Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #779: Worth Wollpert

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

In this podcast, I interview Worth Wollpert and talk about his time in Magic R&D and running Magic Online.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, I've been doing a lot of interviews and that's not going to stop. So today I brought from the past, from R&D's past, Wolf Warburg. Hey Mark, how are you doing? So, Worth, okay, so we're going to start where we always start, is talking about how you got into magic. start where we always start is talking about how you got into magic yeah it's uh it begins at the beginning um i walked into a comic shop in 1993 when i happened to be a in between my senior year just about to start my freshman year of college and and found some people playing on the table uh i was a dnd guy and a comics guy uh forever and obviously loved games too so i was instantly hooked and sort of from there the rest is history i bought some cards and started playing and and then found the pro tour which i'm sure

we'll probably get into a little bit more later in the segment um which got me the attention of all of you guys and then uh whatever it was seven years from there a little little less than seven years from there i started working at wizards okay well we'll get there we'll get there let's back up a little bit okay so so interesting you and i are from the same place i'm with the audience knows this but we're both from cleveland ohio yeah we grew up what half an hour from each other not even probably oh less than that i think yeah 20 minutes so anyway so you started playing when you were in high school um so what's the gap between that and you getting to the pro tour how much time elapsed before you started playing the pro tour well i mean literally when i so i was in california of all places um staying with a girl and uh in the summer so it was right

after gen con 93 and i'm assuming i actually think the the folks i saw playing might have been at gen con and brought cards back um and so it was i had just graduated high school whatever it was that previous june and was about to start college um so i don't know technically i was in the in the betweens um but uh but yeah it was like from the very beginning so i was playing and and loved the game enough that in the cards were hard to find back in the day um anything was hard to find uh because it was so popular and so i just kept searching and you know you know me well enough your listeners might not but like i'm the guy who likes to collect things and sort of i've been described as the man who knows how to get things more by more than

one person. So I just, I fell in love with every bit of the aspect of magic from the collectability part of it to the game was obviously a transcendent. So I just spent my next few months trying to gather cards and find people to play with at Penn state and was sort of failing at that. And then the gray matter stuff started happening in New York and Brian Dave Marshall and neutral ground and Glenn and those guys, they started putting on actual tournaments. And I'm

very competitive to always been a team sports guy. So I was started driving by myself from state college up to New York. And I met, you know, that we may touch on this later too, but I met a bunch of my future best friends, which is, you know, all the folks from Cornell, like the cool and think one day Tony Tsai and those guys. So we met, we all started hanging out at Gray Matters, which were, you know, for your listeners that don't know, but sort of like the tournaments of the, the only real tournaments of the day that had any kind of prizes behind them. And, and so, yeah, it was like, I started doing that.

I want to, I want to say it was 94, 95, and then the Pro Tour started. So real quick, I want to jump into a little history before we get to the Pro Tour. So this is in New York. 94, 95, and then the Pro Tour started. So real quick, I want to jump into a little history before we get to the Pro Tour. So this is in New York. So if people have ever heard of Neutral Ground, Neutral Ground was, I don't know how to describe it, but a game store that really specialized. It was in downtown New York, and it specialized in playing. You could come and play, and they had a lot of space for playing. And now game stores do that.

At the time, that was kind of a new thing. That wasn't really how game stores functioned. And Grey Matter was the, like, tournament wing of Neutral Ground. The same guys, Brian David Marshall was one of the people who ran it. So anyway, that was the first big tournament series and stuff that was run.

