Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #484: Early Magic Evolution

Episode Date: November 3, 2017

In this podcast, I explore Magic's early sets and talk about the design innovations each one brought.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about evolution. The evolution of game design, then it's actually of magic design. So one of the things that's interesting, I mean one of the one of the vantage points that I have that that's kind of unique in game design is that I've worked on the same game for my whole career and that Magic is a game like most games when you make the game at least old-school most games like you made the game it was the game you're done like it's Monopoly here you go here's the board there's the pieces and there's not there's not too much evolution to Monopoly yeah yeah yeah the

board has been changed a few times visually they've cleaned up the rules a little bit um there's been a few tiny you know changes but pretty much what monopoly was was introduced you know or first became publicly became a big public game and now not that different um now magic is different in two ways. One is that we keep creating new content. While there definitely are games that do that, you know, like Dungeon Dragons, for example,

it falls in that category. There's games that predate Magic that do this, but Magic is somewhat unique in that it keeps creating new content, and that it's that the new content is very strategically oriented. That these are the pieces of the game. You know, something like Dungeons & Dragons gives you

tools to use, but in a lot of ways, Dungeons & Dragons, I mean, I guess Dungeons & Dragons has evolved plenty, too. That's a, maybe somebody on Dungeons & Dragons can do that podcast. But the idea is, so A, we keep making new product. We keep making new cards,

new mechanics, and we keep evolving. Now, one of the things that's interesting when you look at Magic is the rules aren't the same when the game started as now. In fact, we keep changing the rules. Now, the basics, you know, the basic idea of Magic hasn't really changed, but the actual rule implementation has changed quite a bit over the years. There have actually been quite a bit of different things as people sort of start to understand, like as we start to understand sort of how things work.

You know, if you take a look at something like protection, I love to tell this story, which is, in the early days, when magic first started, protection was kind of like a feel. It was like, well, do what you think, you know, what would it mean that it can't be affected? And just you would like a feel. It's like, well, do what you think. What would it mean that it can't be affected? And then eventually, like, oh, we can't have tournaments in which things aren't clear.

It's not, you know, we can't have everybody interpreting things different. So we started to have to clean up the rules. And over the years, we keep evolving the rules. Sometimes it's to, I mean, usually we clean up the rules now to do one of two things. Either we consolidate things like, oh, we had a bunch of different rules and we could clean them up and these three rules could become one rule and just make it a little bit easier to understand the rules. Or we realize that we've done something we don't want to do anymore and we pull it out of the rules. We go, well, that's non-intuitive. That confuses people. Okay, maybe we shouldn't be doing that.

And so magic by its nature is constantly evolving, both in the addition of new content and on some level subtraction sometimes of old content. And so the reason I bring this up, the reason of today's topic is one of the things that's very interesting about working on Magic is the technology of making the game just changes so radically over time. Because like one of the things that's interesting. So for example, I want to go through some early Magic history and just sort of talk

about how things that you might take for granted weren't always exactly taken for granted. You know what I'm saying? So Richard makes Alpha. And he definitely experiments. I mean, Alpha was... It's a pretty robust set if you go back and look. Richard definitely is... Even in Alpha itself, he's messing with the rules.

You know, he clearly has a bunch of cards that say, well, normally you do this, but not now, not with this card. But Alpha was just sort of the beginning. So let's sort of walk through some early sets. And I want to talk a little bit about what the evolution was of the early sets and sort of talk about how it changed things. Okay, so we're going to start with Arabian Nights, the first ever. So for those who don't know the story of Arabian Nights. So Richard basically makes games. So a little setup here so we understand the context. Richard and

his friend Mike Davis had come to Peter to pitch a game called Robo Rally. Peter Atkinson says, my company's too small. You have too many pieces. I can't make that game. The game I could make would be a card game. And he's looking for something portable to play in between role-playing games. Richard goes, ooh, I think I have something. And then Richard takes a game that he already

had created and adapts to the idea of a trading card game. Richard comes up with the idea, spawns the idea of a trading card game, and he merges it with a card game he had made before. Anyway, he makes magic, and the thought at the time was that they're going to introduce Magic and, you know, the base game would be out for a year or something before maybe, maybe, maybe if it's successful they consider doing something else, you know, adding on another, you know, another add-on to it.

