Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #760: Shivam Bhatt

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

In this podcast, I talk with Shivam Bhatt about his role with Commander and his podcast.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, as you know, I've been doing interviews. So today I have Sheevan Bhatt. So, say hello. Hello. It's so nice to be here. First time guest, long time listener. Thanks for having me. Okay, so we're going to start where I always start with these interviews is, how did you get into magic? Well, I got into magic the way most of the people who've been interviewed got into magic in middle school in my band class. In the back room of my band class in like seventh grade in 1994, I heard a friend of mine say, OK, well, I've got this dragon and he's going to breathe fire if I use all these mountains that I've got.

And someone said, well, I'm going to blast him with this water blast and he's going to go away and i needed to know what was happening with dragons and water and i went there and i saw two of my friends sitting there playing with like i guess revised in the dark at the time and one had a shivan dragon out and i was like oh my god i'm into dragon lands i love dragons this is amazing i need to know what this is and my friend was like hey look it's got your name and i looked and it said shivan and i'm like they spelled my name wrong what the heck and he's like well and i'm like okay well if this is a red card what is against this i need to know and he's like well he flipped the card over and he showed me the five colors on the back and he said red's

opposites are blue and white and i'm like all right i'm gonna play blue and white and uh so my first deck was a blue white control, which is the least me that possibly could be, all because Sheevan Dragon spelled my name wrong. Ah, okay. I didn't play a red card for 15 years. Yeah, the funny thing I think is, is Richard was trying, Richard was trying to come up with a name for a dragon, and I think he based it off Shiv, right? Yeah.

So. So I actually did research into that. Yeah. to come up with a name for a dragon and i think he based it off shiv right yeah so so i actually uh did research into that yeah and basically because richard garfield lived in nepal for a time and so the main hindu god in nepal is shiva the uh like you know god of destruction and yeah and so shiva is known for generating a lot of heat which is why he lives up in the himalayas and so richard garfield took this idea of generating a lot of heat and use that to create the world of shiv in dominaria using it to make like the shivan dragons and all of the other like shivan fire yeah other cards that we've seen like that so uh since then i've come to grow and appreciate that card but my start with it was uh inauspicious to begin with

okay so you are in middle school yeah Yeah So is this something you did continuously? Like, did you play, like What was your early Magic experience like? So basically, I started with The Dark and with Revised right around then And we all got our decks and had our Sea Serpents And everything And I played from middle school

So about 7th grade, 1994 Through the end, through about when Weatherlight had come out because when weatherlight came out i was a kid and i was looking at visions and mirage and my friends and i were like phasing and flanking that's going to destroy the game forever we're never going to play this again and so we stopped kind of playing and we moved on to playing dnd more and more rpgs but then when i got to college like i've dabbled in other CCGs and you had started writing your column on Daily MTG. And I was like, oh, you know, I go to Wizards every day for D&D stuff.

So I'll just read this magic stuff and just kind of keep my fingers in it. And so I ended up reading your column. And that was my main interaction with magic for a long time until about Duels of the Planeswalkers came out. Because I was a hardcore Chandelier player back in 94, 95 duels of the planeswalkers on my xbox i'm like oh i can just sit and play magic again i remember this game this is free let me give it a try and it was i was completely hooked from the second i touched it again it reminded me of all the memories of my childhood and then i flooded right back and then my friend took me to a draft it was my first time ever drafting it was for rise of the aldrazi and the aldrazi is exactly where you want to go

when you're a first time drafter and we sat down and the first card i opened up is a card i've never seen before it was sark in the mad so it's a planeswalker and i'm like what the hell is a planeswalker and why are all the cards negative and so i played it and i thought it had summoning sickness because of course you play a, it's got summoning sickness. And the person I was playing against killed it and told me, like, you know, you could have just made dragons, like, right away. And I was like, well, you're supposed to tell me these things. And so I stopped playing Magic because it got really hard really quickly.

And then you guys put out Innistrad. And what happened was, in 2011 or so, like, during the recession, I was recently unemployed from Sony and I was living in San Francisco and world championships was happening in San Francisco and all of you guys you and Aaron Forsyth and you know BDM and all these big people were coming down to host this big event and it was really close to me and I was like ah you know I've got nothing else to do on a random Wednesday. I might as well go. And they were having Innistrad drafts for $5. So I went in and I started playing. And Innistrad was a set that brought me back.

