Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #488: Unstable, Part 1

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

The Un- sets are where I try new things, so it seemed only apropos to experiment with having the podcast be about the design when the set is being previewed. This is part 1 of 3.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And it is finally time to talk unstable. So I did have a podcast with Mark Purvis where we talked about sort of general terms about how the set got made. But now it's time to talk specific terms about the actual design of the actual set. Okay, so I don't know how long this will take. I'm going to start today. This might be a multi-podcast. I'm not sure. But anyway, we'll begin back in the beginning, 2011. So January 2011. Okay, so let me explain. I mean, Mark, I want to sort of go more detail, but I'm going to hit a few points we talked about in the podcast with Mark Purvis.

Okay, so our problem was we wanted to make a third onset. So by we, it was the Council of Marks. So it was me, Mark Purvis, and Mark Globus. And we wanted to figure out how to make a third onset. The problem in our way was both unglued and unhinged, we had printed too many cards and had to destroy cards.

Now, the contention of both me and Purvis was not that there wasn't an audience and it wasn't a successful product, but that we just didn't understand the nature of the product and printed too many cards. but that we just didn't understand the nature of the product and printed too many cards. So way back in the time, in some ways, I guess Unglued was the first supplemental product. We didn't really do supplemental products. Like back then, either we made a core set or we made a normal expansion, all of it went into standard and that's just what Magic was. And this was a different animal and we didn't really know how to treat it.

So we printed it like a small set. It wasn't a small set and there was really, there was a lot of excitement early on and then at some point it got saturated and then we couldn't sell more cards. So the sign to me that there was something going on, because Mark and I had done some research, because our contention that we were saying is there's an audience for this. This is an exciting product. The key to the product is making in the right amount, understanding, you know, not everything, you know, anything can be can will not sell if you make too much of it. Take the best set ever, the most beloved set of all time.

Just double the print run for most of them and now stop selling. Just double the print run for most of them and now it stopped selling. So we were trying to prove that it was something that was an issue of how we managed it, not the quality of the set or the desirability of the set. Also, the other problem was that we knew it was a fight to get the set made. So Globus came up with the idea of, look, what if we just start making it? What if we put together a design team and we start making it?

The only problem is you need some justification for putting a set together. You can't just make things. You have to have an eye towards something. So Globus came up with an interesting idea. He said, what if we, you know, one of the things the unsets have always done is look ahead, is sort of explore space that is untested space. And that one of the fun things about it is there are a lot of things that we've done in the silver border sets that eventually showed up in black border. You know, split cards first showed up in Unglue 2. I guess Unglue 2 wasn't

printed, but first was designed in Unglue 2. Floor lands, creature token cards, forecast, the pact cycle. You know, there's a lot of things over time that we've made and like, oh, you know, meld. You know, the things that we made that when we first made them, like, oh, this is a little out there. But eventually, you know, as Blackboard sort of expands, as we try new things, we are willing to go there. So Mark knew that there was, we were on the cutting edge of some really exciting things going on in printing.

So real quick, let me talk about this a little bit. So when Magic first started, we had, we were just using the technology that existed in the day, which was making trading cards. Trading cards existed. We were just making our version of them, making a game out of them, but they were made the way normal cards were made. What has happened over the years is we've realized more and more that there's a lot of things that the sophistication of printing allows us. Now, for starters, back in the day, we used to send like, you know, actual, like before digital printing, you had to basically make a picture and send, you know, films in order to print. And then eventually it changed over to digital, which made things a lot easier.

You know, we didn't have to, like, film, literally we had to ship over there. It's a physical thing. And digital is not something that we can transfer without having to physically ship it, for example. And another big thing is what we call collation, which is we want a magic pack to appear random, right?

We want you to feel like you could get any card in any order. The reality is it's not 100% random. It, they have to be printed in some order and then some sequence has to be used to sort of make them appear random. As we've gotten to digital printing, it's gotten more and more complex what we can do. So Mark's idea, Globus, I should probably use his last name since they're all named Mark. Globus' idea was that there was really some new and exciting digital stuff. What if we explored what digital printing could do?

And the reason we were working far ahead is, well, we wanted to be on the cutting edge of what printing could do, so let's start exploring. far ahead is, well, we wanted to be on the cutting edge of what printing could do, so let's start exploring. And so the idea was, originally we put together the set of, look, we need to test digital stuff, let's put together a team that's going to test digital things so we can sort of see the future. And, you know, an unset made a lot of sense. So sort of like that we pitched it as, well, maybe we will or won't make this unset, but we need to do this exploration anyway for digital printing. So the product started as kind of a blue sky experimentation. Let me quickly explain.

