Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #592: CAPS

Episode Date: November 23, 2018

In this podcast, I talk about a group of people who do a lot of work on Magic, but not the part I normally talk about. This is the people to whom R&D hand off their work.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so for today's episode, I'm just going to talk about a department that I don't talk about much, but it's a pretty important department to the making of magic. And that is a department we call CAPS. I'm not even sure what CAPS stands for. But basically, it's the people who take care of printing and graphic design. So think of it this way. So R&D is in charge of coming up with all the component pieces. You know, R&D has to say, okay, well, here's what the card is going to be named. And here's what the art is going to look like. And here's what the card mechanically does. You know, here's what the frame, you know, all the component pieces that make up the card.

We have to figure that out. Okay, but there's a big step, which is we figure out what it is that we want the things to be. And that I've talked about printing. At some point, it's got to get printed. But there's a step in between that, and it's an important department that does a lot of stuff. So I want to talk a little bit about CAPS today. Once again, I should stress that I don't work in CAPS. Mostly, it's my perspective of how I interact with CAPS and how R&D interacts with CAPS. There's things I know

for sure they do that I have no idea, just because I day-to-day don't do it. So my caveat today is, I'm going to talk a bit about CAPS and all the different things they do. I'm going to miss things. There's a lot of nuanced things I'm not going to get. But I'm going to do the best job I can of explaining all the different things that CAPS does. I apologize ahead to CAPS,

because I'm sure I'm missing vital things they do that I'm just not, it's not visible to me. Okay, so first thing that happens is somebody has to take all the component pieces and put it together. Like R&D essentially produces a couple things. We produce text. You know, here's all the words that go on the card. We produce art. Here's the art that goes on the card. And when I say we, I mean the creative team has a pool of artists that are all freelance that produce the art.

And then we also have to sort of figure out the frame. Now, we have people on the creative team that help do framework to figure out how frames will look. But the actual act of putting everything together is caps. Like the way to sort of think of it is we are sort of R&D is figuring out all the elements. But in the end, somebody has to compile it all. So the way it works is we have printers. Once upon a time, we used to print in film, but now we print digitally. We don't do film anymore. But still, the printer needs the

digital files all compiled so that it can do what it wants to do. And there's a lot of complications that go on. So first off, let's take the art. We get really talented artists to make really awesome art. So what happens is the artist sends in, once upon a time they used to send in the painting and a few still do that. Most of them now work digitally and send in the digital file. A real quick aside on that. Modern day art, there's a lot of advantages. When I say digitally, be aware that everybody who's doing digital stuff still is using their hands and drawing things. It's just a matter of, are they drawing it on a board versus drawing it, you know, on a canvas. The advantage I know of doing digital is you have the ability to do layers. You can fix things more easy. You can add things. It gives you a lot of control. And the biggest thing is it makes it much easier to transfer it. Once upon a time,

everybody sort of had to pack up their canvases and mail them into Wizards. And that is, I mean, obviously they did it, but it's harder to do. And it delays how long before the art comes in. If you have so much time to do the art, if the art has to be in on a certain day and you have to mail it, it just means you have less time to do the art

because you have to mail it. Anyway, so the artist gets in their art, some digital, some is actual canvas, you know, it's painting still. Then it has to go to imaging. So imaging is part of CAP.

So imaging, what they need to do is get a good, crisp, clean version of the art. And some of it's digital. Being digital, I assume, makes it a little easier. But there's still a lot of cleaning and cropping. And for example, the art has to go in frame. Not every artist draws the art in the exact proportions that it goes in the frame. Some do, some don't. If they don't, then there's some cropping that goes into. There's color correcting. There's just a bunch of different things that have to go.

So you have to sort of prep the art and make the art correct. So for every piece of art, you know, they have to fix the art and make sure the art is crisp and clean. What you want when you see it on the card is the art just pops out because it's the crispest, cleanest version of it. And in the history of magic, you know, there's been some stories like one of the classic stories is Plateau had a different piece of art between Unlimited and Revised, I believe. It's the only card that changes art between Unlimited and Revised.

