Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #504: Hackathon

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

R&D started a new process called a "hackathon" where we take off a week and work on future speculative products. Today, I'm going to explain how it works and walk you through our first two hackathons.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today is all about hackathons and most of you should be going, what's a hackathon? So I'm going to talk today about something that R&D has started to do this year that we've never done before and I've never talked about before. So this will be brand new. Now some of you might recognize the term hackathon. It comes from the software industry. So what a traditional hackathon is, is where the company takes a week or something and everybody focuses on the product that's about to ship and everyone sort of puts the focus on it. Now

interestingly we have a thing we call game days where we kind of do that where we sort of stop normal work for the day and focus on a new product coming out so we can focus and play on that new product and give feedback on that product. Interestingly what we call a hackathon isn't that. So the hackathons kind of inspire two different things. So what we call hackathon is we take a week off of work. And once again, it's whoever is able to take the week off. If people have pressing things, not everybody takes the entire week off. I, of both Hackathons, took the entire week off. And I'll walk through sort of the things I did. But the idea is that as many people as possible

take off a week, and then they use that time to work on a project. And the idea of the hackathon is there are different things hackathons can sort of do. So the very first one we did, Mark Globus, I talked about him in my Unstable podcast, one of the Council of Marks. He is a producer in Magic, and one of his jobs is to help figure out what products we're supposed to make. What is the line of products we

need to do? So one of his jobs is to sort of look at supplemental products and say what should we be making? What are the things we're supposed to do? So one of the products we make is what we call the Innovation SKU. SKU, what does SKU stand for? It's a term in retail. But anyway, it means the innovation SKU is a product which is kind of a different way to play magic. Examples of the innovation SKU would be unstable, conspiracy one and two, arch enemy, plane chase. A commander originally started as part of an innovation product. I think Modern Masters actually started as an innovation product. It's us trying new and different

things that we think might be different ways to play, and that some of them like Modern Masters and Commander, ended up becoming their own products. But it really is a place for us to explore and try different things. There's many different ways to play Magic, there's different kinds of ways to play, And the innovation product really

is pushing boundaries. Now sometimes it's a brand new thing you've never seen before. Sometimes it's something that you have seen before but a new version of it. You know there's a third onset. There's a second conspiracy. We will go back to do things as well in the innovation SKU line. Okay so one of the things that happened was Mark was planning for the next innovation SKU in the future and he didn't know what it was going to be. So he said, he put out a thing saying, hey, if you have any ideas for the next innovation SKU, please send me a note or drop by my office. And I did, by the way, I had an idea for a product I thought was a pretty cool idea.

It turns out a lot of people gave him ideas, enough so that there were six ones he thought were viable ideas for the slot. So what he did was he took each idea, found people who were passionate about it, and made groups for each idea. And each group had like four people in it, I think. Three to four people in it. So for example, both I and Ethan, Ethan Fleischer, had basically pitched the same idea. Slight tweaks on it, but basically the same idea. So, Ethan ended up running this team. I was on it as well as, who else was on it?

I think Allie Medwin was on it and Nat, one of the editors, was on it. Anyway, so the cool thing was that we had a week. And the idea was the goal by the end of the week was to make something that we could demo with, that we could actually play with, so that Mark and other people, Globus and other people, could actually sit down and experience what it is that we were doing. What is the thing we were trying to do? And the idea was, these ideas spanned a great... Some of the ideas were things that we clearly

could do. It was about execution. Some of the ideas were, wow, would this even work? Is this even possible? And like I said, there are ideas that were about execution. There are ideas that were about the physicality of it. There are ideas about, like, is this something that we can even produce? There are ideas that are like, well, we can do this, but is it a fun game? Is there enough design space here? You know, there's a lot of things we were exploring of, you know, is this, does this have all the things it needs to be a compelling product? And so what happened was all week long, we worked on this. And so for example, what I did in my, I did a lot of card design because we wanted to make a full playable demo.

