Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #797: Randy Buehler

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

In this podcast, I interview Randy Buehler, member of the Pro Tur Hall of Fame and former R&D member.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. So I've been doing a lot of interviews going back in the past and digging up people who've worked on Magic. So today I have a very special guest, Randy Buehler, long-time Magic developer. And we'll talk today about all the many things he's done on Magic, which is a pretty long list. So how you doing, Randy? I'm all right. I mean, the whole pandemic thing is not my favorite year in the history of time, but I'm doing all right. How are you holding up? I'm doing okay. Well, let's go back to the past where there was no

pandemic. Sounds good. So we always start with the question, how did you get into Magic? I got into Magic at a literal kitchen table table i was visiting friends for a summer gathering uh i used to play college bowl which is basically team jeopardy right buzzers and competitions and colleges would go to have tournaments and stuff and so there was this gathering of a tournament at a guy's house it was like you know his parents had this farm on top of the mountain and we all would like descend upon the house with buzzer sets and questions and people were playing this game

at the kitchen table. And I'm like, what's that? And now I understand it was like a five-player free-for-all multiplayer game circa 1994. One guy was just, this If Biffa Freed is the best card of all time. Anyway, I pulled up a chair

and by the end of the weekend, this game seemed awesome, and they sent me off to face the world with an all-commons deck that they had made out of leftover cards. It's a Pestilence Circle of Protection black deck. I sort of went off with that. Anyway, that was my intro story. Okay, so this is 94. What was the first set you played with?

Well, so I then went back to campus and I had to find players or whatever. The first, the set that was on sale, I guess this is 95 by then, is Ice Age. I remember being on sale when I started. So it's funny because people tend to think of me as an old timer and I don't think of myself as an old timer, right?

I never bought a pack with a Mox in it. Like I missed, the true old timers had, you know, power cards. I was like, eh, I started with Ice Age. The first new set that released was Homeland. So certainly the early days, but not a true old-timer in everybody's eyes anyway. Okay, so your story is long,

so I'm going to try to go quickly through this. But the first part of your story is you decided to go to the Pro Tour. So let's talk a little bit about your first Pro Tour. Sure, yeah. I got totally hooked on competitive play. I was a competitive guy, and Magic became the outlet for that. Decided to try to qualify for the Pro Tour.

Moved to Pittsburgh, which is where I met a lot of the guys that I sort of formed Team CMU with. I mean, any of whom I'm sure have been on your show from time to time. And got to the pro tour and my goal was i just wanted to figure out if i can actually hang at this level so i wanted to make sure however i did at my first pro tour it was going to be because that's how good i was right i put in the time i put in the effort i did the research i found the decks that had done well in the in the extended format which had just been put together, which was not trivial, right? This is sort of, there are no real websites, like the dojo is just starting to become a thing, but basically like I'm tracking down Usenet newsgroups and I

managed to get my hands on the top extended decks from the worlds where the format had just started. Anyway, go to my first pro tour. I'm just like, I just want to make top 32. I just want to get a second qualification. That was my real goal. And I wound up winning the whole thing. So that was pretty awesome. It basically changed my life completely. Okay, so from there, you spend a couple of years on the Pro Tour, right? Yeah, like two full seasons,

like season three, season four. When I won the Pro Tour, I basically became a full-time Magic player for the next few years. I was one of the first Americans that started flying to Europe to go to Grand Prixs kind of chasing the player of the year title which you know in retrospect wasn't there wasn't enough money to actually justify that but it was it was awesome like i made enough money to pay the bills and sort of see the world so it was awesome i did

that for two years and then just a little bit into the next season before i started at wizards okay so the next part of the story is I was asked by Bill Rose were there people I thought might be good developers for Magic. And one of the things that had happened was Urza's Saga had happened and like

clearly was the people who were working on Wizards were not as fine tuned at understanding power level as we needed to have. And so I gave him your name. Let's talk a little bit about that. What's your story of getting hired? Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it.

I definitely was, you know, if you'd let me keep telling the story, I would have introduced you as the next main character for sure. I mean, you and I had gotten to know each other just because you were always the guy from R&D who was at the Pro Tour, sort of hanging out, seeing what was happening. I always saw you as the guy sort of bringing the intelligence

back to R&D. So I certainly enjoyed our conversation. So I mean, when you suggested it, it sounded pretty cool. It made a lot of sense to me too. Saga, I definitely saw Saga as a, I mean, those cards were just broken. And, you know, I made my living my second year on the Pro Tour by just continuously breaking Urza Saga cards.