I know when Scaf and I were talking about doing the Pro Tour, we modeled, we looked at Grey Matter a lot because that was one of the ones that was really successful. And so from a little bit, I like getting to Magic history. You were very much part of this very early part. One of the first real tournament scenes before Wizards got in the business of doing tournaments yeah yeah and you know for a kid in college that you know at the

time i was maybe a sophomore or something so 94 95 like it's you i grew up in a small town and you get your freedom and and you sort of have your life is your own for the first time and i just the whole concept well magic was awesome but then the idea that I could like go to class during the week and then bug out on a Saturday, because New York was only like four hours from state college. And I could just bug out on a Saturday, play magic literally for like 48 hours straight. Oftentimes not even sleep on Saturday night,

just kind of hang out and just play drafts all night or whatever. And, and just those guys, like it, it is as bonding and experience as you can possibly have when you're all sort of at the very leading edge of this brand new thing. And Brian and Glenn should just like, whatever credit they get, it's probably not enough. Because that scene was so awesome back in the 90s. It just made me want to keep playing more and more Magic. Okay, so let's get from this to the Pro Tour. So how did you first learn about the Pro Tour?

How did I learn about it? I think I might have. So back before the internet was really the internet, there was this thing called, what the heck was it? Rec.games.tradingcards.magic, which was Usenet, I think it was called. Yeah, the Usenet. And for, I'm very old but uh for for those of you that don't even understand what that is it's kind of like a forums or a bulletin board before the internet as such as it it's like it's like if you can imagine reddit less fancy than it

is even reddit's not very fancy um that's kind of what it was and it was a place it was we wanted to gather right there was no other place to get the community together. I heard somebody mention it in passing. And the first Pro Tour is actually kind of a funny story because I was jazzed, obviously, to do that. It was in New York. It was everything I wanted. There was prizes. It was a big deal.

And I tried to call. And either I didn't have the right phone number or I couldn't get through or whatever. And so I just didn't. The way you sign up for the first Pro Tour, if you didn't get one of the 30 invites or whatever it was that you guys sent out was just called in. And so I for some reason could not get my phone to work and I didn't get in all my friends at state college did. And they didn't even care like one 10th about magic. But like I went up to New York with probably three friends from Penn state

that didn't care about magic really at all. They're playing in the pro tour and I'm just like dying in in the corner because I can't play. I helped them. I built all their decks. I play tested all their decks. And so at that point, I was mad, right? Like, this is so dumb. I didn't get in, you know, Pro Tour, and you guys can have it. I'm not interested anymore. Well, obviously, that lasted like one Pro Tour when I realized my little protest was not going to cancel the Pro Tour. So I'm like, all right, well, you win, Wizards. You win this time.

I'll try to win a qualifier for PT3, which I believe was Columbus. Yeah, PT3 was Columbus. Okay, yeah. So that was my first actual Pro Tour. I saw PTLA2 come and go. And, of course, sitting at my house or sitting in my dorm room, I just wished I was there. So I'm like, all right, I give. And so I actually won, I think, a couple of qualifiers.

I think back in the day you could play as many as you wanted. And then PT3 was like I hopped on and sort of never hopped off at that point. OK, so PT3 was Columbus. That's your first pro tour. So how'd you do? How'd you do your first pro tour? Boy, I should know the answer to this exactly, but I don't. I think it's like 36th or something like that.

Not too bad. I want to say between 32 and 64, I think. Yeah, so that, by the way, that was a weird Pro Tour because not only were we running the Pro Tour, but we were running U.S. Nationals. And, like, basically we interspersed them, and then, like, two days were this and two days were that, and the finals was half and half, and it like, basically, we interspersed them, and then, like, two days were this, and two days were that, and the finals was half and half, and it was a weird

tournament. Yeah, they were all kind of weird back in the day. Even the first pro tour was weird, right? Like, you guys set it up with the restrictions and that kind of stuff, so... Yeah, we also... It got delayed. The first one got delayed because of the snowstorm. There's a lot of early quirky things. Okay, so... Trekking through the blizzard, yeah. Okay, so...