Because I was like, oh, I love zombies and skeletons. And look, this is a super flavorful set. It feels like magic from my childhood. There's no scade zombies, but what are you going to do? And I started just jamming drafts. And when you're at Worlds on a Wednesday, the people you're playing against are like the national team of Finland or the team Japan.

And they're sitting there training for the actual tournament. And I'm like, this is my second time drafting. I'm looking through the cards and I'm just passing random cards. And they would turn to me like, why did you pass this Garrick? Why did you pass this, you know, Gargoyle? I'm like, I don't know what they do. I just wanted the pretty zombie, man. And they're looking at me like, you were just tanking my draft it was amazing and that's where i got the bug to come back to magic hard because i had a dual dex that i picked up at

pax and you were up there spell slinging so i sat down with you and i was like i'm going to sit and play magic against the creator of magic or whatever i thought at the time the head designer and i was like i'm going to sit and play magic against the creator of magic or whatever i thought at the time the head designer and i had my little elspeth soldier token deck and you just grabbed a random duel deck that they had and we started playing and you drew me a token of my soldiers that were being made every turn yeah and i still have that token and that token ended up being the genesis of for my tajik Soldier's Commander deck, every single token has been hand-drawn on a Wizard's Playtest card by one of the members of R&D, all because of that one

token that you gave me in 2011. So I've now got this whole collection of like 45 of them. It's amazing. I think what happened, real quick, the story behind that is we were doing spell-slinging at Worlds, and we had these blink things, these blink, and I didn't know

what to do with them, so I just, every time they would ever make a token, whether I made it or somebody else made it, I would just draw it. And I was doing that all day long, and it entertained me to no end. And so, yeah, I'm happy to hear that it had an impact. Yeah, it was amazing. It's like one of those things that now,

when I go and sit and play against other people at games, I fan out all my tokens and they're just like one of those things that now when I go and sit and play against other people at games, I fan out all my tokens and they're just like, holy crap, that's Mon's Goblin Raiders, but he drew himself a Goblin Soldier token. And I'm like, yes, he did. And it's just really, it's a cool way for people to break the ice in a Commander game

and just, you know, get into it. It's really fun. Also, you can learn how badly I can draw. It's like a stick figure with a... It's pretty recognizable. Yes. you can learn how badly I can draw. It's like a stick figure with a... It's pre-recognizable. Yes. I've cornered the stick figure market. So I've learned that that is not the first time we met, right? No, actually. Because what happened is when Unhinged came out. Unhinged was previewed at Gen Con SoCal. And you were there in a

donkey suit. And it looked like this just dusty really gross rabbit suit that somebody must have pulled out of a closet or something it was like the world's worst saddest looking halloween costume and you're standing there watching these people play and i'm like who are you he's like i'm i'm rosewater i'm the designer of magic i'm like oh i explain that that's really cool i was reading up and i'm like what's this ravinka set and you're like ravnica and so you answered some questions about ravnica i took a picture with you in that bedraggled little suit and then i was just like magic it still exists that's cool do you have that picture still i do it's on twitter i'll send it to you okay i'd love to see that does uh it's really great it's it's one of those things where i was

digging through some of my old Gen Con pictures, and I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe I met Mark Russo on a railway before I had any idea that I would actually have conversations with you later. Okay, so you go to World 2011. That sort of, you meet Innistrad. It restirs. So what happens at that point? So after, no, that world, by the way,

was the same world that Professor Flarey in community college also came back at. Me and him came back at the same store, same event for Innistrad pre-release. And we both came back to Magic at the exact same time. So I thought it was like that event was very serendipitous. And I went home and I was talking to my friends about like, oh man, I found Magic again and it's super fun.

And on my message board, my friends were like, hey, you know what? We're playing this game called Commander. You should give it a try. I'm like, what is Commander? It's like, you can play all your favorite cards from your childhood, except in a pile of 100. And I'm like, all right, well, somebody just send me a deck.

And we played by post on a message board. So a friend sent me a text file of a deck. I would fire up, like, I literally created a simulation of the deck. And so it was kind of like, you know, playing chess by mail. Yeah. So I would type in, like, you know, I play a forest, pass my turn. We would have to wait for everybody to pass their turn during taking priority and everything. A five-player game of Commander took three weeks.