But the game is so popular so fast that Richard is sort of forced to quickly make an expansion. So Arabian Nights was something Richard did very quickly. Once they realized, be aware, just as a time frame, they didn't know Magic was going to be a hit until Magic came out in the summer of 93. And Arabian Nights came out

December of 93, which means they rushed that through. They've learned in July or August, let's say, that they had a runaway hit in their hands and they had to make something fast. So this was made really, really quickly. Now it's only 78 cards, it's not particularly big. So what Richard did was, because he was trying to do it so fast, Richard decided to base it on something he knew. Rather than reinvent the wheel,

rather than make brand new, he just said, okay, I'll take an existing IP, you know, I'll take something that exists and I'll design to that. And he'd always been a big fan of 1001 Arabian Nights. So, the, you know, Arabian Nights was the first kind of top-down set. You know, the first set in which he said,

okay, I'm going to build to pre-existing flavor. Now, nowadays, we make our own flavor. We don't just take other people's things. And I understand Arabian Nights is in public domain and everything. But it's something in which

we really don't copy. Like, we'll get inspired. We clearly, like, look at something like Theros. We were inspired by Greek mythology, but we didn't just make Zeus. You know, we made our own versions of the gods that tied into the magic

color wheel, and, you know, we did our take on it, rather than just 100% just repeating exactly what those things are. So, if you look at Arabian Knights, there's a bunch of things going on. Richard starts playing around with some concepts.

So one of the biggest ones he plays around with is land. So if you look at Alpha, Alpha and Beta, our limited edition, the only lands in that set were the basic lands and the dual lands. Lands basically only tap for mana.

Essentially it's like, I can tap for white, blue, black, red, or green, or I can tap for two of those. And so really, in the beginning, land was solely a mana-producing resource. So Richard was really interested in saying, well, what if lands had a little more utility than that? He introduced lands that tap for colorless mana.

He introduced lands that did things other than tap for mana. Oh, I'm in the wrong lane. Hold on a second. Let me get over to the right lane. I just realized I'm in the wrong lane. And safety first. Okay, so he made lands that did things other than just tap for mana. In fact, some of his lands didn't tap for mana.

Now, we've since made a rule since then saying, okay, lands are connected to mana. Lands either need to tap for mana or go get you land or something that'll get you mana. You know, with rare, rare, rare exceptions, lands are tied to mana. In some way, they help you get

mana. Now, they can do other things. This is something Arabian Nights sort of opened up and said, hey, lands can have utility beyond that. And you see things like Library of Alexandria that lets you draw cards, lets you do other things. So he messes around with land. Richard also was really interested in the idea of different costs. If you notice, there were a freets and gins in Arabian Nights.

And he really was playing around with the idea of, here's something that you get that's powerful, but it comes at a cost. Now, he had messed around with it a little bit in Alpha. Alpha had like Lord of the Pit and Force of Nature, where there were sort of costs to be paid. Mostly they were mana costs. You know, Alpha did do a bunch of upkeep costs, so there were definitely mana costs. And Lord of the Pit was the first one that sort of said,

okay, there's a cost beyond just mana. You have to sacrifice a creature. But he definitely went farther than that in Arabian Nights, sort of exploring with the idea of, I think coin flipping shows up for the first time in Arabian Nights. He also messes around with,

so Scheherazade is a card with a sub game. You know, Richard really sort of exploring the space. In fact, by the way, if you ask Richard his favorite card he ever designed in Magic, I believe Scheherazade is his favorite. For those who don't know, Scheherazade, you stop the game you're in, you take your

library, you take it and play a separate game, and then the winner of that game earns something. And so the idea is that you are sort of, it's a nested series of games, much like the stories in A Thousand Arabian Nights are nested stories. Because one of the things that Scheherazade does, she's the, for those that don't know, the story of A Thousand and One Nights.

There's an Arabian king, I assume, who every night he'll marry a new woman every night. And then after their, you know, night together, he then kills them. And the newest bride is Scheherazade. And so she sets out to, she's a storyteller. So what she does is every night she tells a story, but she doesn't finish and says, you know, well, tomorrow night I can finish the story.

And he's so intrigued by her stories that instead of killing her, he leaves her alive for one more night so he could hear the stories. In A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. So what she does is she interweaves the stories so they all interconnect. So there are a lot of times what happens is, within the story is people telling the story. So the stories nest. So Richard was trying to copy that and having games that nest.