And we wanted to do something, our version of the demo required a lot of cards. So we just spent the week making cards. And one of the things that's fun for me is I love designing magic cards. I don't get to design magic cards as much as you would think I do. One of the downsides of sort of my responsibilities is I'm in charge of so many sort of top high level things that I don't get in the dirt as much as I like. I mean, I do design some cards, obviously, but I don't get to design as much cards as I like. You know, once upon a time, my job was I just spent most of my day making cards. I don't do that anymore. And I kind of miss it.

So it was kind of fun to take a week off and like be making cards all day long. That was actually really cool. It's quite fun. And I had I had great passion for this idea. And so we worked all week long. And then on Friday, Mark had scheduled time with each of the groups to do a play test. So there was like six play tests on Friday.

Ours went really, really well. In fact, I'll jump ahead. Ours got picked to be the innovation product, the slot that we were trying to fill. Ours got picked to be that. I can't tell you much about it. I mean, one of the problems about today is I'm talking about us working on the future,

so I can't give you the details of the future because I want that to be a surprise, but I like to talk about the process itself, so I got to be kind of vague on some of these things. What I can say is the innovation skew that Ethan and I and our team came up with, there's an audience for it that I think will really, really, really like it.

It's different. It's something we haven't done before, but it is something that is pretty cool. And I am, I mean, you guys won't see it for a few years, but I'm excited when you guys finally get a chance to see it. It's still in design right now. We're still working on it, actually. I'm on the design team.

Then he also liked another product and ended up putting that in the next year's innovation skew. So what happened was that one hackathon ended up making two products. And then there was a third product that we didn't think we thought would only work in digital so we passed it along to the digital people to magic online and magic at an arena and said here's a really neat idea that you might be able to use in a digital setting and I'm not sure what they're gonna do with that but now the other three ideas one idea I think needed more work like I like showed promise, but it was clear that they

hadn't solved a lot of problems. They believed they could solve the problems with time. One of them, I don't remember the outcome of it. I think there was big questions of what its goals were and trying to rethink its goals. And then the last one, I think the concern was that it wasn't enough design space, that there's a neat idea and maybe as a component of something bigger, like maybe as a piece of something, but by itself wasn't quite enough. But anyway, that hackathon went really well.

It was a lot of fun. And like I said, we ended up making two products, maybe a third, you know, a third digital product. So we, it was a very fruitful week. It was a very good week. So a few months later, the creative team, they do what we call world building. And we do that a couple of times a year where we're going to go to a new world. We're going to go to Kaladesh.

We're going to go to Amonkhet. We're going to go to Ixalan. And they have to build the world. And so they get artists in. Usually it's like three weeks long. And they sort of have an idea what the world is. And the artists sort of keep extrapolating and making different things and trying to make stuff and, you know, using the artists. And they end up sort of slowly crafting the world. And then they're making a document that they send to all the artists of here's what the world looks like. It's a very complex series of things. Three weeks is the initial part.

There's later parts to come. Anyway, they decided they wanted to use that technology instead of working on an existing world that they were building. They wanted to work on a whole bunch of possible future worlds. It was kind of a speculative thing. And so what they did is they had a long list of worlds that we've talked about going to, ideas we had. And then they got some artists to try to do some visual fleshing of it and say,

okay, well, what could it look like? And the idea was less of a total fleshing of the world, because normally you need a whole team to do that. It was putting artists on it to give us a general sense of what things might be, to give us potential of the world. So one of the neat things was, I mean, once again, I can't tell you about the worlds, but we had a lot of like, what about this?

And then you would see like, ooh, that's pretty cool. And then I think they would then, they shopped around some stuff. We often will talk to, we use wizards as guinea pigs, and they did some market research within wizards to sort of understand people that know nothing about the world

how visually compelling they are and stuff like that. Anyway, they I was impressed with that. I really thought that was a cool thing and that it really did a good job because we're always looking ahead to try to figure out where we're going to next.