Wow. Oh, to play. That's dedication. And it was my introduction to the format and i was like oh my god this is the way i want to play magic forever like a play set of one is the best thing in the world and it's like non-competitive it was super relaxing and it let me express themes and flavor and just the vibe of magic that i wanted the fantasy kind of the color of magic that i loved in a way kind of, the color of magic that I loved

in a way that wasn't competitive. And that's what I loved about it. And Commander is what, like, kept me in Magic. Like, Duels on the Planeswalker brought me back, but Commander is what kept me. Okay, so you started getting into Commander. So did you eventually play with real people in person? Yeah, like, I went out, like, you guys put out the pre-cons.

And I started buying those pre-cons. And I went and I started playing Commander at my local store and with some friends. And one of my favorite cards from my childhood was a land from Alliances called Kaldoran Outpost. Which is a land that sacrifices a plane and then you can create soldier tokens. And I was like, I've always wanted to make a soldier token deck. Because, you know, I forgot the soldier token from mark rosewater and so i went and i built an entire deck based around this land using tajik which had just come out in the uh dragon's maze set from uh ravnica block and i built this whole deck around that and around grim grin the innistrad zombie that i

tracked in my first pre-release so it ended ended up being like, these were my two decks, and I got totally hooked on playing EDH. And from there, like, I started, and right around then, you guys announced, like, you know, Origins and Kaladesh, and I started writing essays about, like, cultural representation and just, like, cultural

influences on Magic. And I got invited to join a podcast called Commanderin, which was for a time one of the top rated and most well-known Commander podcasts. And I was on there for about four or five years. And so I played thousands of games of Commander since then. And after that show, I got invited by Sheldon Mennery to join the Commander Advisory Group,

to be a group of players and community members who help make the Commander rules. And that's kind of where I am now, making judgment over Commander for thousands and thousands of people based on a game that I built off of a LAN that I played on a message board. So let's talk a little bit about what that is. So what does that mean exactly? What is the advisory? What do you do? What is it? Sure. So the rules committee of commanders is four people, Sheldon Mennery and friend, Scott Larrabee. God, they're all going to kill me for blanking on their names. But what happened is they had been four older

guys who had been playing Commander since forever. Obviously, they created the format. And they were getting accused of things like, we're in an ivory tower. We don't have a lot of reach and exposure. A lot of people don't even know who the Rules Committee is. And they're like, if we got the community to join us and to give us advice on what people are doing

with Commander in the real world like what are people playing what are the problems people are seeing how are people playing the game then commander would be a more robust from format as you well know commander is obviously the most popular way to play magic right now that isn't just these are the cards i own right the most popular formalized way formalized format yeah yeah and in doing that, they wanted to make sure that it stayed a format that people felt connected to and they didn't feel like was ignoring their needs. Right. So they got Josh Lee Kwai. They got me.

They got Rachel Agnes and some other folks like Adam Staborski and Charlotte, the judge whose last name I can never remember. But we all got together and we joined to form this advisory group to be able to give the rules committee help and kind of advice in how to make Commander work. So it's not necessarily that we were making the rules. It's not that we're like,

we don't get to vote on what cards are banned. But we sit there and say, you know what, Paradox Engine is a big problem in Magic, and it's ruining a lot of cash roll tables. Maybe we want to talk about that. Or, hey, in high-level competitive play, we're having problems with, you know, Flash. Maybe we want to discuss that and take care of that problem. And these are things that the Rules Committee might have discovered on their own. But we being being the advisors having a broader reach and having a broader audience can bring these problems to them sooner so that we can make sure that commander is much more of a um it's much more reflective of what the people want it to be all right and um so i do this when i i've been one of the things i've been doing is trying to get people exposed to different parts of magic

so to someone who's never played Commander, what's your elevator pitch? What's your under a minute pitch to why Commander is the way, a great format? Okay, so in Commander, imagine that you have taken an army. You are a wizard who is on a plane fighting a battle, but you can't fight this battle alone. So you brought a general along with you. is on a plane fighting a battle, but you can't fight this battle alone, so you've brought a general along with you. This general has their army consisting of their colors, the people that they reflect the best, and they've brought on all their greatest spells, all their greatest creatures from the entire history of the multiverse, all 80,000 cards or whatever that

exists in the 25-year history of Magic. You have brought them together onto this field of battle in order to take on this whole host of enemies that have come before you in this massively casual multiplayer game where things can be as swingy as i have 12 000 life and you still beat me by using uh villainous wealth on my deck to mill me for 800 cards you know but if you imagine magic is as wild as swingy is most explosive most like enticing that's what Commander is. We're not talking about stone-faced folks sitting at a table staring silently at each other while they worry about that 23rd card in their draft or about their 14th card in their sideboard. We're talking about whatever answers you have in your 100 cards