Richard also messed around for the first time with exiling. There's a card called Oubliette that represented a prison. And so the idea is you take a creature and you take it out of the game. It's the first time, I mean, it wasn't called the Exiles. I think it was called Removed from the Game at the time. There's a card called Jeweled Bird that messes around with anti. And really, I mean, there are anti cards, obviously, in Alpha.

But it's something that really starts, like, if you think of the wishes we would do later, the idea of sort of bringing things in from outside the game. That's the, Jewel Bird's the first one that does that. So there's a lot of things going on in Arabian Nights that are very interesting. I mean, Richard's definitely playing around to sort of see what space he can mess around in. Okay, next we get to Antiquities. So Antiquities is the first set that really has a mechanical theme to it.

I would argue that Arabian Nights had a flavor theme. It clearly was a top-down set. But it wasn't... The only thing connecting it was kind of, you know, matching all the flavor. So Antiquities... So Richard did Arabian Nights. Antiquities was done by the East Coast playsetters. So Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page.

I think Joel Mick might have been involved in Reeming Nights. Joel Mick normally worked with Bill Rose and the group that made Mirage. Anyway, they were really intrigued with the idea of having a mechanical theme. Artifacts, for those that don't know. It's also the first set. The set did a couple of different things. First, it had a mechanical theme. it's also the first set well the set did a couple

different things first it had a mechanical theme I think every set every card in the set has the word artifact somewhere on it or

it's a land that produces colorless mana that's good for casting artifacts like strip mines in the set I think strip mine might be the only land that doesn't specifically call it artifact

well there's the Urzatron which mentions artifacts in the Slaver text, technically. But it... The Urzatron and the Mishra's...

I said the Shrimp Mine, I think are the two cards. And they're both lands of Taprakalos, but they're both meant to help you get out artifacts. With other utility, obviously. Or, well, one of them gets more mana, one of them can destroy land, which ended up being a problem unto itself. But the idea was, this set was all about

artifacts. It had a strong mechanical theme. A strong mechanical theme. In fact, we don't tend to theme things quite as strong as this mechanical theme these days. Like, even when we do a set that's all about Thing X, everything in the set isn't Thing X. You know, a good Aspen will be, but not everything.

And this definitely sort of pushed space to figure out what artifacts could do. This introduced millstone, so the idea of milling. I mean, Richard had introduced in Alpha the idea that if you run out of cards, the game is over, just to have

a backup in case somehow people couldn't defeat the opponent through life. There was this backup that eventually made the game is over just to have a have a backup in case somehow people couldn't defeat the opponent through life there was this backup that eventually made the game end um but uh the east coast play structures really said well what if that was a strategy what if your goal was to run them out of cards rather than beat them with damage and made millstone um and there was a lot of different things you know there's a lot of cards in it that sort of played around. You know, it was really something that sort of, like I said,

they worked on some stuff that Rabian Knights had done with lands that did other things. You know, the Urzatron was the first land I believe that produced more than one mana.

But they definitely were a little more experimental and they definitely sort of said, hey, this is an interesting theme and, you know, artifacts, it's funny, for those who don't know, when Antiquities came out, it was kind of, at the time, was not particularly, like, it was, so Magic came out, people loved Alpha. And then Antiquities, I'm sorry, then Arabian Nights came out, people

really fond of Arabian Nights. And when Antiquities came out, the fact that it was so focused on theme, some people loved it, I loved it, but a lot of people were like, oh, I'm not that into Artifact, you know, the people were like, well, what's for me if I don't want that theme? And I thought the process at the time was that everybody can play Artifact, so it was a set for everybody in the sense that if you like one card, one of you can play

it. That was the thought process. The real ingenious thing, though, I mean, okay, having a mechanical theme, that was ingenious. The other big ingenious thing, though, I mean, okay, having a mechanical theme that was ingenious. The other big ingenious thing was what they did with the story. So, like I said, Alpha didn't really have a story. It hinted at maybe there was a story. There were proper names

and things. Arabian Nights sort of had a story, but it was the story of Arabian Nights that wasn't really a magic thing. Antiquities was the first set that said, okay, one of the themes they played around with was the story of Arabian Nights that wasn't really a magic thing. Antiquities was the first set that said, okay, one of the themes they played around with is the idea of archaeology. That one of these artifacts, these antiquities, if you will, were things dug up from an age old. That one of you were piecing together a story that happened a long time ago. And they were really intrigued by the idea that maybe the best way to tell a story in a card game, a trading card game,

is that you just get bits and pieces of the story and you kind of put together the story yourself by seeing the different pieces. And so this was the Brothers' War. This was the first set that sort of talked about the Brothers' War. But it did it in bits and pieces, kind of like if you were really trying to figure out history and you were digging up antiquities of old, that each antiquity might tell you a little tiny piece of the big picture, but it wasn't spelled out. And so, antiquities was the first story that really,

the first set that really told a story, or an original magic story. It had had characters, or mentioned characters, it talked about characters, and there was something that happened. There was an event that happened. Now, obviously, those that know the history of magic, Brothers War would become a much bigger thing.

