Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #512: Playtest Cards

Episode Date: February 16, 2018

In this podcast, I talk all about the history of playtest cards in R&D, including a discussion on the latest technology.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. This is a drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about playtest cards. So, this is one of the things that people ask about from time to time. We've actually recently had a big upgrade, so I'm going to talk about that too. So for this one, we're going back to the beginning, back to 1991. I think when Richard started making magic. So we go all the way back to playtest. So the very, very first playtest cards ever made for the Alpha playtest were on cardboard.

They were put on cardboard. Richard and Scaf took pictures, existing pictures, and there was a bunch of different pictures. Sometimes they would be from comics. I know there was like a picture of Superman on one of the cards. I know there was Calvin and Hobbes showed up. In fact, one of them, there was a card called Heal, which was the precursor to Healing Salve, which I think Scaf took a picture of his ankle with a copier. But anyway, they took a bunch of pictures. And so the original playtest cards were smaller than normal cards.

They were about, how about, maybe an inch and a half wide and maybe two inches tall. They were much smaller. Now, what happened was Richard wanted to play test and he wanted people to get a feel of it. And so they just made cards as easy as they could. And that was putting them on like a cardboard stock. So they were a little bit thicker. It wasn't just paper. So they had a little bit of a stiffness to them. It was on a cardboard stock, so they were a little bit thicker. It wasn't just paper. So they had a little bit of a stiffness to them. It was on a cardboard stock. And they were white-ish, although I guess they were a little...

They weren't bright white. They were like a little bit of a darker white, like a dirty white maybe. But anyway, there are a couple iterations of playtest cards for pre-magic. And they, I think, I think Richard might, iterations of playtest cards for pre-magic. And they, I think, I think Richard might, I think the earliest versions might not have had the pictures on them.

And then Richard decided to put the pictures on them to jazz them up a little bit. The playtest cards I've always seen are the ones with the pictures, which I think are the last batch of cards. I do think there was a version early on that was pictureless, but I haven't seen those. So maybe they all had pictures. The other thing that's unique about the playtest cards is when Richard first made the game, the mana system worked a little bit differently. So, for example, let's take... We'll take Prodigal Sorcerer.

So Prodigal Sorcerer was a spell that cost two generic mana and one blue mana. Now, in the mana cost as we know it, that would be two and a blue. That's how it's written on a magic card. In the original playtest cards, it would say three and a blue. And what that meant is the card costs three, one of which must be blue. So Crawl Room, for example, which costs four green green, would say six green green, which means it costs six mana, two of which must be green. What he found was that system was confusing people

because people wanted to sort of add things together and it didn't quite add up. So he ended up changing to the current system. Now, interestingly, I've mentioned this before. If we had to do it all over again, I think what we realized since then is that you want to put the colorless mana first and then the generic, meaning prodigal sorcerer should have been blue two,

not two and blue. Not sure why. I think the reason the generic went first, actually, I do know why the generic went first, is the old system had the converted mana cost first and then the color requirements. So when he changed it, he kept, like he'd already in his mind had the color number and, you know, the number then mana symbol. And I think he kept that. If he started from scratch, I think he would have gone the other way. It's funny because I keep trying to get people to talk about things in the order. Because in R&D, we talk about it in the order it appears on the card.

It's how we do it. It's two and a blue. But when you go out to the public, they just want to say blue and two. No matter what you do, no matter what order, how much I've said, no, this is how we do it, they just want to put the color mana first. Which says to me, for those who know me, if you can't get players to do something another way, you are just fighting human nature. The problem in general is once you sort of do something with magic and there's enough

history built in, it becomes odd to change things. So it's the kind of thing that we did change it on the future shifted cards. In fact, if you ever looked at the future shifted cards, those are some of the ways that I think probably magic should have done some stuff. I would have put the cost over to the left so you could fan and see them. I would have put the mana card first.

I would have put symbols. Anyway, go look at future shifted cards and see some things I would have done had Magic started under... I somehow was in charge of that, which I wasn't. Okay, so that was the original playtest cards.