I think that... Correct me if if i'm wrong because you'll know this i believe was la your first big was that like your first uh sizable win yeah um you mean la much later uh yeah yeah yeah the la does steve omas la a few years yeah yeah so on the pro tour for about three years and then yeah la was my first top eight i was kind of the guy that like i had at one point, I think I had the most top 16s of anybody that not including top eighters. Like I was always the guy that would get close and fail. So I have like an 11th and a ninth and a 14th and that kind of thing. he did that too yeah so it was it was um it was very frustrating i couldn't quite get over the hump and and i got in my own head about it as you i don't know if you even remember this but i think at one point i had a feature match losing streak you know you know mark picks the feature i don't know if you still do but like mark picks the feature matches uh all throughout the tournament and i think i was oh and 14 or something at one point yeah yeah so i remember this because one

of the big things was i would pick the feature matches. I've been in the Pro Tour in ages, but back when I went to the Pro Tour, I used to do the feature matches. And when I picked someone, the big question was, could they reject it? Could they say no? And you really, really, really didn't want to be in the feature match. And I was like, come on, Worth, you've got to just break the streak. It won't be a big thing anymore. Come on, Worth, you got to just break the streak. It won't be a big thing anymore.

Yeah, and that was actually the tournament where I made the top eight. It was the first time I broke the streak. So in a way, you were right. I should have probably just hung in there and thought about it differently a little sooner than I did. But yes, it all worked out in L.A. I think it was 99, but it would have been 98. 98 or 99, one of the two. Okay, so you made your first top eight. one of the two right okay so you made your first top eight um and that so uh i remember because you made you and steven homonee schwartz and john finkel all made the top eight which were all

friends with each other obviously yeah yeah yeah so great good friends and the table was very was crazy in fact i remember the table layout exactly it was rochester drafts um which to this day remains my favorite draft format i believe the most skill intensive draft format but seat one was steve-o um i believe seat one was steve-o c2 was john c3 was me c4 was a guy named terry lau c5 was uh somebody who i don't recall and then on the other side of the table was mike was it mike long mike? Mike Long. I'm sure Mike Long. Yeah, Mike Long, Pat Chapin, and Sven Sparkerson. Yeah. So it was a pretty heavy-duty table for the time.

And John and, all I remember is, you know, Steve ends up mono-black, John ends up blue-white, I end up red-green. And the secret to Rochester Draft, for those folks who have never done it, is you kind of, it's all out in the open, so there's no secrets. Well, let me explain real quickly what Rochester Draft is, just for those that don't know, is you open up the booster pack, and you lay it out.

So all 15 cards are laid out, and you take turns picking one, and you, what they call snake, meaning you go one through eight, and then eight back. So whoever takes the last pick gets a second pick, and then you snake back, and then you keep rotating who starts with it.

So it's a draft in which everything is known every pick is known so go ahead yeah so and i i was always of the opinion and john and steve were too and obviously just in general we talked about strategy all the time for stuff like this that the way to win in these types of things was to do your best to play nice um and as you can see, especially with the people right next to you, as you can see from Steve ended up mono black, John blue, white, myself, red, green, we weren't fighting amongst the three of us for, for cards. And that matters a lot when you're talking about the overall quality of

your deck. Now on the other side, on the other side of the table, that mandate did not get through. They were, it was a, it was crazy. They were shipping each other for for every possible day they were changing colors halfway through and and it's funny because the guy on the left of me terry lau he he got it immediately he knew what was going on he knew john and finkle and myself were like not going to ship each other so he just was very content to to take sort of what came to him naturally after the three of us had picked and so our four decks i believe were the best four decks at the table and it was no coincidence that we ended up steve won the tournament i think john was second and i was third

so it sort of bore out the way we thought it would be but uh but yeah it was an interesting time okay so you how long were you on the pro tour um i guess technically i did miss i missed i was not qualified for rome the rome where the academies were running wild um i went to rome to hang out in rome with all my friends and to play the qualifier at rome which i won um to get back on the pro tour um and uh and yeah so that was i guess what if whatever from pt3 to the last till i went to wizards in new york in 2000 was my last one okay so how'd you get from playing on the pro tour to working at wizards uh well you called me uh that's that was the start of it you you and scaf both called me and um you guys had at the time um for folks that are old enough to remember in the

early 2000s everything that was an IP wanted a trading card game. Any kind of IP, there was a licensed trading card game. And so Wizards, obviously, with Magic and at the time Pokemon, they were the first stop for a brand looking to make a trading card game out of their thing. And so Wizards was signing licenses nonstop. Some of those licenses turned out to be sports games. And I've had a lifelong affiliation for team sports. I'm a huge Hoops fan. I played basketball twice a week for 20 years.

