Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #658: Split Cards

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

In this podcast, I talk about the history of split cards—how they came to be and the many different times we've used them.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm telling one of my favorite stories. I'm going to talk about split cards. Now, I must preface this by saying, one of the things about doing this podcast for so long, like I'm in the 600s now, is whenever I come up with a topic, I'm like, have I done this topic before? And I didn't know whether I'd done the split card topic before. I looked and I looked and I couldn't find it. So maybe I did, maybe I didn't. If I did, I'll add new content so it'll be new. But this is one of my favorite stories.

So I was kind of surprised I couldn't find a podcast where I did it. And once again, maybe I did and just it didn't show up. But anyway, I'm telling it again if I did. Okay, so split cards. So for those that don't know what split cards are, imagine a magic card turned on its side, and instead of having one card, you have two cards on it. And then you can cast either card.

I'm going to talk about how split cards came to be, and sort of talk about how they've become a tool that we use in magic, that is something that has become reoccurring, I guess is a good way to say it. It's a deciduous mechanic that we use when we want to use. And it's shown up a bunch of times. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning of split cards, which is Unglued. So Unglued had a card in it called BFM, Big Furry Monster. And it was a card so big, $99.99, that it had to go into two cards.

You had to have a left side and a right side. So in order to cast it, you had to have both sides in your hand. That, according to all our market research, was the most popular card in Unglued. Well, Unglued out of the gate was very, very popular. So much so that we, um, I was asked to design an Unglued 2. Now, in between me starting to design it, uh,

we overprinted it and ended up having some issues and then we, Unglued 2 never happened. But I was, uh, I did design Unglued 2. In fact, we got as far as getting art in. There's art for it. Um, and then it, uh, we got as far as getting art in. There's art for it. And then it got put on hiatus, never to be made. Now, some of the art ended up unhinged,

and some of the card designs ended up unhinged. But a lot of it never ended up anywhere. I've written a couple different articles talking about it, posting art and cards and stuff from it. But anyway, the most important thing for this story is that in... So, I was trying... Inspired by BFM, I'm like, okay,

how do I come up with something as cool as BFM? And so I said, well, let's work backwards. So BFM is a card so big that it fits onto... It requires two magic cards. What if we made a card so big that it fits onto, it requires two magic cards. What if we made a card so small that two of them fit on one card? And that's where I started from, the idea of, okay, why, instead of having half a card on a card, what if we had two cards?

And we had figured out, if you turn it sideways, you can fit two, I can fit roughly two magic cards. The dimensions are such that if you turn it sideways, I mean, it's a little squat, but it looks very, very close to two magic cards. And so the question was, well, what would you do? And so I just said, okay, if I opened up a pack and there was a card that had two cards on it, what do I think I could do with it? And I said, okay, well, my assumption is I could cast one of them, and that seemed to be

the obvious answer, is okay, well, you have two choices and you can cast one of them. So that's how this first split card was made. The first split cards were just sort of an anti-BFM made for Unglue 2. But then Unglue 2 got put on hiatus. It didn't get made. And now

it did not get made. It looked like it was never getting made. So it wasn't like it got pushed off. Like, Unstable got pushed back a few times. But every time Unstable got pushed back, no one was saying we weren't making it. It was just like, oh, we're going to wait longer to release it. But Unglue 2, it was pretty clear that it was not getting made. In fact, I didn't even think we were going to make another unset at that point.

I mean, later we would make unhinged and then unstable. And so, I had what I thought was a pretty cool idea, but I didn't know where to use it or what to do with it. So, flash forward a couple years. We were at my dad's house in Tahoe. So I and Bill Rose and Mike Elliott were the design team for Invasion. And we decided to go away for a week. My dad, back in the early days, R&D would go visit my dad as a getaway.

