Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #542: Dominaria, Part 3

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

This is the third and final part of a three-part series on the vision design of Dominaria.

I'm pulling away driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so the last two podcasts I've been talking about Dominaria. And when we left, I was talking about the plight of Historic. So the quick recap is, we had made Historic to capture the flavor of history. As I explained last time, there were a lot of reasons why Legendary as a theme unto itself has some gaps in it, and adding artifacts to it really sort of filled it in and helped make it work. Anyway, there was a lot of, people didn't quite get it for a while, we had to figure out how to do it, there were some mechanical

reasons. Anyway, there were all sorts of issues. And I was given an ultimatum by Bill, Bill Rose, the head VP, that I had, I think it was six weeks to fix it, or it was leaving the set. And so I spent a lot of time, I worked with Kelly Diggs and Mark Winters, who were the two people on the creative team. Kelly did the story, and Mark was doing the

art. And I, we iterated and iterated, and I showed cards around the building and got gathered feedback. And I convinced all the other people at R&D that was skeptical that this was the right call. And finally, the last thing I had to do was pitch it to Bill. And the response I got was, no. And I was like, no. And Bill said, he goes, you you know I think we should just try to replace it and so I was given the task of trying to replace it and so so here's one of the problems talk a little bit about design is normally in design you have things that are structural and things that

aren't so when I use my artifact metaphor for vision design, sometimes you're building around things that are like the bearing walls of your building. That's there because it's holding other things up. And some things, when you want... Let's say, for example, someone come to me and said, Kicker has to go. You must replace Kicker. It's not that hard to replace. I mean, it's doing some work.

It has a certain role it fulfills, but it is more a supportive thing. It's not like when you build a set, some things are integral to the set and some things are additive to the set. And when I talk about a glue mechanic, what I mean is there's something, usually there's a mechanic that's tying everything together. And that there's so many pieces leaning on it that when you try to take it out, it is hard. And the very difficult thing about this set was we had sort of built the set around historic and a lot of components around historic. And so I think in Bill's mind, he thought, well, maybe we could just lean more on the legendary matter stuff and then do something else to fill the rest of it in. And the problem was, when you sort of took that away,

when you sort of boiled down just to legendary matters rather than historic, all the gaps, all the things that I said didn't quite work, the things that we learned from Kamigawa, all that was coming back. And I was really, it is really, really hard when you are trying to replace something. And normally what I've learned is usually one thing won't replace it. So I actually tried the idea of, oh, okay, if I had to replace it, how do I replace the pieces? How do I make the individual components work? And the biggest problem I ran into, the one that I really couldn't figure how to overcome, was the basic AsFan issue.

AsFan, for those regular readers, As for AsFan, talks about the percentage of how much something shows up in a booster pack. Kamigawa's had the problem of its theme was just... The basic way I say it, for those that have read me for a long time, is if your theme's not common, it's not your theme. And what that means is that if you're going to have a theme for the set,

it's gotta be present enough that people can get it. Technically, by the way, if you put it heavy enough at uncommon, you can get the ass fan up. But you still have the problem in general of if your theme isn't sitting in a place with enough number that people are seeing it all the time, it's hard to get the theme. And so Historic really had taken a lot of the work of pulling down the theme so that we could get away with it at a common and have more things that care.

And stuff like artifacts and things. There were things, I talked about this last time, so I don't need to go into it again. But, so anyway, I had the challenge of trying to pull it out and replace it. And I couldn't do it. I couldn't find a replacement. I mean, there were things I could do, but in each case, it required...

What I knew is once I wanted to do that, it meant I had to turn down the legendary theme. It wasn't as if taking historic made the legendary theme go up. Because of the ascent issues, I would have to pull it down, and that meant I would need something else to be there. And the problem was, we wanted the set to be about history.

You know what I'm saying? And Legendary on its own couldn't carry that and couldn't carry the Azfan. So, like, okay, what is a different thing that can care about history? I already talked about how I couldn't use the graveyard. Like, it just, like, I had found a solution. Like, when we first started making the set, the fact that graveyards were off-limits to us because of Amonkhet, like, was a major handicap to start with. We have to figure

out how to make history matter when the thing that represents the past is off-limits to you is quite a challenge. So the fact that we found a workable thing there, like, we already had a hard challenge to solve, and we already sort of found this not-easy solution. So I knew when you took away that solution,

and I had all the problems I had before, plus I had a set cemented around it, I'm like, aye, aye, aye, aye, aye. And so I was like, okay, I could dial back on Legendary, and what else could I do? I racked my brains, I racked my brains. And finally what I came up with was

that the best way through was to try to convince Bill that he was incorrect. And so what I did was I went and, I mean, Bill listens very much. It's a collaborative effort. Bill listens to all the people in R&D. I went to each individual person in R&D and I sold my message and explained to them why exactly, what Historic was doing, why it was important, why it was making things work.

