Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #481: Ixalan, Part 1

Episode Date: October 20, 2017

This is part one of a three-part series about the design of Ixalan.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work and I had to take my daughter to orientation. Okay, so one of the notes I got a while back was you guys wanted more current information in my podcast. So I've been trying to do podcasts on more current sets. So I'm going to talk about Ixalan today. A set that's still on sale. How's that? So I'm going to talk about behind the scenes. I'm going to take some stuff that I talked about in my preview articles, but go a little more in, and it is a pretty cool set. So I'm going to talk about all sort of the things that came to make it be.

But first, I have to sneeze. Okay, now that I've sneezed the other way. So let's go back. This is one of those stories that really starts long before the set actually began. So let me explain a little bit about the process by which how we make stuff. So the earliest, there's an early, early, early process where all the sort of heads of different sections in R&D get together. where all the sort of heads of different sections in R&D get together to start mapping out kind of like the initial idea of what the sets are going to be. Usually it's something that we,

once upon a time we called it the seven-year plan, but it's kind of morphed from that a little bit. The seven-year plan was me, as the head designer, just pitching things in kind of a larger vacuum. It has evolved a bit since that. Now all the different people are involved, the creatives involved, development's involved, everybody's involved of, let's figure out what we can make that will make strong, compelling sets that will be something we can make fun standard environments out, be something we

can tell our story we want to tell, something that will piece together larger elements of it to do what we need to do. And so we, the earliest version of this was we do this thing every other year where we do these off-sites, these R&D off-sites. And there's a bunch of different ways the off-sites work. But one of the things we've done for the off-sites we've had is in the morning, we block out, I don't know, like three hours. And the idea is anybody can give a presentation on any topic they wish. But it's what they call micro-presentation. You have five minutes. You can give five minutes on any topic they wish, but it's what they call micro-presentation. You have five minutes. You can give five minutes

on any topic you want. So there's all sorts of topics talking all about everything from maybe here's a mechanic idea or here's something that we should think about or it can be anything. Any topic you want

that's magic related in some way. So Jenna Helen, who's in charge of the story team, she pitched an idea for a world. Something that, I don't know if she'd

come up by herself or whether she'd come up with a bunch of other people. But the idea was she wanted to do, I think the first pitch was vampire conquistadors. And imagine if we sort of visit sort of a, you have a world in which there's an old world and a new world,

and the old world exploited all its resources, vampires, the New World and the old world exploited all its resources, vampires, and so they've come to the New World in search of blood and youth and vitality and sort of take elements from our world but kind of put them through the lens of fantasy. And at the time, you know, she really wanted to do an interesting spin on sort of a mess American culture something we've been looking at to do a set based around and there were a lot of visuals and this was early on

but kind of the crux of her pitch was vampire conquistadors that was sort of the and it was something that was interesting it was a very sort of neat take on it. We'd wanted to do a Mesoamerican influence set. I mean, there's a lot of pieces to it that sort of came together. So anyway, she pitched it.

It went over pretty well. People liked it. And so, flash forward, I don't know, a year later maybe. So we do this off-site where it is, like I said, sort of upper management, sitting around talking about, okay, what are the possible sets we can do? And for each one, the question was, is there a creative spin we're happy with? Is there a mechanical spin we're happy with? Is there a mechanical spin we're happy with? And so some sets are more about,

here's a neat mechanical thing to do. And creators are like, oh, we think we can find something that supports that. Sometimes it's, here's a neat creative spin we can do. And mechanics are kind of like, okay, I think we can do something with that. So in this meeting, we are writing up on the board all the different ideas that we liked and this is the same time where we were talking about different elements like

going to Egyptian inspired worlds, stuff like that and I know they wrote up, I think they were calling this the age of exploration, that's what they were calling it at the time age of exploration world, and the creative had a really good sense visually they wrote up, I think they were calling this the Age of Exploration. That's what they were calling it at the time. Age of Exploration World. And the creative had a really good sense visually what they wanted. But they sort of turned to me and said, okay, well, what's it about? Mechanically, what would it be about? And I wasn't sure.

But the more I listened to them talk about it, the more I realized that there was some conflict built into it. I think the original pitch, there were just two sides. There were the vampire conquistadors, and we had these, like, what would become the Sun Empire, but this sort of Aztec warrior-inspired sort of tribe. And at the time, they didn't run the dinosaurs yet. That would come later.