They were little tiny bits of cardboard. So when I started at Wizards back in 95, that was the technology. In fact, Mirage, which was the first set I really worked, I mean, I did work on antiquities, not antiquities, I worked on alliances. But the first set that I was heavily involved in was Mirage. So what happened basically was the people that had been working on Magic, Richard and Scaf and Jim Lynn and Dave Petty, a lot of which who were original playtesters, wanted to do other things.

Magic Wizards was expanding and Richard was designing other games like Jihad and Netrunner. Jihad would later become Vampire the Eternal Struggle. And so Richard was designing games and they were just interested in doing other games. And so they hired some new people

to sort of hand the reins of magic over to. And those new people were me, Bill Rose, William Jockish, and Mike Elliott. And then later, about a year later, we'd get Henry Stern.

Anyway, that's the second wave. You've got to go listen to my podcast about the second wave. But anyway, so when we were playtesting Mirage, which is the first major set that I started from, I mean, like I said, I did work on alliances. I remember Mirage playtests. They were cardboard, but they were green cardboard. So Mirage, instead of having the, like, the Alpha had the whitish sort of cardboard.

This was green. So the playtest cards from Mirage were... The shape got a little bit different. If you look at the Alpha cards, the proportions to Magic cards were a little bit off in that they were a little skinnier. If you look at the actual ratio of width to height,

the playtest cards were kind of a little skinnier than normal Magic cards. So with Mirage playtest cards, they chopped them so they were a little bit more Magic card size. They were a bit bigger and a bit thicker. They weren't completely Magic card size. You couldn't... But they were closer, and they were a bit bigger and a bit thicker they weren't completely magic card size

but they were closer and they were definitely the ratios were closer to a normal card so Mirage we used once again we were still on cardboard then I know for sure for Tempest

so I'm not sure if it happened mid Mirage block but by the time we get for Tempest, so I'm not sure if it happened mid-Mirage block, but by the time we get to Tempest, we, and my gut says it might have been as early as Weatherlight, maybe even Visions. So what happened was, there was a guy named Dan,

and I think this was Dan's idea. Anyway, somebody had an idea, I think it was Dan, to, that we could, if you took stickers, like you would put on an envelope. So not the super skinny ones, but imagine like the thicker one you would put on an 8x11 manila envelope,

sort of the bigger, thicker one. It turns out that if you take one of those, its height is basically very close to the width of a Magic card. In fact, if you put it on a Magic card, it didn't quite cover the Magic card, but it covered everything but the edges, so you could see the color borders of the card. It covered the rules text box. So actually, when you put a sticker on there, now it was a little longer than a card. You had to chop it. You had to cut it. But what we found was if you print it on one of those and you cut it, it fit on

a Magic card pretty closely. It would cover, not completely, it wouldn't cover, there'd be room on the, all around it, like top, bottom, left, and right, there'd be room. But by doing that, you could, the size would tell you the color. So if you taped it on a blue card, the size would show you the color. And then you could tape it such that you could cover the name. And then you'd get to the bottom, you'd see a little bit of the color peeking out. So what we found was we could make stickers, that we can make cards by printing them on stickers. And then we ended up using the program we used at the time, I think was a, what was it? It was some sort of basic database program.

I'm blanking on it. It's a real obvious, I'll come in a second. So anyway, so the new technology was we would print on stickers. And so one of the things to realize is that when you make playtest cards, just a little side here, is that when you make playtest cards, really what you want to do is you want to shuffle them up and play. You want to play them as if it's real magic. And we want to sort of imitate magic as much as we can. And we have a database, right?

A FileMaker Pro is where we started. So since I've worked at Magic, we've had a bunch of different databases. Our earliest database didn't really have a name. This was a FileMaker Pro database. Then we moved to something we called Multiverse that was built. And then now we're on Drake, which is we're back to FileMaker, but it's a more established built program by people that built it. But anyway, we kept a database. And so our cards were in the database. And so if we had a database, we could export it, and then we could print it on cards. And so it's really important that you playtest.