You would see the Brothers War in other places over time. But that was the first telling. And it was a very interesting way. It was them trying to think about how to tell a story in a trading card game, which has always been a challenge, something that has been something we've always sort of been working on. Okay, next came Legends. So Steve Conard and his design team, I don't know all their names off the top of my head.

So Steve Conard worked at Wizards, and he was a longtime friend of Peter Atkinson, the CEO at the time. And they had done a very long role-playing session together. Dungeons & Dragons, that was my guess. And, you know, for those who don't know, Peter was really, really into role-playing. He started his company. Wizards of the Coast started as a role-playing company.

And he and Steve had played a campaign for a long, long time. So Steve had come to him for a long, long time. So Steve had come to him and said, I have a great idea. What if I turn our campaign into a magic set? And Peter said, oh, that sounds awesome. So the thing that Steve was really interested in was the idea that there were all these characters. That, you know, over the years, they had made all these really interesting, cool characters.

He wanted those characters to be cards. And he wanted them to not just be generic characters, but specific characters. Named characters. So Legends introduces, at the time was the creature type of Legends, although everything that wasn't a creature was legendary. So the super type did exist for lands and artifacts, but for creatures, it was a subtype. That would later get cleaned up. But anyway, it introduces, essentially introduces legendary. The other thing

is, because that's just not enough to introduce in one set, he also wanted to do something splashy. So the set also introduces multicolor. So up until that point, every card was a single color. So Legends introduces the concept of legendary things, and it introduces the concept of multicolor. Now, for splash value, he combined them. So

the only things that were multicolor were legendary creatures, which were, once again, they were creature-type legend at the time. But I will call them legendary. But be aware, at once again, they were creature-type legend at the time, but I will call them legendary, but be aware at the time they were creature-type legend. So the only thing that was multicolor were the legendary creatures, and the only thing that were legendary was the multicolor cards. There was a one-for-one correlation. There was no monocolor legendary creatures, and there was no non-legendary multicolor cards.

Now the interesting thing looking back was there was a lot of ingenuity in the set. There was a lot of cool ideas. But the big difference between Steve Conner and East Coast Playtesters and Richard was Steve at his heart is a storyteller. And there was a lot, a lot of story. Legends did a great job of flavor.

Steve did not have as much sort of game design chops as Richard or these Ghostplaystusters did. So the set is a little looser. Like the development, remember at the time, there wasn't separate design development. So it wasn't like, I mean, I think Legends had like a weekend of development or something, but not, you know, one of the fun things, I think we posted these online, is some of the original cards that, the way that Steve would write the cards is just say what he wanted the card to do, but he didn't really have the technology to understand how to write it in any sort of formal way. Now, be aware at the time, the rules were much, much more chaotic. But, you know, he would just write a card like, all the creatures fight, you know, and this is before fight existed

as a thing, right? Before fight was a word, you know, and it's like, well, what does it mean, they all fight? What does that mean? What do you do, you know, and he wouldn't explain sometimes what he meant, just like, you know, they all fight, you know, and so a lot of that weekend was sort of taking things he'd written and just putting it into magic ease so people could know what to do with it. And because of that, the legendary creatures, the legends, if you will, were mostly nothing to speak of. The uncommons were crazy over-cost and pretty simple, And the Rares, there were a few exciting Rares.