that do the most insane, bananas things you can imagine while sitting and having a great time with your friends. That's what you do in Commander. Yeah, one of the things that I appreciate about Commander is I've always been a big fan of the social aspect of the game. Obviously, I'm the champion of the online sets,

which are about as far away as competitive magic as you get. But I really enjoy the idea of hey, yes, if you like competitive magic, that exists. If you really want to test yourself and see what you're capable of, hey, yes, if you like competitive magic, that exists. If you really want to test yourself and see what you're capable of, look, magic has...

We have a whole Pro Tour system and stuff. We have ways to do that. Down to your local store, they run tournaments and stuff. But I really appreciate that, hey, if I like hanging with my friends, what makes magic a great game for me is the interaction I get,

is the amazing I get, is the amazing moments that happen, you know, that I think Commander does a really, really good job of being that. Exactly. For me, the way I look at Commander is that Commander is about, Commander is basically, we're spending two hours together hanging out. Commander is the means by which we're doing so. It's like a board game night. It's like hanging out with your friends to watch the you know the football game or whatever

but we're doing it over magic you know and for me like because when you're playing like uh you know more like a hardcore like more standard or modern or something like that you have to pay attention to what the cards are doing you have to pay attention to what's actually going on in the game in commander it's a lot more relaxed. You can sit and be like, you know what? I'm going to talk to my friends. We're going to just shoot the crap about the whole day. And then when it's my turn, I can take my turn.

Or if you do something, it's super casual and be like, oh, hang on, I have a response. And nobody worries. There's not a lot of tension about what's going on. For me, it's just like, because my understanding of magic when i started playing back in middle school we would have things like in my in my school after school there would be 12 of us playing massively multiplayer 12 player games you know it would be insane and it would just be a bunch of friends hanging out and playing magic and that's what commander reminds me

of what magic felt like when i was just starting which which is kind of why, like, and plus, I want to play Magic to hang out with people. Like, I run a podcast called Casual Magic because I want to talk about the fun side of just, like, hanging out. Like, Magic should be about playing with your friends, not always about playing with somebody that you never see again, right? I just have very strong feelings that, like, Commander helps facilitate social Magic, and I love it. Okay.

So you mentioned your podcast. Let's move on a little bit, talking about doing a podcast. So you are a podcaster, as am I, since we're on a podcast. So what is it like doing a podcast? What are the behind-the-scenes of doing a podcast that people aren't really aware of? So a lot of things about being a podcast is, like like you get on the phone, or at least for me, I'm on a chat with somebody who I'm interviewing if I've got a guest or if I'm just doing it myself.

I talk into a microphone for about an hour about magic. But then there's the eight hours that follow it of sitting in audacity, cutting out all the ums and uhs, moving all the breath spaces apart, making sure that there's, you know, spaces for sponsor breaks, making sure my intro and extra music can go on, polishing it out so that it doesn't sound like I'm talking to a tin can and, you know, from 400 miles away. It's just, so my background is when I was working at Sony PlayStation, I used to make trailers for them for movies and for video games. So that polish that came along with having to be professional level, making a commercial that's going to run in the Super Bowl, means that when I'm doing my casual podcast,

talking about, you know, a lot of War Elves, I still need to sit there and make sure that it's as polished as I can get it. And that's sometimes a lot of trouble. Sometimes it takes a very long time. But I don't know it's just it's so much fun because like i just like to be able to explore sides of magic that people don't get to talk about or like you know one thing that we have problems with as content creators that we get pigeonholed into like oh i'm the modern guy all i talk about is modern yeah but if you're a

magic player you're not just playing modern you're playing everything? Like Magic players all play a lot of different formats. There are some folks who are specialists, but there are some folks who are like, yeah, like you hear this when Josh and Jimmy talk, they're like, we love Commander, we are the Command Zone, but also we play a lot of Draft. And sometimes when they do Draft videos, people get really mad. They're like, you're the Command Zone, how dare you play anything but Commander? So I opened my podcast up so that people who are like, oh, you know what? I talk about modern on my show all the time, but I really, really want to talk about chaos drafting.