And so it just made it a lot easier to playtest things. So the way it worked back then was we would do exports of the whole file and make cards. And then once you wanted to do a playtest, you would take the cards that existed and then build a playtest out of them. And then what would happen is you would reuse the cards. Now, there's an inherent problem in this, which would come to burn us a few times, which was, because we are building existing files to build out of,

we kept replaying out of that file. But sometimes, let's say, for example, somebody was playing and they didn't give their deck back, those cards would be missing from the system. Now, if you think about this, this is actually problematic. Obviously, if they played the cards, they thought the cards were stronger cards if they played them. So when those stronger cards would leave the system,

it would really unbalance the playtest. And so one of the problems we had early on was because it was time consuming to sort of make up the cards, and we didn't make up all that often, is you would try to do multiple playtests with the same set. You had to be very careful to get all the cards back to make sure that you weren't warping your environment., like, for example, just say someone played red-green and they forgot to get the deck back, and next time you did it, wow, less people are playing red-green.

Right, because you weakened the red-green pile. So you had to be super, super vigilant when you did that to make sure you got things back so you weren't warping things. And usually, by the way, the way it used to work back in the day was if you were if it was your play test you would have to make the card so you would have to sticker them so one of the things I've gotten really good at over the years is putting on play test stickers there's an art to putting because really what you want to do is you want to make it straight you want to make sure there's there's space on each side you want to cover the name because if you put them a little

bit too low you can read the name of the actual card. Oh, let me explain this real quickly. So once we knew that we were doing a sticker program, one of the things that we're able to do is we can order what we call incrementals from the printer. And what incrementals are is the printer just, the way that magic cards get made, for those that don't know, is there's a lot of Magic cards in one giant sheet. Right now, it's 11 by 11. I'm sorry. When Magic started, it was 11 by 11. Now, it's 11 by 10.

But it varies a little bit, the size. It depends how big the sheet is. Different printers will print different size sheets, and it'll be different things. But anyway, what they do is they print it, there's a chopper, you know, to make playing cards. So what they do is they put a stack of the cards in the chopper and the chopper then chops them and breaks them into the individual cards. And then they take that and they later have to put it through a collator that then mixes up where things are at. it through a collator that then mixes up where things are at. But the raw version of it before it gets collated, it just, here is a giant stack of card one, then card two, then card three. So what happens is, and then the way it works is there's a system they have that will dump the

cards. So there's an output from the cutter, which is card one, card two, card three, card four, card five. It's every card in order from the sheet. And note that with the exception of mythic rares, usually on a sheet, cards appear multiple times. I won't get into specifics how we do it, but usually cards appear multiple times.

But anyway, when we get incrementals, what that means is that thing that comes off the line before you collate it, just give us some of those. And we can buy them very, very cheaply, and it allows us to get magic cards. And R&D always gets incrementals, and the idea is we get it, we divide it up, and then it's all the cards from the set. Now, what happens is, you know, because of the way incrementals works, we get all the cards from the set. Now, what happens is, you know, because of the way Incrementals works, we get all of the cards. We don't necessarily need all the cards because for playtest purposes,

we are playing for, you know, Constructed, we're building decks. We'll not have your card shows up in Constructed decks. So there's cards that just don't get used. So what happens is there comes a point where we figure out sort of what the chaff cards are or cards that we're not using anymore and that stuff becomes sticker stock. So what we use to sticker things is old cards. So what ends up happening is a lot

of times you rotate out old cards. So most of the time the stuff you're stickering on is pretty useless stuff but every once in a while the nature of sort of how rotation works is you'll stick around things that are valuable cards. Now, if there's something we might need for larger formats, we save it. But especially in the old days, before there really were larger formats we were as concerned about, you would sometimes get stuff to sticker on, and you're like, what am I doing? Why am I sticking on this card? I made a joke about it in Unhinged on the card. Look at me on R&D where we made it look like it was a sticker and we stickered on top of moat, which is a very popular card from Legends. Very powerful card. Anyway, I won't tell you guys

just because it would be painful to know things I've stickered on. My one rule is I never stickered on a Morrow. Whenever I have a Morrow stickered on, I refuse to stickered on a Morrow. So I never stickered on a Morrow.

Morrow has a special place in my heart, so no stickered on that. But I've definitely stickered my share of rares and I think mythic rares. I'm not sure if I ever stickered a mythic rare. But anyway, so what happened was in the early days is you would want to make your things.

