Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #596: Izzet

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

This podcast is part of my guild series where I walk through the history of the guild through all three visits to Ravnica. In this podcast, I talk all about the blue-red guild.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. Okay, so today I'm continuing on with the guilds. I've talked to Mir. I've talked to Selesnya. Today we talk Izzet. Blue-red. Okay, so Izzet has always been an interesting one. So philosophically, blue is all about the want of perfection. The idea being that you are born a blank slate. And with the proper knowledge, the proper training, the proper tools, you can be whatever you want to be. So blue tends to be very technology-oriented, tool-oriented.

That it wants the latest thing because it believes if it's going to be the best that it can be, a big part of that is access to the latest technology. Okay, so we take red. Red is all about the idea of following your passion. You know, it wants, let's say, freedom through action. Blue, by the way, is perfection through knowledge. And it wants to sort of follow its heart. It wants to live, you know, it wants to live a life that's fulfilled. You know, it wants to be able to embrace its passions and that, you know, the whole idea to red is you're supposed to live life by the gusto and do what you want, you know, do what comes to you and be spontaneous and, you know, and live an exciting life and live a life of, of, you know, meeting all your emotions. So one of, one of the sides of that is red tends to be the color that most dips into art. Red is very much into sort of following your passion. And, um, you know, a lot of the, the sense of the artist very much ties into red, um, where blue has a lot of the sense of the

scientist to it. Um, so what happens when you take the scientific technical approach of blue and the artistic passion of red and you smush them together? Well, you end up with creativity. Blue and red come together. And so, you know, the idea that is it philosophically we always liked was kind of these mad inventors. That they are, they just are passionate designers. That they're constantly trying to make the greatest thing they can. But they're so caught up in their passions and their spontaneity

that they are just making the craziest things. Now some of them work. It's not as if they're not, they are smart. But they do make kind of mad inventions, if you will. Okay, one of the problems we've always had, though, is that is what they represent philosophically. Philosophically, it's kind of like you know, passion, scientific exploration. You know, the quest of technology through the eye of the artist is sort of blue-red.

But mechanically, blue and red, last time we talked about Selesnya and I said how white and green were the colors most about creatures. Well, blue and red are the colors least about creatures. So in a set,

when we make a set, I think 62% of white cards are creatures, 59% of green cards, 56% of black cards, 53% of red cards, and 50% of blue cards. So blue and red, while they still have plenty of creatures, are the smallest. They're the least amount of creatures. And because they're the least creatures, they tend to have the most spells. So blue and red have become the spell, especially instants and sorceries. So in Izzet, we sort of played into that. They were the spell colors. They were the colors that most cared about instants and sorceries.

And one of the challenges has always been that the kind of flavor mad scientists feel and mechanical instants and sorcerers matter have always been a little bit at odds with each other. You know, the mad scientist wants to be more concrete. It's making things. But the instance sorcerers more might want to be about what they're doing. And so, you know, the creative team's done a pretty good job of trying to capture the

general feel of Izzet on their cards. You know, the creative team's done a pretty good job of trying to capture the general feel of Izzet on their cards. But it's just something in which it's probably the guild where the philosophical sort of flavor and mechanical definition are the farthest apart from one another. So that's been an ongoing issue that we've had to deal with when trying to sort of deal with the Izzet. deal with the Izzet. So, Guildpack was the first time, so the Izzet, the Azorius, and the

Gruul showed up in the, so Descension, not Descension, Guildpack. So the first time we went to Ravnica, it was Ravnica, Guildpack, Descension. And the middle set is the set that had Izzet in it. Interestingly, of all the sets that we've designed for Ravnica,

of Ravnica, of Guildpack, of Dissension, of Return to Ravnica, of Gatecrash, of Dragon's Maze, of Guilds of Ravnica, of Ravnica Allegiance, of all eight guild sets, I have worked on seven of them. The one I was not on the design team for was Guildpack. Now, I was. I became head team for was Guildback. No, I was. I became head designer shortly before Ravnica started. So I did oversee this ad, and obviously I had some impact on it.