And I got everybody on board one by one. And then I went to Bill and I said to him, basically, look, Bill, I know you think you should pull this. You know, normally when someone asks me to pull something, I pull it. It's when someone asks me to pull something I pull it it's not often although people seem to think

I have the stubborn streak and I can be stubborn normally if they say we need to replace this I replace it and I said to him I go Bill I don't I literally think I'm going to be hurting the set to replace this that I don't think I can replace it at like I think the set's in a really good place,

and I think pulling it out would cause all sorts of problems. And because the set was built around it, there's a lot of support it's doing that I don't know how to... Like, even if I pull it out and I replace it with multiple things, it would just... I couldn't do it in a way that wasn't going to complicate the set. And so I said, Bill, walk me through your problems. Let me see if I can solve your problems while maintaining the thing I think the set needs. And Bill said, okay. And so Bill and Dave Humphreys was, so when I first, when I

first finished Vision, handed over, Eric Lauer was the lead developer for a while. And then he handed it off to Dave. So at this point, Dave was the lead developer. And so Dave and Bill and I sat down and walked through all the issues that Bill had, and we solved them on a case-by-case basis. And some of the larger things was stuff like Bill wanted to make sure that all the artifacts in the set in fact felt like they were pieces of history. That this wasn't a place where one of them was like shovel. So we made sure that the artifacts had that.

We talked to the creative team and made sure that the artifacts in the set did carry the weight of history. Because Bill understood that artifacts can, but he realized that sometimes they don't. So we worked hard specifically in this set to make sure they did. There are a bunch of things. There's some card by card things. But anyway, we sat down. Bill gave notes. And we worked through them and got Bill eventually, we got Bill to

sign off on it. And the thing I want to explain is, I know sometimes when I tell my I wanted to do it story and no one else wanted to do it and I had to fight to make it happen. It sounds sometimes like I am,

as if the people trying to stop me are doing something wrong. And the reality is, the point of a collaborative design is that the other people are trying to make sure it's the best design it can be. Historic, as it was handed off from Vision, had a lot of problems. It was partway in the right way, but it was handed off from Vision, had a lot of problems. It was partway in the right room, but it wasn't done yet. And all the work I did back when Kelly and Mark and I worked on it and coming up with the new technology of batching and all that,

all that is what made it from an okay mechanic to a really good mechanic. I'm really happy with it now. I think Historic does really strong things for the set. I think it is, like I said, it is hard to convey history. That is not an easy theme. I think Historic does that mechanically in a fun, cool way, and I think it

does lead to a lot of interesting deck building choices and play choices that are fun. But my point is, all that I had to go through, because I, the joke I tell is Kelly, who was very interestingly involved in this,

had said that he had read my stories all along of me fighting for something and that this was the first time that he saw it up close. And that I think that the mechanic is better for all the fighting. The mechanic is where it's at because of all the pushback I got. So I don't want you to, when I tell the stories of me fighting to try to keep something,

it's not as if the people not trying to keep it were the bad guys in the story or even did something wrong. It is the job of R&D to push back and make sure that we are doing the best work that we can do. And Historic, its final version, the one you guys are going to play with, is as good as it is because of all that pushback. And in the moment, it is very frustrating. One of the things people often ask me, what is the most frustrating thing about design?

And there's a lot of different things, and I'll say different things. One of the things I don't talk that much about is when you have a vision for something that other people don't have, and you have to get them to see the vision, it is the right thing to do, it is the right process, but it can be very frustrating when you so clearly see something that other people don't. But what it means is you have to make them see it. You have to, you know, the audience has to see it. So if R&D, if members of the team don't

see it, members of the audience won't see it. So a lot of what you have to do is figure out how to make sure they can see it. Like a lot of the work on Historic was making sure people got it and required, literally, we came up with brand new technology to make it work. And the funny thing, looking forward, this is a technology that I know we're going to use again. That the branching technology, sorry, the batching.