What blue sky means is a blue sky design is often when we're designing, we're actually making a real set. Like, oh, we're making this set. We're making Aminket. We're making Ixalan. We're making Dominaria. We're making an actual set. But sometimes what we need to do is explore ideas that we don't even have a set for. It's just ideas that we want to see.

We want to test out, you know, what are new mechanical spaces we can explore. And that is called blue sky design. I think blue sky, I mean, that's not a magic term. That's a general industry term. I think they call it blue sky because it's like anything is possible. I look up and I can do anything. And so the idea essentially is we allocate time for blue sky design. So we start this product by saying, okay, okay, this is going to be blue sky design focusing on digital printing.

That's where we started. And the idea was that if we started working on this and started making it, that we could then, we would then, in the meantime, make a silver-bordered set, and then at some point, you know, Purpose was going to do his homework and sort of make the proposal to show how the former unsets are, people think of them improperly. And one of, by the way, one of the big things he was working on is, one of the things about the way that the unsets work is, when you talk to sales, the most sets the way they sell is that there's a big sort of the set first comes out it does great and then over a lifetime of set it sort of keeps going down and then when it drops out of standard it drops off a bit and then it just sort of during its lifespan it just

keeps going down so the weird thing that unsets have done is they don't really act like a normal set. They sort of have a decline, but it's a much, it's not as steep a decline pitch. Now, you know, they don't reach quite as high early on because there's a little less universality. Not everybody wants to play an unset, but the idea is that there's an audience that likes them and that you can tell by the sales that people don't tend to lose interest it tends to sell at a certain base for example a normal set if you track it like it just drops off and what we found about the unsets is they kind of there's a point they reach where they that's what they sell at that they're always going to sell at that route that there's a certain they reach where that's what they sell at. That they're always going to sell at that route. That there's a certain quality to them that is timeless.

And that if somebody wants this, if somebody wants sort of a fun, silly set, well, that's what exists. And so the unsets do not behave like normal sets. And then part of our argument is, if you look at all the data, you know, there's a lot of data showing in how they sell and how they function that people don't think of them the same, that they're a different animal, and that there is an audience for them. So Purpose was doing that homework. Okay, so I put together my design team.

So my design team was a guy named Dan Emmons, a guy named Monty Ashley, and a guy named Billy Moreno. So Dan and Billy both worked in R&D. Monty actually worked in online media. Interestingly, none of them are still here. When the set comes out, the set's going to go to print in December. I'm talking to you before then, obviously, I record ahead. So basically, we're going to go to print, and none of my design team is here. I don't want to say it was a long design, and none of my design team is here.

I don't want to say it was a long design, but none of my design team is here. So what happened was, Dan Emmons was somebody who had done a lot of work on The Greatest Designer 2. He wasn't one of the contestants of The Greatest Designer 2, but he had done a lot of work with all the different contestants. If you guys remember, the way that it worked was we had forums where the audience could help because we wanted the people who were testing, because of some of the skills we were testing, we wanted to see them working with other people's material.

So we opened it up so anybody could help them design cards and then they could pick and choose from the designs what they wanted for their set. They didn't have to design everything themselves, that they could get help from other people. Dan was part of that process. The designers, you know, Ethan and Sean and Scott, all the people that had worked on Great Designer 2, really spoke highly of Dan. Dan originally got a job elsewhere in the company. I'm not 100% sure what, maybe game support. But anyway, when he first got his job at Wizards, he came and talked to me and said, my long-term goal is to become a game designer.

I want to work in R&D. How do I do that? And so what happened was I gave him advice that, you know, there's seminars we do. There's hole filling. There's play tests. You know, I told him all the different things that the average person who works at Wizards is able to do. And as he did that, he really impressed us. And eventually we put him on mini teams.

And then we put him on an actual team. And he eventually actually worked his way into R&D. Dan has gone on to work elsewhere, but he was a great designer. I mean, not of the great design search, but Monty is someone I've worked with a long, long time. Monty had, um, uh, back in the days of doing, working on the website, um, Monty had been tied to the website. In fact, before the website, Monty, well actually, Monty had always worked on the website. Uh, there was a period of time where he worked, the sideboard had an online component. You guys remember the sideboard that did events.

