sit down and talk with you, we talked a little bit at Worlds in Memphis. And then we really sat down and talked at the new Phyrexia pre-release

where you were asking me a bunch of questions about Phyrexia and what I thought about Poison and if I expected Poison to come back someday and things like that. And that was my first, like, oh, my gosh, Mark's talking to me about design. This is so exciting. Yeah, I remember I used to go to the pre-releases and I would quiz people about the stats to figure out if they liked it or didn't like it.

I'm really big on first impressions, so I like to see when people play with cards for the first time to get sort of like the visceral, immediate response to stuff. So here's my memory of you, although I kind of vaguely remember meeting you before, but it was your first day in the office. I put you in a comic, didn't I? Yeah, you before, but was your first day in the office, I put you in a comic, didn't I? Yeah, you put me in a comic first day in the office. In fact, I was in a

comic two days in a row because of the comic's gag. Go ahead and tell them. Yeah, the comic was like new in R&D. I think it's a... I was joking about how whenever something starts in R&D, they have very grandiose you know, it's like, okay, how long before I can make my own set, you know, sort of stuff.

Right, right. And I think, you know, I came in with that mentality and a lot of people did. It's like, okay, I'm here. I'm clearly qualified to be in this job. You know, hand me my own reins. Time to lead a fall expansion, right? And you learn over time, wow, there's a lot that goes into this and a lot of processes. Because one of the great things about Wizards is everyone works together to create the end result,

but it really requires you being here long enough to know which teams work on what and what stages we go through. And then, of course, there's all kinds of metrics for how you learn to design and develop your set. So people often come in with, like, oh, I'm going to do this right away. And it's like, okay, you're going to be awesome at this. You've just got to take a little bit of time to get there. Yeah, what people don't realize is the amount, so much, so many more things go into making a product than I think the outside people even are aware of. Like, I know when I talk to

members of R&D about sort of their experience that I don't think, like, the outside world understands half of the things we really spend a lot of time on because it's invisible to the end product. That, you know, The end product just is what it is. But when you're making it, you have to figure out, oh, well, how do I want this template to work or how do I want this interaction? There's all these little things you have to figure out. And so I know that's a lot different. Being inside is a lot different than sort of looking at things from the outside.

Yeah. Go ahead. I should say, even in my time here, I've seen the process evolve significantly, right? I mean, now we're so integrated. Creative and design and game balance are all working really tightly on this. You know, I remember reading some of your articles where kind of like back in the day, it was more like, okay, we made a set. We have some rough ideas.

Creative, go ahead and skim this, right? And now in this new stage of design, we're really working to make sure everything's integrated. And it's a conversation between both teams, and, you know, if I'm working on, say, Commander 2017, and I go to Kelly and talk to him about, hey, Kelly Diggs, who was my creative lead on Commander 2017, I was like, hey, I want to do this thing in my set, he might be like, okay,

well, maybe not this thing, but how about this other thing that I thought, and we'll have a little back and forth, so there's a really great discussion around everything that we do, and it makes things take time, but makes a great product when you're done with it. And I hope this goes on now, as we saw this in some previous Commandos,

where it's like, hey, how about this character that will later become relevant in the storyline, so, you know, people haven't yet met Nahiri, and we knew Nahiri was going to be important, so why not make her the white commander in, you know, Commander whatever it was, 2015. And there's a lot more of that, too, where we're thinking ahead, where we're like, we know where we're going, so, hey,

maybe we can make a cool decision right now. So, okay, so of all the products you've made that are public, I know you have some cool things that aren't public. You can't talk about those. I'm talking about so bad, though. Of all the things that you've made that are public, what was your favorite, what are you most proud of? What's the thing you're in charge of that stands out to you?

You know, the thing that I'm most proud of, it's not obvious. I can't say much about it. It's really Commander 2017. It was my first big card design set lead. So I led Nicol Bolas Arch Enemy, which is awesome. Go give it a chance to play if you haven't already. But this was my first chance to actually get the final stamp on making magic

cards. And, you know, Nicol Bolas Arch Enemy was awesome and we made a really cool scheme, but there weren't any new magic cards in that set. And Commander, I was led to design so it was sit down, day one, what are we going to do? And I kind of helped craft a whole vision of what all the decks were going to be.