The batching technology is something that's going to be very valuable going forward. And we discovered it. We came about it because of this. So, anyway, as I tell the story, I don't want other people, I don't want Bill or other R&D members to be seen as the bad guy in the story. They're not. In fact, they're the good guys. They pushed me to make it the best mechanic it can be.

Okay, so what else happened? So, another big thing that happened in the set, there's some stuff that happened in set design. So let me talk a little bit about set design. First is sagas went through a bunch of changes that happened in set design. So let me walk through that. When we handed it over,

I think we handed it over as some, mostly four and maybe a few six. Our plan was that they would have four nodes or six nodes. So they take place over four turns or six turns. They were legendary when we hand them over. You also could pay mana. I think when we handed it over, you could pay four mana to advance. So either the beginning of each upkeep, or if you paid four,

which you could only do as a sorcery, you could advance the... I think they were called sagas. They originally were called stories, but we changed it to saga. But I think when advance the... I think they were called sagas. They originally were called stories, but we changed the saga, but I think when we handed it over, they were called sagas. They happened at upkeep, and I think...

I don't think all the effects were triggered at the time. So during... Between Eric and Dave, they condensed them down to three. They made sure that every turn and effect happened. In our version, sometimes

there would be turns where effects didn't happen. Like effect, effect, no effect, effect. Although we also had longer ones. They moved from the icons to the chapters. We had originally envisioned sagas as being sort of like board-like. It's not any of Richard's original

thing. I mean maybe more board-like where you're traveling along pieces and there are icons. And we ended up moving toward the vertical strategy with the chapters. And that made it so that you could only do the same effect side to side. Like, you couldn't do it turn one, do something turn two, and do the same thing turn one, turn three. It didn't allow that, but we didn't have designs that did that. Usually turn three did the bigger thing because you were building towards something.

But now one, two, and three could be different. One and two could be the same, and three would be different. One and two could be the same. Three would be different. One could be different. Two and three. Anyway, we had the ability now to duplicate things with the chapter. And then once we went vertical, we ended up doing the vertical art. And that we had talked about in vision design of some of the art representing art within the world. And they liked that so much they ended up making that the saga art.

That the art of the saga are all within world, from whatever civilization cared about that story, the art they would have. And it could be history of Benalia is stained glass, and there's sculptures, and there's weavings and tapestries, and anyway, there's all sorts of different sort of means by which the history was told. It's really cool. Dave also changed it to after card draw because he wanted you to see what you drew before you had to commit to doing it. The reason it's after the card draw and not beginning of pre-combat main phase is I think it was just less wordy.

And we had to write in reminder text. And for all intents and purposes, it's functioning the same, but it just was cleaner and easier to write. I think that's why it was worded that way. When I decided to I wanted to have a third thing in sagas and put legendary in there not legendary, put sagas in there that freed Dave up to make them not legendary because they actually played better if they weren't legendary

so that changed from being legendary. Dave also made it so they were all triggered so all the effects were triggered so basically what happened was Saigus went through a lot of fine tuning they didn't like fundamentally what we turned over

and what they ended up were not that far apart probably the biggest difference between what we turned over I mean they made them shorter but was that we had this option that you could pay mana to advance the story and they took that away the reason Eric took that away was they playtested with it and just nobody

was using it or it wasn't being used enough and they decided it wasn't worth the space on the card they just didn't have enough use to it so that's why that went away but anyway Saga's did a pretty example of what I think, how our process works. Vision came up with a cool idea,

we had a bunch of execution ideas, set design, then figured out how to actually build it, and, you know, tweaked it to make the best version of it. Oh, the other thing they did in, and we always had planned this, in set design is, they figured out what stories we wanted to tell.

The idea was, the stories in the side weren't just random stories, they were the most important stories of Dominaria. So, you know, what happened there? There was a Frexian invasion, let's sell that. There was the Brothers' War, let's sell that.

There was, you know, Nicol Bolas died and was resurrected, let's talk about that. So they're telling all the different stories of things that really mattered to Dominaria and to the different parts of Dominaria. Not only the history, but the history from different parts of the world.

