Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #665: Lessons Learned – Unstable

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

This is another in my series "Lessons Learned" where I examine the lessons I've learned from sets I led or co-led. Today, I talk about the third Un- set, Unstable.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's trying for the drive to work. Okay, so I do a series called Lessons Learned, where I talk about all the lessons I had designing or co-designing a set. The last one I did, I talked about Guilds of Ravnica, and I realized I actually missed one. So I'm going to go back and do a set that I have not talked about. So that is Unstable. Now I've done podcasts on Unstable, but I've never done a lessons learned on Unstable. So I thought today I would talk about all the things I learned about doing the third unset. Now for starters, this set was a very different experience from almost any other thing I've worked on. The biggest reason is it took place over seven years. For example, we were in design for multiple years and then we were in development for quite a while as

well and then there was a big gap between the set being done and it coming out because it got delayed a couple times. So, and more so than that, it's also one of the few sets, at least in modern time, where I was with it all the way through. It's not often that I run a set in Vision that I'm on the set design team. This was actually back when we had design development. But it's not often that I'm on the set design team. This is actually back when we had design development, but it's not often that I do both. Way back when, I used to be on design teams and development teams,

back when everybody was on the development team because we didn't have a lot of developers. But I haven't really done that in a long time. And while I have been on some development teams, usually I would be on development teams that I wasn't on the design team. teams, usually I would be on development teams that I wasn't on the design team. And so the idea of me leading the design team and being on the development team is almost unheard of. Usually, the person leading the design would not be on the development team. But the unsets are near and dear to my heart. This was definitely a passion project of mine. And like I said, it

required a lot of will to get it through the system. So I was very involved from the very start of the product to the very end. You know, I was actually talking with the editor. I was talking with the people doing flavor text and naming. I was talking with, I am the rules manager for UN. So I had to talk rules manager stuff and templating and organized play. And the commander, people that run commander, made the Un sets, the Un cards, available for a couple months to play in commander. So there was a lot of communication I had all through the process.

And so it is definitely a set that I've done more on than most sets. And so when I talk about lessons learned, seven years, multiple teams, there was much to learn. So that's what today's topic is, is me talking all about what I learned from Unstable. So first off, let's talk a little bit about getting the product made. So first off, let's talk a little bit about getting the product made. Because most of the time when I'm trying to make a magic set, it's a done deal by the time I work on it. By the time I'm working on it, it's a known quantity that, oh, we're making this. It is rare that I start working on something that at the time I start on, we don't know if we're going to make it.

That is a weird experience for me. But the thing about Unstable was that we knew that part of the way to get it made was to make it a good value proposition behind the scenes. And part of that was, magic's a hungry monster. It's always looking for new things. We knew it would be a lot easier to say, look, we've made this. It exists. Why don't we put this out?

Versus, hey, this doesn't exist yet. It was just an easier fight to win. And so luckily R&D made the decision to let us work on a project that had not yet been greenlit. That is not something we do all that often. I mean, we do it sometimes. Usually it's with more experimental stuff. But I think R&D in general had faith that we ultimately could get this done. There have been two previous unsets.

And pretty much R&D had our back on this one. A lot of the convincing wasn't convincing R&D. R&D was happy to make it. It was more about the brand team and sort of like, did it make business sense? So the first interesting lesson I got from the set was just learning a little bit more about sort of selling it internally.

That part of my job as the head designer is I have to convince people that things are good ideas. And usually what I'm trying to convince them is, here's a thing that doesn't exist that I think if it existed

people would like. This was not that at all. This was, this has existed. And I think our take on it is wrong. And so a lot of what Getting Unstable made was, well, it was two parts. One was trying to make the business case, trying to say, here's how we can use the data of information we already have to demonstrate that there's an audience for this product. And then the second part was trying to convince them that the audience had changed in a way that would increase the opportunity that this would be something people would like. that this would be something people would like. So the first part was, interestingly, us just crunching numbers. And one of the things we found was when you looked at the numbers,

the numbers did a lot of weird things that only made sense if the audience won the product. And a lot of what we had to present, a lot of kind of the business plan is, look, here's all the data we have on it. And this data, you only can interpret the data, like the only way the data made sense is if there's desire for the product. Because if there wasn't desire, the data just wouldn't make any sense. So we did that. And then I haven't had to do a lot of analytical cells.