But it's the one team that I wasn't directly on the team. Anyway, so the mechanic they came up with was a pretty good Instants in Sorcery Matters mechanic. It's called a Replicate. So the way a Replicate works is you can pay extra mana, and for every time you pay extra mana, you get to copy the spell. And how much the spell costs and how much it costs to Replicate the spell varies. Sometimes the spell costs more and the Replicate cost is less. Sometimes the spell is a little cheaper but the replicate costs more.

It can vary a little bit. Usually the replicate costs a little bit less than the cost of the spell. So doing it the first time is the most and then extra times costs a little bit less per spell. Now replicate was a pretty fun mechanic. It went over pretty well with the player base

but the challenges were, okay, so once again, now the first set that had them only had three guilds in it, and the extra tricky thing was you never drafted guild pack by itself. You always first drafted, I think back in the day it was two packs of Ravnica and then one pack of guild pack was how it was drafted, I believe, back in the day. So Guild Pack really supplemented what you did in the first pack. Now, one of the interesting things about the way original Ravnica worked was we had four guilds and every color was represented twice except for blue and red.

So blue and red had extra individual monocolored spells. There was no multicolored blue-red spells, but there were more mono-colored blue and mono-colored red spells. So one of the things you could do if you were trying to draft is you could draft blue and red knowing that you wanted to go into Izzet in the third pack

and just pull up, there were just more blue and red spells to take. The other thing is, if you look at the guild, okay, so there is only one blue guild in that set. Um, uh, there's no other blue guild. Uh, but there was a second red guild, which was Gruul.

Um, the thing was, because you drafted as the third pack, you never really drafted, is it with Gruul? That's just not the way it worked. So more of the way we had to think about it in that set was, okay, what are the blue and red guilds in the first thing that you might combine it with? So for example, I might draft Dimir and then sort of pick up Izzet in the last pack. Like I might draft Dimir, pick up some extra red cards in the first two packs and then go after getting Izzet in the third pack.

in the first two packs and then go after getting Izzet in the third pack. Or I could get Boros in the first pack and then pick up some blue, extra blue in the first pack and then pick up blue in the last pack and I could do Boros and Izzet. The idea being that we had to sort of think how you would combine things. Now the interesting thing is Selesnya and Golgari had zero overlap with Izzet. So Izzet really overlapped with Boros and with, what is that, Boros and the blue one was Dimir. Dimir and Izzet actually worked a little bit together because they're both slower, a little bit slower. Izzet ended up being sort of a tempo-oriented guild.

Blue and red when it plays together. What tempo means is I'm constantly sort of doing things to put you off balance so that I'm beating you because it's not that I'm necessarily always destroying your things as much as I'm just keeping you a step behind. Bounce is a good example of tempo where I take a creature and put it back in your hand. It's not that the creature is gone forever, but you've lost a turn of utility out of it. And a lot of the way that is a tense of function is it uses that utility and that tempo to

sort of get incremental advantage and slowly beat you down. that tempo to sort of get incremental advantage and slowly beat you down. When put together with Dimir, you know, Dimir had Transmute as its mechanic, and the blue Transmute cards would allow you to go get some of the cards you needed out of your deck. So the Transmute actually worked just fine. And if you Splash in Black, if you went Dimir plus Izzet, you just had a slightly slower gameplay. But Dimir, once again, tempo and card advantage, because Dimir is very about

control card advantage, actually has a decent amount of overlap. So those had some synergy between them. Boros was a little trickier. Boros was more aggro. If you went Boros, Splash, and Blue for Izzet, you tended to try to take the Izzet cards try to use the tempo thing

to help you with playing an aggro because you can go aggro tempo it's a little harder and aggro less likes playing three colors but there was a viable thing that you could do if you were trying to draft that as you will see in later guilds we start having things where you get, like...