The other thing that Dave did with the legendary theme is a couple things. One, we figured out when to use historic and when to use legendary. Basically, if parts of historic didn't make sense, so for example, when we affected creatures we ended up changing to legendary creature rather than historic creature

now technically historic creature would count artifact creatures but the idea that there were things like sagas that didn't make any sense when you said historic creature we found that was confusing to people and that most of the time it was legendary things you were affecting anyway

so we found when to use historic and when to use legendary, where it made sense. Usually, if it was broad enough that you could affect anything, it was historic. But if it got narrow to the point where it would cause confusion of what it meant, then we changed it over to legendary. The other thing Dave did was two things. One is we had experimented in design with doing legendary instants and sorceries.

We did not find something we thought fit. One of the problems in general is, when you put legendary, the things that legendary means on a permanent, it can't quite mean that on an instant or sorcery. There's no such thing as having one on the battlefield when you play a second one. There's

things that it means that it just can't mean in instant or sorcery. So we were trying to figure out what people thought it would mean, and we did not come up with a clean answer. So Dave came to us and said, asked about you know, did we try? And we said we did. And I said to him, I didn't find a clean answer.

But I said, if you can find one, you know, it wasn't we didn't like the idea of doing Legendary Instant Sorcery. It fit the theme of the set well. It just was a matter of, oh, we didn't find a solution we liked. So Dave played around a bit, and he ended up becoming one, which is what is in the set. There's a cycle, I think, of legendary sorceries. And the flavor of it is that in order to cast it, you have to have a legendary creature or planeswalker on the battlefield. Somebody, a legendary person, must cast it.

And in the spell, it's a spell being cast by a famous person. It's Urza, it's Karn, it's Jaya. It's somebody casting the spell. So the flavor is of a famous character casting a famous spell. But for gameplay reasons, you just need a legendary creature or planeswalker you don't need the specific one

that's cast for style points you can get Jaya out and cast Jaya's spell but it is so he added that the other thing

that he added was something that Ethan had come up with I'm not sure whether Ethan the idea Ethan had brought up is we now with collation,

have the ability to do things that once upon a time we couldn't do. And Ethan's idea was, you know, if you look at Kamigawa, one of the problems with Kamigawa was the idea of legendary being a big thing in the set was hard to see because, you know, not every pack had a legendary creature

in it. Not even close. You know, all the rare creatures were legendary and a few of the uncommons. But, like, you could open five, six, seven packs and not see a legendary creature or thing. And so Ethan came up with the idea of what if we used collation to make sure that every single pack had a legendary creature?

Dave really liked this and he ran with it. So the way it ended up working, which is something that this is not something we could have done many years back, is the collation looks and makes sure that between your uncommon, your rare, or mythic rare, because there are no

legendary commons, that you get a legendary creature. If you get an uncommon legendary creature, it replaces your uncommon. If you get a rare or mythic rare legendary creature, it replaces your rare mythic rare slot. So the idea is every booster, I guess the lawyers should say almost every booster. It's not promised, but ideally, every booster that you open up should have a legendary creature in it. Every booster that you open up should have a legendary creature in it. Note that this doesn't count legendary non-creatures.

And I don't think it counts planeswalkers. Not that you can't get a planeswalker, but there are certain cards that fall in this coalition, certain that don't. I mean, you can't get those things. This is not promised. I think you get a legendary creature in every booster bag. You might also get a legendary other thing, like a planeswalker or an artifact or whatever.

But I think that'll be a bonus to the legendary creature that you get. So, like, for example, I think if you get a planeswalker, you also get a legendary creature. I think that's how that works. Not 100% on that. But anyway, Dave worked it out to make sure that that happened. One of the things we like more and more is

when we have a theme, we like to make sure that a single booster pack is symbolic of the theme. That if you open one booster pack, can you guess the theme? Now, given I understand in this particular thing, you'll get one.

But even so, if you open just one booster pack, the Aspen Historic is greater than one. You're going to get a legendary creature. There's a decent chance of getting something else legendary. You know, sagas, while not common or uncommon, there's a decent chance of opening a saga because there's 14 of them. Some are uncommon, some are rare.

And there's at least one Mythic Rare. Maybe two. Anyway, so the idea is, if you open a booster, can you figure out what's going on? Can you figure out the theme? And there's a lot of ways to convey that. There's the art. There's the flavor text. There's the mechanics.