Now, Mark Purvis of the Council of Marks, Mark Purvis, who was one of my, so me, Purvis, and Mark Globus were the three that really pushed to get this made, what I call the Council of Marks. And Purvis did a lot of the work on the business end of sort of convincing everybody that there was an audience. And I think when you looked at the numbers, the thing that was interesting about it is unglued and unhinged predate us doing supplemental sets, meaning we didn't really understand

supplemental sets. It wasn't something we did. Now we do them all the time. But back in the day it was like especially like unglued we had never done anything like this so all we had to go off of was the sets we put out

and basically we put out main sets large main sets small main sets and core sets that's what we put out back then and so they're like well what's it the closest to? I guess a small set and they treated it like it was a small set. But look, it's just a different animal.

And, you know, supplemental sets are a little more niche-y. They're for a subset of the audience. And we just made too much. We overprinted because we didn't understand it. And that was the whole sales pitch we had to make internally of, here's what went wrong. It wasn't a lack of desire on the audience part. It wasn't the audience it was aimed for didn't enjoy it. You know, the main problem was we misunderstood the need and thus made too much. And the big point of printing is anything, no matter how successful it is, if you just print too much, we'll stop being successful. You know what I'm saying? Because the second you have to, you're not selling something but destroying it. So what happens if you have too much stuff is at some point

you destroy it to get it off the books. And so we had to destroy a bunch of the unsets because we had made too much. But the idea there was sort of convincing them of that. So there was a lot of that. The other thing that was interesting is trying to sort of show evidence that the Magic audience has changed over time. And that the audience has got bigger, has broadened some, and that there is a more casual base. And that, yes, there's a competitive crowd. And, yes, we have a lot of people that, you know, enjoy the competitive side of things. But the evidence also pointed that there was a lot more players

that were playing at a more casual level, and something like an unset definitely is aimed at a more casual audience. Anyway, all that was going on while we were making the set. So let's talk a little bit about making the set and my lessons from making the set. I just want to point out that there were some interesting lessons to have that were business-related that weren't actually quite as designery as normal. Although I will say that part of being a designer is selling your set, especially internally. Usually the things I'm selling is individual mechanics, but hey, sometimes you got to sell the concept as a whole.

So the place we started when we made Unstable was that it was many years later from Unhinged. And I wanted us, whenever we do a new unset, I like us to use the latest technology. Because what happens is magic keeps evolving. You know, magic keeps coming up with new tools and stuff. And that what I wanted was, I wanted the unset to kind of take advantage of the new technology to do things we hadn't done before. And the biggest one of that was, I wanted the set to have a setting. I wanted it to be set somewhere.

I wanted to build the set in a way that took advantage of that. So one of the things I decided to come up with was, I wanted to do, A, I wanted to have a world, and I really wanted to have a concept push to build the world. That it wasn't just random cards set wherever. The previous unsets kind of were just like,

here's jokes from wherever we need them to be. It acted more like a core set, kind of, where wherever it needed to be, that's where it was. And this time we decided that we wanted it to be set on a world. Now, given there's a few individual cards, you know, I don't think Spike Tournament Grinders on Batblovia. So there are a few cards that are just like, we're doing fun things in a vacuum. And yeah, it doesn't connect necessarily to the creative overall. But the majority of stuff did.

So I was interested in making use of a world, of a cohesive creative. And I was interested in factions. So factions are something... I did a whole podcast on factioning. Ravnica is really what put it on the map. I mean, I would argue

we had done some factions before that. But Ravnica is the one where I think we really did factions and turned it up to 11, where we really pushed factions as a whole concept. And what we found is factions are pretty popular. When we do factions, the audience really seems to get into factions. So I was excited by the idea of doing factions. Originally, by the way, and this will sound like a story that I keep telling,

I was interested originally in doing enemy factions and not allied factions. That was the original plan. But Steamflugger Boss, as you will see, kind of undermined me. Okay, so the jumping off point was really trying to get something that I thought was something different. So the funny thing is, when we were trying to build the world, now remember this was seven years before it came out, so it came out in 2015, so it's 2010. So one of the things I said is, is there something that we haven't done yet that we don't expect to do anytime soon?

And I was told steampunk. And so like, okay. And at the time the thought is, oh, we don't think we're doing steampunk. As you will find out, obviously we did. But we thought at the time we weren't doing it. So I was given the go ahead and do steampunk. So I definitely was trying to do kind of a wacky version of steampunk. And that got us to some kind of mad inventor's world.