So what happened is they sort of had this two-faction sort of story in their mind. Like there's the outsiders, the natives and the outsiders. And I knew that, you know, because we were working on a bunch of different worlds I said to them, I go I know for example that Battle for Zendikar which wasn't that long before that and in Kaladesh both had had sort of two-sided conflicts

so my proposal is, I said could we have a three-sided conflict instead of a two-sided conflicts. So my proposal is, I said, could we have a three-sided conflict instead of a two-sided conflict? Magic Roy hasn't done a three-sided conflict since Mirage, really. If you know the story of Mirage, Mirage has three factions to it, and there's a war between the three factions.

And anyway, so I said, so one of the things, there's a game that Richard Garfield had made. If you ever look at the back of a Magic card, there's a thing called Deckmaster. What Deckmaster was is, when Richard first made Magic, the idea was that the trading

card game was something that Wizards was going to sort of become the expert in. And the idea was, they liked the idea that Magic was just the first of many trading card games, and that we would brand the Wizards of the Coast trading card games, so people would recognize that this just wasn't one of these games, it was a whole category of games, which we call Deckmaster. And so Richard had made, the second game he made, I think was Vampire the Eternal Struggle.

There was Vampire the Eternal Struggle, called Jihad at the time, later renamed. He made Netrunner, he made Battletech, I think those were the four Duel Master games before we stopped using Duel Masters. So when he made Vampire the Eternal Struggle, it was based on a role-playing game.

In fact, all three of them, all three of the non-magic licenses, were based on role-playing games. Because Peter, the connections that Peter had in the game industry, was with role-playing. That was kind of his passion. And so when he was looking for worlds to build games out of, the places he went was to role-playing games. And Vampire the Eternal Struggle was a sort of a fun... It was all about vampires, and it was very political.

So Richard decided that he would make a little bit more of a multiplayer political game out of it. And the idea was that you were fighting over resources against other vampire clans, and it was designed to be more of a multiplayer game, like a political multiplayer game, and less of a two-player game like Magic. Magic was a little more strategic, a straight-up sort of strategy game, where Vampire was considered to be something that was a little more, like it took a little more strategic, a straight-up sort of strategy game, where Vampire was considered to be something that was a little more,

like it took a little bit longer, required more people, and definitely had a lot of sort of, you know, you were constantly fighting over resources. So one of the things he used is he had something called the Edge. And the Edge was a mechanic that only one player could have at a time. And the idea was that if you wanted the edge, you had to sort of get it from the player who had the edge, and then you could take the edge. And the advantage of having the edge

was that it granted you some abilities if you had it. Now, it was my favorite part of the game, the thing I thought was most interesting. And I've seen, you know, edge-like mechanics in other games. The idea that there's this one specific resource that you have to fight over, and that having the resource means that you get extra abilities, you get sort of bonus abilities. Anyway, I was very intrigued by that. Now, I've been looking for a place to sort of make use of an edge-like mechanic.

So what I said was, okay, what if we, instead of a two-sided conflict, we made this a three-sided conflict, and then I could use the edge mechanic. I could sort of play up politics a little bit. But the reason I wanted three factions and not two is just to change things up a bit, have the dynamic be a little bit different, and I like the idea that the different factions were fighting for whatever the edge represented. I called it the edge just because

that was what I was introduced to it as in Vampire, but like I said, I've seen it in other games. I just like the dynamic of what it was. Okay, so that is where we left things. We left things of three-sided conflict and there was going to be some political maneuvering

and there was going to be a resource that you could sort of earn but then you would fight over. So anyway, all seemed good. Once again, I,

the way it works in the early stuff is I sort of get a rough idea of something I think that will work. And then as I get closer, you know, I start exploratory design, then I can figure out, you know, I can sort of test some of my ideas. But I was pretty confident. I had confidence that we can make an interesting edge mechanic. Okay, so flash forward another year and a half or so. So Sean Main comes up to me. So Sean had created Conspiracy a couple years before. Sean really, really likes multiplayer games,

and he had this idea of a format where you mess with the drafting, and you combine them together. And Conspiracy was sort of this combination of a format where you mess with the drafting and you combine them together. And Conspiracy was sort of this combination of a format where you draft and you affect the draft and then you play multiplayer games against other people. And he had made Conspiracy. It was a little bit of a, you know, when he first pitched it, it really sounded like this very odd product. But everyone was like, OK, you know, we need to do experimental things with our experimental, you know,