And then, yes, of course, at the tail end of the process, I handed it off to Brian Hawley, who was developing it. He did a phenomenal job developing it. But the core ideas of what all the decks were going to be, and we've announced that it's tribal, so what all the tribes are going to be, and all these different elements, those were things that we had to figure out

in the design period. And it was a blast to work on, and I learned a ton. I mean, we talked a moment ago about how you come in day one. You're like, I'm going to leave the set. I'm ready to leave the set. And even by the time I left this, it had been, you know, I'd been here for four years or something like that, three and a half, four years. And during this process, I still learned a lot, right? It's like getting to learn enough to actually do the thing. And once you do the thing, learning a ton through that trial, learning what, you know, you have to deal with

editing, you have to work with creative, you do all these different things to make sure your set is awesome. And there's a lot of learning through that

that I then applied to some of my other super secret projects afterwards. Yeah, it's funny that one of the things I've joked about is the way I know

that someone's ready to leave a set is they're intimidated by leaving a set. Like, if you want to leave a set and you're just getting bucked up, you're not ready yet. And when I say, do you want to leave a set, you go, I'm not sure, but let me think about this. Like, oh, maybe you're ready. Because I think what happens is, the way it works in Wizards is you're on other teams.

You start by just being on teams, and little by little you get more responsibility. You get on bigger teams. You have a larger role. So, for example, what time did you and I work on? You were the strong second. What time was that? We worked on Soup Together. On Soup Together.

Okay. And so one of the things that I do in design is that I have somebody who is sort of in charge of the file, who I work closely with, who one of the best ways we have for training people is to sort of make them responsible for overseeing everything without being responsible for all the individual decisions necessarily. And I know it's kind of throwing you in the deep end a little bit just because it's like, okay, here's a set. You're in charge of monitoring this whole set. And I, as the lead, will give you a lot of feedback, obviously, and I'll tell you what I need. But I put a lot on the person doing it to have a lot of autonomy to sort of figure out how to solve problems. I mean, I'm not solving all the problems for you.

to solve problems. I mean, I'm not solving all the problems for you. And it was a lot of fun working with you, because it was, it's a very intimidating project, because usually that's the first time someone ever has like the file to control. And it's like I said, it's in a controlled way, because you're not completely, you know, you're not running it, but you are controlling the file. And so, how was that? How was, I mean, you can't talk about soup proper, but how was that process? Yeah, this process was great. I mean, Mark described it pretty well. It's kind of

like training wheels, almost, where Mark's like, okay, we need to do this kind of thing with the set. We need to make sure that we add, say, this new mechanic in. But then it's up to me to figure out what the cost of all the cards are. Maybe Mark has a few ideas about what these cards should do,

but figuring out, okay, well, I think this would be really awesome on a four-mana card. I think we can make a spell like this. Here's some ideas for what we could do with the set. And there was a lot of autonomy given to me, which was awesome. And, in fact, a bunch of stuff that I did when I was being the file keeper for Mark still persisted all the way through the end of Stoop, or at least as close to the end as we've gotten right now. So it's pretty exciting.

Do you talk much about how far ahead we work on things? I mean, it's crazy, right? I mean, we did the Stoop file keeping thing a year ago, more than that, actually, I think, a year and a half ago, maybe. Yeah, I talk about it all the time, but somehow the players... People still... One of the things I find very funny is a set will come out, and they're like, oh, here's some things we want to see

in the small set that follows. And I'm like, oh, by the time you see the large set, the small set is done. We're not going to be changing anything. The next set of calm is already done. And in fact, the step after the next step is probably done, or very, very close to being done. So it's one of the things when you get to work in R&D.