And that's because the art got corrupted. You know, one of the things you have to be careful is that you get it, you keep it, and we have to store all our art images and stuff because we might reprint the card someday. So everything we produce, not only are we making this individual card out of it, but we are saving it so in the future, if we need to come back to it and need the image, that we have all the images. in the future if we need to come back to it and need the image that we have all the images um and remember we we now make i don't know the exact number um but close to a thousand unique pieces unique cards a year um and i mean unique i mean brand new cards that have never been made before and or cards that are brought back but with new components, usually new art. So we make a whole bunch of pieces, a whole bunch of cards, and most of them have art.

Every once in a while, we even have additional pieces of art. Sometimes we do alternative art and stuff. And there's all that to manage. But anyway, so we've got to get the image figured out. So the image comes in, and all the images have to go through imaging and make sure that we have a nice crisp clean version of the picture. Okay, next we need to make actual full cards. And what that means is, is editing is going to go through,

compile all the component pieces. So what happens is R&D, you know, all the different parts of R&D turn in their parts of the card. So let's take a normal card. R&D is responsible for the rules text of the card, the mana cost of the card, the rules text of the card, the power and toughness of the card. And in conjunction with creative, has to figure out what the creature type is. Usually the creature type is creative and less than mechanically relevant.

Then R&D might work with creative. Creative's got to turn in the name of the card, the creature type of the card, the flavor text of the card, and the art team obviously produces the art. You know, their freelancers make the art for the card. And all those things have to go to editing. Editing works with all the, make sure everything, you know, the names are clear and communicate what they need to and aren't a name we've used before and aren't confusing with something else that's in standard with it or something. Making sure that the rules text is templated correctly

and it does what it says and it matches other cards that do a similar thing. They double check the creature types to make sure the creature types are being consistent. To make sure, you know, there's artist credits and legal text and there's just a lot of text that goes on a magic card. So the editors work real hard to make sure that all that text is correct and accurate and then they pass it along and then Caps has to turn all those component pieces into one singular card. Sometimes, by the way, there's framework done by creative if they're trying to

make a brand new frame, something like Saida's or such. But then, and when they do that, they work with creative, not with creative, they work with caps to make sure that that can get made. You know, that's an important part of producing it is making sure that there's a crisp, clean way to make the frame. So anyway, what happens then is they have to compile all the cards. And so Caps works with editing to make what we call the one-ups, which is a version of each card in its frame that's the complete version. And then there's a back and forth between Caps and editing to make sure that all the information got conveyed correctly. So sometimes in communication, something will get changed or something will get missed.

Or sometimes since editing has sent the information to caps, R&D will change their mind about something. Play design realized a card needs to cost one more or whatever. There's some slight change about it. Meanwhile, while that is going on, usually the art hasn't gotten in yet. Usually they start working, well, I should take it back. Art is coming in during that time. Some of the art

is in when they start laying out frames. Sometimes not all the art is in. Just because art comes in in waves and sometimes art is on time, sometimes art can be a little late. It depends on a whole bunch of different factors. But anyway, at some point,

they get all the component pieces. They make the full one-up. When we do a slideshow, for example, I talk about R&D doing a magic meeting slideshow. That is the one-up, the card and frames. Here is the best, without being printed. There is a difference between cards on the screen and cards that are printed.

We do do print tests. That's one of the things that CAPS works with printing on, is to do print tests whenever we're trying something new. Sometimes we're trying a new foiling process. So, printing is, I think, a subsection of CAPS. I've talked about printing before, so I won't get too much into the printing part of it, but a subsection of CAPS. I've talked about printing before, so I won't get too much into the printing part of it, but printing is part of CAPS.

I did a whole podcast on just printing itself and all the things with printing the cards. Printing is part of CAPS. In fact, when I talk about CAPS today, the entire podcast I did on printing is sort of a subcategory of this. They're in charge of printing the card. I'm talking today about producing all the materials that need to get printed.

Okay, so, but anyway, if there's a brand new foiling process or we're trying to do something we've never done before, the people who lay out the cards work with printing to make sure that we can test things. We'll do print test runs. We'll make sure that things work the way we think they work. We always test them before we actually would produce a product for the public. Okay, so now we have the cards.