The weird thing about original Ravnica was the way you drafted it, the second and third set didn't really let you... Like, you couldn't just draft Izzet in a vacuum. You couldn't just draft a red-blue deck. I mean, you could... Well, red-blue is weird. You could, in the first pack, first two packs,

draft red-blue just because there were extra blue and red cards. But something like Gruul or Zorius, you really have super hard to draft just those colors. Okay, anyway, Replicate went over pretty well. It was a fun mechanic. It definitely allowed you to sort of, as you got more mana, allowed your spells to kind of get bigger

because in copying them, they essentially created a larger impact on what they did. Okay, so then we get to Return to Ravnica. So Return to Ravnica, Izzet was in the first set. It was in Return to Ravnica. So the first set was Izzet,

it was Azorius, it was Selesnya, it was Golgari, and it was Rakdos. So now we're in a system where we have five guilds, you're drafting all five, and you can, in fact, draft two color. So, okay, so the trick of this one was, so Ken Nagel was the lead designer, and Ken had created a mechanic during the second great designer search.

Ken came in second in the, I'm sorry, the first great designer search. Ken came in second in the first great designer search. Ken came in second in the first great designer search, losing to Alexis Jansen. And one of the mechanics that Ken had made was a mechanic called overload. And the idea of overload is it went on instants and sorceries, and what it did is it changed the targeting. So normally the idea of the spell would just target a single target and then if you pay the overload cost it would target every legal target it could. So for example, target creature gets plus one plus O and is unblockable. But if I overload it,

all target creature, you would say target creature you control. In order for overload to work we would specify whether it was for you or not for you, so that when you overloaded it, it only hit the things you wanted. So Overload would say, oh, okay, target creature you control gets plus one, plus O, and is unblockable. Well, if you overload it, now all creatures you control get plus one, plus O, and are unblockable. And the idea was, now sometimes you might do damage to the opponent's creature, or then you do damage to all the opponent's creatures. You know, it, um, whenever expanded, it sort of took the effect you wanted and went bigger.

Um, now the thing that this did was it, um, it was a mechanic that went on instants and sorceries. So obviously, since it is very instant and sorcery focused, it made a lot of sense to go on them. Um, I, the thing I always had with Overload, instant and sorcery focused, it made a lot of sense to go on them. The thing I always had with Overload, I mean, I think Overload is a fine instant and sorcery mechanic. In retrospect, I don't know it was a great

Izzet mechanic in that it is not... I mean, if you like to play into the idea that the Izzet are these wild inventors and that often part of wild invention is things blowing up in your face, which sure, you could represent a little bit of that or maybe you could represent them, you know, that they're I don't know, they're tinkering in some ways, that they're constantly expanding I don't know, I mean you could, we tried hard to sort of give an Izzet feel to Overload

I think Overload. I think Overload is not inherently... I mean, it's the kind of thing that with proper flavoring you can make it feel is-it-y, but it is not something in a vacuum. I feel like it was a little bit more disconnected. I think the reason Kenroy liked it was it was a fun mechanic, and it did... Hey, it needed to go on Instants and Sorceries and wanted to be in a place where you could have Instants and Sorceries.

The other reason it was a decent guild mechanic is it is a pretty restrictive mechanic as far as card design. You need to have things in which you're willing to do both the singular effect and the global effect on one card

and one rarity. Like, one of the problems we had when making Overload cards is you know, you hit one creature, that feelsarity. Like, one of the problems we had when making overload cards is you know, you hit one creature, that feels common. Hit all creatures, eh, that doesn't feel so common anymore. And we had to be very careful. It wasn't easy, for example, to make commons just because we don't make very many

commons that hit all creatures, or all the subset of creatures. Usually the higher rarities do that. And then, at the higher rarity, sometimes when you do the singular thing, yeah, the overload version felt rare, but the singular didn't quite feel rare. And so it was tricky to design.

And then even just the rarity issue, just the overall number of effects that you both want to target one thing and want to target a group, it is not that big. You know, I mean, for starters, it had to target a group, it's just not that big. For starters, it had to be a targeted spell. And then it had to be a targeted spell that it made sense that you would target a lot of creatures.