And anyway, the three of us were there working. as a getaway. And anyway, the three of us were there working. And Invasion, the basic idea of Invasion was we wanted to do a gold set where the whole set was based around multicolor. And it was loosely based on something called Spectral Chaos, which Barry Reich, the first person to ever play Magic with Richard Garfield,

he's one of the original playtesters, he, different playtest teams had went off and made their own sets. The East Coast playtesters made Ice Age. The Bridge Club group made Mirage. Anyway, Barry, by himself, made a set called Spectral Chaos that we had never made. And so, but we had had the, we had purchased it or whatever. So Bill decided that we would use it as a springboard. We loved the idea.

And so Invasion really was the start of Bill as head designer. And one of the things that Bill was very up on was having more themes. Invasion really is the start of what I call the Third Age, where blocks started to have themes. They were about something. Before that, it was like, oh, every set had two mechanics. What are they? They were just two mechanics. Where Invasion was the first block that said, hey, it's about something. This is a multicolor block. And so, because we were doing multiccolor, it dawned on me that having the split cards, the way I had made them originally, they were allied color. So, you know, one was red

and one was green or one was blue and one was black. So I had made ally ones and I knew we were doing ally stuff in Invasion. So I said, okay, Bill, I got an idea for you. I know it's a little out there, but I think it's really cool, and I think it fits the set really well. So I showed him the split cards. And I drew them up, and it was always my intention that there were two cards on one card. That was how I envisioned

it. That's always how I wanted it. And I just thought it was very compelling that when you opened it up and just saw two mini cards, I thought it was clear what you needed to do that people could figure out what you would do with it that it was intuitive and it just was it was one of these cool things where you just

didn't expect it it's something that was magic going in a place that maybe you wouldn't have expected magic to go but in a way that was clean and cool and flavorful and looked interesting. And so I was excited, but I was a little nervous. I mean, I made these cards for an unset, right?

I made these cards because, you know, the whole point of an unset is we wouldn't do them in a blackboarded set. So I knew I was pitching something to Bill that was a little out there. So I remember I think I sketched them up a little bit so I could demonstrate them. In any way, I showed them to Bill and to Mike because it was at a desk. Mike hated them.

Mike, Mike Elliott. Mike did not like them. Mike thought they were, like they didn't look like a magic card. They weren't a magic card. But Bill was intrigued. And so there were three of us. I clearly wanted them in the set.

Bill liked them. Mike did not. But like, okay, two to one, we put them in the set. And so Mike was not a fan. And word got around that we had put these in the set because they were pretty out there. They were very different. And I mean, I was very open that I'd made them for an unset. I was very open that, you know,

I'd made them as something a little more experimental. And so what happened was, because these were kind of different and because Mike was not a fan, Mike was campaigning other places to sort of convince other people that we shouldn't be doing this. So when we began Invasion,

basically news of these had spread throughout the magic, different parts of the company that did magic. And the only person other than me and Bill who liked them was Richard Garfield. And Richard's take on it was, oh, this is interesting. This is an interesting idea. You know, Richard was definitely able to see, like, oh, this is a neat idea. Everybody else, I mean, the rest of R&D, brand, marketing, sale, anybody who could possibly give us an opinion, their opinion was, yeah, we should not be doing this.

And nobody liked them, other than Bill and I. Bill and I liked them and really thought, and the funny thing was, I think that Bill got emboldened by everybody telling him he shouldn't do it. Both Bill and I have a stubborn streak. I mean, I always, as the creators of them, I always believed in them. But there was a lot of skepticism. In fact, the very first meeting, so Henry Stern was the lead developer for Invasion. And the very first meeting, the very first things out of his mouth was, okay, can we just kill these?

And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Henry, Henry. Can we play them first? You know, before we kill them, let's see if there's any doubt. And I said to him, I know the way they're laid out is weird. You know, there's different ways to lay them out. They could look like a more traditional card.

