Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #483: Ixalan, Part 3

Episode Date: October 27, 2017

This is part three 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 dropped off my son at camp. Okay, so the last two podcasts, I've been talking about the design and development of Ixalan. Okay, so when last we left off our story, Ken Nagel and I were the co-lead designers of Ixalan. So we worked on it for a year. First six months, I had the reins. Second six months, Ken had the reins. And then we handed it off to Sam Stoddard and Eric Lauer.

So they could develop it. So now we're going to talk about development. Okay, so when Ken handed off the file, Explorer was in the set, the double-faced lands, you know, the non-lands that turn into lands, the treasure map becomes the area with the treasure, and we had vehicles.

But we did not have a dinosaur mechanic or a pirate mechanic. We had slots for them. We decided in the end, in order to sort of stay within our... We were trying, other than the deciduous mechanics, so not counting Transform or Crew, we were trying to stay at three mechanics. We liked the idea of Explore as a general mechanic that helps smooth things.

And then Ken had made the conclusion that we wanted to have a dinosaur mechanic and have a pirate mechanic. And the idea was that both vampires and merfolk would have a theme. They'd have a mechanical theme. It just wouldn't be a keyword. Okay, so let's start with the pirates. So what I explained before was, originally we had done plunder and design, which rewarded you for having damaged something ahead of time, then you got a loot.

Then we tried, for the pirates, we tried enlist, where you enlisted a pirate. You got a tutu black creature with menace. But what we did know is, we wanted the pirates to feel piratey. So if you go back a little bit, look at the history of pirates. Magic's had a few pirates in the past. There was, like, Kukemsa Pirate and Mirage,

and there was a bunch of Rashad and this and that in Mercadian Masks. And there were a few cards that, in the Grand Creature Update, like Vermeer DiPietro, that originally, they always weren't even flavored as a pirate, but that was a legendary creature from Legends, and back in the day, Legend was a creature type, and if you were a Legend, that's what you were.

But later in the Grand Creature Update, you became a legendary creature pirate. Or a human pirate, probably. But anyway, we never really, really done pirates, so we really were trying to do pirates right. We wanted to sort of do top-down pirates. And what we realized was that there were a lot of different aspects. If you looked at pirates, there were a lot of different aspects of pirates. There was kind of the trickiness of pirates, the

sort of, you know, the sneaky, tricky part. There was kind of the underhanded part, sort of backstabbing, you know, sort of. And then there was the swashbuckling sort of element to it. And if you notice, those kind of line up with blue, black, and red to a certain extent. But what we wanted to do was we wanted to capture all the different elements of pirates. And we wanted the keyboard mechanic to be something that was piratey feeling. and we wanted the keyboard mechanic to be something that was piratey feeling. So, basically what happened was we had tried a bunch of different things and for the longest time, one of the things you tend to do when you try to figure out what you're trying to find

is you look to the past and said, okay, well if I was using a mechanic we'd already used, what would I use? And so the mechanic we came up with was RAID. So we were looking for a Raid-like mechanic. So in my article, I tell the story, I'll tell it here just because it's a fun story. So Daryl Hannah is an actress in Splash, Blade Runner, Steel Magnolias, a whole bunch of stuff. She had always wanted to be in a Woody Allen film. That's one of the things.

So she had mentioned to her agent in passing one time that she had always, like one of her bucket list items was to be in a Woody Allen film. And so somehow the agent got a hold of the script to Crimes and Misdemeanors, or not the call list, meaning who are they auditioning. And one of the parts was for a um daryl hannah-like actress and and the agent's like whoa i think i know so she calls up daryl he calls up his client and says you need audition for this part she was like what he goes you know he said it's for a daryl hannah-like actress there's nobody more more Daryl Hannah-like than you.