That has gone by the wayside, unfortunately, in the last couple. But anyway, my point is I love sports. And at the time, the Geeks hadn't quite taken over the mainstream yet. I think Harry Potter was just out and the matrix was just out like lord of the rings wasn't a thing yet and and just the general sort of marvel certainly wasn't in the the general takeover of geek culture into the mainstream hadn't happened so the folks who understood like you know what uh how to get a first down or what a three-pointer is or what does can of corn mean in baseball like Like the, and also understood magic and training card games at a deep level,

that pool of people was very small. And so that was sort of my end. Scaf knew that I was a big sports guy and you knew that I had, well, you both knew that I had some, some magic skill and whatnot. So that sort of dovetailed into a job offer to come work on licensed games at wizards,

which started off as I was working on magic, but I was also the guy running all the licensed sports games for Wizards early on from R&D. Okay, so your first, you have your career in Wizards, you moved around a little bit, so we'll start with your time in R&D. Okay, so this is your Magic time, right? This is where you're making Magic sets.

I mean, obviously, later on, you'll interact with Magic, obviously, but so this is your time where you're actually making sets. So I have you, later on, you'll interact with magic, obviously, but... Yeah. So this is your time where you're actually making sets. So I have you... This is what I have you now. You designed Scourge.

So you're on two design teams, Scourge and Masters Edition. So Scourge, I remember... I know you have some Scourge stories because you and I intersect on Scourge. Yeah.

You were very helpful to me as a, I'll say, fledgling designer. But man, that's doing a lot of work, that phrase. I wasn't even a particularly good magic developer, let alone designer. And so I really wanted to try. And to Bill's credit, he decided he'd let me. He and Brian Tinsman were my cohorts on Scourge.

And really, it was like Brian did most of the work, Bill did the second most. And then like way down at the bottom was like me contributing, I don't know, 20 or 30 cards, something like that. And even that is loose because like you said, you and I crossed over. I would be sitting at my desk and just thinking to myself, geez, how does Mark do this for like 300 cards three times a year or something like that? And so I eventually I'm like well mark the time you sat right behind me yeah and and so um and so i would just ask you various questions and stuff on like how to make cards what you thought this should be or and you helped me design what is one of my favorite cards of all time which is siege game commander um i remember i don't know

exactly how the conversation started but i i said something like i wanted a goblin that that threw goblins and and and like did stuff with brought brought a whole bunch of Goblins with him and did stuff when – you know, used them in a way Goblins should use things. So you and I helped. You helped me arrive at Siege Jam Commander, and then obviously I just made Ambush. I think Ambush Commander was the elf that did the same type of thing. So, yeah. But, yeah, there are a few cards in Scourge I'm really proud of. And, you know, it was like I was happy to not have to do design work like that anymore because I really wasn't that good at it. But I had a couple.

I think I designed Eternal Dragon was mine. The Warchief Cycle was mine. And the Goblin Warchief was probably another card I was really proud of. In fact, when I submitted that card, you know, I was more of a player and a developer than a designer. So I even submitted that card exactly as it stands more of a player and a developer than a designer so I even submitted that card exactly as it stands printed except it was a 2-1 and I even said in my notes when I submitted that card I think this is a little too powerful as costed but I'll let you guys work it out because you know development's job at the time was to figure out how much stuff

should cost yeah um and then all they did was added a point of toughness and shipped it so you know whatever that's happened before and look I've been on the other side of that, too. I've definitely made cards too good that were already good being handed from design. So but yeah, there's Stifle. I don't remember if Stifle was mine or Brian's. Wirewood Symbiote was was my homage to Quarian Ranger, which I loved. And so I was just too derivative with the stuff I did. Design's really hard. And so I was too derivative and it wasn't really my thing.