And we liked the idea. So one of the things that I wanted to do is, like, I'm a big believer that you tend to do better designs when you just have a very bold idea of what you want. And so when we started with Steampunk and I said, okay, what is the wacky version? I want to build a world that's fun and different that I can make a lot of jokes in and stuff. If we're going to build a world for a silver board set, there's got to be humor built into it. Because, you know, that's kind of one of the things that the unsets do is there's comedy that it allows us to do world building that is sillier than normal. And so the idea was that I embrace the idea of mad scientists.

I like the idea of imagine a world where just people are doing crazy experiments. And then, once I did that, my thought process was we do Enemy because, for example, both Izzet and Simic both have kind of a mad scientist vibe to them in different ways. And I thought, oh, well, maybe enemy really plays up this idea of opposites coming together, that there's some inherent conflict or something. I thought maybe there was a road to go. But what happened was once we got to Scientist World, contraptions came up. So contraptions are something we had done in Future Sight.

Well, we had made a card in Future Sight, a future-shifted card, meaning a card from a potential future, that referenced contraptions. It was called Steamflugger Boss, and it said all riggers get plus one, plus oh, And it said, like, all riggers get plus one, plus O, and whenever a rigger assembles a contraption, instead assemble two contraptions. We had no idea what it meant to be assemble contraptions. We just made up words. I think originally, by the way, it was erect a monument, and then we decided that that might be taken wrong by the audience. So we changed it to assemble a contraption. Now, at the time we made it, we had no idea what a contraption was. In fact, the idea of the card was we thought it was funny that we were just referencing

something that didn't mean anything. And so, um, it really was just meant to be kind of a funny joke where, um, you know, it was like, a lot of the future Shifter cars were hinting at real things we thought we'd do. We thought it'd be fun to hint at one thing and it just was like out of the left field. Like, you didn't understand the terminology of the car. It's like, all riggers get plus one below. There are no, I mean, I didn't change that. There are no riggers. And whenever you assemble a contraption, assemble twice, right? What's the assemble contraption? And so we liked it. It just had this wacky sort of like, what the, you know.

And we thought it was fun to have one card that just was out there. And at the time, we had no intention necessarily of making contraptions. It was just, it was kind of a high-level joke that we thought was funny. But then Aaron Forsythe, my boss, at the time had a column. He wrote the development column. And he admitted that it was just a joke, that we had no intention of selling contraptions. But I've learned with magic players that you never tell them that you're not going to do something, because it only makes them really want that thing.

So it became an ongoing thing of how can you do contraptions? And so I, I started like, at first I'm like, oh, haha, but eventually like, okay, there seems to be this groundswell of people that want contraptions. So I started toying around what a contraption could be. Um, and the problem I ran into was either it got too complicated and sort of got outside of what Blackboarder would do, or we could do it in Blackboarder, but it just wasn't that resonant. It was sort of like, oh, okay, I mean, I could call it a contraption and you assembled it, but like, eh, you know, and I felt like contraptions had such a buildup that if you weren't going

to do them right, like, just to say you did them and do something like contraptions had such a build-up that if you weren't going to do them right, like, just to say you did them and do something that was kind of, eh, was not going to make people happy. In fact, I thought it would make them more unhappy. And finally, we're finally doing contraption, and it's like, you know, look at the top card of your library if it's an artifact put in your hand. Like, something that's like, okay, functional,

and I guess with a straight face you could call it a contraption, but it didn't, it doesn't sing, right? So one of the things I realized was we were doing Mad Scientist World, and I mean, it just was an opportunity. I sort of had come to the conclusion that I didn't know whether I could make, I wasn't sure whether I could make, I wasn't sure whether I could make contraptions in a way that would both kind of make people happy that we finally

did them and make them feel like contraptions. Like, could I have the payoff and make it all work? And I was dubious. I had experimented with it. And I hadn't found a solution I really liked. But then when Silver Border was doing Mad Scientist World, it just felt like okay, here's an opportunity. And what I said to my team is look, let's try to do this let's give it a best shot. The nice thing about Silver Border is you just have more access to things than you do in Black Border. So I'm like, okay let's just make this and make it something that we think

would be cool. Interestingly, I based the basic design was actually based off a game I had made before coming to Wizards. And the original version of it, there was, so imagine a card and there's an up, a right,

a down, and a left. There's an up, a right, a down, and a left. There's an up, a right, a down, and a left. Originally, it used the card, there was a card that you would start with that was kind of the thing. And I think the idea was it would be the back of the deck. And the idea is you would just build around the deck itself. And the way it originally worked was

that any one card had connectors to it and you could connect it to any place there was a connector. And then there were some rewards for closing off things and stuff. Like I said, it was based a lot on this game I had made. And what we found was that it was complicated and a lot of times what happened is you would draw a card, but if it didn't happen to fit, you didn't get it. And so it's a very

unsatisfying thing. It wasn't that often you got to assemble a contraption. If in fact you assembled it and you didn't get to actually assemble it, that felt like this was unhappy times. And when it went around the card, because it was up, right, down, left, it took four turns. So it just took, it took a turn longer to go through it. And just things weren't quite happening enough. And so we realized that we needed to rejigger it. And so instead of going around the card, we decided that we'd put it side by side and do three things.