They're all checked. We think we have the cards. Okay, we have a lot more to go. That's just the cards. Okay, next, there's booster wrap. So every time we got to make the booster wrap and some products have booster wrap, some products, so there's two different types of products. There is booster products and there is, I don't know what we

call them, but non-booster products, which is a booster product, something that shows up in a booster. You open it up, it's randomized. Non-booster means it shows up in something, a box of some kind, and it's non-randomized, and you know what you're going to get. Maybe it's a deck. Maybe it's a bunch of different things it can be. And so every single product we make, whether it's a booster product or a non-booster product, everything goes through caps because everything we make gets printed.

So everything has to be created. Okay, so I've talked about the cards. Oh, another thing that goes on, by the way, is I talked about this when we talked about the printing of how, you know, we have to figure out what we're printing and how we're printing. And there's a lot of work that goes into figuring that out. So CAPS caps anyways, making the booster pack. We used to make booster packs of various sizes. If you go back in Magic's

history, I believe over the years we have made a five card pack, an eight card pack, a 10 card pack, a 12 card pack, a 15 card pack. We might have even made bigger than a 15-card pack. We now standardize. Our packs tend to be 15 cards. When I say 15 cards, they're also as an add card, so it's technically 16 cards. Add card slash token card. But anyway, so we produce the booster.

Part of producing the booster is... Oh, so another part the Caps has to do is not only are they producing the physical cards themselves, they're also in charge of things like the logo. So what's going on behind the scenes is, you know, we're trying to figure out what set we're making. At some point, creative team working with brand identifies the name of the set. And then Caps has to take it and go and figure out a logo for it. Now they've worked with the brand team and the marketing team to make sure that the logo is doing all the things it needs to do to be exciting and communicate what the set is about. But Caps is busy working on that. So graphic design is part of Caps.

So graphic design has to work and figure out. Now, when you're figuring out what the logo for the product is, that goes in conjunction with what the box looks like and what the boosters look like and what the advertising will look like, that there's an entire campaign, as we call it. So for example, I'll take Ravnica as an example. The last time I did Ravnica, I'm not super familiar with the, you guys have seen the current Ravnica. I'm talking about Return to Ravnica. I assume there's something similar with, I just haven't, the boxes aren't in my hand yet, so I haven't seen them. But there was a city theme that ran throughout Return to Ravnica, I assume it's in Guilds of Ravnica,

where there was sort of the pattern of the box had this sort of vague city feel to it of buildings. And that was very abstract, but it just had this sort of city feel. And then what they do is there's a color palette for each of the sets. Now, back when we did a block, they would match them so that all the sets in the same block would have a similar feel to them. Now, I mean obviously we we have two sets back-to-back in Ravnica that are very similar to each other. I assume those will have similar look because those are more similar like an old-school block. The last set is more different so I'm not sure how they're gonna handle that but

anyway, the the graphic design team does have to figure out sort of the campaign of how are we selling this? What does it look like? What does the logo look like? What's the packaging look like? And they have to create all that. So when I talk about them making the booster, there's a lot that goes into making the booster. Part of it is that involves the logo and make sure the logo looks right. There's some sort of patterning and color. What exactly do the boosters look like? And something that most people don't think about is we want to make sure that the booster is unique, that you understand what product it's from, but that it both has to feel magic but feel the set it's in.

That's one of the challenges that graphic design is always working on is we want the current thing to feel like a magic set, but feel unique. If we're in Ravnica, well, maybe that's city themed. You know, if we're on Amonkhet, well, there's an Egyptian touch. You know, if we're on Ixalan, okay, there's a sort of a South American vibe we're trying to get. Wherever we're doing, there's something about the world that we're trying to communicate. The other thing that happens is there's a number of images on the booster packs. I think it's five. We've bounced around the number of images. Early Magic had a period where it was one image, and then we moved to three images. I think we're currently at five images. We bounce around. And those images, what happens is Caps works with the creative team, with the artists, the art directors

and brand to identify images that we think are both just really, really strong pieces of art, things that really grab you visually, and things that are indicative of what the set is. And usually what I think we've learned on booster packs is, with exception, usually we put characters on booster packs. It's something that looks back at you, is the most compelling. From time to time we've done other things. I'm not saying it's always been creatures, but it's usually, usually creatures or planeswalkers.