And so she auditioned and got the part because, you know, when you write Daryl Hannah-like actress, maybe you'll take Daryl Hannah. So the similar thing happened with Raid, which was we kept trying to find a Raid-like mechanic. And then in development one day, I wasn't there, so I'm not sure who said it, but somebody, one of the developers said, hey, hey, why not Raid?

You know what's like a Raid, like a mechanic? Raid. And Raid, I mean, the name was perfect, and the flavor, and like trying to find something like Raid, why not just use Raid? Raid had been introduced in Tarkir as one of the Mardu, the Mardu mechanic. And it hadn't been a great... Sometimes, there's an interesting question about when you bring mechanics back. And once upon a time, like, originally, when I first started at Wizards long ago, our thought on mechanics were they were disposable.

Like, if you use the mechanic, might as well use it all up, because we're never using that again. And then eventually, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're in for the long haul. There's a lot of good mechanics. Just because we made a mechanic once, it's good. Why not do it again? And so the first mechanic I think we brought back was cycling in Onslaught. First named mechanic, keyword mechanic.

And then we got to the point now where we often try to bring back mechanic. We tried, on average, to bring back one mechanic, roughly, a set. Sometimes we bring back mechanic. We tried on average to bring back one mechanic roughly a set. Sometimes we bring back more. I mean, this set already had a bunch of deciduous stuff we were using. It had vehicles, it had transforms. So it already was kind of using a bunch of mechanics that we use often. Deciduous means that we don't use them all the time. That's evergreen. But we can use them when we feel we need to use them. Most mechanics, we try to have a little bit of distance between reusing them so that people are happy to see them come back. Now, Raid was in Tarkir. Tarkir wasn't that long ago, but long enough. Let's see. So you get Ixalan, you go back a year

to Kaladesh, back a year to Battle for Zendikar, back here to Tarkir. So I've been four years. That's kind of short on bringing it back. I think that's the reason that we at first didn't think to use Raid was it was bringing back a little quickly, but what we decided was it was a perfect fit. People liked RAID. It was a popular mechanic. You know, we shouldn't be, we shouldn't use mechanics when we need to use them. It's not that we're going to use RAID every four years or anything, but this just seemed like the perfect opportunity. This pirates, a pirate mechanic, RAID for a pirate mechanic. So we just, we, we bit the bull and said, okay, we're going to do raid. That happened relatively early in development.

The one that was much harder was the dinosaur mechanic. So between design and development, they tried a whole bunch of dinosaur mechanics. There was one, I'm not sure I remember the names correctly. I'm going to use names, but I might be remembering the names incorrectly. So one I think was called Call. So the way Call worked was it was a dinosaur that you could cast pretty cheaply and it was a pretty big dinosaur

but until you paid the activation cost it couldn't attack or block. So it's kind of like a monstrous variant except the creature was always big. Sort of a cross between monstrous and the gods of Theros, for example, kind of trying to turn on. You could still use him. You could fight with him.

You know, you could, things that cared about a creature's power, he was on the battlefield, but he couldn't attack or block until you sort of unlocked him. And that was nice, and it allowed us to get a lot of bigger creatures out quicker and get them on the board. I think that's the reason the mechanic was tried.

Like, one of the problems of dinosaurs is you just want to have a bunch of big dinosaurs. Now, the good thing about dinosaurs is actually there's a lot of different kinds of dinosaurs. Not every dinosaur has to be an 8-8. Like one of the problems we had in Dragons of Tarkir was there's this idea of what's a dragon. And we got too small for that. That's not a dragon. Dinosaurs, you can get a little bit smaller and still feel dinosaur-y.