we have a category that is all about sort of innovative stuff. And so that went into the innovative product and it was a big hit. People liked it. So behind the scenes, real quick, what had happened was, conspiracy came out, and then they decided they wanted to do another one. But what happened was, originally in 2016, Unstable was going to, in fact, Unstable was originally going to come out in 2015. I talked about this in previous podcasts. It got pushed back to 2016. And then in 2016, there's a concern that because both Unstable and Kaladesh

kind of had their roots in steampunk, that they'd be too similar to each other. Turns out, they're quite different from each other. But anyway, the concern was, okay, why don't we push back Unstable for a year? And what are we doing this year? Ooh, how about Conspiracy 2? So Conspiracy 2 was fast-tracked.

It actually was, you know, kind of in a rush to get out, that they usually would have a little bit more time. But once they realized that we had to push back on Stable, they needed something. So they went to Sean. Obviously, Sean was the perfect person to do Conspiracy 2. And so Sean had been working on the set for a little while he came to me

and he said that he knows that i was planning to do a um edge-like mechanic in um ixalan and so he said to me um would you mind if i explored an edge-like mechanic for Conspiracy 2. Obviously, it came from a political multiplayer game. Sean had confidence that it would work well in a political multiplayer game. I was the one that actually was trying to push it in a little different space. So the original problem was Sean's deadline to finish the design

was scheduled to end before exploratory for Ixalan was going to start. In fact, I think Sean's ended right as it would have begun. So he came to me and said, can he explore this? Because he and I both knew there's some chance that

when we finally tried it out for Ixalan, maybe it wouldn't work for Ixalan. I was messing with a multiplayer political mechanic. Maybe it wouldn't work. So I said, okay, here's what I'm going to do, Sean. I go, I will start Exploratory Design early. I will start six weeks early so that we can sort of test. And I'll mostly use that time to test what I can about this mechanic

to get a sense of, will it work in two-player play? So what I said to him was, look, you can explore this, but also explore other mechanics, because if I find it works for Ixalan, look, Ixalan's a much, much, you know, Ixalan block is a much bigger thing than Disconspiracy 2. I'm going to keep it for Ixalan. But we might explore it, realize it doesn't work, and then I don't want to prevent you from using it if we can't use it. So if we work and find out it can't work, well, then you can, you can use the conspiracy too. So Sean said, okay.

So we went off and I put together my exploratory design team or my early exploratory design team and we play tested. Um, and so what we found out was that it worked actually I was pleasantly surprised I thought it would work I was happily reinforced in my belief that it would work so six weeks later

I come back and I say to Sean I say Sean we have playtested it guess what it works it actually it's a very interesting two-player game. So, I'm sorry to say, I think we're going to use it in Ixalan. And Sean said, look, we too played with it. Now, obviously, it ended up being called the Crown, you know, the Monarch mechanic.

And he said it works really, really well. And here's our problem. We tried other mechanics. We tried other mechanics. We tried other things. And we couldn't find anything else that worked nearly as well as the monarch mechanic. And so the problem was, normally in this situation, you know, the larger set kind of has priority. That, you know, supplemental sets are wonderful and all, but if a large set, especially at the time, was a whole block,

if a block needs something, look, that just supersedes the needs of a supplementary set. But Sean, the deadline was basically that coming up, he didn't have another option. And so we took pity on Sean and said, okay, okay, okay and said, okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay. Conspiracy 2 can have it.

Which meant that when we started Ixalan, like, we had done some work. We had some plans. And so anyway, we had to start from scratch. The idea being at the time was Ixalan had its entire design, exploratory design and design time ahead of it. Okay, we had a lot of time, we would figure out another solution. So, but when we first started Ixalan, I had asked for a third faction. So the creative team went back and they decided that they liked the idea of adding pirates. So what had happened was during the lead up to the big meeting we had had about what worlds we wanted to go to, a whole bunch of the creative team members had kind of pitched worlds. In fact, every creative team member, I think, pitched one or two worlds. It

was an exercise that the creative team had done to try to find potential worlds that we can do. And so each person on the team came up with a world. So one of the worlds pitched had been a water-based pirate world. And the problem was that there just wasn't quite enough to make it work. But they really, really liked the idea of pirates. They knew the players had the idea of pirates. They knew the players had been asking about pirates. And if you went to the source material,

there were pirates, you know, off... If you go back in history, there were pirates. And so it's like, oh, well, what if we somehow incorporate pirates? What if the third faction was pirates? So the idea is we'd have the Vampire Conquistadors, the Sun Empire, the sort of Aztec warrior natives, and the pirates. And we're like, oh, okay. And, okay, we said, okay, okay. And so we started, we started working, and I was trying to figure out how to make them work.