That's not what I wanted. That's not my plans. But I was trying to convince Henry not to kill them. And so I said to him, look, let's just play with them. Let's see how they play. And then we'll decide from there. And eventually

we played with them and I got Henry to agree that they played well and they were fun. And I got Henry to agree that well, let's worry about it. I said, there's ways to lay them out that are much more like a normal-looking magic card. My idea is a little more out there, but let's just see. So little by little, I got Henry to agree that the cards played well. And then little by little, I got him and the team to agree that the layout was intuitive

and would be something that players would like. Meanwhile, Bill did the same stuff with the brand team. I mean, the interesting thing to me is the fact that we got them printed after... I mean, it was an uphill battle. Of all the battles that I've had to win, it's one of the ones that was the hardest because it really was me and Bill

against the world for quite a while. But little by little, I mean, the mechanic was fun. The mechanic was cool. So we ended up doing them in Invasion. We did them on five cards. Oh, early on, by the way, they were going to give them just, I don't know, like just name them like the name of any card. Like it's this and that.

It's like just two names. And I said, said oh but the idea that they're connected is important we don't want just give them two names so I proposed the naming convention of blank and blank meaning if you took the two cards and put and in between them they would go together so the idea is oh well this card is Assault and Battery. And Assault did the thing that Assault would do and Battery did the thing that Battery would do.

By the way, Assault and Battery, when I originally made them, was called Hit and Run, by the way. Okay, so I got the naming convention through. We put them in the pack. So I, back in the day, I don't always these days, just because of my family and, you know, I've been through a lot of pre-releases.

I used to go to every single pre-release. Now I tend to go to pre-releases of sets that I'm majorly involved in. But anyway, I went for the Invasion. I remember the Invasion pre-release really clearly, which was, it was in the basement of, for a while we had opened up stores, Wizards of the Coast game stores, and our marquee store was in the University District by the University of Washington, and it was two stories, and the basement was a place where tournaments were held. And I remember being in the basement during the pre-release, and what had happened was

one of the sheets had leaked. So players ahead of time had seen on the card sheet the split cards, but they didn't know what to make of it. And they rationalized away what it really was. Like, oh, it's an incomplete sheet and they're not sure which card's going to go there. And this means one of the two cards will

go there. I don't know. They came up with lots of excuses. But anyway, I went to the pre-release. Some people had heard something about them. But I'm watching. My favorite thing is I'm watching somebody open up the cards and he's fanning through the cards and he gets to a split card. And the look on his face is like,

what? And then you can see him turning it sideways and he's reading it. And then I get to see the light bulbs in his head. He figures out what it is. And he's just a giant smile. And that's the kind of thing. Just watching people interact with that for the first time.

Especially for a lot of people not knowing because while there was some stuff that got spoiled, not everybody reads the spoilers and stuff. So it was so much fun seeing people. Because we purposely did not preview the cards. The split cards we decided they were uncommons that we weren't going to preview them and be a surprise for players just to discover them.

You know, we previewed a lot of other stuff, but not the split cards. Okay, so we did... Invasion had the allied split cards. So, I mean, had five cards that are uncommon. So, white-blue, blue-black, black-red, red-green,

green-white. And we used the and naming convention. Then they showed up next in, um, in Apocalypse, um, where we did the enemy ones. So we had done the ally ones. Now the enemy ones ended up becoming, they're a little bit more powerful. Um, fire and ice, which is probably the most powerful of the early ones, was in Apocalypse. But anyway, we made... So we had made the ally ones in the first set

and made the enemy ones in the last set because the first two sets were ally, the last set was an enemy-themed, so those showed up. So the next time they show up is in Dissension. So a bunch of years later. So Dissension is the third set in the original Ravnica block. So we had split things up. So there were four guilds in the first set,