going around the card, we decided that we'd put it side by side and do three things. And then we would use the back of the card to sort of be a thing so you could note where you could mark on the back of the deck it showed you where the lanes were. And that we changed it.

So the lesson there, which is really interesting, is we went down a path, and the path showed a lot of promise like I really liked the idea that you had a separate deck it had components that were contraptions and that you were making a larger device that used all of them

that really to me it scratched the itch of the idea that I'm building a contraption, that a contraption wasn't just one thing. It was kind of this interconnectedness of things. But the lesson there, which is really interesting, is that I got partway there, and I really liked components of it,

but I was able to recognize that it wasn't all the way there. While it satisfied some of the needs, it didn't satisfy all the needs. And a lot of times, one of the things that happens in design is when you see some success, you keep wanting to go down the path of the success. But part of good design sometimes is saying,

even though there's things I liked about this, this isn't quite what I need. And you really have to be willing in design to give up on something and start anew. really have to be willing in design to give up on something and start anew. And that doesn't mean you have to give up on everything that the old thing was, but you have to be able to start from scratch and go, okay, let's start this over. With no assumptions, what will we do? And what was neat in contraptions is we were able to take something and say, oh, I like elements of this,

but it's not working. We have to pull back from scratch. And we really said, okay, what do we like about it? We sort of pulled back and said, what do we like about it? Let's assume nothing. What do we like?

And we listed the things we liked, and as we started piecing it together, we started finding the opportunity to make a new version of it that kept a lot of the successful parts of the old version, but really revamped a whole bunch of things that really bring lot of the successful parts of the old version, but really revamped a whole bunch of things that really bring it to life and make it work.

The other thing that was really interesting and something that I'm continually learning, but Unsets especially helped teach me this, which is this idea of be careful that you don't pre-constrain yourself. That one of the things that's very early is to assume things that you know because of what you've done with the game and then not

because something starts out of bounds, you don't investigate it. And that one of the things I've learned time and again, and really unstable hit home in a big way, was look, try the crazy thing. Even if you don't do the crazy thing, well, A, sometimes the crazy thing isn't as crazy as you think. And B, sometimes the crazy version of it gets you to a slightly less crazy version that keeps the same element of what you want, but can work. And

part of doing the crazy thing is you really have to explore and figure out where the fun is and don't worry so much about what can and cannot be done. There's so many things in Magic where if I just said, well, if Magic doesn't do that, I wouldn't have done it. You know, things like split cards or like hybrid mana or like double-faced cards, things in which we hadn't quite done

that before, that wasn't something we had done, but, you know, saying, okay, just as we hadn't done doesn't mean we can't explore that, and, you know, what might seem daunting at first, like split cards, really does seem kind of out there, if you've never ever made a magic card that isn't the normal frame, but once you go down that path and do it, it paves way, in many ways, like I did a podcast on split cards, I think it really paved the way to the idea of we have more flexibility with frames than we originally thought.

So Unstable really got me there. The other thing that Unstable taught me was how when you plan things, that things don't quite go the way you have to sort of be willing to not stick to your

preconceived notions. I really wanted an enemy colored faction set. But what I found was, so one of the things is once we added contraptions it meant, I felt it meant we had to add Steamflugger boss. I felt like we had said this is from the future,

okay, the future is still reordered, but still, I wanted to sort of keep alive that. And everything about the Steamflugger boss, from a creative standpoint, made sense in the world we were trying to build. So one of the things I said is, look, we're going to do a faction world, and if we're going to do a faction world,

one of the factions has to be the steam flogging faction. You know, the goblins have to be a faction. Now, we were doing comedy, we were doing mad scientist, like, it all made sense. But the problem I realized was, if I wanted to do two-color factions, okay, if I'm doing enemy color, that means it's either red-white or red-blue. And the whole essence of the scene flogger was chaos.