And at some point, I'm trying to remember the order of things, but we made a third faction, and we started playing around, and the idea we really got into early on was the idea of exploration. Like I said, we had nicknamed it age of exploration. So I was trying to figure out sort of, oh, by the way, real quickly. So the design team

went through a lot of different people. The idea, this was the last sort of block before we switched over to the 3.1 model. We didn't know, obviously. We didn't switch over until we were doing Dominaria, so we didn't know we were making this. This was going to be the last block. But anyway, Ken and I were co-leading it. We had a year of design. The first six months I did, and then I handed off the reins to Ken for the second half. The idea being that Ken was there for the first half, and I was there for most of the second half.

Dominaria would pull me away near the end. But anyway, the idea was that I, Ken and I were working together and then sort of halfway through, you know, I was in charge in the first half and Ken was in charge of the second half. So we had a pretty cool team. I think the original team was me and Ken, James Rose, who we had borrowed from another section of the company, James Wyatt, who was the creative representative, and Ben Hayes, who was sort of our developer, our development representative. Now, over the time for design, Gavin Verhey, Jackie Lee, James Hada, Mark Gottlieb, Sam Stoddard, and Yanni Skolnick, they would all join at different times.

The team went through a lot of change, not really because of the team as much as external things. What happens is when other projects sort of come around, a lot of times we'll switch things. And when a set goes for a whole year, there's just a lot of things that change around it so for example like Ben started as the sorry as a development representative and then I think it became Sam and then it became clear

that Sam was going to be one of the people running the development so I think Yanni took over for Sam so that Sam could get some distance from it but anyway Eric Lauer and Sam Stoddard were the co-leads of development. Dave Humphries, Ethan Fleischer, Gavin Verhey, Melissa DeTora, Pete Ingram, and Yanni Skolnick were the development team. So anyway, we started by looking at the idea of exploration. Um, like I said, they were, they were Nick,

it was nicknamed the age of exploration set by the creative team. Um, and we liked the idea of exploring and we did a lot into sort of figuring that out. Um, we also were looking for something splashy. And I, interestingly, the splashy thing on the set happened relatively early. Interestingly, the splashy thing on the set happened relatively early. So one of the things that we were trying to figure out was, how do you represent the idea of exploration? And we had a bunch of different ideas.

But one idea I really liked was the idea of having locations. I think this might have been something that Ken spearheaded originally. And so we were trying to figure out what locations meant. We went through a bunch of design. You know, we had tried locations in other sets. It's something we had tried before. But we're like, oh, okay, this is a set that's really about locations and about the idea of, you know, different factors have control of different areas. And so we tried a whole bunch of different things with locations.

We tried locations where they were like enchantments, where you could be there, and when you were at a thing, it affected something about you, how you were on the board. And then the idea was that, you know, you could keep the location and then there was some bonus, but if you ever wanted to attack, you had to leave the location. And we messed around a lot in that space. It was similar space that we had, some of that space we had played around with in Khans of Tarkir. But then eventually it came to the idea of, could we boil down exploration to a singular card? And so the idea that we came up with is the idea of using double-faced technology.

And so the idea is, what if the front of the card represented some means by which you found things? So I think the first idea we came up with was a treasure map. And so the idea was, what if the front side of the card is a treasure map? And the treasure map is a tool for you to figure out how to get to Treasure Island, for example. So the front was treasure map, and the back was Treasure Island. Back would be a land. And the idea was that the front part of it was some kind of quest for you to find the land on the back.