three guilds in the second set, and three guilds in the third set. So we kind of wanted a way to give some of the early guilds a little bit more something. But we still wanted the third set to feel cleanly like it's about these three guilds. So the solution to this problem was to bring back split cards. And the idea was that for all ten guilds, we would make split cards in which one half was one guild and one half was another guild, although the guilds always overlapped a color. And so that way it allowed us to make a few more cards for the guilds that had shown up in early sets but in a way that didn't take away from the third set being about the final three guilds

which I thought was a clever answer so also this was our first multicolor split cards because the original split cards while the original split cards were multicolored in the sense that one card was one color and one card was another color they were all mono the individual mini cards were multicolored in the sense that one card was one color and one card was another color, the individual mini cards were all always monocolor. So Dissension was the first time that we made split cards in which the mini cards were gold cards.

In fact, in this particular execution, both sides were gold cards. Okay, next time that split cards show up was in Planar Chaos. In Planar Chaos, we made some mono-color split cards. In fact, they're all red. As a way to show a different execution of red chaos, we put split cards in red. So the idea is, oh, you don't know what red's going to do. It might be this effect or that effect. And it let red have a little bit...

We played around... So Planet of Chaos was the alternate reality present set, where we were sort of messing around with stuff and doing things like we sort of took the color pie and reimagined it. And one of the things with Red is we were trying to show

how Red could do chaos in a few different ways. And so Red was a little more unpredictable in that we let red have more choice. So when you fought red, you didn't quite know what was going to happen was the idea. Anyway, so I think it was a vertical cycle, meaning there was a common, uncommon, and a rare. And in each case, there were two cards, both red. And I think one was cheaper and one was more expensive is how most of them worked. So it's like one you could do more early game and one you could do more late game.

Although in the late game you could do either, obviously. Then in Unhinged, Silver Border Sets always like to make fun of conventions of normal magic. And so we made a split card that itself was a split card. And then one of those split cards was a split card. And the reason we did that was it allowed us to make five cards, one of each color. And each one of the cards did a basic functionality. They tended to destroy something or counter something. So, I don't remember, but my guess is that black must have done a creature, and blue countered

instant or sorcery, and red destroyed a land, and green destroyed an artifact, and white destroyed enchantments. I guess something like that. And anyway, we called it Who, What, Where, When, and Why. One of the challenges was there was five was we had to give it five names, and we needed them to connect with an and.

So what we were doing was looking for a set of five things, and we came up with those words. We were able to sort of mix and match them to make them work. Anyway, that card, interestingly enough, has become a very, very popular cube card because while it's weird looking, it is a very functional card. It's like, hey, depending on your color,

you can deal with a problem, and this lets you deal with whatever problem if you have the right color to deal with it. So it's a very flexible card, and so it's become a very popular card for cubes. Okay. Next time we saw split cards was in Dragon's Maze. So Dragon's Maze tried something a little bit different.

So it again did, the split cards were guild cards. But this time we had a mechanic called Fuse. So this is the first time we added a mechanic to split cards. So what Fuse did is Fuse said, if you pay the Fuse costs, I'm sorry, Fuse said you are allowed to cast both cards. I think you had to pay the cost for both cards, but you're allowed to cast, you can cast either card or both cards. Does Fuse have a cost, or was it, I'm trying to remember whether Fuse had a cost

or whether it was just you were allowed to cast both sides. I don't remember. We did both and it's one of those problems. When I was playing around with it in design, we had tried it one way and then they tried the other way and then they, I don't remember how it finished up.

Fuse allows you to cast both sides. I don't remember if you pay extra or there's a fuse cost. There might be. But anyway, that's the first time we did split cards where we added a mechanic to them. I don't know how often we're going to do stuff like that, but I did appreciate

how it allowed you to sort of treat them a little bit differently. I know there's people that want us to make every split card fuse. The problem, by the way, is that fuse split cards are very hard to make because the way we design them is we make two effects that you might want to have together. So the idea is you can do A or you can do B, but A and B together interact in some way. Because to do A or B or A and B don't mean anything.