And I didn't feel with either red-blue or red-white that I quite got the chaos that I wanted. I mean, red-white is very, very hard to do chaos, since white is the antithesis of chaos. Red-blue, I felt that I was just... I was not trying to recreate Izzet my goal was not just to do Izzet and do Simic straight up I wanted to do something a little bit different and so I just felt that if I went down the Steamflugger boss in Red-Blue

I was going to end up with an Izzet and I didn't want to be Izzet, I wanted to be something different and so what I realized was, when I looked at it, I realized that red-green made the most sense for the seam fluggers. We hadn't done a lot of goblins in green. We'd done a little bit in shantamore. So I felt like it's a place to stretch goblins a little bit. And then as I started mapping out other things that I wanted, like I really wanted a cyborg.

I really wanted a cyborg. I really wanted a cyborg faction. And the cyborgs made a lot of sense in White Blue. And we originally, we were going to have ninjas.

We ended up pulling back a little bit and making spies, of which ninjas were part of it. Yeah, originally, Black Red was going to be clowns, and Black Blue was going to be ninjas. And then we sort of pulled back. So Black Blue got pulled back into spies, of which ninjas were part. And Black Red got pulled back into supervillains. For a while, we had a clown supervillain, but that ended up going away, so I think the only clown ended up on

Jeff's desserts. And then, green-white, the thing I was really fascinated by in a mad scientist world was I liked the idea of animal hybrids that were just weird mixes and matches of animals.

But because we're going to go to white-green rather than green-blue, instead of being the subjects, I like the idea that they were, that they were the ones running the experiments, that it wasn't people doing it to them, it was them doing it to themselves. And once I got into white-green, I really kind of embraced the idea of this is a commune where people who wanted to do this could live together. And we ended with the Crossbreed Labs. But the lesson there was that I really had a vision of doing something different.

And I knew, like, I know that players want an enemy color set. We will eventually get there. It's ironic that the few times that I try to make one, how just multiple times it gets morphed into an ally color set for different reasons. Like, Dragon's Bizarre Cave was supposed to be enemy color, but Wedge made you draft enemy color, so it was too similar. So we ended up having to go ally color. I promise you guys, I'm aware that you guys want an enemy color set.

It will eventually happen. It is on our radar. But anyway, it's important to understand. A lot of making Unstable, and especially because we had the time to do this, was really kind of going all in on something and then letting what you learned really guide where you were going. And I think Unstable did that more than some other stuff that I've done, where it really sort of

it really as it started getting life on its own, it really started pulling in certain directions. And the thing that I liked about Unstable was, it was kind of the set that as we sort of explored it, it really had its kind of had a form it wanted. So like, Michelangelo had this sort of theory that when he was sculpting, that the thing he was sculpting was trapped inside the stone, and he was

merely freeing it. As if it existed in its whole entirety there, all he was doing was cutting away all the bits of the stone around it that weren't supposed to be there. And I feel that Unstable had a little bit of that sort of vibe to it about that a lot of it was just us making some

choices and then following where those choices led. For example, Host and Augment very much came out of, we're doing a mad scientist world, what would we expect to see? And we had toyed around in Black Border with a mechanic where you had a left side and a right side. We've been playing around with that forever and we can never quite make it work. And the sort of, the breakout, which Silver Border lets us do, is the idea of overlapping them,

that there was a dotted line and that you would overlap them. And that way, the solution that one piece could stand on its own, and the other piece sort of went on top of it. And the idea that we could literally cover part of the card was something that, maybe one day Blackboard will be ready for that, but not yet. The visual, really it got created by the visual. I had this idea and I pitched it to Dan Emmons who then illustrated it, sort of drew, brought to life what I had been pitching. And I showed this in my article.

It was like part shark, part ninja, I think. And anyway, I think that it really ended up coming out. I mean, it really was driven by this idea of this visual quality to it. That's another thing that the unsets have started to teach me is the importance of the visual and the importance of when you're trying to ask people to do something that's kind of weird and different, if you can find visual ways to be intuitive. The thing I like about host and augment is to be intuitive. The thing I like about Host and Augment is if I just show you the cards and it's all I do, the cards, the visuality of the cards do so much to getting

you to figure out what's going on. It really is this, oh, I do this and ah, you know what I'm saying? And you have this moment that once you see it, it's very strong and connecting. Oh, and the big issue we had with... So the place we'd always tried to do the host augment had been... Sorry, the pre...

I think we call it link. Was the place we started with used to be the left side is the 2-2 flyer and the right side is 2-2 menace or 3-3 menace. You know, or not menace, that's another version. It's 3-3 first strike.