So when you first start working in R&D, we have what we call the gap. Do you want to explain what the gap is? Yeah, totally. So the gap is when you come to R&D, and it is set on sale, right? So for example, when I came to R&D, Innistrad had just come out. But I was working on Gatecrash and Return to Ravnica. So everything between that time,

I didn't know very much, I had little recollection of. But sets like Avacyn Restored, Dark Ascension, I know all the tournament top-level cards from these sets, but the limited formats and what some of the commons are, that's probably the biggest black hole I have in the whole game. Yeah, and so one of the things that happens is when you come to work in R&D, there's that gap between what you're working on when you start

and what you know because it's live in the thing. And it is, like I said, there's a couple things that people always say to me when they start working in R&D. Oh, here, I'll talk about this, by the way. So you walk in the first day and we say to you,

okay, here's two or some sets. Familiarize yourself with these. Yeah. What is that like? Oh my gosh, that's so crazy. Because you come in and as a magic player, you know,

all of you guys listening right now, you're used to a set comes out little by little, and you learn about all the themes and mechanics and the carefully-shared cards on our website, and then the full visual spoiler comes out, and you get to go to the pre-release and check out the cards for the first time. And, no, in this case, it's here are three files

full of finished cards. Read through all of them. Understand what all the cards are. By the way, we hired you for development, be ready to build decks tomorrow. And it's a very daunting process, and it's not something that as a match player you're used to. Thinking of things you had to get used to when you entered the building, right? It's seeing things whole cloth, and then being able to look at them holistically

from everything that you see, and figure out what the right thing to do and wrong thing to do are with it. Often in R&D, you know, like, for example, if I'm working on Commander 2017, well, okay, not everyone has seen that set as I'm working on it. There'll be a time when I show it off to everybody, and they're going to see the whole file, right? Like, for example, Mark, I would say with you,

you probably didn't see a ton of what was going on in Commander while I was working on it. But then you saw it, and you probably had comments, right? And you had to look at the whole thing holistically and see, okay, well, here's what's going on. Let's take these mechanics they chose. See why these cards are here.

And it's a very different perspective than when you kind of see things on the outside and your goal is just, is this powerful or not? Yeah, it is. One of the biggest differences between inside and outside

that people don't realize is that the consumers experience the product as a lost entity. It is what it is. So when you see a card, that's what it is. We made that card. That's what the thing is. But in R&D, when you see something, it could change.

And so when you're looking at it, it's like, can I make this better? Is there some way for this to be different? And so the attitude of looking at a file in flux is a very different animal from looking at a set that's just a known finished quantity. And I know when you get an R&D that just getting your mindset into the I have to evaluate this and then

hey, if I have an idea how to make this better I try to change it. And that's a really different animal. Like I know the first time I had people do design play tests, that they always give me feedback that a lot of it is not useful to me because they're treating it like this is a finished thing. Let me talk about a finished thing.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Was this fun? Did you like this? Did I throw this away? You know, that there's, especially early design, if you like this, check for this away, you know, that there's, especially early design, so much of it is about what is the cool part, not should this card cost one more, you know. Absolutely. So I'm playing, I play a lot of board games, and playing board games with me is a bit of an experience,

because sometimes I'll play a board game and be like, okay, this game was really great, but I think it would be more fun if we tweaked rule X and Y, And so I'll be sitting down with all my friends who aren't game designers, and they'll be like, okay, let's play it again, but let's change these rules. And they'll look at me and be like, what? You don't change rules of a game. It's just what I'm used to, right? I'm used to playing games and modifying them. So one thing I do is, so Magic and my life, I've always been a big Magic player. I even work at Wizards. I still like to go out and, you know, meet up with friends, do casual draft and that kind of thing.

And the number of times that I've made a misplay in a game because I just thought a creature did something different than what it used to do in design is astronomical. There was this one time I, like, blocked their creature, and I said, okay, if your creature dies, go to combat, you know. And I looked over, and their creature just had extra stuff. I was like, oh, great, it got that late in development. Well, I forgot about that stuff. That creature's dead.

That kind of thing just happens sometimes. I'm so used to what cards used to be. My memory banks are a little frazzled sometimes. Yeah, occasionally in articles, I'll write something. They'll go, that's not how the card works. Oh, that's how the card works for a long time. Yeah, yeah. That happens quite a bit with you.