I consider the Memory Jar deck that we put together, that was mostly me, in fact, and then Eric and I flew over to, what was it, Grand Prix, whatever. We flew to Europe. Rome? No, it's Madrid. Not Madrid. Oh, Grand Prix... Whatever. We flew to Europe. Rome? No, it's Madrid. Not Madrid. Oh, Grand Prix.

Sorry, the Pro Tour was Rome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the Pro Tour was Rome. I thought our Academy deck was, in fact, the best Academy deck, even if we didn't think that O'Hofi's the one who won it. But then the Memory Jar deck,

like, not very many people have gotten a card Emergency Band in the history of Magic. I definitely have that on my resume, sort of one of the highlights. I'm like, yeah, that's what got me my job at wizards so uh i always thought of that as switching teams right instead of breaking the cards after they came out my job was then to break cards before they got published uh you know different sets of incentives you know you don't really get rewarded with you know fame on the internet whatever passes for fame in the magic

world you don't get rewarded with prize money. In fact, what happens when you break a card inside is they take your toys away. You have to go play with something else. But it was fun. It was super fun. And yeah, trying to break cards before they came out was... That became my new job. Okay, so you get hired originally as a developer.

That's your first job at Wizards. Yep. And the first set you worked on was invasion correct yep yeah it's funny everybody who comes into wizards has kind of a black hole set like it's like the set that it came out after you joined but it was already being done worked on so like mercadian mask is just this black hole in my mind i went i went straight from the saga block to invasion and i was pretty happy i felt like i got put on the invasion development team sort of first day on the job and i felt like i was able to contribute

right away i was able to make some suggestions you know i came in with just i think a pretty good understanding of where the power level of magic was at and sort of what you needed to do to print cards that were relevant but what you also needed to do to make sure those cards weren't too good and yeah hit the ground running with the Invasion block. Yeah, the story I always tell about you is you had to convince us that the Tap Lands, the Tap Duel Lands were okay and not too powerful. Yes, no, definitely. The Invasion comes into play, Tap Duel Lands were not in the set. I'm like, you can't do a gold set without good Duel Lands.

And that was what passed for good Duel Lands back in the day. Like now they're whatever, a common draft filler. But yeah, that was definitely, for gold dual lands back in the day like now they're whatever common draft filler but uh yeah that was definitely you know it's pendulums i know you love your pendulum analogies and that pendulum needed to swing toward just having lands that that were better right you know by the time i've been there for a year or two we got all the way to fetch lands right it's that pendulum swinging okay so the first set you led, you led the development of Odyssey. Let's talk about that. I mean, I actually, I sort of co-led Plane Shift.

Like, William Jockish was the lead, but they sort of put me in a position to go sort of represent R&D to the rest of the company. So I pretty quickly moved up the ranks is I think the point of the story. I felt like I came in, was able to hit the ground running

from a power level point of view, and then I was able also to sort of understand what R&D was trying to accomplish and how that needed to interact with the rest of the company. So it was a pretty quick rise up the ladder. And then, yeah, Odyssey was the first set where I was just, okay, solo lead, you're in charge of the development side anyway. Go do this.

And just so the audience might not know this, coming to work at wizards and within a year leading something is super fast that that is not normally how it works so yes it was very very fast okay so let's talk about odyssey a little bit what do you remember of odyssey uh it's funny i think of odyssey there's a lot of stuff i like about odyssey but at the same time i also recognize that it's like there's a third of the audience that loves it, and then there's two-thirds of the audience that's kind of, well, it was a little fiddly, it was

a little bit too much. I was definitely happy with what we did with the power level of Standard. For me, a lot of those first couple years of Magic was, look, the creatures need to be better, the spells are too good, right?

I'm coming out of this era where, you know, I was the guy with the deck of 23 counterspells. And so for me, a lot of it was like, so counterspell is just too efficient, right? You, you, stop whatever the hell the opponent is up to, too good. Source to plowshares, too good. These answer cards are just better than the threats. And so I look at the Inv invasion block, Odyssey does this, Onslaught I think does this as well, where it was really a matter of making sure the threats were actually good enough.