I mean, it's characters. And usually it's not just, it tends not to be beasts as much as humanoid things, that humans respond really well to humanoids. So the packaging tends to be things that, you know, you sort of can identify with. And usually there's a variety of images. We don't necessarily try to worry about color balance or anything on booster images. We just want to make sure that it is indicative of the set and compelling and makes you want to, you know, just makes you want to pick up the pack and excites you.

Now, the booster pack, sometimes we have the ability to write inside the booster pack. We don't often write inside the booster pack, but sometimes we do. There's been times where we've done stuff where there's instructions or... It's something we're capable of doing. We don't always do. So the other thing that's interesting is the booster wrap is a different material, obviously. You know, the cards are cardboard. Or not cardboard. It's paper.

Cards are paper. And the booster wrap, we've changed the material over the years. Early Magic had a problem that it was, you could see through it. And so we went to opaque to make sure you couldn't see through it. Because it's important that you don't know what's in it. We want people to find out what's in it when they open it. And anyway, there's a lot of different issues to deal with. There's

like the card, there's a lot of rules, not rules text, legal text and stuff that goes on the booster pack. But anyway, okay, so they got to make the booster pack. They got to make the cards. They got to make the booster pack. We're, okay, so they've got to make the booster pack. They've got to make the cards. They've got to make the booster pack. We're not done yet.

The box. So a lot of people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about the box, but we sell magic cards in boxes, and the boxes have to double as a display. So what that means is, if you've ever noticed in a box, when you open it up, I mean, it comes as a display. So what that means is, if you've ever noticed in a box, when you open it up, I mean, it comes as a sealed box. We shrink wrap it with Wizards of the Coast logos on

the shrink wrap, so you know that we've shrink wrapped it. But anyway, when you open up the box, what you'll notice is you can fold it back, so there's a cutout that sort of pops up, and what you can do is you can push it in the back so it becomes a standy is that the right word something that you could put on a shelf or at a register that people can just that advertises your set that is the logo for the set the name on the set and usually a piece of what we call key art which is just a compelling visual piece that says oh this is exciting and communicates that it's magic, but communicates whatever the flavor of the world that we're in is, and makes you go, ooh, I want that.

Now, the boxes double, and sometimes the consumers just buy the boxes, but the boxes have to double as display so that, you know, most of magic, well, a lot of magic is bought in boxes, but a lot of people buy, you know, buy boosters in the store, and so we need to make displays out of those. So those have to be designed. Now, over the years, there have been a lot of extra boxes. Like, there's a lot of products that go along with a set beyond just the booster box. In early Magic, for example, we used to have the starter decks that were sealed 60-card decks, and we always have a booster box. In early Magic, for example, we used to have the starter decks that were sealed 60-card decks, and we always have a booster box and a sealed box.

You know, for a while we have done... Now we have Planeswalker packs, so the Planeswalker packs have to be designed... I'm not sure they... They might come in their own box as well. I'm not up on my packaging of all the new stuff.

But anything that's related, the CAPS team and the graphic designers are responsible for making everything that goes along, every visual component that goes along with the set. So the cards themselves, the booster wrap, the boxes. They work on doing a lot of the components for the advertising. So the other big thing that happens is part of what we call campaign planning is all these component pieces are tied together. What images we use in the advertising, what images we use as the key art on the box, what images we use on the booster wrap, all that ties together because there's a... so what a campaign is, is early on, although after

R&D's usually made the set, actually definitely after R&D's made the set, because they have to know what the set is, there's a whole team that gets together and says, okay, what is this set? What is it about? How are we selling the set? What's the exciting thing about the set? And part of that is figuring out, for example, what the image is that's on the box, the key art. Because everything, the campaign, everything ties together. So what's really common is the key art gets used in ads as a means to draw you in. And then you'll see the same key art on the box.