You put it in the database. So early on, we only could export particular, the whole set. With time, we would change that. One of the things that would happen with sticker technology or printing technology was we kept finding ways to upgrade it and make things better. Now, one of the things, for example, early, early magic, the database wasn't able to handle symbols, for example. So early magic was, so for those who don't know, we have a letter code for all the

colors. White is W, blue is U, black is B, red is R, green is G, artifact is A, land is L, multicolor for card codes is Z, colorless I think is C, colorless, I think is C. Um, hybrid is, uh, usually it goes in the Zs, but we use H when we're trying to talk about hybrid. Um, but we want to talk about mana costs. Um, you know, generically used numbers. So let's say, for example, a card costs, uh, three generic mana, a red and a green. It'd be three RG. Um, the reason blue is U real quickly is we use them for card codes. And part of card codes is telling you the frame. So there's an artifact

frame, which uses A. There's a land frame that uses L. So the idea was black and blue both start with B. So one of them could not be, B could be both black and blue. Then you go to the second letter, that's L for both of them. L is land, so neither can use the second letter. You go to the third letter, A is artifact for black. Well, U is not used. So we use U for blue. We later learned out that in the printing business, they have the same problem. And in professional printing, when they do colors all the time, K is black. If we had known that, maybe it would be.

But now we're talking about WUBRG, which is the order the colors go in. That's how we refer to the colors. But anyway, if you ever hear me sometimes, instead of blue, I'll say U. That's where it comes from. Whew, sorry. Okay, so eventually we started to be able to get symbols into it. So we eventually got to the point where red mana, instead of being an R, could be a red mana symbol. The next thing that we were able to do is... I mean, a lot of the changes in playtesting cards are smaller things,

like things that were important to us. Oh, somebody asked on my blog, let me explain this real quickly. When we make a set that has reprints in it, do we use a real card? Do we go get the actual card or do we just put it on a sticker? And the answer is we just put it on a sticker because it just really isn't worth the time and energy to go track it down. When you're busy making stickers, it's a lengthy process. So usually, one of the things that will happen is eventually we start having other people,

like office assistants, one of their jobs was making the stickers. So back in the day when I was leading the set, I would have to make all the stickers for my own set. And it would take a decent amount of time to make the stickers. So back in the day when I was leading the set, I would have to make all the stickers for my own set. And it would take a decent amount of time to make the stickers. You would have to give yourself enough lead time

because you physically would make them. And sometimes you'd have meetings where like you're stickering because you need a sticker. Not even meetings necessarily, but in the pit,

like, okay, who can help me sticker? And you have people come help you sticker. So this is what we have to do is you'd have to export your file. You have to print your file

on the stickers. We have a special, oh, we got a special printer just for stickers because it was causing all sorts of problems trying to put the stickers in the real printer.

So we got a dedicated sticker printer. That's one of our upgrades. And then, so you had to get it, you had to print it on the sheets, then you had to cut them because once again,

they were a little too long. So you had to go through and cut sheets, then you had to cut them, because once again, they were a little too long. So you had to go through and cut them, and then you had to sticker them. And when you stickered, you had to make sure that you put them on the right color card. One of the big things about stickering is not just putting them so they're neatly on the card, because there's a lot of bad stickering that can happen. You want to be very neatly on the card, you want to make sure the spacing is right, tell what color it is, and you want to make sure the spacing side tells what color it is. And you want to make sure it goes on the right color.

So for a while, one of our technologies was when we had sets that were first, second, third set, for a little while, we did this thing where the first set would be on black border, the second set would be on white border, and the third set would be on silver border. So the core sets used to be on white border, and obviously the would be on silver border. So the core sets used to be on white border and obviously the unsets were silver bordered. So around the time of Unhinged we got a whole bunch of incrementals for Unhinged. We had a whole bunch of core set incrementals and then we used that. So the idea was when you mix your cards together you could separate them back out. Now note this was a time where we kept reusing things. So when you were using different

sets, we wanted to make sure we could break it out when you were mixing matching, you know, one, two, or three sets all together, or two or three sets together. But little by little, we would improve the printing process. Then there was that one big upgrade is we then started getting the ability to put um pictures on the cards so first we got symbols on the cards and then we got pictures on the cards so um we were able to put sketches the reason we did that was just so i mean usually when we were playtesting um i mean design wouldn't have anything but in playtesting, I mean, design wouldn't have anything. But in playtesting, I decided in development, they would start to get sketches in.