Monty had worked on events a long time and did a lot of the online support for events. And eventually eventually moved over to online media and he was very involved in the making of the website. If, for example, you remember my,

I talked about a podcast on topical blends. My second one, it looked like the, looked like the, the boards of, of My Ting's, a humor site.

Monty was the one that designed all that and made it look awesome. Anyway, Monty's very funny. Monty had always wanted to work on the set. I felt like this would be the perfect set for Monty to work on. He had sort of sensibilities, so I brought Monty on. And then I needed a development person. Billy Moreno worked for a long time in development. Billy was eager to do it, and so Billy came aboard.

I think at one point near the end of the process, Billy would swap over for Ian Duke. Ian's the one, you might see him doing commentary at the Pro Tour. He's been a long-time developer. Ian's the one person who worked on the design team, although, for like a month maybe of the seven years. And he was, he's still in the pit. So we got together the team. And so where we started was, so this is a long about story because where we started and where we ended up are very different animals.

So where we started was we tried to figure out what you could do with printing technology. So it was an interesting experiment. We said is okay let's assume we could do anything we wanted. Let's assume the technology exists. Let's start designing things. And so we designed all sorts of crazy things. Some really interesting neat things and we spent a lot of time sort of exploring where printing could take us. Ironically, we were a little ahead of the curve. And a lot of the neat ideas we came up with a lot of the cool things we wanted to do. The print technology, the set took, you know, six and a half years to design, we never quite caught up to the print, we were a little bit too ahead. Now, the interesting

thing is, there's a product coming out in a year or two that obviously came out after us that was finally able to do one of the things that we had tried to do. So when that set comes out, I'll talk about that. But it's coming along. And I think, ironically, we did do a lot of really interesting good blue sky work for digital printing, which was one of our goals. But it turns out that a lot of that stuff didn't actually make it because by the time we went to print the set, which, once again, many years later,

hadn't quite made it. It's not that digital printing couldn't do some of that stuff. It couldn't do it for a large enough, cheap enough, in a way that was consistent that multiple printers could print. So we sort of discovered things that... There's a difference between can do it and can do it effectively. So we sort of found a space where we started doing some things that was on the cusp of being done, but not consistently enough that we could do it for a set.

But like I said, there's an upcoming set that actually did one of the things that we'd wanted to do and were told we couldn't do. Okay, but anyway, so we are trying to figure out, we started by being the blue sky digital design. But the other thing that we wanted is, I knew we wanted to have a creative component. Previous unsets were very much scattershot. They were very much, here's the funny thing,

they were parody sets in the sense that everything was just making fun of stuff in a vacuum. Everything we did was, how do we make something funny, and there was no cohesiveness to the creative. But one of the things that I said is, look, you know, the last set was made in 2004. When I started to design it was 2011, so it was seven years later. Obviously, six more years will go by before it comes out. But I wanted to make use of sort of the current technology that we had available.

So one of the things was I wanted a cohesive creative treatment. And part of what that meant was I wanted there to sort of be a world, if you will. So what happened was I looked through all the different potentials of places we could do. Ironically, the one I picked was steampunk. I said, what if we do something fun with steampunk? And the idea that we originally had started with was the idea of doing a sort of a mad scientist world.

Because I like the idea of mad science as a way to reflect sort of the craziness. One of the things about the unset, I mean I've done podcasts on unglued and unhinged is that there's a certain amount of humor to them. Now each set actually had a very different kind of humor. Unglued sense of humor was very different from unhinged sense of humor which was going to be different from unstable sense of humor was very different from unhinged sense of humor, which was going to be different from unstable sense of humor. And that I liked the idea of finding a way to sort of justify what the set wanted to

do thematically in a way that reinforced the background. Now be aware, at the time, we had no idea real magic was going to go to a steampunk world. So what happened, real quickly for that, is we didn't actually come up with Kaladesh until we were doing Origins, and we were trying to figure out where

Chandra was from. And if you look at Chandra's outfit, it's like, okay, well, it says there's some technology. You know, clearly she has an outfit that's sort of designed. You know, it had a little bit of an inventor's feel to it. And we knew that Chandra was sort of of a mixed heritage. We knew that her mother was of Indian descent and that her father wasn't and that she sort of came from a, you know, that we,

obviously as evidenced by her name, Chandra, that we knew the world she came with was going to have some sort of Indian influences. And so we kind of knew it had technology and we knew it had Indian influences and sort of that led us down the path to Kaladesh. And what happened was we didn't really mean to sort of go down the steampunk route until just it was what made sense to fill in Chandra's background. So when I started with Unstable, when we picked steampunk, we weren't doing it. I mean, it was something that Magic one day would do, but I'm like, okay, well, I'll do it now.