In general, we didn't make a lot of too tiny dinosaurs. But we didn't make things that were, tiny dinosaurs, but we did make things that were on the smaller side compared to not every dinosaur is an 8-8. So we tried the call mechanic. The idea was that way we'd get more bigger creatures out there than dinosaurs, and let dinosaurs be bigger, because essentially you had to kind of pay for them twice

in order for an attacker to block with them. That just proved unsatisfying. I understand the reasonings behind it, but in gameplay, you just felt bad. It's like, here's my dinosaur, and I can't use it yet. We also tried, well, we tried a bunch of different things. I know they tried a bunch of stuff that played off size and a bunch of things that, like,

they were trying to sort of say, what exactly makes a dinosaur? And there's a lot of... We tried a thing where small things couldn't affect them, where you couldn't be blocked by power two or less, or power three or less, and you couldn't be affected by spells three or less, I think is what it was. Sort of that they're too big for small magic and small creatures. Anyway, they tried a lot of different things.

The one they ended up going with was a mechanic called Enrage. So what Enrage said is, whenever I take damage, I trigger and do something. I mean, that's the idea that if you somehow harm a dinosaur, he's not happy about it. Or she. They are not happy about it. he's not happy about it, or she. They are not happy about it. And the idea was that

in raids, like, if you get into a fight with a dinosaur, that's bad because damaging a dinosaur is bad. Or, if somebody, even you try to kill with direct damage, or its controller hits you with direct damage, not enough to kill it, but enough to trigger it, it lets you do some cool things.

Now, interestingly, while they were messing around, I was working on a set in the future. I can't tell you what set yet, but I was working on a set, and I actually, we had made the enrage mechanic for our set, and it was playing really well. And so what happened was, when they realized for dinosaurs they wanted to do it, we had somebody who said, oh, hey, they're using our mechanic. And so the rule is if somebody earlier needs it, they have priority. For example, when I was working on something, there's a lot more coming after it. So if somebody's later in the process, they're in development,

and I'm working on something earlier on, I will hand off stuff. Now, if the mechanic is super central to what I'm doing, I might say, hey, hey, I really need this. But this was a case where I liked the mechanic, but I could replace it. So we gave up the mechanic. So one of my jokes in general about Ixalan was a lot of times we gave things up for other sets. But this is one time where another set gave up something for Ixalan. Okay, so we had a mechanics.

We had raid for the pirates. We had enrage for the dinosaurs. We had explore to help smooth the mana. We deciduously had brought back vehicles for pirate ships, and we'd brought back transform so we could do the lands, the things that start with the lands. Okay, we had our mechanics. Now the question was, we had to define what each tribe did.

This was a tribal set. Now, this was a tribal set with only four tribes. Last time we had done it, well, Innistrad was a tribal set. Now, this was a tribal set with only four tribes. Last time we had done it, well, Innistrad's a tribal set that had five tribes. Before that was Lorwyn. That was a tribal set with eight tribes. What we learned is the lesson of Lorwyn was if you go

too high in the number of tribes, in order to make it work, you have to kind of starve the set of anything else. And then you don't get to have other fun things in the set. Like, to go back and look at Lorwyn, like, if you have to kind of starve instead of anything else. And then you don't get to have other fun things in the set. Like, to go back and look at Lorwyn, like, if you're not

one of the eight tribes or, you know, Changeling, you're not in the set. Like, it's just hard to fit anything in. Like, there's so much. So, by having a few, fewer tribal stuff,

it allows us a little bit more breathing room. For example, there were things that were with the pirates that aren't necessarily themselves pirates. You know, allowed us to do like a, you know, a parrot or something that's, that's,

well, I don't know, is a parrot a pirate? I'm not sure if a parrot was a pirate. That's a good question. But anyway, so the key was that each of the three color combinations, so the pirates and the dinosaurs of the Sun Empire, had three two-color combinations. And then the two colors had one. So, okay, so let's start by talking about pirates. So pirates have blue-black, black-red, and blue-red. And so remember what I said earlier, that there's sort of the, there's the craftiness of the pirates, there's the ruthlessness of the pirates, and there's sort of the swashbuckling trickiness of the pirates. Um, so the blue-black were kind of the underhanded, you know, the, you can't trust them sort of

sneaky pirates. The black-red were kind of the, the ruthless, do-whatever-it-takes stab-you-in-the-back pirates or not stab-you-in-the-front I guess blue-black is stab-you-in-the-back blue-red is stab-you-in-the-front and then blue-red is a little more the swashbuckling pirates

the sort of flamboyant, you know exciting adventure pirates and one of the things we were trying to do is there are pirates have a lot of tropes associated with them that cross over a lot of different boundaries. There are a lot of different kinds of tropes. The more we sort of dug into pirates, we realized there's a lot of different kinds of pirates.