I talk about the seven year plan. It's more of a rolling plan. Back in the day, I used to like, here's the next seven years, you know, and then get it signed off. And then that would change over time. But it would be, now we tend to keep building on two and three years at a time. So here's two more years, here's three more years, and we keep building on to it. And that we need to know worlds and we need to have ideas and that when we sign off on a new world, there's three things we have to know. We have to know visually, what's the creative of it?

What's it going to look like, roughly? We need to know story-wise, what's going to happen here? We have a larger story we're telling. Does this fit in a larger story? And what kind of cool story can we tell here? And what planeswalker would want to be here? And stuff like that. And then three is mechanics. Like, what's the second to me about mechanically? You know, it's got to play fun. It's a game. How's it going to play? And so the idea is that we try to figure that out. So they had done

some advance work to figure out what worlds we might want to go to that we hadn't seen yet. And I realized that really we needed to do that for mechanics, for design. I wanted to sort of look ahead. So I went to the heads of R&D and I said, I'd like to do a hackathon for future design. And they said that was a really good idea. So we put aside a week. It was just last week for me, a while ago for you guys. And so what we did was I came up with a bunch of different categories of things I wanted to work on.

And there were a few other categories that other people had. So here's what we did. Some of these categories I'm going to have to be a little vague on. So one category was about planeswalkers. A lot of our design of planeswalkers tends to be top-down. The creator team makes a character, and then we figure out how to design a planeswalker to match that character. But one of the things we realized is that because of that system of mostly doing it

top-down, we're missing some interesting design space. So we decided to do the opposite in this brainstorming session or this team was what if we first um figured out mechanical space that was interesting and then maybe we could build some characters that matched interesting design space it's like oh here's a cool thing that we've never done with planeswalkers this would be really neat oh well what can we do to sort of um what can we do to sort of build something that'll fill that space? And then maybe we can, you know, more of a bottom up design of Planeswalkers. So one team was talking all about Planeswalkers. One team was looking ahead to sort of story beats and saying, okay, we have an idea where the story is going. Are there mechanical connections we can make to the story? And so the idea was, let's figure out, like, what, you know, we kind of know what we're doing in the story.

Let's see if there's mechanical elements that can reinforce the story points that we want to make. So that was sort of a team all about, okay, how do we represent that? Then there was a team, this's a team that wanted to do some radical rethinking. And the idea of the team was, let's go back to the beginning. Let's make no assumptions. You know, let's not assume, let's not assume because we've done something, it's the right way to do things. Let's go look at the sort of the basics of the game and question some things question like um you know because some of the innovations that we've had over the years like i remember when eric came up the idea of drafting backwards like we just never thought of that we'd always drafted forwards and that's what if you what if you dropped the newest set first and we're like wow that actually makes a lot of sense and that it wasn't it wasn't that

we made this very conscious choice to go forward. This is kind of how we did it. And as soon as someone said, hey, what if that wasn't the right choice? We could go, oh, maybe that's not. So there's a team all about sort of reevaluating some basic choices that we had made to see if we had made some choices based on inertia rather than on what's necessarily in a vacuum the correct call. on what's necessarily in a vacuum the correct call.

One of the teams was all about just general design, no gimmicks, just what are cool designs. Because what happens over the years is we tend to do a lot of design work. Some of it just isn't usable where we come up with it. Not that it's not neat mechanics, not that it doesn't play well, not that it's not cool or exciting. It just doesn't fit the place that we, you know, a lot of designers, we need to fit this very narrow band.

We try something and like, oh, that doesn't fit the needs of this set. It doesn't mean it's not a great idea. It just doesn't fit the needs of this set. So this team was A, looking through a lot of the ideas that we had made over the years that we hadn't, you know, good ideas we hadn't made. Like energy is a good, I mean, we made energy, but energy is a good example of a mechanic that we had in our back pocket for years and then finally found a place for it. So, the team partly sort of looked at some stuff we had done

before. Also, it said, hey, does anyone have an idea of stuff that they want to suggest, you know? I mean, I'll get to in a second how we got the ideas, but that team was all about sort of fleshing out mechanics that we can do without any, you know, without any pomp or circumstance. Just things we could just do we haven't done yet.