Can we get people to play big creatures? In particular was, I think, the icon. I mean, it's not really Odyssey, but for me, my favorite memory of that arc, by the time I'm leading Odyssey, I'm watching what Invasion is doing in the real world. And so that fall, we're in Odyssey development, I'm going to the Pro Tour,

and Brian Kibler playing a riff in the top eight of a Pro Tour, Brian Kibler enchanting his Riff the Awakener with an armadillo cloak, attacking John Finkel for the win. I mean, it's one of kibler's favorite stories like almost his origin story right the dragon master he's been posting off that story for years but i love the story because for me it's just yeah that's what we were trying to do right we got a guy to play a six mana dragon in his pro tour deck and not just play a six mana dragon but enchant it with an armadillo cloak. That was, for me, the sign that, yeah, okay, we're headed in the right direction.

We're pushing the game toward creatures being playable and not just the random rush creatures, but big creatures being playable. There just aren't answer cards that are efficient enough to stop people from enchanting a rift with an armadillo cloak. So that was, it's not an Odyssey-specific story, but that's what that time in Magic was about from my perspective. Yeah, I mean, that's the big thing

about that time period is it really was this major shift in how we thought about how we developed the game. I mean, you were really the leader. I mean, they hired you and then the other people came and you were definitely part of getting other people to come and, you know, development really,

that's the era where the idea of the Pro Tour players really became the developers, right? Yeah, I was sort of, I mean, Henry Stern came off the Pro Tour, right? And so it was not like I was the first Pro Tour player that got hired. But yeah, there were a bunch of us in a row. I mean, some of which was, you know, me starting to recruit people. Some of which was just, there were some other people that were sort of, things that were in flight when I started. to recruit people some of which was just there were some other people that were sort of things that were in flight when i started um but yeah and a lot of it was getting that pro tour deck

building mentality to just understand you know what sarah angel's not too good sarah angel's not even good enough like i remember getting there and hearing that sarah angel had been taken out of the course that because she was over the over the curve over the line like what are you guys talking about like this the the understanding of how good defensive cards need to be to be good enough for tournament play i mean sarah's awesome obviously uh but she wasn't good enough for tournament play and i think that that just getting that sort of updated sense of where power level actually needed to be to make cards playable that was uh yeah it's one of the things I'm proudest about, honestly.

I mean, just, I think Wizards, the development side, right, the playtesting, the numbers side, I think just got better in that stretch. And yeah, I'm pretty proud of that. Okay, so what happens now is you used to start leading a lot of sets. So I'm going to list some sets here. You can jump into any one you're interested to talk about,

but you co-led Judgment, you led Onslaught, you led Scourge, you led Mirrodin, you led Saviors of Kamigawa, you led Coldsnap. Like, you were just leading a lot of sets. Now, at some point during there, you go from being just a developer to being the head developer. When did that happen? How did that happen?

I honestly don't remember the exact set, but, yeah, I mean, I think I went from leading a set to sort of overseeing the development process in general. I can't point to the exact set when that happened. And then eventually to director of Magic R&D. Like, essentially, a position was created. I mean, those positions didn't even really exist as such at the time. But, I mean, I think that the work we were doing on the development side was better.

the work we were doing on the development side was was better like that standard was much more stable and uh the game sort of stabilized after the chaos of going from tempest to saga to mercadian mask right you're like probably too fast definitely combo broken sort of not interesting enough kind of powered down which i assume was on purpose right mercadian mask it was like clearly it always looks to me like people are told, look, just don't mess this one up. We're going to go hire some Pro Tour players. Try not to break anything before we get in here and actually get this development process fixed.

I don't know. We were threatened that we'd be fired if Mercating Mask broke like Urza Saga. So we made sure that didn't happen. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's some stuff in there that is fun, but I think that the, you know, invasion into Odyssey, into Onslaught, which was sort of my first three blocks, I felt, yeah, we stabilized the power level of the game. We sort of got to a point where, okay, this is a power level for Standard that we can work with on an ongoing basis, right?

We don't have to just keep outdoing the previous year. You know, we can do cool things and we sort of help the game transition from, you know, is this a fad? Is this thing going to be around forever? To, okay, this looks like sort of a stable evergreen brand. And yeah, that was going well. So I was getting promotions, I think, because of that.

I got head developer, which essentially meant I was overseeing the development side of the process. And then eventually director of Magic R&D, where I was overseeing design and development. I mean, I had the art team for a while as well. So a bunch of things happened during this time. So one is I attribute you to a lot of recruitment. You got a lot, I mean, some of which you had obviously people you'd worked with before, but you did a lot to just bring in a lot of sort of magic talent, if you will.