Eventually Magic will get to it, but I'll do the silly version. They'll do the real, you know, the serious version and it won't be a problem. Obviously, if you remember the podcast with me and Purvis, it caused the set to get delayed for a whole year. So obviously it was a problem. Okay. So the first thing that I wanted to do was I wanted to get a sense of, I wanted there to be, I like the idea of factions. I really like the idea of

factioning. It was an inventor's world. So I was trying to figure out what to do. So anyway, meanwhile, once we had come up with Steampunk World one of the things that became apparent to us so back in Future Sight we had made a card called Steamflugger Boss and Steamflugger Boss, like I said I've told this story many times, but it was us screwing around it was us just making up words that didn't exist we thought it was funny to have a card in Future Sight from the future from a potential future that just made up terminology.

And the original version, I think, erected monuments. And we decided that erecting things wasn't right. So we turned it into assembling contraptions. We didn't really know what that meant. I think we defined contraptions as artifacts, as they felt like artifacts. But we had no idea what that meant. It was just a joke. In fact, I don't think we had any intention of doing anything with it.

But at the time Aaron was writing the development column, and Aaron decided to out us and just say, yeah, we just thought it was funny. And Aaron told everybody we had no intention of making it. Well, don't tell magic players you have no intention of ever doing something. So what happened was, it became a thing. And so I actually spent a bunch of time

saying, okay, how do we do contraptions? What do we need to do? One of the weird things was the way Steam Flutter bosses worded, it's not that you, the player, assemble contraptions necessarily, but like, rigors, for example, whenever a rigor assembles a contraption, that's the creature.

Because rigor was a creature type. And so what does that mean? The creature does it? Normally you, the player, would do it. And it was an artifact, and I really wanted to get the feel of, well, what is a contraption? So I decided that, okay, let me think about what a contraption is.

So a contraption is you're taking things that don't normally go together and putting them together. A contraption has a little bit of a vibe of kind of, you know, you're taking disparate parts and welding them together. You're sort of making something that has a little bit of a makeshift feel to it. You know, like one of the reasons, I mean, we already knew we were doing contraptions before we went to Kaladesh. I mean, it never really was on the table. But even if it was, Kaladesh was on inventions. Contraptions and inventions are different things. Inventions have, can have an artistic quality to them.

They can have, you know, you're carefully doing something. Contraptions are slapped together. Um, and so, one of the things after messing around with contraptions, I really said, you know what, let me see if we can do contraptions in Silverboard in the sense of what would I do if I don't have restrictions? What would I do? How can I make contraptions? And so what I realized was that the contraptions wanted to be this thing where you were putting things together and that I wanted synergies, like I wanted you to physically make a contraption. That a contraption wasn't just boom, it's done.

It was an ongoing, evolving thing. I thought that was important. That I wanted you to assemble a contraption. Now, assemble, by definition of the word, doesn't mean one piece. It means many pieces. You don't assemble, you know, you assemble something that has pieces you have to put together. But, equally important, I wanted there to be gameplay. I wanted it to be something that you were building, but there's something inherently fun and something that mattered to the gameplay. And so one of the things that I do all the time is I'm constantly trying to figure out where the future of magic is.

That's my job. And there's something that I thought of that I didn't quite know where or how to do it. Is the idea, I've been playing around a lot with external pieces. So if you remember, for example, in Innishrod, one of the kinds of stuff was called Night Day. Where when you brought a creature that cared about it, you went and got this card from outside the game and brought it into the game. And the card told you how you determined it was night and how you determined it was day and how it changed. Then it made this little sequencing.

The one thing we have tonight is the monarch plays a little bit in the space. Like, go get the monarch. And then the monarch tells you what the monarch is and what it means and gives you the rules about how the monarch works. I really wanted to, it's a space in Magic that I've been playing around with. So one of the extremes of that was the idea of a deck that's not a different deck, it's a second deck. And that there are other games I've seen where, you know,

there's more than one deck to the game. And I like the idea of what if there's something in which there's a whole component. And so these are ideas I'm sloshing around my brain. And so when I sort of put on my silver border unhat and said, how do I make contraptions? And I said, well, I want to assemble them, meaning I want to put them together. So I said, I want to make something. I want to put them together. So I said, I want to make something. I want to physically make something. So another thing, before I came to Wizards, I was fascinated

by magic. And so I did a lot of design on trading card games. I've talked before that I made a game about fighting through time, Time Duel I've talked about. So there's a different game I made that was a robot building game. And the idea of the game was that you were fighting with a robot, but I liked the idea that you physically built the robot. Like that you would put an arm on it or a leg on it or put a weapon on it.