And the idea is if you link them together, oh, now it's a 5-5 flying first striker. You know, the idea is that each side brought with it its own components. And we just got endless problems there. So the thing we tried with Host Augment is the idea of, I want a left side and a right side. Is there a different way to divide them up? What if the left side all did one thing and the right side all did a different thing? And that's when we realized the idea of triggers,

of the idea of a trigger condition and an output, an input and an output. And the idea that was very compelling there was if you put things together and there's always with a left side and a right side, oh, then you could always have an input and you could always have an output. And that seemed very, very strong.

And that one of the things we realized was, once we understood, because the big question was where to put the input, where to put the output. And what I realized was, if you put the output on the host, then you could just make it an enter the battlefield effect. And then when you essentially, like one of the things I'm always looking for in unsets is how to do

cards that are just not that complex, but they make sense in an unset. And the cool thing about the hosts were, look, it just was a creature with an enter the battlefield effect. We do those all the time. Now, it had a dotted line down the center, and it was part of a mechanic, so it made sense in a silver board set, but it allowed us to make a lot of nice, simple cards that normally would be a little bit more complex, and allowed us to make those. And so, anyway, it ended up making a lot of sense to make those input.

But once we knew that, that meant that the augment had to go on the left side of things because the input had to be to the left of the output. And then once we started realizing that, it just started us down the path of figuring out how to make that thing work. And then it's fun that when we got to concepting, we really played around a lot with what are fun things to mix and match? What are cool front things? What are cool back things? And we spent a lot of time figuring out where the fun was.

Oh, one of my lessons, by the way, I think I mentioned this before, the half-kitten, which is a very funny joke. The only thing I would do to change the joke is, I would have made the back half-kitten, same illustrator, same everything, I just would have changed the color. So the idea, if you make half-kitten, half-kid and that it's two different kids put together. I think that'd be funnier. Um, but anyway, uh, yeah, that was another thing where,

um, the idea of allowing the needs of the structure to sort of dictate what you'd like. A lot of the way we solved the problem was, okay, what are we playing with? And it was really left and right come together. You know, the idea of,

that you're sort of stitching animals or something onto another thing. You're stitching things together. Originally, it was called Suture, I think. The final product was Augment. But it was called Suture for a while. And, like I said, there were a lot of cool things

they had to get figured out, like the art figuring out of that, the tube, so the artist had something they could draw that then always would connect together. Figuring that out took a while. Oh, that was another big lesson,

by the way. One of the things that I really appreciated, so Don Mirren was my art director, is there were a lot of really creative solutions to things like Dawn figured out how to make the host augment work

she's the one that came up with the idea of having the contraptions be 3x3 that made a larger picture that was Dawn's idea and that there was a lot of one of the things that I really enjoy about Unsets is there is a freedom that comes with...

I mean, I say all the time that restrictions create creativity. They do. But it's also sometimes to say, okay, I don't have to follow the rules. What can I do? I can break the rules and I don't have to follow them. It's can I do? You know, I can break the rules and I don't have to follow them. It's fun sometimes to sort of push in different directions. And one of the reasons I really enjoy doing unsets is, as a designer, it just lets me sort of try things I never get to try and push in directions I don't get to push.

And there's something really fun about that. There's something really fun about, you know, getting to the heart of what makes something tick and being able to say, hey, to make this work, let's do that. And I love, like, Host Augment is a great example of, I started with this idea of, I want to solve this problem. I have tools I don't have before. Oh, what if there's a dotted line, you physically put them together. And that was really compelling. And that drove me to, and my whole team, oh, what if there's a dotted line and you physically put them together? And that was really compelling and that drove me to, and my whole team obviously, to how do we make this work? What does it mean? And we let the visuals of it drive a lot of the essence

of what it did. And that's one of the big things about Unstable in general was I was really happy how we had wacky ideas and themes and things, but then we were able to follow the set and let it go where it wanted to go. And because it was Silver Border, because we just had flexibility that we don't always have in other sets, we really could push to some fun and interesting places. Anyway, I hope you guys, that was fun.

It's fun talking about, I always enjoy talking about Unstable. So anyway, those are many of the lessons that I learned doing unstable. Um, maybe one day I'll like this. This is one of those sets that I could talk at infinite. Um, there's a lot more lessons to learn. Maybe one day I'll do part two. Um, but anyway, I'm now at work. So we all know that means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make in magic. I'll see you guys next time.