There were a few Rares that kind of did something. But in general, they were a little more lackluster than you would have hoped for legendary creatures. We've since learned to make legendary creatures a little more fun. Now, Legends did introduce the Elder Dragon Legends. So the reason that is important is one of them was Nicole Bolas. Oh, by the way, Antiquities in the story of the Brothers' War introduced Urza and all the characters,

but also, as a villain, introduced the Phyrexians. So the Phyrexians first showed up in Antiquities. Nicole Bolas first shows up in Legends. So if you talk about sort of villains in Magic, obviously there's some newer villains, but two of the biggest villains,

which are the Phyrexians and the Kolbolas, go way back. Go back to the second and third expansions of Magic ever. So, now the other thing that, the other thing that Legends, I mean, there's two big things Legends messed around with, was Legendary and Multicolor. He also, they definitely tried a lot of top-down stuff. So there's a lot of, like, cool, weird one-of things from the nature of them doing top-down. Okay, so now

we get to the dark. So the dark was done by Jesper Mirfors. So Jesper was, when the game started, he was the main, he was the art director. He's the one that oversaw the card backs, the frame, the original frame of magic, sort of all the look and feel of original magic. That was Jesper. And he was the art director, so he was the one that found all the artists. He's the one that went out and, like, one of the things about early magic

was that it wasn't a stable of artists. Like, right now, I mean, we're always looking for new artists. We always add to our stable. But we have a roster of artists that we've used. You know, we use hundreds and hundreds of artists. So when we go to do something, we have a backlog of artists that we have a relationship with. When Jesper started, there was, there was nobody. So what Jesper did was he, his biggest thing is he went to this art school that I think he had gone to, but it's a local art school, and there was a lot of artists there that he was friendly with, and a lot of the artists came from this school. I believe, like, Mark Tadine, Anson Maddox,

Amy Weber. I believe a lot of people came from that school. Anyway, when magic hit it big, Jesper said, I would like to make a set. And what Jesper was interested in was a tonal... It's interesting you could see that Richard does the first top-down set, first top-down expansion, and the East Coast Playtesters do the first mechanical-centered, and then we see Legends being sort of a character- centered. Well, the dark is tonal

centered. That what Jesper wanted to do was show the dark side of all the colors. Because one of the things that Jesper found very interesting is that the colors had the ability, and this is something that we, like Alpha definitely leans a little more toward white is the squeaky clean color, and black

is kind of the dark and evil color. And that with time we started to say, you know what, there's some nuance there. And really the dark is the first set to sort of put the stake and say, you know what, black doesn't always have to be, you know, black doesn't need to be quite as dark as you think. And white, you know, especially, I guess he was more interested in showing the dark side of all the colors. So we saw less of the good side of black than we saw the dark side of white. But he definitely showed like, hey, white can be evil. Here's how white is evil. Here's all the colors.

Here's the dark side that all the colors lean toward. And the thing that was really interesting from a tonal standpoint is the set really started to sort of mess around with sort of what you could do with flavor and how you could design things. And the dark had a lot of really interesting top-down designs, or I should say flavorful designs that were sort of trying to capture

this quality that he wanted. He also did the art direction, obviously. He was the art director. If any one person had more control over any one set, it would have been Jesper on The Dark. And The dark, once again, the dark, because of

the nature of what he was doing, it definitely pushed some boundaries. Now, there's a lot of early magic has things that we experimented with that we later decided weren't really what the colors were up to. Like, there's a card called Preacher in the dark, which steals things. And the idea, it's a

flavorful card that, you know, I can talk to you, and through my rhetoric, I can sort of fill your heads and get you to do my evil ways by using, you know, sort of this sort of an evil religion as a tool. I mean, sort of a dark, it was like a dark religion. The dark had, everything was sort of dark

in the dark. And like, gaining control about the creatures isn't really something we do in white. We did a nod to in Time Spiral. But that really isn't a white thing, you know what I'm saying? Blue steals things. Red sometimes temporarily steals things. Black on occasion steals things.

But white really isn't the stealing color. But he really sort of was trying to sort of capture the essence of the character. Early Magic did a lot of that, which is, what, philosophically, where would this go color-wise? We'll just mix the mechanics to match the thing that matches the flavor. And as time went on, we got a little better with that. Okay, so after the Dark was the Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires.

And that was another chance to really build in mechanical themes. That's also the East Coast Playstafters. You'll notice it's interesting that one of the things that if you look at early magic, most of the other people making magic you know, Arabian Nights was top-down flavor from an environment. Legends was top-down character. The Dark was top-down tone. Those were all very flavor-based. But Antiquities, although it did have a lot of flavor

with the story, very, very much had a mechanical heart to it. And same with Fallen Empires. They came up with a story, and it had a story. It was a fight between five factions. But Fallen Empires did a bunch of things. First off, it really explored what tokens could do. I mean, tokens existed since Alpha,

but it really sort of pushed the boundaries of where it could be. It really started playing in the idea of tribal in a way that, I mean, early magic had tribal in the sense that there was the Goblin King and two goblins, I believe, or Lord of Atlantis and a merfolk.