That you would literally build it with cards. And one of the things that i played around in that game was the idea of of order mattering that spatial order means something that i can only put the you know if i want to put an arm on something or a weapon on something i have to have the right connection to be able to do that i can't just you know that the idea of is when you were assembling your robot, every piece couldn't go in every part. Like, it's not like I, here's a leg, I can stick a leg anywhere. No, a leg had to go to the torso.

Or a certain kind of weapon had to attach to a certain thing. You know, like, for example, I had certain weapons that were arm weapons and that I had to have an available arm slot to put it. I couldn't just put it anywhere. And let's say I have an arm and I put a machine gun on one arm, then I could maybe fit a flamethrower in the same arm, the machine gun's there. So I was playing around a lot with spatial stuff long ago, this was before I came to Wizards.

And I always had in my ear the idea that I like spatial matters. And so all these different pieces came together, and I loved the idea of physically making a contraption, much like you made the robot. That was my inspiration at the time. And I liked the idea that, well, where do I get these things? I get them from outside the game.

They're their own deck. The reason I wanted a deck was I wanted some randomness to it, meaning I wanted you to get a piece and go, where does this piece go? Not that you prearrange everything. Like, it was less interesting to me if I just ahead of time said, here's piece one, here's piece two,

here's piece three, and then just, I didn't know what, I didn't know when I'd get piece one or piece two, but I knew that piece two would always follow piece one. That wasn't exciting. I wanted some randomness because it's a trading card game.

I wanted, like, I got this piece. Where did this piece go? And I wanted to be able to explore that, right? I wanted to be able to, I wanted the variance to be part of it. I mean, it's a good game. I love the idea of I get this piece. Where does this piece go? And that maybe there's an optimal place to put it. Maybe there's a suboptimal place to put it. That's where a lot of fun game design comes out of. So the earliest version that I made was very actually, interestingly, it was very very inspired by this robot building game that I had made years ago. And so the original version of it, the way it worked was you had a center core,

and so all robots... Actually, I think... In the robot building game, you had to have an energy core. The core of your robot was the motor that ran in that game. And I think what I did for this game is there was a centerpiece that everybody had that kind of didn't do anything, that was just where you started. I think it's how, it was long ago.

And the way it worked was when you got a contraption, assemble a contraption, get a contraption off your deck, and then fit the piece in wherever the piece fit in. And if it didn't fit in, then it didn't go on the thing. But you had a lot of options. And the idea, the way it originally worked was it built out in four directions. There was a car, right? The car has four sides.

And then the idea was that there were sort of different links on the different sides. And you had to link it up so that it matched. And that there was, I think it was a combination of there were so many prongs to it, there might have been some color coding. But essentially, you'd get a contraption and it could only go in certain places. And then the idea was different pieces, when you stuck a piece on, each piece would have its own external stuff and you could join things onto that anyway

so that's where contraption started was much like my robot building game I mean, you're making a contraption not a robot, so there's some differences like the robots, there was more form to the robots because they kind of wanted to have they had a torso

so the There was more form to the robots because they kind of wanted to have... They had a torso. I know, I know. So, the... I started there. And so we started on the path of saying, okay, you know, there are... There's a deck. There's a contraption deck. There are creatures that assemble... Well, there's things that assemble contraptions. If it was a creature, it would be contraption deck. There's creatures that assemble,

well, there's things that assemble contraptions. If it was a creature, it would be a rigger, it would assemble it. Or there were things that you, the player, could assemble if it was spells and things that wasn't tied to a creature. And we started on that path. Okay, the reason I bring that up is I'd want to do factioning,

and so we had realized at some point that we wanted to do contraptions. And once I knew I wanted to do contraptions, that meant I needed to bring Steamflagger Boss. Now, a lot of people say, wait a minute, he's Black Border, he's Silver Border. But I knew there's no way in the world you finally make Steamflagger Boss mean something

and not have Steam Flagger Boss. Now one of the things we toyed around with during the course of the design is we experimented with mixing Silver Border and Black Border like what if some of the set is Silver Border and some of the set is Black Border and we tried a bunch of different things I came up with a bunch of different ways that we could do Black Border mixed into Silver Border. In the end, what I realized was

that I don't get to make Silver Border all that often. There's a lot of things that you can only make in Silver Border that if there's an audience that liked it, let's just give them the thing that's give them what they want. Here's an awesome Silver Border experience and that diluting it with sort of black border stuff just made it less of what it was that like part of the unsaid is, and the reason people love the unsaid is it embraces this wackiness and that, um, while we could embrace the, the humor and the flavor, um, I really like, like we don't get to make Silver Border products all that often.