But the idea we like is, if you open a random booster, can you figure out what's going on? Can you figure out the theme to the set? And we worked really hard with a lot of different things to be able to do that. And having the legendary creature in every pack just helps that. Just ensures that you have a legendary creature. But also, like I said,

Historic is helping that. The sagas are helping that. There's a lot of components going into the set that are helping sort of reinforce the theme. Okay, another big thing to talk about, since I'm not quite at work yet, is when we started, in fact, the entire vision design, there was a soup and there was a salad. So the original plan was we were going to have a large set followed by a small set. I was going to leave the large set. Ethan was

going to leave the small set. That's one of the reasons Ethan was on the team. And we basically the original version of the story was a more elaborate version of the story. I'm not going to get into it because I'm sure components that they didn't include well, you know, the next time we go to

Dominaria might include some of those components. But there was a longer story and the big finale ended up taking place in salad, not in soup, since there were two parts to the story. And so one of the things we did was we built a bunch of things for salad while we were building soup. So, for example, we made a mechanic. salad while we were building soup. So, for example, we made a mechanic.

There was actually going to be a night theme. A little bit of the night theme got pulled back into, not a lot, but there's a little bit of a night tribe, a little tiny bit, that's in Dominaria. But that originally was going to be in soup. Not in soup, in salad. It was going to be in salad. But what happened was, anyway, we built the set. When we handed off the vision design, we laid out the plan for what salad was going to be.

That was built into the vision design. And then, during early set design, I believe, we made the decision that we were going to go back to core sets. corsets. And I think what happened was we realized that we were, because spaghetti and meatballs, well, I'm not sure what we've said about spaghetti and meatballs yet. Anyway, we made the decision to put the corset in. Somewhere around there, we eventually made the 3-in-1. The Core Set returning in the 3-in-1 happened very interrelated to each other, but there was a middle ground we were trying to figure things out

where we wanted the Core Set back. And I think us bringing back the Core Set is what made us realize we needed to go to the 3-in-1 model. But it is not as if the decision all got made in one afternoon. We sort of, like, it took us a little not as if the decision all got made in one afternoon. We sort of like, it took us a little while to understand the decision. But anyway, for design purposes, for vision design, we did make a salad. We did, or not make it, we plotted out what salad would be. We figured out how salad would work. And that was something, as I'm talking about the vision design, sort of fill you in,

the Dominaria did a bunch of different things. Other components that I... Let's see if I talked to it. So there was a bunch of... So Wizards Tribal started in vision design. I... Did I tell the story? I apologize if I told the story in the previous podcast.

The one of the challenges about this is I'm writing articles as well as doing the podcast on this. So sometimes I hit something where I know I wrote the article about it, but I'm like, oh, so I know I've told the story, but did I tell it on my podcast yet? So if I've told the story, I apologize. I don't remember telling this on the podcast. But anyway, I started doing a thing called Head to Head on my Twitter. It's something I had wanted to do originally on the website

when I first started the website back up in 2002. But it required some programming that we never got around to. Eventually Twitter got around to it, and I realized that I could run the head-to-head where I had different themes run off against each other on my Twitter feed. And one of the first ones I did, I think the very first one I did was creature types. Dragons ended up winning, but the one that did really well, that did better than was expected, was wizards. Wizards did really well.

And when we were starting Dominaria, I had that in my brain that, oh, wow, the fans. And we had done wizards two different times. One time we did them was in Lorwyn, but due to some stuff that was going on in Constructed, we kind of nerfed them, so Wizards weren't particularly good. And then we did them one other place. In Morning Tide, we did them.

But there's just so much going on. It was just hard. Like, we had eight races and five classes. Anyway. I realized that there was some pent-up desire for wizards. We realized that, you know, Dominaria had a lot of, you know, the Tolarian Academy and a lot of stuff.

So we decided we were going to do a wizards, a little theme for wizards. We wanted two colors. Normally, when we make a tribe matter in a set, we put it into two colors to get some flexibility on how to build it. We knew they'd have to be blue. We ended up making the other

tribe red, just because we liked the idea that they cared about instants and sorceries, and red and blue are the colors that sort of care about instants and sorceries. And so we ended up making a theme there. There also is a sapling theme in black and green. Well, I think we might have made a few sapling tokens.

The theme, that came out in set design when they realized that Black and Green was missing something. And I think Vision had put in a little bit of sapling just because it was Dominaria. And they decided they wanted to play up that a little more, that Green would make the saplings and Black would sacrifice the saplings. That's usually how Black-Green sort of plays it is.