And so pretty early on, this is one of the earliest, interestingly, one of the earliest things we sort of latched onto was the idea of double-faced cards where the front represented some kind of exploration and the back represented land. And the idea was that we had used double-faced cards in Innistrad and Shadows over Innistrad, both blocks, as a means to show dark transformation. And then we had used it in Magic Origins

to sort of show creatures sparking, that they were a normal creature and then poof, now they're a planeswalker. So interestingly enough, by the way, I should point out that Sam Stoddard, who led Ixalan, had led Magic Origin instead of the Planeswalkers on it and had led Eldritch Moon that had the meld cards on it. So when we pitched this, it meant Sam, for the third time in a row,

was making a set with double-faced cards. Which is interesting because Sam was one of the earliest skeptics of double-faced cards. Which is interesting because Sam was one of the earliest skeptics of double-faced cards. He was really worried about the logistics of it all. But little by little he's warmed up to it. I joked that he would keep having sets that had them in them until he accepted that they were a thing. But anyway, so early on we were playing around with exploration. We actually got the double-faced cards relatively early.

Now, they went through all sorts of implications. It very much is a card-by-card design thing. And so most of the designs you saw in the final product, I think design came up with some of the flavors. Like, it's a treasure map that turns into a place. up with some of the flavors like it's a treasure map that turns into a place but the actual execution a lot of that happened throughout design and development okay so at some point i was trying to make three factions work and i was having problems

and what i realized was is like in mirage the factions weren't mechanically tied. The factions were something that sort of represented but it was a story point. It wasn't really a mechanical point. And I found a lot of problems trying to trying to make three work. Now one of the things was

once pirates got into the mix it became apparent almost instantaneously, that I needed, that I wanted some amount of tribal, because how do you do pirates? So the history of pirates is, I think there was one pirate in Mirage, and then Mercadian Masks had a little tiny pirate theme, and it was all in a couple cards, blue cards. The one in Mirage was a blue card. And we had kind of dipped our toe into pirates,

but we never really committed to pirates. We never really mechanically committed. I guess the ones in Recading Mask had a little tiny mechanical connection, but it was tangential at best. And pirates had always been one of those things that kind of like werewolves were, we got to Innistrad. It wasn't that magic had never touched it.

It was it hadn't touched it much, and it hadn't really made its thumbprint on it. Like, we hadn't done definitive pirates. You know, you could never, you could never really, really make a pirate deck. I mean, I guess technically you could because they existed. Um, but there weren't a lot of them, and they didn't have any mechanical cohesion in a way that was particularly pirate-y. So I knew that if we were going to do pirates,

I wanted to do pirates right. I knew the pirates had a lot of potential. But pirates pushed me to wanting to do a tribal execution. And then the vampires were vampire-ested as well. How do you not care about the vampires? And so I realized that maybe we were moving toward a tribal set. The problem was that tribes, three factions is not that great for our tribal set. So I went back to the creative team and said, okay, can we have a fourth faction? And so, and then once we had four factions,

I made use of a mechanic, or something I had done during Contents Arc here. So during Contents Arc here, when I originally was dealing with the creative team, they had come up with four factions. Now, four factions is tricky because we

color balance. And so what I realized is, I said, okay, okay, if I want to color balance but use only four factions, I can't make them of equal size. I can't have every color represent the same number of factions.

So I realized there's a thing I could do where I went 3-3-2-2, meaning two of the factions were three-colored and two of the factions were two-colored. That allowed me with four factions to hit all five colors. It had a nice balance to it. Now it turns out during Kanzatar Kyr, the creative team realized they had a fifth guild, sorry, fifth clan, Soltai for those that are curious,

and they really wanted to add it in. So I ended up moving to wedges. Then they became wedges. And I had to sort of not use the 3-3-2-2 model. So when I was struggling here, I realized that I liked the model. I liked how it worked. And so I brought it in. So we decided, so the way the 3-3-2-2 model works is you can have a lot of choice.

In fact, you can pick two of anything. The first two things you pick, well, there's one exception. The two three-color guilds could only, had to and could only overlap on one color. So in order for it to work, between the two three-color guilds, you had to get all five colors with one and exactly one color overlapping. So once you picked one tribe, it would start dictating other tribes.

So for example, we started with pirates. By the time, we had pirates, we had vampire conquistadors, and we had the Sun Empire. And so I started with the pirates. Those were the most flavorful ones we had the Sun Empire. And so I started with the pirates. Those were the most flavorful one we had at the time. I'm like, okay. We'd always done pirates in blue. They're on the ocean. They're tricky. They're sneaky.

Okay, blue made sense for pirates. What else made sense for pirates? Well, black made sense for pirates. They're pirates. They're doing a lot of nasty things and they're, you know, if you look at all the sort of pirate facts, I mean, they're kind of like terrorists, if to get right down to it.