It's just, I mean, why not be like, why have the fuse to it? What makes fuse cool is that A plus B can do something. So they're hard to design and split cards are already difficult to design. Oh, the other thing, by the way, is because of the naming convention, one of the things that definitely influenced how we designed split cards was we tended to front load names and think of names and then design cards knowing that those were the names we wanted to do. So split cards really became this, the naming convention became a big part of how we designed them to make them a little bit more organically. While we do that in stuff like unsets, we don't normally design to names. That's not something Blackboarder does all that often.

I mean, we do top-down designs a lot. But as far as like, it's going to be called this, so make sure the cards do these things because this is the name, is not something you see very often in Blackboarder design. So that was definitely something that was really interesting in my mind of us trying to do something.

Just the way we designed them was different than normal. Okay, next time split cards show up, and I'm not sure whether to count this one or not. I'm going to. Amonkhet had Aftermath. So Aftermath was not a normal split card. In fact, they don't look like normal split cards. In fact, they have a different frame. But essentially, they are split cards in which card A you cast from your hand, and card

B you cast from the graveyard. We had talked about whether or not to do them as split cards, like to make them look like split cards. But in the end, we decided that it might be a little confusing since they don't work exactly like split cards, and so we gave them a slightly different frame.

I'm not even sure whether to include them in today's podcast because in some way they are split cards, in some way they're not. I decided to include it just because they're close enough that, you know, I need to film half an hour, so I decided to talk about them. So not only do they, I mean, they're different in hour, so I decided to talk about them. So, not only do they, I mean, they're different in the sense that you don't have a choice. The thing about split cards is you normally have a choice, and these

don't give you a choice. This gives you, like, you can do A from your hand and B from the grave. The naming convention, instead of doing and, since they're not normal split cards, is we did two blank, two blank two blank because the idea is you have to do the first card then do the second card and once again by the way I

I'm not even sure whether these are supposed to classify as split cards I put them down here because they're close enough that I thought I would talk about them they are kind of their own thing they didn't have the same naming convention they don't play quite the same the gameplay is different so in some ways I guess they're not really split cards. They're sort of split card adjacent. So I'll talk about them here, but they're not technically split cards, I guess.

Okay. Last time we've used them so far was Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. So here we tried something a little different. Is these both sides of the same guild. One side is a traditional gold card, meaning a traditional multicolored card.

And the other side is a hybrid. So let's take Golgariv. So one side might be one black green, meaning three mana, one black, one green. And the other side might be, or sorry, maybe it's like I know the traditional side tends to be more expensive, so three black, green. I don't remember the actual card. And the other side might be, you know, one black or green, black or green on the hybrid side.

So because one side is hybrid, they follow the rules of hybrid. So a multicolor design, you have to care about both colors, and you want to be something, ideally, that requires both colors. We've definitely shifted over the years a little bit, and we're more willing to allow something that could go in one color but thematically makes sense in the guild. But the hybrid side has to be something that each color can do individually. So the idea is if the card is 1HH, where H is

let's say black-green, that means mono-black could do this effect, and mono-green could do this effect. And I think in general the hybrid costs were the cheaper costs, and the traditional gold costs were the higher costs, if I remember correctly. And I think what was going on

was, I think Eric was leading set design when these got made. I think what was going on was I think Eric was leading set design when these got made I think the idea was that he wanted to do something that gave you flexibility within guild rather than making you play guilds together and he was kind of figuring out

where to use hybrid cards because that's a whole other podcast but hybrid was another tool that we tend to use that works well in Ravnica, and he was just trying to do something we hadn't done before. We tend to do split cards in Ravnica sets, or we often have done split cards, like we did

like Dissension had split cards, and so, anyway, split cards are something we do in Ravnica sets, hybrid is something we do in Ravnica sets. Hybrid is something we do in Ravnica sets. In fact, the first hybrid cards were in the original Ravnica. And so I think he thought mixing and matching them would just create something that was kind of fun. And anyway, so those are the cards of Guilds of Ravnica.