And this is back in the day where the idea was you could play as many cards as you wanted in early magic. So it's like, oh, Lord of Atlantis and a whole bunch of merfolk. A whole bunch of Lord of Atlantis and a whole bunch of merfolk. A whole bunch of Lord of Atlantis and a whole bunch of merfolk. Figure out the balance. But this is the first set that really sort of played in and I would argue that Fallen Empires

was the first set that really thought at all about limited. I mean, there was a ways to go before limited. I mean, early limited is pretty rough compared to modern day limited. But it was the first set that at least even took into account having a general sense of balance.

Like I said, they played around with themes like Tribal. They played around with counters. They definitely sort of played around with sort of... Oh, so here's something else they did that we do now that I think is the first set to really do that. They said, okay, there's factions. In fact, the way it worked was

every color had two factions. There were 10 factions in the set, technically. There was a war. So every color had a war going on between two different parts of it. And so the idea was you had to sort of figure out where you wanted, and each faction had their own flavor to it, and then each conflict had its own flavor to it. So what they did is they woven these themes. So for example, let's say you're doing the sapperlings, or the fungus. The idea is they would grow over time. So the idea was that faction, if you left them alone, they would grow. Meanwhile, they were fighting the elves, and the elves had a mana thing where they had their own sense of growth,

but it was a little bit different. So green had a growth theme, but how they used it was different between the two. You know, green, what green wanted to do was ramp up and play larger creatures. But what, you know, the fungus wanted to do was make a lot of saplings, so it would sort of spread wide rather than grow tall.

And so the neat thing about it was each faction sort of had its own mechanical flavor. And you would see us doing that a lot later. The idea of factioning things, the idea of factions having their own mechanical flavor, that started with Fallen Empires. That was the first Fallen Empires doing that.

So I'm almost to work, and it's interesting that I'll end with Fallen Empires because the next set after Fallen Empires is Ice Age, which is the first kind of... Legends is the large set, I get it. But the first set

that was kind of something that could stand alone, if you will. Legends wasn't really designed to stand alone. In fact, for example, you had to go to Rare before you could actually

destroy an enchantment, for example. I mean, there were... There were something called enchant worlds at the time, and now we call world enchantments. By the way, I didn't mention everything these sets did, because I was more talking about how they played in a larger picture. World enchantments was a unique thing for Legends. They represented where the fight was going on, so when you played one, it had some rules about your fight. But as soon as a new one got played, the old one went away

because you've moved to a new location. And that was the earliest of us playing around with locations, I guess. I guess I could point that out. We've many times since then figured out different ways to sort of get the essence of location, be it planes from Plane Chase

or be it like even the double-faced lands in Ixalan. We've definitely messed around with location a bit over the years. But the reason I stop at Ice Age today, well, A, I'm almost at work, but B, I feel that Ice Age was the first sort of us starting to get a larger sense of how sets worked and that it was the first sort of, the first set that really was meant of a standalone in a way that no set before it happened.

So if people enjoy this, maybe I'll do another story about the early evolutions of magic. But the point I want to make today is that every time we make a set, we discover something new. That when Richard made Arabian Nights, he expanded sort of how we thought about different things, how we thought about land, how we thought about costs, and how we made things. And antiquities made us really rethink about mechanical hearts for sets, how they're designed, and the kind of storytelling that we can do.

And legends sort of talked about what role characters can play, and multicolor, and what legendary things meant to be. The Dark added the idea of what tonal things we could add to the game. The Fallen Empire really introduced the idea of factions and mechanical sort of definition of factions. So there was a lot of different things going on there in the early years, and every set would add something new to the repertoire. And then every set after that had that. It's kind of like each set introduces a new color or paint,

and then every set after that gets that color to use. So that's kind of the role of today. Sort of talk to you about how magic is an ever-ongoing thing. I always find it interesting as a sort of a historian, not just of the game, but of the design of magic. It's neat to

look back and see the different things happen as they evolve. But I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. Oh, before I finish this real quick. If you guys like today's podcast, let me know. This is the kind of thing I couldn't do more of if people like it. But anyway, I'm now in

the parking space. We all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.