So they had a lot of black to them. And red also seemed to make a lot of sense. There's a swashbuckling element that we also wanted to capture, that we wanted to sort of get the sense that they were sneaky, but they were dangerous, but they had a sort of a flair to them, that we wanted to also capture some sort of the romanticism of the pirate. We wanted to sort of get the gruesome reality and the romanticism

and kind of find a happy medium between those. So we decided that we liked them in blue, black, and red. Okay, so once we did that, that meant the other tribe had to be white and green and then either blue, black, or red. So meanwhile, we looked at the other

tribes and said, okay, what are the other tribes, do any other tribes really need something? And we looked at the pirates, I'm sorry, we looked at the vampires and said, okay, well it's kind of hard to do vampires and not do black. Now, the interesting thing was that

once you had three colors, once you had black, blue, and red, it makes it hard to do black and blue or black and red. So we're saying, okay, was there some way to do vampires in black and white or black and green? And the more we had studied what the creative team had wanted with the vampires, there was this religious order. We realized that they actually had some white to them. Like, okay, well, what if we make them black-white? So we said, okay, the pirates

can be blue, black, red, and then the vampires will be black-white. Okay, so once we did that, now we're starting to make even more dictation, right? So we're saying, okay, the three color tribe that is not the pirates has to be white and green, and then it has to pick a third green, and then it has to pick

a third color. And then we said the two-color faction, the other two-color faction, has to have green in it. Because green had to be in the one we didn't name. So the third faction we had had was the Sun Empire. I'm like, okay, well, they had to be white and green. I'm like, okay, well, they had to be white and green. I'm like, okay, that makes some sense.

You know, they're native to the forest. You know, there's some green qualities. But we also made an empire, and we wanted this army, and it made a lot of sense in white. So green and white made a lot of sense. So we had to figure out then whether to do blue, black, or red. That was the third color.

Now, if we wanted the vampires to be black and white, we'd use black for a second time, which meant black was off. So it meant we'd either go white, green, blue, or white, green, red. Well, we liked the idea that it was an army and had a military aspect to it, and once you stuck around on that path, red made a lot more sense than blue.

So we ended up making white, green, and red. Once you do that, it dictates the final thing that meant the final two-color pair was green and blue. So we went to the creative team and said, okay, we need to be in green and blue. And so what they did is they came up with these druids that were elementalists.

And they cast, like, elemental magic with the idea that, you know, blue, green, and red were the colors that sort of messed with elements. And so blue and green, they thought, okay, blue and green could have some elemental qualities and you could kind of put druids, you know, sort of druid-ish wizards there.

And then because there was there was some in general one of the things to keep in mind was that whenever you're doing something that's

well understood whenever you're making something that's like oh we're doing top down Egypt people go oh I get it top down Egypt

this was although it absolutely had Mesoamerican influences this was a lot more of a, you know, what exactly is this thing? And it was the kind of thing that, as we explained, it required a little nuance. It wasn't, you know, top-down Greek mythology world or something. It had a little bit of a nuance. And it was cool, and we liked it, but it was a little bit harder to make sense out of those. And so what happened was,

you know, it was the one thing on the schedule that people were like, oh, what is this thing? I don't understand this thing. And so the creative team was looking for a way to get a little extra oomph in the set. So they came to me one day and they said, what do you think of dinosaurs? And I, of course, said, dinosaurs?

Players have been asking for dinosaurs forever. In Future Sight, we hinted at a plane called Moraganda, which I think was more of a prehistoric plane. The players were really excited and wanted Moraganda. Clearly, one of the things they've been asking for was dinosaurs. So the idea originally with the dinosaurs was that they weren't going to be in a faction, that just they were going to be this extra thing.

That there would be the four factions, and then just a part of the natural landscape would be dinosaurs. So anyway, I'm at work. So I realize that my story is going to have to go over more than one podcast. So let me leave with this part, which is we now have four factions. We have blue-black-red pirates, white-black vampires, red-white-green sun empire, and a green-blue sort of

elemental druids. Elementalist druids. And we had just introduced the idea as an extra element, dinosaurs. That's where we were. Like I said, we haven't got to mechanics or anything yet. So, next time,

I will continue the story of how Ixalan came to be. Anyway, I hope you guys are enjoying today, but I'm now in my parking space, so we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make magic. I'll see you guys next time.