So come on my show. Let's talk about chaos draft, you know? Yeah. Do you feel you don't get too pigeonholed? Or do you think your podcast is broad enough that people can expect anything from it? I set it up with the expectation that, look, I'm going to talk about commander, but I'm also going to talk about unstable. I'm going to talk about commander but i'm also going to talk about unstable i'm going to talk about jumpstart i'm going to talk about conspiracy or like i did an entire episode on elves in every format right just because i don't care it's magic magic is about the broad range of everything we can do and i think that's just it's so much fun

because every set that comes out every card that comes out is a new vector to approach the game. And I think, like, I'm sure I could do an entire episode just on Thopters, for instance, of like, Ornithopter going from the first set all the way to, like, you know, making Thopters in Commander with Brea. I don't know, it's just, it's super fun. I think there's so much to explore and so much to do that just sticking yourself to a format specific

is doing yourself a disservice. So where can people find your podcast if they want to listen to your podcast? You can go to casualmagic.libsyn.com and you'll find it there. Or if you just Google Casual Magic on iTunes or Spotify or what have you. And it's basically everywhere that you can get to except for YouTube. Okay, so also you talked about writing so how long did you write something or do you still write well i mean i was an english major for training and i was a magazine editor as a job profession profession for about a decade

working in video games and stuff so i've written a lot and one of the other things is i'm a hindu priest so when i when calendars is coming out i'm like oh here's the intersection of magic writing and hinduism that i can talk about yes and so i started writing like long essays on tumblr about like hey look at this uh sample art that they gave us let me tell you everything that's going on in this artwork where the influences are what they could do and um that just kind of for like the past five years i've been writing a lot about just like uh kind of the cultural expect like explorations of magic and the like aspects of stuff that like look i'm not a competitive player i don't know anything about strategy don't come to me to find out the latest in the meta but you come to me if you want to know why this artwork has this cool nod to the like

saheeli rai that was put out on the commander pre-con there was a sahili for the two-color uh artifact act from about two years ago yeah and she was in this pose that is a very specific dancer pose from uh the national dance of india and so i did a whole long tumblr post explaining exactly or costuming what these angles mean and how this was kind of like reflected in the art of kaladesh and it was just really cool. I thought it was, I mean, other people thought it was fun too, but I really liked just exploring that side of magic. Now, I know you, you, do you enjoy exploring stuff outside of sort of your, your,

your personal heritage? Do you like sort of like, yeah, so like, go ahead. No, you, what were you doing? Well, I'm just sort of curious, like when we, one of the things that we do on our end is we like to bounce around worlds, right? Of course. And we like, every world we go to, there's some real world element to it just because it's based on something. Yeah. Sometimes it's top-down, like, sometimes it's top-down where, look, we're doing Greek mythology and very loudly it's Greek mythology.

Sure. Other times, like, Ravnica was doing a lot of Eastern Europe, but it wasn't, we weren't loud of Eastern Europe. It was just, it's this thing. And if you happen to know that, um, and so it's every single world has some real world underpinning to it, just because we have to build on something as a,

a jumping off point. Right. Like that's the thing. Like I was a, I'm a big fan of world history and of language and of linguistics beyond just my own. And so I'm trying also not to be just pigeonholed as, oh, there's the guy to talk about Indian things. Like I loved Eldraine because in Eldraine, Arthurian mythology is one of my favorite genres of like cycles of literature.

So I was super excited to see the questing beast as a legendary creature. I was super excited to see Excalibur and all of these just like things. I was really sad that I didn't get to see Gawain and the Green Knight, but you know, what are you gonna do? We had the Green Knight in the file for a while and the problem was Arthurians in this weird place where not enough people really know it. People know the real low-hanging fruit of it and we go up just a little bit. They just don't know it as much. Yeah, but when you're like a devoted nerd of Arthurian mythology it's like oh no give me my green knight when we if we go back to Eldraine

we we had a green knight I'm surprised it didn't stay we had it for a while uh I think it just got bummed for it's one of those things that the the people that we put the set together are always sort of trying to find space for things and like, oh, we have to have Excalibur, but oh, we need this thing. Who's going to miss the Green Knight? And of course, you're going to miss the Green Knight. I'm going to miss it. Like, I'm the guy who you put the hundred hand one in Aetheros for.