And that the swashbuckling pirate, for example, is really different than kind of the underhanded pirate or the ghost pirate or the zombie pirate. There's a lot of different kinds of pirates, and we tried to figure out where we wanted to go. the zombie pirate. There's a lot of different kinds of pirates. We tried to figure out where we wanted to go. So for Blue Black, what we realized was there are a lot of things that we tied to pirates. Pirates wanted to have ships, so they had vehicles. They wanted to have weapons, so they had some equipment. And they wanted to have treasure. Oh, let me talk about treasure for a second. So one of the things that we realized with pirates was pirates are after treasure. So originally we said, okay, we're going to use gold tokens.

Gold tokens were something we created during Theros Black. It was on two cards, I think. Guild and whatever King Midas was called. It's a counter that you could sacrifice for any color mana. We originally put gold in the pirates because we were like, oh, they want their gold. That seems exciting.

But what we found was there's a mechanic in Aether Revolt called Improvise that lets you tap an artifact to help pay for cost. And the problem was it basically turned gold from producing one mana into producing two mana. And that was just too good. So we ended up having to put a tap on them

and chain them. So we needed to give them new names. We called them Treasure to sort of match with the pirates. So we loved the idea that the blue-black were kind of the greedy underhanded pirates. So we like the idea they were a little more connected to treasure, although all the pirates are connected to treasure. So vehicles, you know, the ships, the weapons, the treasure, that the blue-black have an artifact theme, that they care about having artifacts around and are kind of rewarded. You know, they're the ones that are more connected to some of the artifact things.

Also, it's a little bit more of a controlling deck. It's a little bit slower. Black-Red was more of the aggro deck, more of the attack. This is the Vicious Pirates. And so we gave them the more straightforward things that make them want to attack and deal damage. This one plays in Raid. Ra one plays in raid. Raid works in all of them, but this is the one where raid works a little stronger because its aggro is constantly attacking. And then blue-red was a little more tricky.

It was a tempo deck. So a tempo deck is something where I sort of put out some creatures and I'm constantly keeping up balance. I'm bouncing something or countering something or shocking something or dealing direct damage. I'm sort of like, I'm constantly keeping up balance. I'm bouncing something or countering something or shocking something or doing direct damage. I'm sort of like, I'm beating you because I'm always sort of keeping you just a step behind me.

And the idea was that the reason we want, you know, there's three colors. In Draft, we didn't want you to normally play three colors. That wasn't really the goal of this. The mana doesn't really let you easily play three colors. But we liked the idea that if you're playing pirates, you have some choices, and that you could play different kinds of pirate decks.

One of the reasons in the model we used, what I call the 3-3-2-2 model, is we wanted the things in the threes, which is the pirates and the dinosaurs, to have a little bit more execution, because we knew more people would want to play pirates and dinosaurs. So the way it's sort of mocked out is there's eight two-color combinations you can play if you want to play tribal.

Well, three-quarters of them are either dinosaurs or pirates. Okay, let's talk dinosaurs. So dinosaurs have red-green. That's kind of the ferocity of the dinosaurs. That's the color that plays up in Rage the most. In Rage was a mechanic that went on all the dinosaurs, but especially in green. It made the most sense in green. And then red not only is number two in enrage, but it also has the direct damage, things that you can trigger the enrage with.