I mean, it wasn't that we weren't able to make the spells we needed. We did. In Dimir, I talked about how Cypher ran out of space and we're scratching the bottom of the barrel to get space. That wasn't overload. Overload, we did manage to sort of fill up the space we had. I don't think we could have done overload in a much

bigger space than we did. I mean, on some level, you could argue it's good for guild mechanic because it's not that big. And guild mechanics tend to be smaller. My real issue is just a very, as a color pie purist who really gets into the color philosophy

a little bit of a stretch color philosophy wise although once again the disconnect between instants and sorceries and is its general sense I mean already has that thing okay so let's talk a little bit about the guilds we had to play with so once again this was a set we were drafting drafting five. So the basic strategy, as I've

explained in other podcasts, is if you have five guilds, the default strategy is drafting a two color deck of one of the guilds. And the secondary strategy is drafting a three color deck that is two of the guilds. So let's look at how the guild lightened up. So Izzet, blue and red. So on the blue side was Azorius. So if you play blue, white, and red together, you're playing Izzet with Azorius. So Azorius is a slow controlling deck. Izzet is a tempo deck. Those actually combine not so poorly. Some of the things that you're using for tempo,

like a lot of what a control deck is, is I need to get set up. I need to stall you until I get set up and take control of the game. And a lot of tempo is I'm trying to stall you, but while being aggressive. I'm trying to stall you so I can get in the hits. If you combine the two of them,

both of them have a lot of stall strategies, and you can either lean toward Izzet where you're using the tools of Azorius to help you with your stalling to get through for aggression, or if you lean toward Azorius, you're helping your tempo stuff to help you slow things down to get control of the game. So the Azorius mechanic was Detain. So the Azorius mechanic was Detain. Detain is an action that target creature can't attack, block, or use its abilities until... Is it your next turn? For a turn. So it's very tempo-y.

So it did make sense and played just fine with Izzet. So on the other side, Izzet got together with Rakdos, which was red-black. And Rakdos had... What was the name of the mechanic? It was a mechanic where you could choose whether or not it came into play with a plus one, plus one counter.

And if it did, it couldn't block. So the idea was you were trying to figure out sort of what aggression, how much aggression you wanted. What was that called? Unleash? Unleash, I think it was called. Now, once again,

if you get Raktos together with Izzet, you're getting a little bit more aggressive. Raktos is also one of those decks that is what I call kind of aggression plus. It's trying to attack, but the way that Raktos tends to work is it uses all its destruction spells to kind of clear the way. So it has

some control elements to it, but it is more like, I'm trying to attack you, not quite as fast as a true aggro deck like Boros might, but quick enough in that I'm using my spells to sort of get things out of the way. Well, a tempo deck and kind of a more controlly aggro

deck like Rakdos, those, once again, also can be synergistic. You're playing more into the aggressive elements of Izzet and sort of using tempo and the destruction of Rakdos to clear the way to get your things through. So both those strategies definitely could work together. It's just funny in that it's sort of how you, like, when you combine with other colors or other guilds, it's just how are your tools being used and usually what happens is one of the guilds

is kind of providing the how to win and the other is using tools to advance that and that you can lean either way. One of the cool things about drafting the guilds is if I draft a blue-red deck splashing black where it's Izzet with a little bit of Arachdos or I draft a red-black deck splashing blue for a little bit of Izzet, you know, both those decks are all three colors, you know, blue, black, red, but they play a little bit differently depending on sort of how you're doing it and that's one of the cool things about Ravnica is you have a lot of nuance in how you draft and just the way the games play out a little bit differently depending on sort of how you're doing it, and that's one of the cool things about Ravnica, is you have a lot of nuance in how you draft, and just the way the games play out are a little bit different

based on the choices you made. One of the cool things about Ravnica. Okay, so Overload went over okay. It was probably middle of the pack. It wasn't as much, I mean, Replicate wasn't necessarily, Replicate, so when I grade things, I take the four quadrants, meaning the audience gives it a grade.