But you're used to it, you know. One of the jobs of being used to, you know, as someone on the outside, you have to learn a lot of Magic cards, right? And if you want to play Standard, there's a lot of cards you'll know.

But on the inside, your memory kind of knows not only all the cards that exist, and you're getting them thrown at you in these gigantic set batches, but you also have to

be able to filter out what is current and what isn't current. Like, I've gone to build an FFL deck for the Future Future League where we played Future Standard before, and built my whole deck around the future future league where we played that future standard before,

and built my whole deck around the card, only to realize that card was cut a few days ago. Like, oh, well, you know, I didn't remember that. Yeah, the other thing that happens is, I have a problem with this for you, is we play with cards with a playtest name, and then when they come out, they have a finalized name. But most of the time, I'm playing with the set.

It's not the real name. It's whatever goofy name would give it as the playtest name. And so I become horrible at remembering card names because, you know, it's like, oh, it's not Chainsaw. It's Trepidation Blade, you know. So I'm curious, Mark. So I'm a huge fan of playtest names. I love giving things goofy names or pun names. Me and Jules Robbins go So I'm a huge fan of playtest names. I love giving things goofy names or pun names. Me and Jules Robbins go to town on the ridiculous names of playtest cards.

What are some of your favorite playtest cards? Favorite names? I'm trying to remember. There are a couple of ongoing jokes. One of my favorite jokes we had for a while was in the early days of Magic, when we first started banning cards, the French office had their own list that had their own ban list.

And so, in addition to the cards we had banned, they banned every card that let you look at the top of your library. And so for a while, every time we made a card that let you look at the top of the library, we just named it banned in France. That's pretty funny.

And then another one we would do is whenever somebody would complain about a card, we would change the playtest name so their name was in it. So like Henry Stern, you know, didn't like some cards, so we call it like Stern's Familiar or something. so we call it like Stern's Familiar or something. And then what would happen is, when the player, he uses a playtest name, we'll get out if the card's a good card, we'll talk about it. And then people go, you know,

it'll say Stern's Familiar, and they're like, wow, Henry made this card? We're like, no, no, no. If their name is in it, it doesn't mean they made it, so. I often, I often give names to people

or name cards after people when they inspire the card. There's a card drawing set or a card drawing card in a recent set that I named Yanni's Genius, or Yanni Skull, and one of our developers suggested it to me. And so this is when we have a playtest, and everyone's like, Yanni is a genius! Yanni is a genius! And you know, you keep guessing.

Which is pretty fun. Playtest cards are awesome, and I actually keep a little stack of old playtest cards so when I go around to events and Grand Prixs and conventions and things, I can show off how cards got to where they are. One of the things I work on at Wizards a lot is conventions, packs, and things like that. Well, what's that like? I know you travel more than any human being I've ever met, so tell us a little about that. So one of my great passions in life is traveling.

Actually, a goal of mine is to eventually visit every country in the world. So I'm up to a high 60s, I think, right now. And there's a little over 200 countries. So we'll see. Some of them are going to be hard to get to. But I love to travel. And every time I have the chance, I go somewhere. And part of that was really kindled through magic because the magic approach took me to so many places.

And whenever I travel, I like to visit Magic audiences, so I'll stay with people from Magic that maybe I know or don't know. And, you know, Magic's been such a great community that I feel like I have a little safe house, like a D&D special quest area where I can go and meet Magic players at a tournament, and then, you know, it's a match where it's totally up, and there's friends everywhere. But anyway, one of the things I work on is our convention presences. So, for example, at PAX, the PAX two years, we've done some pretty cool stuff, like the

year of Battle for Zendikar. There was a big Eldorado-y tentacle coming out of the outside. Last year, for Kaladesh, we took over the Paramount Theater, which is this awesome, like, steampunky India-looking theater in Seattle that we took over and turned into our own stage for the World Championship as a kind of side event. And it's a real blast to get to work on all these projects.