Like we gave a bunch of spells in red that just did a little bit of damage, so you could sometimes use them on your own dinosaurs to trigger the dinosaurs to trigger the enrage. Green-white was about toughness, was about size. You know, one of the things about dinosaurs is they're real big. And so we wanted to play up their size. And we had a bunch of different ways mechanically to care about toughness. And so green-white's the color that does

that. It's sort of the dinosaurs with the big butts, we would say. High toughness. And there's a bunch of different things. There's some cards that, you know, do damage based on toughness rather than power. There's, you know, cards that sort of care about toughness in different ways. And green-white plays into that theme. And then red-white is the more aggro dinosaurs. Plays into the aggressiveness of the dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs definitely have the sort of wild quality to them that we wanted. Dinosaurs were kind of like pirates in that there were a lot of dinosaur tropes that we wanted. We made the decision early on, by the way, a couple decisions about dinosaurs. One is we liked the affectation of, since they were tied to the Sun Empire, and we were already weaving feathers into the Sun Empire, just because the source material made a lot of use of feathers, we liked the idea that dinosaurs had some feather qualities to them. A, that ties into some modern sort of understanding of what dinosaurs might actually have looked like. And it gives them a little bit of a unique look.

It fits into this world and it makes the magic dinosaurs just a little bit different than everybody else's dinosaurs. You'll see as you see the cards, in fact, by now you can see them. It's not that they didn't look like traditional dinosaurs. And there's plenty of scaliness, if you will, on them. It's not like you can't read them as dinosaurs. We just wanted to put a little affectation to make them feel a little our own and a little this world. Also, there are a lot of different kinds of dinosaurs. What we did is we sort of looked at dinosaurs and then kind of made our own versions of dinosaurs.

So we decided to sort of stay away from technical names, just a little bit of technical names, but more types. And the idea is we kind of made our version of dinosaurs, a lot of which are reminiscence of kinds of dinosaurs, but we didn't name them specifically, or mostly didn't name them after existing dinosaurs. We kind of, you know, gave our artists a little bit of freedom to sort of expand

a little bit. Now, we definitely stayed in types, and there's certain dinosaur archetypes we did, and we stayed in those. But we definitely did a little bit of... We were free to sort of investigate a little bit on how we did our own. Okay, vampires. So vampires, I think the vampire

theme goes back the farthest of anybody. We were in black-white. We knew that we wanted to have a vampire feel to it. And so pretty early on, we like the idea that there's a resource that they sort of peddle in, and that is life. That they can make the opponent lose life, they can gain life, they can drain life, and life is a resource to them. They can spend life to do things. So one of the ways that the vampires work is they are constantly trying to gain life in order to spend life.

And it sort of captured the sense of them wanting to be something that drains things. You know, they're vampires. life. And it sort of captured the sense of them wanting to be a set that drains things. You know, they're vampires. Also, it turns out that black and white mechanic overlaps them is lifelink, which definitely fuels in this flavor of, I'm doing damage, making

you lose life, and I'm gaining life. So it definitely has a draining type feel to it. And you'll notice the tokens that we made. We make little 1-1 white vampire tokens with lifelink, which is sort of a carryover memory from the enlist. That's what the pirates made. So the pirates definitely had that.

And we decided that we wanted the pirates to be, I guess, mid-rangey. The idea being that they're not super fast. They're not an aggro deck. There's other, you know, the pirates and the dinosaurs have, at at some level some speedier stuff. But it's something in which I can kind of get you part of the

way there, and then I have tools to sort of plink you out. So it has sort of a mid-range... I mean, Black-White likes bleeder-y type decks, and so we played a little bit in that space just because that's what Black-White... the mechanics of Black-White let you do. Okay, so the merfolk went through a little more issues. Remember, the merfolk morphed themselves. This guild, or the

faction, sorry, wrong world. This faction really sort of changed a bit over time. Like I said, at some point they were elementalists and then they were beastmasters and then they became merfolk. The idea we ended up playing around with is, well, for a while they had a spells matter theme. And one of the things that Sam tried is, he was doing a bunch of different effects with if you cast a non-creature spell. And then he realized that really what he wanted was prowess. And so he said to us, he said, look, it's weird that green cares about spells being cast,

but somehow they don't get bigger. That seems weird. Green's all about getting bigger. So he said, could we try prowess in green just for the set? And so the idea was prowess would be blue and green, but only in Murfolk. Only Murfolk would have prowess in the set. And we'd be bleeding prowess to a completely different color. And that was weird, but we tried it.