One of the teams looked at frames. So one of the things you'll notice that whether it's double-faced cards or level up or miracles or enchantment creatures, or enchantment creatures. There is, we are more and more willing to sort of work with the frame to try to make cool things. And so this team was like, okay, what can we do with frames? You know, what can we do with frames

that might take us to new design space? You know, what mechanics are available to us that are only available to us because we're willing to experiment with the frame and do things with the frame. And so that was one team. And then I live the last team. My last team, let's just call it the out-of-the-box team,

which was, okay, there's things we haven't done because something about them we wouldn't do or we haven't done. Let's be bold. Let's, you know, my team was all about sort of looking at things that were a little farther away from where magic has been. And trying things that magic might not currently do. Or using resources in a way that are different. I got to be sort of vague.

But think of the out of the box. You know, sort of the let's swing big. Okay. So what happened was, so we had six teams. Each team had a leader. I led the last team. And each team had a team, three or four people. So the way it worked is we came in on Monday and there were six brainstorming sessions, each one led by the team lead. And each team lead could run their, they had one hour, they could run the brainstorming session however they wished. So, and the way it worked was usually for your brainstorming session, your team showed

up for your brainstorming session and then anybody else from any other team or even for people that weren't on the team that wanted to come. And the idea of the hackathons is people can participate as much as they want to. So let's say, for example, let's say you're not even in R&D and you don't have the ability to take off the whole week. Maybe you have some free time and you can come down and come to one of the brainstorming sessions. And you could, you know, if you're passionate about one of the ideas, you need ideas for how to design new planeswalkers or something, you can come to the meeting and you can pitch ideas. And so what we did is we were in a room, we had one of those easels with a giant pad that

were kind of like, you know, giant sticky notes and we would write on them and fill it all up and stick it to the wall. I had a really good session on Monday. In fact, I think we filled up like 12 sheets, like giant sheets. I think my team, partly because of my subject matter, I was hitting a lot of different areas, but we got a lot of ideas. Like I said, 12, I mean, just full pages of ideas. of ideas like I said 12 I mean just full pages of ideas so then each person or each team then took Tuesday to look over all the brainstorming that had happened

to absorb all the ideas so what I did it with my team so my team was me Gavin Verhey and Eli Shiffrin Eli's the rules manager Gavin he's now one of the he works one of the product architects. But he does a lot of design and he's done development and stuff. Anyway, so what we did was we took everything that had been suggested and we boiled it down to 13 categories. And then what we did is we put those categories through their paces and we started asking questions. So question number one we asked was how challenging would this product be to make from a physical put it together standpoint?

How much of a challenge is this to just forget the design part of it, just the, how hard is it sort of from a caps perspective? How hard is it to actually make the product? We looked at how hard is it to design? How much design space is there? How many things can we make in it? We looked at how accepted would it be by the audience? Is it something that the audience would go, hey, this is cool, or they go, wow, you know, this is a little, this is a little weird. Like, how far away from the norm was it? We talked about how much kind of splash it had. Like, when people saw this for the first time, what would the reaction be? We talked about what we call design weight, which is how much does this thing force the design around it? Something that's heavy in design weight means the whole set really has to revolve around

this mechanic. It's the center of what's going on and it requires a lot of support. If something's light in design weight, you can just stick it by itself in a normal set and people play with it and have fun, but it doesn't dictate things around it. It doesn't sort of control the design as much as something that's heavy design weight. So anyway, we did all this measuring and all these vectors to figure out sort of how each of these things stood. You know, how exciting and how easy and how much design space and all this stuff and stuff.

Then, we then made a giant chart. So the chart was, one vector was potential. was one vector was potential. And what that meant was, if we did this at the best version we could, how exciting was it? You know what I'm saying? So high potential was people going,

oh my goodness. It's kind of like maybe split cards or double-faced cards or something where the first time we did it, people would just sit up and go, oh my goodness, what are you doing? So that's kind of the high end of it. And then the low potential is, maybe it's a workhorse mechanic, maybe it would play well, but it's not, no one's going to go, oh my goodness.