Black-Green can do this token making where you're using the resources. That's usually how Black Green sort of plays. It is, Black Green can do this token making where you're using the resources. That's a real Black Green thing to do. So that got added in. There's a lot of other, oh, the goblin theme got added in during set design. Oh, another thing that we decided to do during vision design was we liked the

idea of doing aggressive reprints, meaning that if ever there was going to be a set that just had more reprints and more high-profile reprints, Dominaria made a lot of sense. It was the 25th anniversary. We're going back to Magic's home. So one of the things that we did is

we in Visions experimented with a lot of crazy ideas to bring things back and then I know set design sort of carried the ball we tried a lot of crazy things my biggest problem is

I'm not 100% sure what crazy things Land of War Elves ended up making in I know we toyed around for a while whether that should be Bird of Paradise or Land of War Elves we thought both would be exciting Well, Llanowar elves end up making in. I know we toyed around for a while whether that should be Bird of Paradise or Llanowar elves. We thought both would be exciting. We thought both would be sort of shocking to see come back.

Both are originally from Dominaria. Actually, both are from Alpha. I think we ended up going with Dominaria because it was a little more iconic. Like, Llanowar was a little... Like, Birds of Paradise was from Alpha, but it was... Well, it was iconic

because it was from Alpha. Llanowar had a little more, like, Birds of Paradise was from Alpha, but it was iconic because it was from Alpha. Lando had a little more flavor gravitas, if you will. So we one of the things we did in vision design was the idea, as vision does, it was the vision that

we were going to have some cool reprints come back. But we left it up to set design to sort of figure out which ones worked. You know, it's because set design had to work with play design, and the idea was, so the goal, and I'm not sure if 100%,

this was the goal that got a vision, and I'm sure we came really, really close to this, but not 100%, was that all the reprints would be from a set that was now on Dominaria. I say now on Dominaria because Wrath got overly on Dominaria, so we allowed ourselves to take things from Wrath. There are four sets that take place on Wrath. Tempest, Drunkhold, Exodus, and Nemesis all take place on Wrath.

So anything from those sets were allowed. But anyway, I think there's like 33 sets, I think, that take place either on Dominaria or on a place that is now part of Dominaria. And so we try to pull our reprints from those sets. It is possible there's some like simple card that didn't come from one of those sets if we just needed something simple. But in general, I know when we handed off Vision, all the reprints were from one of those sets. Because we thought that was an important part of it. one of those sets.

Because we thought that was an important part of it. And in general, the other big thing that we tried to do was we really played into high fantasy. The knights being part of it was a combination of us and creative... Like I said, we were building toward doing some knight tribal. So the plan was

originally to have a whole bunch of knights in the first set and knight tribal in the second set. I think we ended up pulling back a little bit of knight tribal into the first set and there were a bunch of knights in the first set, and knight tribal in the second set. I think we ended up pulling back a little bit of knight tribal into the first set, and there were a bunch of knights in, I think, white and black. We, um... Anyway, so we... We tried really hard to do some more classic fantasy. That's something that Dominaria had always done.

Like, Djinn of a Lamp. We did a little more... We tried to do a little more top-down stuff. Vibrant Renewal was a big part of the set, so we definitely tried to play into that. I mean, there's a little bit more art than mechanics, but we definitely played into places that show up that Dominaria was thriving. It has all this adversity, but it keeps coming through.

That's the part we like a lot about Dominaria is you can't keep Dominaria down. You can try. You can throw all sorts of things. You can throw ice ages at it and mendings at it and, you know, whatever you want to throw at it,

but invasions and things. But it comes through because it's always, you know, it is a resilient little plane. And so anyway, I mean, I'm super, super proud of how it turned out i think that the set is a fun set it plays well there's all sorts of neat themes um it really was designed not just playing standard but mean things to other formats um we definitely were super conscious of obviously

commander we we even i know there's some shots in Modern, I think, in the set. There's all sorts of stuff going on in there. And we think it's a fun set. It's like we knew when we made it, we had a big challenge because it was the 25th anniversary. We were going back to Magic's home. You know, we knew the players would have high expectations.

And so I feel like we met the high expectations, which is always tough to do. But anyway, I hope you guys, hope you guys enjoyed playing it. We enjoyed making it. It was a real fun set to make. And so I think I've talked, I mean, at some point at a later time,

I will do stories of cards. I'm not going to do that this podcast series, but I will come back and do Domini or cards later. Like I said, that takes more time to prep, but I will do it eventually.

But anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.