In the end, we had a bunch of problems. One was having that much prowess at common actually turned out to be a problem. The prowess in small numbers is fine, but this gets a lot more complicated. Like prowess is a little bit complicated on the board in that you have to sort of say, when an external event happens, this might get bigger

and you have to care for that and you have to sort of watch what external events happen. Having one or two products, things that come, is not usually a problem, but having a bunch turned out to be a problem.

Another thing that happened, by the way, one of the things that went on during this, and if you read my State of the Union, or it's not State, State of the Design speech, is one of the things that went on during this, and if you read my State of the Union, or State of the Design speech, is one of the things we're always tackling with is complexity. One of our concerns about Kaladesh and Amiket year was it's a little more complex than we meant.

We're trying to get the right balance between having enough things going on, the players are having fun and enjoying, you know, there's enough depth of play, but not so much that it's just intimidating to sort of learn all what's going on. And so, like I said, we tried to pull back on the number of new mechanics in the set. We were bringing back a bunch of things, so we tried to pull back on how much new stuff we had. And it turned out we ended up having to make some changes. One of the things we did, which I think we're changing moving forward, is we made the decision that vehicles aren't something that should be a common.

We did them a common in Kaladesh. They were brand new. They were a key part of the set. But we learned that really they're pretty complex. And so one of the things that we're trying to be more conscious of is seeing when we're doing something that causes confusion. And so we've made the decision in Ixalan, and I think it's an ongoing decision, that we're just not going to do vehicles at common. Vehicles are an uncommon thing or a rare thing or a mythic rare thing. But they're not something you just will see,

you know, at common. So we decided not to use prowess with the merfolk. And then I think Sam went down a path of

the idea of the... Oh, the other problem with... Sorry, I didn't get... The other problem the merfolk had was caring about non-creatures

proved to be a little too much tension-y in a tribal set with... Sorry, I didn't get it. The other problem that merfolk had was caring about non-creatures proved to be a little too much tension-y in a tribal set, because you want to care about merfolk. Merfolk are on creatures. You know, we don't use the tribal super type, or not super type, the tribal card type anymore. So, like, in order to be a merfolk, you had to be actually a creature, be a merfolk. And so the issue at hand was we didn't... It was hard to have enough merfolks in your deck that you trivially cared about merfolks, but have enough non-creatures in your deck that you cared about non-creature spells. And the tension there was just a little bit too much.

So what ended up happening was we went in a different direction. And so the idea that Sam ended up with is the idea that the merfolk, he went back toward the flavor-wise sort of the elementalist flavor, but the idea that they can beef themselves up. And the green merfolk are good at sort of making themselves bigger, and the blue merfolk are good at getting them through,

that build in some invasion and stuff. Now, the reason blue likes invasion is it doubles also helping with the pirates. So there's kind of the merfolk has this kind of of plus one plus one counter theme where you build things up mostly on the green side, and the blue side helps get the evasion to get them through. And so there's a, the merfolk have a little bit of a trickiness feel in that

they're sort of, you know, they're sort of using their magic and then you have to sort of watch out for them. But anyway, how are we doing on time? Yeah, I just got to work. Let me spend a few more minutes. I got here quickly. Okay, so once Sam and his development team had figured out sort of the flavor of pirates

and the three color combinations, the flavor of dinosaurs and the color combinations, what vampires are up to and what merfolk we're up to, and the color combinations, what vampires were up to and what merfolk were up to. He definitely did a lot of work of trying to capture the different flavors. And once again, we were playing at a whole bunch of different tropes-based. We were playing at pirates.