It's just like, oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, not that people couldn't enjoy it, not that somebody might not get excited by it, but low potential, man, it's more workhorse-y than it's splashy. Workhorse is a term that R&D uses to talk about something that helps the game play well, but doesn't draw a lot of attention to itself. And we need workhorse mechanics, we need splashy mechanics, we're just sort of gauging how splashy was it from how workhorse it was. The other vector we looked at was obstacles, meaning how easy was this to do? Is this something we just knew?

So like low obstacle means we know we can do it. It's something we can do tomorrow. It doesn't use any technology we don't have access to. High obstacle means, oh my goodness, we're messing with technology we've never messed with before. Or maybe there's printing technology that we have to figure out doesn't even exist. Can we do this? Or maybe it's something that has really challenging design space or really, really far away from normal magic and

would be a lot to get people to accept it. You know, high obstacle meant that it will require a lot of hoops to jump through to solve the problem. Okay, so we then divided our chart into four quadrants. So quadrant number one, which was the most desirable to us, was high potential, low obstacle. This would excite people, they'd be very excited by it, and we probably can do it without too much trouble. Next quadrant we cared about was high potential, high obstacles. Wow, players would really like this, but it's not going to be easy to do.

Next quadrant was low potential, low obstacle And that is, okay, this is not going to necessarily excite anybody But not that hard to do, we know we can do it And then third was low potential, high obstacle This isn't really going to excite anybody, and wow, this is going to be hard to do So we got rid of everything in that so we had 13 things I think I can't remember how they broke up there was 5 in the first one and then 3, 2, 3 or something

but there were 5 in the first so the good quadrant had 5 in it the bad quadrant had five in it. The bad quadrant had three in it. So we got rid of those. Things that aren't going to excite people that much and going to be a lot of work on our part, okay, not a great spend of our time. Things that have a lot of potential and probably we can do, that is where we decided to start.

Now that doesn't mean we weren't going to spend some attention to the other stuff, but it's where we put our focus. Okay, then Wednesday was another brainstorming day, except what we did is we mixed up the times. So just say for example, you're not in R&D or something, you just can't take the time off, you have a

standing Tuesday meeting at 2 o'clock, we didn't want you to miss both of the, you know, just say you really wanted to talk about planeswalkers, and planeswalkers at two both days, so we mixed it up, so it was a different order. Also, we wanted people just to, about planeswalkers, and planeswalkers had two both days, so we mixed it up. It was a different order. Also, we wanted people just to... There was a lot as clear as people were brainstorming, people were going

to multiple meetings, there was stuff spilling over from one meeting to the next. So mixing up the order also helped. And what we found on the second day was that there was a lot more intermixing of ideas. There's a lot more... Something would come up and someone would say, oh, well, we were working on this idea in our group, and so you're seeing more cross-pollination

and more ideas that were starting to sort of branch in different places. What I did for my brainstorm session, the first one I'd gone really broad. I'd asked for a lot of ideas in a lot of different areas. This time, of the five things in our first quadrant, there was one area that I had not spent a lot of time thinking about that I thought showed a lot of potential. It's the area that I was most happy to sort of discover because I hadn't been thinking a lot about it. And so I spent most of my brainstorming on that

one area, which is a really, really big area, a very interesting area. One of my takeaways from the end of the week was we are finding more and more cool things to do with double-faced cards. But one of our problems is there's a lot of logistics with double-faced cards. There's a lot of cost with double-faced cards. And not everybody loves double-faced cards, so we don't want to do double-faced cards all the time. So we are looking for other things that kind of have the breadth of double-faced cards, meaning that they're cool, they're exciting, and they open up a lot of design space.