And then is it in the top 25%, the second 25 if I remember correctly, I think Replicate was second, like the 50th or 75th percentile, and that Overload was 25th or 50th percentile? Anyway. So that brings us to Guilds of Ravnica. So in Guilds of Ravnica, we were very focused in... I mean, the funny thing is I had never led a set before that had Izzet in it. I did not lead. I wasn't even on the team

for Guildpact. And Return of Ravnica, I was on the team, but Ken Nagle ran the team. So this is the first time that I was the lead for a set that had Izzet. And I, for those who don't know, I feel I am a very Izzety person. Interestingly, Izzet is not my... So this is an interesting sign. I'm a very Izzety person. That's my personality. Yet, I'm not the biggest Izzity person. Interestingly, Izzit is not my... So this is an interesting sign. I'm a very Izzity person.

That's my personality. Yet I'm not the biggest Izzit player. You know, like, I'm much more likely to play Simic or Kagari. They're just a little more Johnny-ish compared to Johnny. And I kind of wanted Izzit to have... Like, I felt like Izzit, philosophically, was very Johnny-oriented. But the way it played out was a little less so. And I wanted to see, could we add in a little bit more of the mad scientist?

Like, one of the things I loved about Izzet as a guild was their embrace of creativity, the idea of how they sort of just, you know, would create these odd inventions that combine things in neat and cool ways. And I feel like we never quite got that part, the creativity part, we never quite got out of Izzet. So one of my goals was I wanted to try to do that this time. I really wanted to get a little bit more creativity into the Izzet.

So the first thing we tried was splice onto instant and sorcery. So for those that might not know, so in Champions of Kamigawa block, we made a mechanic called splice onto instant and sorcery. So for those that might not know, so in Champions of Kamigawa Block, we made a mechanic called splice. In the set, it was splice onto arcane. Arcane was a brand new spell subtype on instant sorceries that we introduced that only existed in the set,

in Champions of Kamigawa Block. And the idea with Arcane was you get to spend mana, if it's in your hand, to basically attach it to the spell that's being cast. And then the spell does its normal thing and does what you spliced onto it, but the spell doesn't leave your hand. You're kind of splicing it onto this other spell, but you get to do that and still but the spell doesn't leave your hand. You're kind of splicing it onto this other spell, but you get to do that and still

have the spell in your hand to later cast it as a spell. Interesting, real quickly, when I made Splice, the original version I had for Splice was not working out of your hand, but working out of the graveyard. And the idea was you could splice cards onto cards and I think

there was one version where it was a little more flashback. You would splice it once cards and I think there was one version where it was a little more flashback. You could splice it once and there was another version where you could just splice it as many times as you wanted. We then decided it made a little bit more sense if it was sitting in your hand where you had some tension between casting it versus not casting it. Where if it sat in your graveyard

you always would cast it first and there was a little less interesting tension there. So splice splice's biggest problem in Kamigawa was it was really graveyard, you always would cast it first, and there's a little less interesting tension there. So, Splice's biggest problem in Kamigawa was it was really parasitic. Like, it was splicing onto something that only existed in that set. Like, if you wanted to play Splice on a arcane,

you had to have arcane spells. But what's that on arcane spells? Only champions block. Only Kamigawa block. Nobody else had that. So, it was a little too parasitic. Late in the process, because I actually was not on the design team for Kamigawa, but Nobody else had that. So it was a little too parasitic. Late in the process, because I actually was not on the design team for Kamigawa, but I was on the development team. Even though I made the mechanics.

I made a bunch of mechanics. In the early days, before I became head designer, although I became head designer during portrayers, I used to do a lot of design work where I wasn't technically on the team, I used to do a lot of design work where I wasn't technically on the team, but I would do a lot of work helping the team.