Now, one of the problems we ran into was every time we had made more split cards, we realized that the naming convention was limited. There's only so many blank and blank. Now, there's a lot of them. The reason we picked them in the first place was there's a lot of blank and blank expressions. But not every blank and blank expression makes sense for a Magic card. Because remember, when you're naming it, the individual name has to match the color it's on and then the overall expression has to kind of match the overall essence of the card

and so it was tricky and we were starting to paint ourselves into a corner so when we decided to do them for guilds of ravnica the decision was made let's come up with a new naming convention and something we think we could do for a while. And the idea here, I mean, one of the things we realize is split cards have become a tool, like I said, you're seeing right here, they show up from time to time. They are a tool in our toolbox, like I said, they're deciduous, which means any set is allowed to use them. They're free and open to any set.

And really the question is, the reason you use split cards is there's some value to what you're doing. The split cards help you do something. And as today's podcast shows, there's a bunch of different ways and times that that can be. Because of that, we now

accept the fact that we're going to keep doing split cards. The audience really likes them. Oh, what I never talk about is we put them in Invasion. So remember, by the way, I didn't finish the story. I told about behind the scenes. I didn't tell about out in the public. So there was a lot of nervousness about the split cards. And Bill and I worked really hard to slowly get everybody around on them, to get everybody

internally excited by them and on board. We did that. It was a long, steep hill. But anyway, the cards come out, and the audience goes ape. The audience loves them. They're really, really popular. To this day, I think they're in the top ten

of all-time guild mechanics, when players rate guild mechanics. They're very popular. Players love them. In general, A, players love choice. If you look historically, choice mechanics tend to do very well. And, look, they're fun. The way they look is really cute. It's funny, like I said, I had to have long...

I had to talk to a lot of people over a lot of time to convince them that my original... how I wanted to show them was the right way to show them. But once we actually made them, once we actually showed them to the public, they were endearing to the public. And it's funny, it is funny, like, as someone behind the scenes, how often you have something that is, like, I was so sure the players would like them. I was so sure the players were going to like them. Like, there's never a doubt in my mind. But sometimes, you know, the nature of doing new things that are different is getting people to see, like, I'm pretty good at seeing the thing that isn't there, seeing the future, saying, Like, I'm pretty good at seeing the thing that isn't there,

seeing the future, saying, okay, how is this going to go over? A lot of people, it's a lot harder. And so I know when I pitch new things, part of my job is to sell people on the coolness of the new thing. And anyway, split cars was really the thing that put that on the map where it's the first time I had to fight really, really hard for something. And I had to sort of go against the grain to get something made. So anyway, always will hold a near and dear place in my heart. So anyway, Doug Byer, who was doing the naming for the Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance,

needed to come up with a new naming convention. And I know he tried a bunch of different things. So in the end, what he ended up doing was he did this sort of alliterative thing where the cards both start with the same three letters. So that the cards, when you read them, they sound similar. Now they deviate because past the first three letters there are other letters or different words. But it just makes them thematically sound similar to each other

so it conveys this idea that oh well in this guild you can do this or this but they have a similar sound to them so that is the new naming convention my assumption is we'll do that until that becomes too hard for us to do and then maybe one day

we'll make another naming convention it's funny if you had asked, we'll make another naming convention. It's funny, if you had asked me when I made the naming convention for the original cards, the idea that one day we would run out of space because we made so many of them, I would not have guessed that. So that is definitely one of the, one of the cool things. The, my big takeaway, so one of the things, the reason I think that I like telling the story of, and I mean, if you pay attention to my media, I've definitely told the story before. I don't know if I've done it on my podcast before, but I've definitely written,

I know I've written an article about it, for example. and the reason I think I like to tell the story is that one of the one of the things about my job that I think is important is that I have to see the unseen if you will, that part of being a blue sky guy, of being a vision guy, is I have to see what isn't there. You know what I'm saying? That it is very easy to say, hey, here's something we've done. Let's do it again. And I'm all for doing things again. I'm all for reusing resources we've created.