But it was a heck of a lot of fun. Okay, now that was your only, that and Master's Edition were your only designs. You did a bunch of development. So I want to name them off and you can jump in and if you have a story from any one of them, it's good. So you worked on Judgment, Onslaught, Leg legions fifth dawn and saviors of kamigawa yeah so so those are some

crazy sets uh legions for the for your fans who don't know is a hundred percent creatures yep uh it was the first time so literally no spells no artifacts nothing all creatures um we kind of cheated a little bit we used some cycling effects on creatures to get around the no spells, no artifacts, nothing. All creatures. We kind of cheated a little bit. We used some cycling effects on creatures to get around the no spells thing. When you cycle, it does X, usually related to some tribal thing. But in that development team, I think it was me, Elaine, Chase, William Jockish, and Mike Elliott, who was the lead, Mike Elliott. And at one point, he got mad because with Akroma, it's the set that a chroma the first

chroma angel ever had this from yeah and he made some comment about uh in multiverse which was the tool we used to track things back then like talking about a chroma he made some comment that it that all we were doing was just we just kept adding keywords and i remember i saw that and i'm like well you think we've added keywords now and then i just added like three or four more keywords to see to see if he would even care or notice or whatever. And so Elaine and William thought it was hilarious. And eventually we just convinced him, I think just through force of the will of the three of us

saying, no, we should print this with as many keywords as we can. I think at the time it was the card with the creature with the most keywords ever. It's probably not true anymore. But yeah, if you look at Akroma, she has a lot of keywords on it. She does. anymore but um but yeah if you look at akroma she has a lot of keywords on it she does yes she does yeah yeah um but yeah so in judgment was my

i'll go back one more judgment was my first first set at all um and sort of i was i was probably a couple months into my tenure at the company and i remember getting handed the judgment file which you know even even getting handed a file at that point which was a year or two out is the coolest thing to ever happen to anybody like for a guy that's been in magic for seven years and someone comes by and hands you this thing of this new set um and i forget who the lead was on that set i want to say it was william jockish same way of jockish but uh but it was the first time we were trying to do the um the you guys had a name for him the the choice cards the like book burning and rowby oh yeah yeah we call them um what do we call those uh it'll come to me there's a name

for them both of our memories are probably too bad to remember but but like it was a very interesting because those those cards are always oh punisher the punisher punisher that's what it was yeah good memory uh but yeah so it was, it was a lot of discussion around how much you can actually push those and have them still be... So real quick for people that don't know what we're talking about. There are cards in which it says, do thing A or take a certain amount of damage. And the opponent got to choose which of them you got to do. And A could be anything. There are things that Red didn't even do. But because you could opt in to B, you couldn't, you know.

So Red was like, I don't know. Cranky's Point's a good example. It was a wrath. Yeah. Yeah, it was like wrath or take six or something like that. Yeah. And there's one drawing cards, right? Book Burning was drawing cards.

Brawby. Brawby. Brawby was drawing cards. Yep. Yeah, yeah. So at the time, Red didn't really draw cards at all. Yeah. Not even looting like it does cards. Yeah, yeah. So at the time, Red didn't really draw cards at all. Yeah. Not even looting like it does now.

Yeah. Yeah, it was a really interesting sort of first foray into development for the new guy. Also, Judgment, for those that don't remember, Torment, the set right before it, we had leaned into Black

so that there were more Black cards than everything else and there were less green and white cards, which is Black's enemy. And then Judgment, there was more green and white cards and less Black cards. That's an experiment we didn't run. I mean, we ran once and white cards, which is black's enemy. And then Judgment, there was more green and white cards and less black cards. That's an experiment we didn't run.