So the thing that we were brainstorming on, to me, when I say it's the next Double Face Cards, it's different from Double Face Cards. It has different aspects, and there's different reasons people like and not like it. You know what I'm saying? But what I mean is it's something big enough with enough design space that it could be something that we come back to time and again. Once again, like Double Face Cards, not all the time, but like if once every

three years we did something like this, it felt like that. That had something that, you know, every three, four years we could do something. So we brainstormed on that, and then I brainstormed a little bit on the other four things. I spent like 45 minutes on the first one, 15 on the last four. But anyway, once again, we got a lot of ideas, which I recorded. And then Thursday was another day to work with the team. So the takeaway last time for the first hackathon, the takeaway was we needed to do a play test with Mark Globus so that he could see all the products we were making. The takeaway here is we're doing

a presentation, I think it's going to be in card crafting, where we're going to talk to all of R&D and say, here's all the things we learned. But I still put my presentation together. Here's all the things we've learned. Here's the cool things about it. Here is what the future holds. Here's where we see the things. So we kind of got to talk about that and what we, oh, so what we did on Thursday was we took each of the five things in our first quadrant. And it turns out that each one of those, minus the one that I had done the extra brainstorming on, we had already in design experimented with something in that area.

So one of the things that happens is we do a lot of thing in vision design that don't make the product. And so a lot of the areas we were exploring, it turns out that we've touched upon those areas. And the more we look back, like, oh, this is this area. Oh, this is this area. So what we did for each one of them is we already had an area that we had messed around with. We tried to find a different vector that was a different way to do that. So in each of our categories, we had an old thing that we had experimented with in the past and had some knowledge of. And we had a new thing that was a new way to do that. So in each of our categories, we had an old thing that we had experimented with in the past

and had some knowledge of, and we had a new thing that was a new way to do it. And then we made decks and we play tested and we field tested some new ideas. So when I do the presentation, I can say,

here's the old idea, here's the new idea. Here's something we've played with and we have some knowledge of. Here's a new thing that we tested that we think shows potential. And the idea is, these are five categories that moving forward, I'm going to ask myself, can we make use of any of these five areas in a set?

Now, the idea is, my team was pushing boundaries. So I'm not saying that what we were coming up with, every set wants to do. Because it's definitely, I was playing more in the out-of-the-box area, but there are a lot of neat ideas, and if in the next couple years we do a couple of them, I think that would be really cool. So Thursday and Friday we spent sort of finalizing that, and then next week we're doing a presentation, which I still make my presentation. We got 10 minutes.

It's an hour long six people six groups 10 minutes each we got an hour bam bam bam bam bam we're going to move through them and then what I'm going to do is collect everything as head designer

so that I can understand all the things we put together so it was a really interesting week one of the cool things about it was the first hackathon

I really was just involved with doing my product I wasn't involved in the other product so I tangentially you know I saw them and I I had a little bit of you know dipping my I would dip in and peek at things but this one was different the second hackathon because two of the days were brainstorming I really got a lot of involvement with the other six teams and then I got to have a lot of suggestions for them so that was that was fun so the question is the future

hackathons so the thing that I that I get very excited and we did two hackathons here one of the things we realized is hackathons are a resource sink we're not working for two weeks like I I said, essential work continues. If you're working on something that needs to get out at a certain time, not everybody necessarily always takes off all of the week. And some people take off none of the week. But one of the things that I think is really cool is that it was a resource that allowed us to do stuff that we hadn't done before and allowed us to explore and find things we hadn't. I like to think of things as tools.