But some of the time, you got to come up with new things things and that one of the challenging thing about doing new things is look we're in the 26th year of making magic like my job is to keep reinventing things in a place where we've done nothing but reinvent things for years on end and so um

cause like one of the interesting things about the split cards from a historical standpoint is um at the interesting things about the split cards from a historical standpoint is at the time I pitched the split cards, we had never deviated our frame. I mean, Unglued had made the full art lands, which I guess is the first, maybe the first time we had changed frames in any way.

But up to that point, I mean, now we added gold to the set. I mean, we added gold to the set I mean we we we we we we we

we we we we we we we we

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we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we we They did have built into them some sense of looking like a magic card. But it was, historically speaking, the first time where, especially in a Blackboarder project, where like, okay, I want to do something. But in order to do that, I have to make the card not look like a normal magic card. It has to look different. And I think the resistance at the time is that's a big barrier.

And I think the resistance at the time is that's a big barrier. The idea that, like, one of the things I find when I'm trying to do stuff is, at some point I say, we've always done thing X. What if we didn't do thing X? And so, for example, we've always used this frame. What if we didn't use that frame? That is a big, you know, the first time you do something is the hardest. They always say that zero to one is the biggest change.

You know, one to two, not as big a change as zero to one. And two to three, three to four, four to five, you know, it just diminishes over time. But zero to one, that's the biggest change. And so, usually the biggest fights I have is, like, for example, another major fight I had was over double-faced cards. And that's the same issue is every magic card has a back. What if we didn't have a back? What? You know, now once, the funny thing is once we broke through that, once double-faced cards were a thing, okay now, you know, we found other ways to use double-faced cards. You know what I'm saying? We, what if there's a planeswalker and he's just a creature and he sparks and becomes a planeswalker?

Or with these lands, like we've started to figure out other ways to make use of the technology. That's because once you introduce the technology and get people used to it, you know, it makes other things. And so split cards, beyond just being cool unto themselves, split cards really were the thing that said, hey, magic cards could look more than just like normal magic cards. It really opened up the gate for us saying we can really broaden, that the card frame itself was a tool for innovation. That was not something, like I said, and I often talk about how the unsets really are

paving new ground. Unglued was the first set that did that, and BFM did that. The four lands did that. You know, I definitely played around, you know, there was frames in which I had a larger text box, or I had a lot more room for the name, where I, the unsets really played around the idea that we messed with the frame as a component and that led me to the idea of what if in Blackboard or what if that's something we could do and split cards were that battleground split cards were coming to Blackboarder and saying hey we should be able to change the frames and the funny thing is the offshoot of that is so many different things like in my mind the success of split cards,

while split cards are a cool mechanic and we use them and people like them, it goes way beyond just the individual mechanic itself. It really was the fight to say, kind of the fight for frames. And if you know now, look, we really embraced the idea that one of the components of game design is the frame. And that using the frame as a tool, we can do things and convey things and execute things that we couldn't without the aid of that.

Like, we now have two people on staff in R&D who do frames, you know, who do graphic design so that we have the ability to manipulate and play with frames. Because that has now become such a valuable tool to us that we have the ability to manipulate and play with frames because that has now become such a valuable tool to us that we we want that ability and that ability wouldn't be there if not for um the fight we had over split cards so the the story of split cards goes beyond just hey i like split cards and really was me fighting for something bigger. And so, even if you don't like split cards, if you like hybrid cards or double-faced cards or, I mean, Planeswalker cards, pick a card in which we needed the frame to convey something

and we went with a different frame. That was really the thing that sort of broke down that barrier. But anyway, that, my friends, is all the stuff I have to say about split cards. So I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast. Anyway, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.