Like I said, if this Silver Border product isn't successful, we're not going to make another one. So, you know, there's not a lot of chances to do it. So I kind of wanted to use all the opportunities. We did explore it, and it was decided that none of our takes on why to do Black Border quite made enough sense to justify it. We did experiment with it.

So anyway, once we knew that, we then had the issue of okay, so we have factions. One of the five has to have Steamflugger Boss in it. So okay, Steamflugger Boss was red.

So that said, okay, well, and seam flutter boss, there were goblins. Like, okay, somewhere there's goblins. Now, goblins made a perfect sense in a game all about steampunk with contraptions. I mean, goblins made perfect sense. Goblins are fiddlers by their nature, and, you know, goblins,

if ever there's a creature that loves contraptions, it would be goblins. So it made sense that one of the factions would have goblins in it. And in fact, I liked the idea that one of the factions was the goblins. I mean, goblins also are humorous, we're doing a funny thing, so goblins

felt like they were a perfect fit. Okay, so what that meant was I had four possibilities for factions. I could make red-white goblins, red-blue goblins, red-black goblins, or red-green goblins. Those are my four options. So whatever I did, the idea of the set was not that it was going to be primarily gold. The idea was we faction, but most of it would be monocolor. That meant whatever

faction I did, I had to make mon-colored versions of it. And the reality was I was trying to do pretty traditional sort of crazy goblins and white goblins and blue goblins neither of which made sense. They really just didn't make sense. You know, that

I mean, could I create a white goblin or a blue goblin? Yeah, possibly if I made a world where that made sense. But that wasn't this. That wasn't, now some people said, but is it? Is it feels like, you know, very much the inventor. And I feel like if I was making a faction that was, is it? Yeah, but that wasn't what I was doing.

I was making crazy goblins that were throwing things together. And what I realized was that that wasn't what I was doing. I was making crazy goblins that were throwing things together. And what I realized was that that wasn't really red-blue. The mono-blue goblins ended up being these smart, clever goblins which isn't what I wanted them to be. They're not smart, clever goblins. And so I realized it didn't quite work in mono-blue. So then I looked at black and green. The problem with black is not that red-black goblins don't make sense, but you start getting toward, like, Tolkien goblins.

It starts getting a little meaner and crueler. And I wanted this to be a fun, silly stuff. Like, I wanted the goblins to be kind of crazy and chaotic and not sort of devious. And what I realized, the more I sort of looked at it, is red-green was the perfect fit. Green already has kind of a feral quality to it. We've done green goblins in the past and it just felt like

the sensibility of the steam floggers just made more sense in red green. So that was, that sort of was the first one we nailed down and it ended up being an allied color. In retrospect, I could have mixed and matched and up being an allied color. In retrospect I could have mixed and matched and not done all ally or all enemy. I think at the

time I was sort of like oh this is ally, let's do allies and so I started thinking in terms of where the allies would go. Like I said it's funny because once again I did this seven years ago. I mean since then I had done Khans and then eventually did Ixalan where I mixed and matched and they weren't all the same. But at the time that I was putting it together, I just really, ironically,

wasn't in the set of having psychos that were a little off like that. I just wasn't thinking that way. So I ended up going down the path of doing Ally. But anyway, I'm now at Rachel's school.

So remember when I started, I said, this probably wouldn't be one podcast? Well, clearly it won't because I'm just getting started. I haven't even gotten... All you guys have seen so far

is the early, early, early contraptions. I haven't gotten... Wait a minute. I have much, much more story to tell. But I only have a couple weeks to tell it on the website.

So I'm planning to tell a lot of it here on the podcast. So there's much more to tell. But anyway, guys, that is part one. So anyway, I hope you're of it here on the podcast. So there's much more to tell. But anyway, guys, that is part one. So anyway, I hope you're enjoying it so far. I'm having a blast talking about it. But anyway, I'm here at Rachel's school.

So 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. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.