I mean, we ran once and then said, let's not do that again. Yeah, all for the best, I believe. Okay, so you worked in R&D for a while, but at some point you're like, okay, I'm going to try something other than R&D. So the next place you went is the brand team. So let's talk just a smidgen. I know you didn't spend super long on the brand team, but what was the brand team like?

So actually, really quickly, before I even went to the brand team, it is not accurate to say I went of my own volition. Bill, who is one of my mentors and remains a friend to this day, he called me into his office and said, look, man man you're an average to above average developer we need these types of folks on our bench and you're kind of welcome here as long as you want but I think you're being wasted he saw something in me that I didn't see in myself yet and he knew that I was a better fit for Wizards

and I'd be happier long term in a business role before I had come to Wizards one of the parts of the story I didn't tell was that I was in an MBA program and I wanted to go to law school to be a sports agent. So I'm a business guy, like my family has run a small company. So that's just kind of in my, I'm the lemonade stand kid. And Bill knew that. And to his credit, he's one of the best I've ever seen at sort of putting people in the right seat. And I was pushed out of the nest.

I did not leave the nest willingly. So he's like, go to brand and figure it out. And it was set up as like this kind of thing where you can come back if you want to. But anyway, I get to brand. I realized pretty quickly what I don't want to do, which is traditional marketing work, agency work at the time,

buying media on websites and stuff like that, running marketing budgets, that kind of thing. So I realized pretty quickly that wasn't for me. But thankfully, at the end of that sort of couple was an 18 month period. The person who was in charge of Magic Online, Justin Zoran, was leaving the company for another opportunity. And at the time, the business was very small. But it sort of had no expectations. uh magic online started in 2002 but it just had never really gotten off the ground the way we wanted um so somebody i forget actually who even handed that to me it might have been casey reader um had said hey look justin's leaving we have this thing um do you want to take a crack running it because you're more of a product guy than a marketer and

and i said sure and that kicked off the next whatever decade ish of, of me being the magic online guy in air quotes that none of you guys can see. So let's, let's all talk about magic online. So, uh, what does that look? So I talk a lot about tabletop magic. I talk a little bit about digital, but let's, let's get into digital magic. Uh, what, what's it like running magic online? Uh, well, well it was it was an interesting opportunity because it not only it so my time with magic online dovetailed with the sort of rise of social media and was twitter reddit like facebook all that stuff and so um and i'll and i'll stick in some comments about duels with planeswalkers here too because i think that's relevant as well. But, but basically what happened was in, I think it was 08 or 09, uh, 08, uh, I, I got ahold of the reigns of magic online

for real and, you know, looked at it and just said, you know, why, why is this business not what we want it to be? And so I tried, you know, my best to fill in where we could. And you mentioned master's edition. That was one of the things that that one of the first things that I came back to bill with, like, let's make a new product that we can only do online. Um, that only makes sense really online. And that's how master's edition one, two, three, and four were born. And it fills me with joy, by the way, every time I see something named masters, because I know where it came from, you've leaned into that branding, and it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as it used to, but I do have a little bit of joy, I guess, happiness whenever I see that happen because we started making products for the digital space

that really can only exist in the digital space. Mold Mirror Big is another good example. We leaned into that a little bit. For those of you that don't know what Mold Mirror Big is, online you can do a bunch of stuff you can't do a paper right you all the admin tasks are taken care of for you there's no shuffling um and so more big is a format with a 60 cards deck of land that you get uh essentially you can pay x and discard a card from your hand always land to summon a random creature of converted mana cost x so you have this tension of like playing your

lands out there's no way to draw cards because your decks are all land um and so you kind of are at the mercy of the variance wheel but it's a it's a fun way to spend you know a couple of hours playing magic in a different way so that's what started magic online and sort of poking around at the things we could do um and then you know over the next decade or so, we sort of made Magic Online. It looks very similar today to the way I left it when I left Wizards in 2017. And it caters to the same type of people, I think, that Arena doesn't and can't cater to, which is the folks who prefer, you know, older cubes. Every card, with a couple of exceptions, every card that's ever imprinted in Magic is available on Magic Online, which blows my mind, honestly.