It was a really interesting tool in the R&D arsenal. And even if we can only do it once or twice a year, wow, that is amazing. And the other thing is I want to figure out what we can use hackathons to make. We tried products. That worked well well we tried future mechanics and mechanic space that worked well you know we obviously also did a little work on planeswalkers and other stuff you know it all it really really was a cool system we got a lot of interesting stuff out of it um and there are a couple other things that hackathons do let me talk a little bit through the the strengths of hackathons one of the reasons i liked them so much um one is concentration that

i mean while we work on a lot of things, a lot of the way we work is I work a little in this and a little this and a little in that. There's a lot going on at once. And having the ability to have some clarity to focus on one thing for a whole week really was interesting. Allowed us to advance things in a way that sometimes we can't do. It really got us some ideas that I think might have taken a lot longer under the normal system. Second, it allowed cross-pollination in some ways that weren't normally there. For example, on the hackathon, the first hackathon, I got to work, I mean, Ethan I work with all the time, but I got to work with Nat and with Allie, two people that I don't work with all the time but I got to work with Nat and with Allie two people that I don't work with

very much and it was really interesting to see both of them have a lot of design chops that I did not know and it's fun to see other people making cards and you know just getting other ideas and other you know the the way we make design teams there's a lot of roles that have to be filled and so although different people can fill those roles and there's a lot of variety in the kind of people per se they still are you know there's a certain mindset a lot of teams have i love sort of just cross-pollinating and having different kinds of teams with different people and that it was really neat to just get interactions with people that i i get less interaction with. And I love the idea of just embracing something and sort of

just trying different techniques, like the brainstorming sessions. I like that the hackathons are exploring with different techniques of how to use the hackathons. One of my jokes is one of the future hackathons maybe should be on hackathons. How do we make hackathons better?

I feel like we could use hackathon technology to make hackathons better. you should be on hackathons. How do we make hackathons better? I feel like we could use hackathon technology to make hackathons better. But it was really cool. And that one of the things, I mean, this was probably my biggest takeaway from both weeks is I just celebrated my 22nd anniversary on Magic.

And one of the things I get asked all the time is how much life does the game have left you know yeah Richard made a robot system but I mean you've made you know 17,000 plus cards at some point you know you're going to use up all the design space and then you know maybe we'll repeat things

or something you know and one of the things that was really interesting like the first hackathon said oh my goodness there's a lot of projects we can make there's a lot of products that we have not made that we could make goodness, there's a lot of projects we can make. There's a lot of products that we have not made that we could make. You know, there are a lot of cool ideas that, and some of them we haven't quite figured out. Some of them require more work, you know. But the idea that we just could sort of, we need ideas and bam, like out of the gate,

we had so many ideas that we made a whole hackathon of ideas, of product ideas. Or on the second hackathon, just the, the amount of exciting future possibilities. Like I, like I said, I can't tell you what they are, but I can tell you this. Um, every team was brimming with ideas. Every team ended with just this giant, like one of the big things is we each have 10 minutes and we're like, oh, okay, can we get across everything we learned in 10 minutes? You know, and we're, we're going to try to do that because we're trying to condense information down to sort of get to the crux of what was the most important thing. I do believe it's important. But one of the things that I want to do is

make sure that I absorb all the information from them and that people give me reports and stuff is I want to see all the different things available to us because we want to keep making exciting magic sets. We keep wanting to excite you. And that one of the worries that I admit I'll have over the years is, you know, at some point, we'll just use up all the good ideas.

But one of the things that magic does is it keeps surprising me of how many good ideas, how much potential it has in it. And I'm super refreshed after this last hackathon. You know, I mean, just my team, for example, we're doing really different kinds of things, and there's so many neat ideas.

There's so many neat out-of-the-box ideas. I mean, hopefully at this point you guys have played Unstable. That's just like, you know, peaking in the future of looking at some things we could do. And that's just, you know, a drop in the bucket. So anyway, the hackathons are an amazing new tool. They do cool things.

They really let us see the future. And the future is bright, my friends. The future is bright. There's a lot of neat things. I don't even know what we're going to use and what we're not going to use yet. I just know there's all these fun toys that I get to play with and eventually you get to play with. So there is a world of fun toys coming your way,

and neat things, and neat mechanics, and neat cars, and neat planeswalkers, and all neat story beats, and all sorts of cool things. So I've seen the future, and I've seen the future of the future, and I've even seen the future of the future of the future, and there's really exciting stuff coming. So you guys are in for a treat for many years to come. Anyway, I am now at

work so i need uh 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