And so putting the sketches on at least gives you a little familiarity, get a sense of the card, help you differentiate a little bit. One of the things about playing with playtests on the cards that you realize is how much of normal magic, how much the picture helps you sort of know what's going on. And so we found it was even just putting sketches on the cards helped sort of grok things.

We eventually, somebody did, I think it was Alexis, during her time as a, when she was, after she won the Great Design Research,

the first one, and she was an intern slash contractor for six months. I think she's the one that wrote the program that, I think it was her, I might be writing the wrong person, that allowed us to mimic actual magic frames. So then we got a period where we could print cards that looked like a magic frame. And so for a while, we usually didn't use the color printers. We used a black and white printer.

So they wouldn't exactly look like magic cards. But we had the ability when we were playtesting with people outside of R&D that we could print them in color versions and they would have art and they would look, the stickers would look a lot like a magic card. You know, I mean, not 100%, but really close. It was much closer to anything we had done. One of the things we had found over the years is R&D, we're used to the playtest cards. In fact, it's funny, I'm way more used to playing with the playtest cards than I am with real cards.

Like, it's always a treat when I get to play with real cards, because there's pictures on them and everything. You know, it just... I still get excited to play with real cards, because I don't get to do it that much, comparatively. But we did eventually get the technology to print cards that look a lot like Magic cards. What we found out was we didn't end up using it that much,

because it just used a lot of ink. So what we tended to do is, I think we would put in the sketches just so we help identify the cards, but we didn't tend to use the whole frame version. There was a version in which everything looked like a magic card. It pretty much would copy what the magic card would look like, the whole frame, and then put it on a card. And what we ended up using the technology form, we still use it now, is if we're going to have a playtest with an outside group, sometimes we do advanced playtest stuff,

sometimes we do, like, brand will come and we'll do a playtest with brand, or customer service, or magic online. You know, somebody who playtest with brand or customer service or Magic Online. Somebody who needs to sort of see the cards ahead of time will come invite them to a playtest. And if they're not familiar with playtest cards, it takes a little getting used to playtest cards. And one of the things we do when we playtest with outside people is we're often really interested in first impressions and things.

And what we found was the more it looked like real magic cards, the more we got sort of genuine expressions, and the more it didn't, the more it kind of would warp how, it would warp sort of perceptions. One of the things I've learned more and more as I do more and more playtesting is, and here's a little playtesting tip for you. You kind of want your playtest to be as close to the real thing as you can. Now, oftentimes, you know, there's many reasons why that can't be true. But one of the things you'll know when we like do official playtesting is if we're going to have people outside the building look at something,

we will prototype it. We will make things, I mean, there's ways for us to sort of print that are, well, we can print things that look pretty, pretty, that the average layperson wouldn't know that we didn't actually, that this wasn't a normal magic card. We have the ability to print pretty close to, for purposes of doing prototypes and stuff. And so one of the things when you're doing your playtest is especially if you're dealing with outside people that aren't used to the design process, you want to have as finished a looking product as you can.

I mean, to the best of your ability within the budget that you're working. But one of the things we learned is that people can't disconnect the overall look and feel from the mechanics that they're so ingrained in the way people play.

Because if you think about it, when you play a game, everything matters. You don't shut off your brain. For example, in design, I know when things matter and when they don't. So I'm going to go like, oh, that part doesn't matter to me. I'll just not worry about that. Like, one of the hard things when people play design playtests for the first time is we'll get

notes that are completely useless notes. Like, oh, this card costs one too much. Well, I'm glad you told me that, but, you know, the costing in the design, for example, is roughly in the right place, but if it's off by a manner or two, then it doesn't matter. That's not the point of what we're trying to do.