So if you've heard me talk about Onslaught or stuff, there's teams that I'm not even credited on that I did a lot of work on, and it helped a lot. Anyway, I made a bunch of mechanics, even though I wasn't on the design team. I made Splice. Richard and I made Flip. Okay, so

late in the process during development, it dawned on me that maybe we could do Splice on Instants and Sorceries. And I brought that up, and I think the lead developer, I think it was Brian Schneider, and what he said to me was it's just too late. We've done too much work with it as

is. That's a major change. It's too late in the development process to make that change, even though it's an interesting idea. So in the back of my head, I always said, okay, at some point we should do splice on instant sorceries.

It felt like the less parasitic version of splice. So the very first thing we tried, remember in a previous podcast, I talked about how we started the meeting by writing every mechanic we formally had done that would make sense in that guild. And one of the ones we wrote down for

Izzet was Splice. The thing I liked about Splice was the idea of mixing and matching spells. It was like, oh, well, if we could pick effects that kind of blended with each other, then there would be this neat idea of I'm the mad

scientist making a spell. And that felt pretty cool and that felt pretty easy. We played with it and it ended up being one of those things where the utility of instant sorcery is a little bit higher than just arcane. And it kind of meant

that either we had to give a cost to every instant sorcery in standard which was also kind of meant that either we had to give a cost to every inch of sorcery in standard, which was also kind of hard because subsets had already been made ahead of us, or we had to put that tax on the splice stuff itself, and then it just got kind of unwieldy and not particularly usable. The whole point of splice is it wants to be a cheap cost, so you have the mana to splice it. But because of the power level of being able to do anything, anyway, it just didn't really work out.

We tried it, and it just, we couldn't find a clean solution that allowed us to make cool, fun splice cards that could be done in a way where they easily were spliceable. Okay, so next, we tried a bunch of different things um the next thing that we did

um which I will refer to as um Jewel I'm not sure we called it Jewel

at the time but I think when they played with inset design um Jewel Jewel's Robins tweaked it a little bit

and so they ended up calling it Jewel although J-E-W-E-L is Jules. So the way it worked was it went on instants and sorceries and the idea was when you cast this instant or sorcery, after it resolves, exile it.

And then, whenever you cast another instant or sorcery, you can play that card for free. And the idea was, they were small effects, but you then can sort of mix and match them together because we were trying to recreate what we had been doing in... what we had been doing in... Worth a Splice.

I know in set design they ended up moving it, so instead of being free, you had to pay, you could cast it again, but you just put them on cheaper things so you had the mana to cast them. That had a similar feel and definitely had some of the experimentation. In the end though, Eric realized that you were gaining a lot of card advantage and that was causing problems. It was a little bit too efficient. So Eric was trying to figure out how to sort of get some of that

mixing and matching spells feel, but in a way that wasn't kind of putting you up cards. And so then he came up with the idea of, well, what if you had to discard a card to use it? And then he realized that of, well, what if you had to discard a card to use it? And then he realized that, oh, it just was easier to put it in, instead of having it in exile, and then if you used it, it goes to the graveyard, it just made more sense to be in the graveyard, and then if you use it, it goes to exile.

So they ended up having sort of a flashback feel to them. But the big difference is normally with flashback you have a cost and traditionally it's a larger more expensive cost for the second time you cast it and here it's the same cost that you were casting out of the graveyard as the same cost it cost to cast it

but because you were discarding a card in some ways it was a combination you were discarding a card, in some ways it was a combination between flashback and a mechanic called retrace. What retrace did is it allowed you to discard land to pay a mana cost, essentially copy a spell that's in your graveyard. Retrace spells were on instant sorceries, and it turned your lands into copies of these spells. And that was something that was... This is kind of a cross between flashback and retrace, that it allows you to

turn cards in your hand essentially into another version of this card. But you don't go up in card advantage, because you had to trade a card for it. And then, as Eric was sort of working around with the sets around it, so remember, in this set, Izzet overlaps with Dimir and overlaps with Boros.

So when overlapping with Dimir, Dimir has Surveil. Surveil is a sort of scry-like variant where you look at the top end cards of your library, you can put them in any order you like, and you can choose any number of them and put them back on top of the library in any order, and the rest you can put in your graveyard. So in a world of Jumpstart, sorry, the mechanic ended up being called Jumpstart.