I think the key art for Guilds of Ravnica is Vraska, I think. There's a Vraska piece where she's underground, and there's the upside-down building. I think that's the key art. In fact, there's two pieces of key art. One's with, and usually it's her planeswalkers. One's with Vraska, and one's with Rahl for Guilds of Ravnica. Usually these days,

it's not always the planeswalker, but usually the key art involves one of the planeswalkers. The one exception is when the name of a character that's not a planeswalker is in the name of the set, like Avacyn Restored. Avacyn was the key art. It's called Avacyn Restored,

so I did not put Avacyn on the box. But one of the big challenges that always comes up is trying to figure out, like, what's the right image. I'll give a good example of something that was a little complicated. When we went to Kaladesh, the main character of Kaladesh was Chandra. But the way the set played out is the first set, Kaladesh, was all about the inventors' fair and the second set, Aether Revolt, was about sort of the inventors having a revolt against the government and we knew we wanted to have Chandra but the thing that came up is

what's going to be an image of Chandra being Chandra does she say creative inventor fair or does she say rebellion? And we're like, she says rebellion because her hair is going to be on fire and she's probably going to have a fireball on her hand or something and you're going to go, oh, she's rebelling. And even though she was from Caledon,

she's not really an inventor. So the idea of creativity and invention, that didn't quite come through. So what we did is we said, okay, who can we put on the box that says, wow, I'm an inventor. And then we created Saheeli for that purpose. So that's why Saheeli got made,

is we really wanted someone to be an inventor planeswalker, because it was all about invention. But making some of those choices and doing things started dictating stuff. In that particular case, we actually made a character and a card realizing the needs of the advertising

and of the box. So one of the things that is important is there's a lot of back and forth. I mean, it's a good example here where, you know, brand and caps were trying to figure out sort of like how to market the set and realized that we were missing something

we needed to market the set. And then came back to R&D and said, look, this is a component piece we need. Can we have this? And R&D said, sure, we will make this for you. And, you know, Creative had to make the character R&D and make the card. And we had to sort of build Saheeli.

And she was done, you know, later in the process. But that was us realizing that we needed something to do this. And CAPS really is an important part of putting all those components together. The other big thing to explain here is, I've been leaning a lot on the graphic design side of things, because I talked about printing. Another big part of what CAPS does is physically making the object.

You know what I'm saying? It's not just, like, part of what I say is R&D makes it conceptually, and CAPS makes it physically. You know, R&D is like, wouldn't it be cool if we had this art and this text and, you know, and then CAPS has to go out and actually make that happen. So part of their job is not just all the graphic design and the layout and all that. It's also, okay, we need to get the component pieces to make this. We need to line up the printers. We need to, for example, like BattleBond.

BattleBond had this neat mechanical partner where we wanted to have two of the same, two related creatures and or planeswalkers show up in the same pack together okay well how do we do that so i i've talked about how an innistrad i'd wanted to get two cards together and at the time they couldn't do that so one of the things we had to figure out was okay has the technology changed do they have the ability to do that and it turned out that one of our printers did have the technology. I think more will get it. But as the digital printing technology keeps evolving, and so part of what CAPS needs to do is understand what is capable,

like what can we do and can't we do, so that we can understand and figure out what we're able to do. A lot of times R&D, like, we don't interact, like, for example, I don't interact with caps all that often because most of the times I'm making things that I know we can do. But sometimes, a good example would be the double-faced cards in Innistrad. I wanted to do something that, okay, we hadn't done before. And in Innistrad, for example, I asked the two questions.

I said, I want to make a card that's printed on both sides, and I want to make two cards show up in the pack together. And so what Caps did at the time, and this was many years ago, is they went and did the research and came back, and they said, okay, we can't print on both sides. Here's the limitations. They have to be on their own sheets. And it made

us have ramifications for what the set was doing. And also, I talk about printing math before. If you listen to my printing episode, I talk a lot about it. R&D, the set size, has a lot to do with how we print the cards. The numbers we choose have a lot to do with, oh, well, how many cards fit on the sheet, and how many

different sheets are we making? And there's a lot of math that goes into figuring out set size based on printing. As printing technology gets better, there's less and less constraints on us and more and more ability for us to choose what we want. But there still are some constraints and we work with CAPS to understand that. And a lot of times when you want to do something, usually CAPS isn't yes or no. What CAPS says is, here's what it would take to do that. Here's the price tag it would take. Here's the logistics cost it would take. Here's all the sort of costs. And costs can be the amount of energy people have to do to set it up,

the amount of resources we need, what logistically it means for us. Like sometimes, for example, we'll want to do something where one component has to be printed at one place and one component has to be printed at another place. And so in order to do that, we got to print the first component with enough lead time that we can send it to the second printer. So when they print the second component, they can combine them at the second printer. And CAPS has to figure all of that out. It is very easy for me to go, oh, double-faced cards. Let's have double-faced cards. But I need to talk and understand all what that means. Unsets is another really good example where, you know, I wanted to, I did a lot of crazy things in Unstable. There's cards that have completely different backs, but backs that match each other.