We were the pirates piratey. And I know that we tried really hard to make the pirates, not that there aren't some grim pirates, but have the pirates have this kind of sense of adventure to them. Kind of make the pirates more fun, a little less gritty. He worked hard to make sure the dinosaurs were sort of feral and felt dinosaur-y. A bunch of different things we tried made the dinosaurs feel a little too smart, and the dinosaurs kind of

shined where they were kind of big and dumb, but feral and powerful. The vampires had white vampires and the merfolk had green merfolk. So the key there was to try to make something in the decks that just played in a little bit different space than the decks that had before. So the cool idea was if you want to build a vampire deck

now you can add some white and do something different. If you want to build a merfolk deck, now you can add some green and do something different. And so there's some cool things there that sort of played in that space. Like I said, he messed around with treasure and went from gold to becoming treasure. He did a lot of work on the double-faced cards, on the transforming into the land.

What had happened was, early, early in the process, we had decided not to do masterpieces. But a little bit of work had been done on what the frames might look like. And so when we ended up using some of that work, and then more work got put on top of that, but that was kind of the original impetus for the backside of the double-faced cards, was when we were thinking of maybe doing masterpieces, the early, early exploration into it. Like I said,

that we stopped partway through so that we sort of picked up where they were looking and then advanced them and made them work for the back side. The reason it was important, by the way, on the back side to have them look differently is we didn't want you thinking you could just play the land. The lands are very powerful, but the reason they're powerful is there's a hoop you have to jump through to get them. And we didn't want players going, oh, I'm just going to play this side, which is this super powerful land, because you have to transform into the land. And so we wanted to make sure there was something clean that sort of said to you, hey, hey, hey, these are not normal lands.

Don't think of them as normal lands. And that's why we did this sort of map motif thing on the back. Also, it's cool. That's another part of it. But we wanted to be clear that it's not a normal land. So anyway, that, my friends, is, I guess, all there is to say about sort of the making of Ixalan. This set went through a lot more changes than most sets. We looked at a lot of mechanics. We tried a lot of mechanics. We tried a lot of different structures. You know, we had two factions and three factions and four factions and who the factions were changed and, you know,

like I said, this was definitely a set that had more flux. But, when you look at the finished product, wow, really exciting finished product. Like, one of the cool things about this is, you know, when we say we want to do an Egyptian set, everyone gets it. Like, okay,

Egypt meets Balduin. People go, oh, it's like an Egypt set. This was one of those sets that was really different. That was it. Like, okay, it's an Egypt meets Bolas. People go, oh, it's like an Egypt set. This was one of those sets that was really different. That was like, oh, well, it's kind of got some Mesoamerican influences, but it has pirates and it's got dinosaurs and it's tribal and it's got all these things that sort of like...

It's a lot easier when you're making something when you can sort of condense what you're doing down to just a few words. Like, you know, when I was able to internally say, oh, well, I'm making Amiket. That's Egypt meets Bolas. People are like, oh, okay, I got it. This set was one of those sets that really didn't for the longest time have the one sentence what it is. And people were like, oh, what is it? I'm not quite sure what it is. And it took a lot of time to sort of get it down to the point. In the end, we sold it as Pirates and Dinosaurs.

But it took a while, like I said. When the set originally, originally was pitched, there were no pirates and there were no dinosaurs. Right? There's a long evolution to this process. So, anyway, I hope you guys, hopefully you're playing it by now, because it should be out. Actually, it definitely should be out. I record ahead of time, and it's not that

far from coming out. But anyway, I hope you enjoy it. I hope you have fun with your pirates and your dinosaurs and your vampires and your merfolk. But anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.