Having been through software development now at another company after I left Wizards Online for Blizzard for a couple of years. The fact that that all works is honestly just mind-blowing to me, the number of unique Magic cards that all work on Magic Online. I did want to tell a story about duels in there.

Do you want me to just start telling it? Sure, sure. Okay. Well, real quickly, Duels of the planeswalker was uh a program that we made uh where was it playable it was on its console first it was on xbox yeah first on xbox and anyway it was it was meant as our introductory digital product at the time um so anyway okay go ahead yeah so one of the things we realized with magic online was it was

aimed at very very hardcore folks um in fact fact, there were parts of the program that were actively pushing you to not want to deal with this if you weren't the type of person like me who would basically give anything to play Magic on the computer. And we realized that was limiting for us in a lot of ways. And because Magic Online was built in 2002, we had a lot of sort of built built in what we call technical debt or limitations that we were trying to deal with. But then we realized there's this whole as the rise of social media started to happen. And I hopped on Twitter. In fact, I just looked before we got on at MTG Online is still technically my account. It was the very first I think it was created like day five of Twitter existing. And and I used to take like questions from the community and like get feedback there. And then I synthesized all of that stuff

both there and on Reddit and other places. I realized we had this massive untapped market of folks who really wanted to get back into magic. The folks who have like put up, who have a box of cards under their parents' bed at home and had gone to college or then gotten a job or gotten married or whatever, but would love to be able to tag back in sort of on their own time on a on a platform that isn't a

pc and so we put together this program called dozel planeswalkers and we launched it initially on xbox in the summer of 09 uh came to pc through valve um uh later and ps3 later and then eventually to every platform that would have us ip iPads and phones and Amazon and everything. And it really, it kind of, we had the tiger by the tail there because that, Duel's launch, the sort of dovetail of that with, when Aaron redid all of the, what's the sort of the set, the core set that rebooted everything? Oh, Magic 2010.

Yeah, Magic 2010. And at the same time, we had, as a company, decided for Organized Play to move events, the big PTQ events sort of pushed them back towards stores. So all of these three things were funneling players into stores and sort of creating this hype around Magic that had not existed in a while. Magic was, we kind of gave magic a super

boost at that time and i just the the it was like trying to hang on to a rocket we would walk into a store i remember i was on a store visit in europe and the and the store owner came to me and he said i don't know what you guys did exactly to get all these people to start showing up in my store but i hope you do it every time you release is set obviously you can't do that but the point was like he almost had more customers than he can handle and if you're if you're hearing something like that from a from a store owner that's like the best possible thing you could hear right so yeah we're in duels duels and and magic 2010 design and the sort of push from big events into stores i think just very very serendipitous confluence of events there.

Yeah, just for a little history, Magic's been on kind of a 10-year climb, where just we've been, every year has been the best year we've ever had, you know, for like 10 years. One year, I think we were off by 2%. But other than that, we've had a 10-year streak where every year was better than the year before, and you're talking about where that started. So that was kind of the begin of the ascent, if you will.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I am almost to my desk. So, we have to wrap up here. So, Worth, any final thoughts?

I just, it thrills me now that I'm, you know, three and a half years or so clear of it all to see, my oldest son is 17. He loves playing arena. I've taken him to the local store.

We've played two headed giant events a couple of times. I just, I love the fact that it, that magic is continually growing and evolving. You guys keep innovating. The new stuff is really cool. I just, I love to see it. I told Richard a long time ago, I owe Magic a far greater debt than I could ever hope to repay. It's given me my life, my career, my friends, my family's security, all of it.

So I just, I love the fact that people are so passionate about it and still are to this day. And I hope it continues forever. Okay, well guys, I am now at my desk. 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 so thanks for joining us Worf sure thing and everyone I'll see you all

next time bye bye