In a world of Jumpstart, Surveil is nice because sometimes what you want to do is you can dump the jumpstart stuff into your graveyard because you can cast it out of your graveyard. So, you know, you could use the surveil to interact with sort of the graveyard component of Izzet. And, once again, I talked about this before,

but Dimir and Izzet definitely have some overlap. They do have some, but Dimir and Izzet definitely have some overlap. I did talk about this before. They do have some overlap. Dimir is a little bit more... Oh, no, did I talk about this? Maybe I did. Yeah, I did talk about this.

Dimir is card advantage, sort of trying to aggro using card advantage to do what it wants to do. It's doing a lot of trading and stuff. And, you know, Izzet is very more tempo-oriented. Well, those two blend together pretty well. So Blue, Black, Red allows you that. And then you can use your Surveil and your Jumpstart together.

Izzet with Boros was a little bit trickier. You know, once again, you're trying to use your tempo as a means to help out with your aggression. Because, obviously, Boros is the fastest, most aggressive deck that we make. The one thing we did try to do is make sure that our jumpstart cards in red were things that the Boros would want, the things that they tended to be combat-oriented or more aggressive-oriented, so that there's the kind of thing that the red cards have good overlap. You know, they played obviously well in an Izzet deck,

but they also played well in a Boros deck. And Eric worked really hard to make sure... Of all the connections mechanically, I will admit that Boros and Izzet, Mentor and Jumpstart had the least inherent connection to them. Most of the other ones, like Surveil and Jumpstart have some synergy between them. But one of the things that happens when you're building a Raptor cassette, where you have five sets and they have to sort of connect in a circle,

is usually you can connect everything, but in the end, the first one's got to connect to the last one, and usually that's the hardest one to make the cleanest connection. And the way you end up doing it is not by sort of the core essence of the mechanics, but by the execution of the mechanics. The cards that you do, you know, the red mentor cards and the red jumpstart cards, both have to be careful how the other deck might want to make use of them. The other deck, you know, if you're having Boros, Splash, Izzet, the Jumpstart cards make sense.

If you're having Izzet, Splash, Boros, the Mentor cards make sense. And so having that mix was important. So once again, since I'm talking about Guilds of Ravnica shortly after, I mean, as I'm recording this, the pre-release happened, but the set isn't released yet. So I obviously don't have a lot of data about how much people like it. The one thing that I will say that I like a lot about Jumpstart is it is the

first, is it mechanic, guild mechanic, that really taps, I feel, into the idea of sort of creativity, and you get to sort of mix and match spell effects. It's not perfect. I mean, we definitely experimented with things that went a little further in our design, in vision design. But I'm happier, you know,

we're moving in the right direction. I feel like every time we get to Ravnica, we kind of improve our tools. And I admit that it is the guild that's probably the biggest challenge. But I'm happy how it feels, and I do feel that it has a pretty Izzet sensation. And the gameplay is a lot of fun. I do think that Eric and the set design team and all the play design team, one of the things about Guilds of Ravnica is I think it's a very fun set to play

because the guilds both have strong identity and do what they do, but they work together really well. And the synergy between the guilds really is, in my mind, the secret sauce of a Ravnica design. If you want to make something where the guilds both feel good in isolation and feel good in conjunction. And I feel that Guilds of Ravnica does that really well. So anyway, that, my friends,

is all there is to say about Isit. It is definitely one of the guilds that has... I mean, it stayed pretty true. I mean, it is the instant sorcery guild. Mechanically, it stayed pretty true. And its flavor of the madventors, you know,

the creative team always does a good job, and it always has the names that kind of blend words together. You know, it has a good sensibility. And I feel like, you know, with time, we're getting even better of sort of combining the mechanical identity with the flavor identity. And that is something that I do appreciate. But anyway, I'm driving up to work.

So we all know what that means. It means that's 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 all next time.