There's cards that have overlapping art between the frames. There's cards that have no frames. And each one of those requires us working with them to understand the parameters of what can and can't be done. And once again, there's testing, and there's all sorts of things to figure that out. But one of the things that's happened over time is the more

we realize the power of doing cool things in how we print things or how we lay them out and stuff, the more we're having to work with CAPS to sort of figure that out. And I hope you understand as I'm explaining it today, it's a very

dynamic, interconnected process. Okay, but CAPS does even more things. Um, and I hope you understand as I'm explaining it today, it's a very dynamic interconnected process. Um, okay. But caps does even more things. Um, so sometimes there's components. For example, uh, if you have a pre-release kit, which caps has to make all the pre-release kits, um, there might be a die in there. There might be, uh, we've done other things, stickers and other things in there.

Um, all of that has to be produced all of that has to be created okay, if we're going to make stickers okay, well who do we work with to make stickers can the printers make stickers is somebody else making stickers, are we making and shipping them, how are we doing that with the dyes for example dyes take a long lead time

usually so the question is whether or not we're making something unique and how we're making it unique. Sometimes unique, a common thing we'll do is we'll make our own dies where like the 20 is represented by the expansion symbol. We have to make those, those don't pre-exist. And then we have to make those and build them and then, you know, pick colors and stuff and then create them. And whatever it is we're making, Caps makes everything. If you ever buy a Wizard of the Coast product and there's anything in that box or in that booster pack, Caps had to

get it made. And, you know, I talk a lot about the booster products because that is kind of the bread and butter of what we do. But we make a lot of products way beyond just our booster products. We make a lot of deck products. We also make products that are, you know, being from Arch Enemy to Plane Chase. You know, we make things of different sized cards and different components. We've made things with boards. We've made things that have, you know, metal component pieces or plastic component pieces. You know, whatever it is we're doing, we have to sort of get out and figure that out.

And a lot of that, so another thing that CAPS does is sometimes when we're making something, we have to figure out ahead of time, I think it's called the COGS. I don't know what COGS stands for. It means all the component pieces because you have to price everything out. So in a Magic Pack, you know, Magic Boosters are pretty easy. It's like there's 16 cards wrapped in a booster inside a box. We know how to do that. We do that all the time.

But let's say we're making something a little bit different. Maybe the box is a shape we've never made before um maybe there's component pieces in it we haven't made before so what happens is we have to sit down and price out each piece to talk about okay what does it cost us to make what will we sell it for and add it up to make sure that the component pieces don't go over the expense of what we need to make the box, you know, at the margin we need to make it at.

So a lot of CAFs is doing pricing and figuring out, okay, well, do you want this? Do you want this? Even something like Unstable, we had a lot of interesting ideas

with Unstable and we had to price all the different things out and some ideas we had, you know, were really cool ideas but they were really expensive and we couldn't do them and some ideas were, oh you know, were really cool ideas, but they were really expensive and we couldn't do them.

And some ideas were, oh, no, no, we can do that. That's a cool idea. You know, one of the things that's important is when you're making a product, you have to, like, often I talk about how R&D does its job and then CAPS does its job.

But that's for, like, a booster product where it's a known quantity. If we're making something we've never made before, sometimes the first people to do the work is Caps. Usually what happens is R&D and brand make a spec document, meaning here's what we think the product will be. So for example, I not so long ago had Scott Essin on.

We talked about the Transformer trading card game. This is an example of Caps in, I mean, same Caps department just making a Transformer thing. When we were about the transformer trading card game um this is this is an example of caps and i mean same caps department just making a transformer thing um when we were designing the game we actually started by figuring out what components we wanted and then figured out what those components cost and then figured out from that okay if we want those components what else can we have and a lot of that the entire design of the game because we really, really wanted big, giant Transformers where the Transformer cards were just eye-poppingly big