Yes, yes. Right? Like, when you put those exact specific, very tiny nods to cultural things from all these cultures, I'm like that target audience for that. I love it when we see all these cultures i'm like that target audience for that i love it when we see all these little little nods like because arabian nights was still available when i started playing magic and that was one of those like first times i've seen you know people who look like me in a game and so it was really really fascinating and cool like to see suleiman or like all the

and gins and it just i was so thrilled that fantasy had opened up to this, like, you know, real world sources. And so I was like really sad when magic moved away from that into hard fantasy. I mean, I love hard fantasy, but I was glad to see that we're making some steps back into more like inspirational takings from real cultures. Because I think that there's so many cool stories that we tell that can make really cool

magic cards. I don't know. This sort of thing excites me a lot. So one of the things that I do is we have to plan ahead. We have to figure out where we're going years from now. And a lot of that is talking about where can we find... And sometimes influences

are mechanical, but a lot of times it's sort of flavorful, and sometimes it's like, we have an awesome world, what, give me some mechanics, we don't know what to do with it, but this is an awesome world, and sometimes it's like, I have cool mechanics, I'm not sure what to do with that, you know, and it's a matter of mirroring those things so that you can find

the perfect marriage of this mechanic and this sort of world thing. Sometimes that works, and sometimes that does leave a little bit of a weird feeling, right? Like, I mean, Kaladesh was mechanically my favorite world of all time, and then top-down, I was just like, oh, this is such a almost but not quite,

and it ended up feeling really weirdly hollow. Yeah. But then you guys moved forward and took the lesson from that and did things like Ixalan which had more of a you know a real feel to it and like other settings since that Eldraine has more of like a rounded feel to it so I'm hoping that there's a better way

to integrate we have great mechanics we need a world and we have a great world and we need mechanics that makes it feel more cohesive going through we don't want it to be like Kamigawa right where it was just like I love Kamigawa because I lived in Japan. I speak Japanese. I'm big into the true Japanese mythology.

But it felt mechanically like it was just kind of glommed onto this great world. And I think you guys have gotten a lot better about being able to integrate. And there's still places to go, but I'm excited to see. One of the things that we're behind the scenes, for people people to know is we're trying to do more and more with getting

experts in the areas that we're messing around with so that we we obviously we we've had areas where we've not been as good as we can and so we are trying very hard to make sure that that people who are more experts in the thing have some input and that we understand what we're building, what we're making. And I think that's important. I mean, I think it'll make it for a better game too. Like it gives you more,

because when you have a better understanding of the world or stuff that you're talking about, then you have interesting hooks that you can build mechanics around or that you can find a cooler mechanical match for. And I don't know. I just, there's like i think theros is the gold standard theros and like almond cat are so fantastically well realized worlds that

give you this influence of where you're coming from while also respecting like you you've still got a game of magic you've still got the workings of magic and it worked really well but like the gods and stuff that were in Amonkhet were so cool and felt so like taken from this like Egyptian mythos and it just, it was awesome. Like, I hope we can see more stuff like that. Like, I mean, what you got

to do with Kaia, for instance, was fantastic. So more of that. We're working on that. I mean, like I said, the in some ways, when you start with the world and then you build mechanics, it's a little bit easier than when you start mechanics and then you build the world. And we're trying to

sort of meet them in the middle so we have more back and forth. I mean, as you like to say, magic is a hungry beast. So you're going to have a whole lot of inspirations you're going to need to find because there's got to be sets for the next umpteen million years. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no...

Like I said, I can see... I know the future, so... Let's just say there's some real-world inspirations coming and we're working very hard and getting the experts and stuff. So anyway, hopefully people will be happy when they see it. So I'm almost to work here. Do you have any last thoughts? Any last thoughts about Magic Commander?

Okay, so one of the things that we're living right now in quarantine times, and one of the best things to come out of quarantine times has been that there's this huge community of people playing Magic over webcam, over Zoom, over Discord. We've all gotten together. We're sitting there playing Commander at our playing Magic over webcam, over Zoom, over Discord. We've all gotten together. We're sitting there playing Commander at our tables over webcams, hanging out with each other, playing over Twitch. And it just warms my heart so much that even in a time

when we are supposed to be socially distant, not near any of our friends, we can still find a way to play Magic in person with each other, even if through a distance, through webcams. Well, anyway, Shivam, I want to thank you for being here. This has been a lot of fun. But I have gotten to my desk, so we all know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic.

So, Shivam, I want to thank you for being here. Thank you so much. And, guys, I will – sorry, go ahead. I was just to thank you for being here. Thank you so much. And guys, I will, sorry, go ahead. I was just saying, this has been great. Thank you so much.

So guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.