Yeah, no, we hired Brian Schneider on my watch, Eric Lauer, you know, Mike Turian came in, Aaron Forsythe came in, although that one was more for the website and was probably you as much as it was me. But certainly I was grabbing Aaron from the website and pulling him into R&D. Definitely a thing I had my hands on as well. Another big thing that happened.

So Bill Rose was the head designer. Actually, he was like sort of both head designer, head developer for a while. And then Bill got promoted and ended up becoming the VP of R&D. And then you were the person that finally convinced Bill that he couldn't both be head designer and be VP of R&D although he tried for a while and you were the one that made me the head designer

so thank you for that you're welcome, yeah I know, well deserved okay so I named a bunch of sets here Odyssey, Judgment, Onslaught, Scourge, Mirrodin, Saviors, Coltsnap. Any stories from any of them that strike you as a fun

developer story? You know, it's funny. The one that I'm proudest of is one you didn't name. Okay. Which is Ravnica. And the reason I'm so proud of Ravnica is I think I was on

literally every single team. I wasn't necessarily leading them all, but I was on the development team for every set in those years, right? Just there wasn't a magic set. I didn't have my hands, you know, in the details as a developer. But, you know, as we've talked about this career

where I wind up getting promoted to this director of magic R&D spot, Ravnica is the first set that was led by people who reported up through me. It was the first set where I felt like I built the team, you know, I didn't do all the work myself, but I sort of assembled the talent and, you know, helped put the vision in place and then, you know, let, let the thing go. And it wasn't me, but it turned out spectacularly. And honestly, I felt like that, you know, helping to

build the infrastructure of R&D such that it could do something like Ravnica for me was better than just being in there tweaking all the numbers myself. Yeah, Ravnica was the first block. I mean, I became a designer in the middle of Champions, but that was a train in motion by the time I was there. So Ravnica was kind of my first time getting to do something, getting to lead as head designer. So yeah, and another big thing you did. So, when I originally pitched Ravnica, the 433 model, there was a lot of skepticism. And you were one of the people that, like, backed me up because, I mean, really, other things I had to fight very hard for. I didn't have to fight that hard for it because you backed me up.

And you said, yeah, we should do this. And we did it. So, thank you. Thank you for that. There's a lot of things in the past I pitched that was a much bigger fight. And that was, while it was very, a lot of people were very skeptical of it, you always had faith in it. So that was much appreciated.

Yeah, no, that's how the, I thought that's how the process should work. Right. I felt like, I took that success as evidence that sort of the system was working as intended certainly you as the head designer were that was a good set yeah right it turned out pretty well so uh okay so let's talk a little bit um before we move away from your time at wizards is there any other wizards things you want to talk about? I mean, there's all kinds of small, fun stories, but I don't know.

What? So, Ravnica was just saying... You've got the basic arc of my career. I don't know if you're fishing for particular... No, no, no, no. I'm just... I want to make sure that there's stories you want to tell during your Wizards time. I mean, there's some non-Wizards stuff we're going to get to,

but if, you know, anything during the Wizards years that you would like there's some non-Wizards stuff we're going to get to, but anything during the Wizards years that you would like to talk about that I didn't know I had? I mean, way back at the beginning, one of the stories that I think this idea of this transition from, okay, Wizards wasn't particularly good at development to I think by the time I get up to director of Magic R&D and eventually promoted out of R&D, I think of that as, you know, my legacy being to help wizards get good at development. That's really the thing that, I mean, I guess everybody's the hero of their own story.

That's the way I look at that story. And it's funny, like the future future league is that legacy almost incarnate, right? When I showed up, there was no future future league. I remember, you know, I moved to town. I'm staying at some, like, you know, random corporate apartment in Tukwila while I'm looking for a place to stay. And they're just like, oh, the Future League's going to get together. And the Future League was once a week, people would get together and build decks,

and it was current real-world standard plus one set. And so it was an effort to try to understand what was likely to happen in the real world, but hadn't happened yet. And so I do this, you know, I show up with this deck and whatever, my deck was terrible because I was sort of drinking from the firehose and I'm trying to learn all the sets at the same time. I didn't know the Mercadian Masks block yet, so for me it's not plus one set, for me it was plus four sets um but i get there and it's like okay we played you know what did we learn and we can't do anything with this information right the next set that is coming after what we're playing in the future league it's already been put to bed right this we're working on invasion what good does it do us to test these prophecy cards this

essentially where we are so the future Future League, I basically said, look, we need to move farther into the future. We actually need a future Future League. We need to be playtesting the set that's currently in development where we can actually change the cards if we find something. So Future Future League was me.