And it makes me think outside the box a little bit. Because working on sets is a certain kind of design. But designing events takes some of those design skills, but also takes a whole other area of your brain

and just runs with it. Yeah, no, it is... In fact, you first came on the design team because you were doing event design, right? You were doing, this is back in the Theros era where we were, we had little games that would be pre-released and stuff. Yeah, so Dave Guskin, who used to be the lead experience designer in R&D and assistance on other projects, was kind of my mentor in this sense, and I was brought on to the design team

to help work with him on things like the Return to Ravnica boxes, Theros Face the Hydra experience, the Garruk oversized card for Magic 2015, things like that, and work on the experience design in Magic, and because I really got into my head how to make a good experience,

more than just the gameplay, but what brings people into events, and what makes events exciting, and what are cool minigames players actually want to do, that gave me a great opportunity to work with other departments at Wizards, because Wizards is a big company. We have four floors of our building,

and we have digital on the second floor, mostly, and the third floor is R&D and kind of caps to make a lot of the boxes and packaging, things like that. And the fourth floor mostly, and the third floor is R&D and kind of caps to make a lot of the boxes and, you know, packaging, things like that. And the fourth floor had a lot of brand and organized play and social media and things like that. And it gave me an opportunity to go up and really work with organized play and events on how we want to run these events, what kind of special things we want to do for them. And then after experience design, or after Dave moved off

experience design, and they needed people to work on events, I was a great natural fit for that. So they brought me in to kind of work with them a little bit and I still do that to this day when we're helping to plan events. And it's been a blast. I love event planning. In fact, in my own life, I plan a few big events every year. My birthday every year is a GavinCon where

I rent out a convention, or a little convention center area and a couple hundred people show up and we play games all all day, and there's panels, and a musical act, and things like that. And it's a real blast. So that kind of translated into my own life. And I took some from Wizards and brought it back, and I was like, I could do this event planning thing. And it's been pretty fun. Yeah, no, no, I always watch your social media to see where you're at, because I know you're always about at different conventions and visiting different places.

So it always seems to be, oh, so I'm always at work, so I wanted to get, there's one story I wanted you to tell, so I need a abbreviated version so I'm not too far from work. But tell me about the time you fell into a volcano. Oh, my gosh. This is a favorite answer. In fact, if you just Google Gavin Volcano, I'm the number one result. You can go there and read the whole story. There was, like, some kid with, like, a science fair project who was beating me for a while, but I got him.

The really, really, really, really short version is I was on a cruise with about 2,000 people that I knew, or kind of knew as a convention on a cruise, basically. And I went hiking, and I slid down the side of a volcano, trying to get back to the ship, missed the ship, and had to island hop back to get back on the cruise ship. And it took many days, and I was told it would be impossible to do. But that really does to do it justice. So

go... Gavin wrote a... how many words is your story? I don't know, about 10,000 words or so. 10,000 words. Go read it. It is hilarious. And then the next year, they had the000 words or so. 10,000 words. Go read it. It is hilarious. The next year, they had the Gavin Watch, hashtag Gavin Watch, where people said where you were at so they didn't lose you again.

People following around, I've been gifted many volcano items. It's kind of a thing now that the word volcano and Gavin are almost synonymous. For example, there's actually a new ad in Seattle advertising flying to Costa Rica that's talking about don't go into a volcano alone or whatever. And so everyone's been sending me pictures on social media of this thing.

Like, hey, Gavin, you should go on this promotion. Don't go alone, right? So it's pretty synonymous. And I've actually named a few playtest cards to bring it full circle. And there are a few playtest cards that have to do with volcanoes appropriately. I know. Have you yet had an actual volcano card make it out? I don't think you have.

Not yet, but I've got... I'm going to keep trying. Volcanoes and bear snakes are my two big things, so one day it'll be one of those two prints. So anyway, I'm now driving into the parking lot. So this was a lot of fun, Gavin. Hopefully you will fill out many more podcasts to come. It was fun talking to someone while I drive,

and not having to sit next to me. Yeah, I had a great time, Mark. Thank you so much for having me on. And if you enjoyed it, please let us know on Twitter or social media. Mark and I are both on there. And maybe we'll make this happen again.

Okay, well, anyways, thanks very much. I'm now at work. We all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.

Okay, Gavin, we're done. Okay, I'm hanging up.