And then a lot of what happens in early playtests, we're just crossing cards so they'll get played. Obviously, when the dust settles, not everything is going to be all at the same level. There's gradients to what we do, and some things we push and not push and whatever. But, so a lot of times in design, I find the comments that aren't necessarily necessary

for the point you're at, but with the public and specific it, how something looks, how it feels, all that really impacts the overall effect of the game. And when you are playing, you're doing play tests, the emotional impact is a huge part of the thing you're measuring. So if you're not giving them the whole experience, you're getting, your data is kind of warped to a certain extent. So you want to play with as finished products as you can, or as finished looking products as you can. Now, I understand this play test, not everybody has the resources of a company like Wizards of the Coast to do prototypes. So I get it, I get it, you can't always do, completely do that. But to the best of your

ability, it is really important. Okay, so over the years, we kept upgrading stickers. We eventually got the ability in the database to make decks out of them. It used to be when you play tested Limited, we'd do stickers and when you did Constructed, we used to have blank cards and you would just write on the cards. And there's some famous examples of people shorthanding where it was just tiresome to write it out. Like, there's a famous card where it was just a blank card with a red 3 on it.

And I was like, that's a lightning bolt. Eventually they got the technology with their database that you could tag a deck, make the deck in the database and then just print up that deck. So that if you were going to playtest for the

FFL or something, FFL is the Future League, the playtest in the future in R&D. So we got the technology to, you know, if you want to just print up your deck, then you can print your deck. It made it a lot easier. Now, the latest, greatest thing is we are not using stickers at all. I should say it back. We still use stickers. The new technology, we're still sort of getting the kinks out of it.

And sometimes so many people need to do something that we, the capacity to print the new things right now is slower than they'll do to stickers. So we're still in the phase where sometimes we use stickers. And if we want to go external, if we want to make the fancy looks like Magic Card, sometimes we'll do that on the stickers because we can just make them look a little bit better. Anyway, the newest technology is printing directly on the card.

So what we discovered is that with the technology, with sort of advancements in printing, we can now buy a printer, and then we can buy, basically we can get blank Magic cards. We have the ability to get blank Magic cards. That is something, it is not something the average person can get, but something we ask of the printer is, when they print Magic cards, they will print the back,

and have all the backs the same and make blank cards that have the backs on them but not the fronts so that they then can print on the fronts and we say to them, hey, hey, can you give us some of the blanks can you just take some sheets of those and chop them up and just send us that and so we get blanks to work with

so now we're using the blanks to print on directly so that our playtest cards will be actually printed there's a bunch of kinks that we're working on right now. I have played with the new cards. They're a little lighter than our old printer was. I think they're working on that. The time per card average is a little slower than it used to be because since we're physically printing, it takes a little while longer. One of the big technologies of printing, actually, like I said, wasn't

even the printing of the things themselves, but we had an assistant a while back named Dan, and Dan was the man. And so one of the things that happened was Dan was our first sort of office assistant or administrative assistant. And Dan would make the playtest cards. And so what happened was you had to schedule it with Dan because a lot of people needed playtest cards. But the technology of not having to make the playtest cards and stick with the playtest cards yourselves, for those who have never done it, it was a giant leap forward.

In my mind, one of the biggest leaps ever in stickers. Now, we now have a different admin, but we still get to do, we can put in stuff to have our stickers done. And so it's really nice. Now, one of the things there is you have to sort of plan ahead a little bit and know when you're going to do things and sort of map out getting things done so you have time to get them stickered um but under the old system you had to do that anyway i guess really that's not that different just you have to coordinate with somebody else now when you're doing it um but anyway now we have fancy printed stickers um now the nice thing about the printed stickers a they look nice uh b is there was a big

problem uh that we had with shuffling. So one of the problems with the old system was usually we would use normal lands. We wouldn't sticker the lands. And one of the problems we found was there was some sort of shuffling issue with the fact that some of the cars had stickers on them and some didn't have stickers on them because of the lands and that there would be clumping that would go on. had stickers on them and some didn't have stickers on them because of the land and that there would be clumping that would go on.