that the cards you were playing with were dwarfed by just the awesomeness of the Transformers because look, it's a Transformers game, you want the Transformers to be awesome and we knew they wanted them double-sided the awesomeness of the Transformers. Because look, it's a Transformers game. You want the Transformers to be awesome. And we knew they wanted them double-sided because obviously they needed to flip from one into the other. Anyway, a lot of that, a lot of times we make a product, R&D does a little bit of work to sketch out what we want to do,

but then we go and talk to CAPS to figure out, can we make the product? Or more realistically, what components can be in the product? And what components being in the product sometimes will dictate some of the choices we make about how we build what we build. And like I said, I spend a lot of time on, you know, the virtual making of the product, because that is what I do. And just as much time and energy goes into, you know, just as much innovation, just as much thought, you know, every time we physically make something, whether or not it's the construction of the box or the materials used to make it or the graphic design of what it looks like,

all of that have dedicated teams who are spending a huge amount of time making sure that each of those things are the best that they can be. And, you know, like I said, I mean, there's nobody doing, you know, the equivalent drive to work about caps. But if one of the caps people had their own podcast, you know, there are endless topics that they could talk about. Some of which I completely forgot about because, like I said, I only interact with CAPS.

And usually my interaction with CAPS, because I'm the beginning part of the process, is I want to do this thing. Can I do this thing? Or what are the ramifications of me wanting to do this thing? What are the costs of doing this thing? Usually what I find these days is it's not that I want to do something that can't be done, it's I want to do something that maybe can't be done practically. That usually is the limitation. Like, even back,

going back to Innistrad, a good example where I wanted to put two connected cards in a booster together, what they came back and said is, we can do that at a 95% hit rate at the time. And I'm like, oh, well, that's not good enough. You know, we're not going to do something

if 5% of the time it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Obviously, with BattleBond, you know, like one of the interesting things also, by the way, that Caps has to deal with is, you know, I talk about how design technology has changed. Well, actual technology has changed. You know, if you go back to the early days of printing magic and go to now, while there are a few overlaps, we print on sheets and things, there's a few

things that are the same, pretty much it's radically different. Just how we do it and how it's made and how we transport stuff and how we check stuff and all that is a very different process. And that one of the things that R&D always cares about is, what is the technology? Because can it allow us to do things? Like, every time there's new technology, I'll just take the pairing, for example.

Once you say, I can guarantee two cards will show up together in a pack, you now have mechanics and opportunities to do things you might not have had before. Like, one of the things I talked about when we did Unstable, Unstable messed around with a lot of sort of future printing. Now ironically, even though we were way ahead, we weren't, we got a little too ahead of ourselves and some of the ideas we're playing with still, even today, aren't quite there yet. But I've seen a lot of stuff in the future of printing and there's some amazing things coming and that stuff really will enable us to do more and more interesting things because essentially the way I like to describe it is design will make use of whatever tool it

is given and that as more tools are made available, more things can be done. And so a lot of when people say, where's the future? Part of the future, I mean, part of the future is iteration. That's getting better at doing what we do. I feel we keep improving on that. But part of it is there's new tools and new opportunities, things that we never did before, not because we never thought of it,

but we never could do it before. And all of a sudden, oh, now things are opened up and now you have certain opportunities to do things that changes the dynamics of what we can design. So anyway, my hope today was just, I like doing podcasts from time to time in other parts of the company and making people realize that there's other teams that work really hard, that do a lot, and that I know when you open a pack of Magic cards that you're probably the most focused on what do the new cards do and how do they play.

And maybe you don't necessarily spend a lot of time looking at the booster pack, although you probably do because you're sitting there waiting for the draft. But maybe you don't spend as much time, you know, getting excited about the booster pack or the image on the box or stuff. But I mean, I know that's a huge part of the process and huge part of, you know, and that I think it's just like a given. Like, of course, the boosters look good. Of course, the boxes look good.

But there are people that spend a lot of time and energy making sure that is true. And so, today is a little bit of a nod of, you know, part of us making the game you love is doing a lot of things that you probably don't give a second thought about. But somebody does have to give a lot of time thinking about it, and they do. And one of those teams is Caps. So anyway, hats off to Caps today. They are a hard-working team that does really awesome stuff and they literally I talk about making magic they literally make the magic cards so next time you're

opening up a booster pack give a tip of the hat to the Caps team. So anyway I'm now at work so we all know what that means. Means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic it's time for me to be at work. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.