And so we learned to pile shuffle because sometimes all the land would clump together, or actually the non-land would clump together because of the stickers, but it meant that the land by default would get together because the other stuff would clump together. And then you would just get weird, like things that wouldn't

normally happen in MET or very, very rarely happen. And so, we did a bunch of things to help that problem. One of the biggest things now is having all the cards be printed. So, yes, by the way, that does mean... Oh, no, no, we don't have to print lands, because it's printed now and not stickers, whatever, the friction problem we don't have anymore. I'm trying to think of how we do on time. It seemed like I had some traffic. No, not a lot of any, how are we doing on time? It seemed like I had some traffic.

No, not a lot of traffic, actually. It's a normal amount of time. I'm almost to work. Trying to think of any other sticker stuff. It is interesting looking back. Oh, the other thing that's funny about the stickers is they're always coded, but because we're doing play tests, they're coded not with the set name. In design, they're coded with the code name.

So every set has a code name. And usually what we do is there's a three-letter code for printing. Eventually what happens is the real code goes in once we have an actual code for the product. In fact, every product at Wizards has a three-letter card code, including Magic Set expansions. And so we always put that in. So if you get a card from late in the process where the name is known, the three-letter code is the code that is the set. So, you know, Ixalan was XLN.

So you see XLN is Ixalan. The tricky part is that the design cards use the playtest name and so you know if i go look back and i see b-a-c b-a-c what code name is like uh okay that was bacon okay what set was bacon like oh oh that was original mirrodin was bacon um and so you get these very fun guessing games of you have to figure out the code name from the three letter now the one thing we've always done is one of the rules was because it didn't matter

that you always use the first three letters in the code name although we ran into a problem recently with archery because we can't reuse a code that's already used and so archery should have been ARC but arch enemy actual should have been ARC, but Arch Enemy actual card code was ARC.

So you can't put a thing in the database of a pre-existing code. So normally we use the first three letters. That doesn't normally cause a problem. Archery, I guess, ended up being ARY rather than ARC. I'm sure that'll confuse me one day in the future when I'm looking at playtest cards. Now, as far as the playtest cards, we usually do not let people have access to playtest cards. In the early days, we were a little looser on this thing,

and so there were trivia shows and stuff. I gave away awards and things. So there was a point in time where I never gave away a lot, but there was a point in time where I did give away a lot, but there was a point in time where I did give away a few. So there are a few playtest cards in the wild. Not tons, but a few. And so it is a rare thing to see. They're not...

The sad thing is I will keep a little bit of them, and for a while we kept some for sort of history purposes, but eventually it was too much to keep, and so a lot of them got destroyed. So I have a few from sets that I've done, so I do have some. They're not completely all gone, but it is not... There are sets that I don't think we have any playtest cards of anymore.

I have playtest cards of some of my early sets because I used to keep them, and then I just started keeping them as a general for R&D. I had a cabinet that I kept them in. And eventually, it would sort of just overwhelm the cabinet

and decided that we didn't need them. So what I did is I went through and I plucked a few from each set and kept a sampling. But the rest all got destroyed. So anyway,

that, my friends, for those that wonder how we playtest cards or how we make playtest cards, that was pretty granular, a pretty granular podcast. The thing I find funny is I try to do a lot of different podcasts, and some people really, really like the granular ones. Some get like, and this is the kind of ink we put in the printer when printing. Some people really get, I don't know the kind of ink we put in the printer.

I do know we went to a special printer just for printing the stickers and because there was a while when we'd print them on the normal printer and then you would

have to change out the paper and then you would accidentally not put them back in and someone would print up a file and it would be on sticker stock

which is expensive so we finally decided we'd save money we wasted so much printing on sticker stock we're like you know what it'll be cheaper for us in the We wasted so much printing on sticker stock. We're like, you know what?

It'll be cheaper for us in the long run to buy a dedicated sticker printer. And now, now with the new technology, we need a special printer because the printer itself

has to print on the card. But anyway, it was pretty cool. But that, my friends, is probably more than you needed to know about Magic Playtest stickers. But I am at work,

and so, anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed today's show. But, as I am pulling into the parking lot, or actually pulling into my space, or not my space, a space, we all know what that means. I mean, this is my... The funny thing is,

I messed up the beginning too, but you never hear that. I just redo it. Okay, one more time. I'm in my practice space, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you guys next time.

Bye-bye.