That's definitely a thing that goes on my resume. I don't know if it goes on my tombstone, but sort of inventing the future future was sort of the beginning of that push to helping put better development processes in place, help the company get better at breaking the cards before they come out. Yeah, and for example, just I give a, like,

I think of like Eldraine, Throne of Eldraine. So I led the set. You're the one that made me head designer. I handed off to Eric Lauer. You recruited him. My architect was Mike Turian. You're the one that made me head designer. I handed it off to Eric Lauer. You recruited him. My architect was Mike Turian. You recruited him. So your legacy lasts a long time,

even though it's been a little while since you worked at Wizards. Your influence is long-felt, so it is definitely... One of the things that's fun for me interviewing people is I want the audience to understand. People come in, and their influence can last a long time, especially people that had a lot.

I think it's very correct. When you started, we didn't know what we were doing from a development standpoint. And by the time you left, yeah, it was a pretty good system. Like I said, it went. It's funny because I was there before that. And I never pretended to know. I had no illusion that I knew how to develop, and others think they did.

I mean, I at least said I knew I didn't know. But the story I always tell is you and Eric put together whatever deck it was from Urza Saga that you guys were showing to me that it was broken. Would that have been? It could have been the Academy deck in Rome. So you send the deck to me to prove to R&D that this was broken. Would that have been? It could have been the Academy deck in Rome. So you send the deck to me to prove to R&D that this is broken.

And the reason that they listened was I never lost and I wasn't good. And they're like, we can't beat Mark. Something's wrong. We can't beat Mark. That's great. And yes, I think that was, I think that incident was the thing when i pitched

to bill you he's like okay yeah we should hire this person um that's great yeah the academy deck was when the target came out i remember when we were uh play testing like team cmu this is you know we would always go to the oh this is basically a restaurant on campus at carney mill university and the set set was just getting spoiled. We didn't necessarily know even what all the cards were yet in Urza's Saga. And Andrew Cuneo had found Tolerian Academy. He was like, there's this Tolerian Academy card. It's all, you know, we're just playtesting.

And so he had a bunch of zeros. He had Mishra's baubles and a bunch of zero mana artifacts to turn this thing in and what he was doing with salarian academy was casting mahamoti jins and he was just crushing people with like turn one and turn two mahamoti jins and then like we find that the rest of the set you know have you seen this time spiral card oh my god what if we cast time spiral on tap our academy and then do stuff it yeah, that was, those decks were kind of crazy powerful relative to what else was going on at the time. Okay, so post-Wizards, so the next, sort of, in my mind, the big chapter is, you were affiliated with the Pro Tour from the very beginning, but you kept your toe in the Pro Tour all

the time that you were at Wizards. And then, post-leaving Wiz wizards you had a big role so let's talk about that a little bit sure i mean honestly i i think i was following in your example here in that you know i'd always watched when i was a pro tour player i could tell that you know you were a guy who was at the pro tour and sort of bringing intelligence back to rd and yeah but certainly by you know the last year of my pro tour career i knew if i thought a car needed to be banned i need to tell mark right we had conversation i remember having a phone call with you about the about land tax at one point where i had won an extended tournament with a land tax scroll rack deck that was

absurd one of my favorite decks and uh so for me i saw r&d guy going to the pro tour it was clear that you could get out of touch if you were inside the ivory tower and i didn't want that to happen to me so you know when i got to wizards i decided i wanted to keep going to the pro tours especially given my role in development i wanted to make sure i stayed in touch with you know what the pros were doing with the cards that we were publishing so i had started dabbling in commentary i mean you you gave me those breaks you know i remember uh there was a world where Chris Pakula, who was normally your go-to, actually made it into the top eight. So you had to replace Pakula because he was too busy playing to do commentary.

That was the first commentary I did, and it wasn't great. But you gave me another shot. And it became this thing where once I would get knocked out of the tournament, you would ask me, hey, did I want to do top eight commentary? So I enjoyed doing that. And when I got got to wizards i wanted to keep doing that and so essentially i brokered a deal with the organized play department was jeff donae at the time he was running it and uh he was willing to let me do commentary and sort of pay to send me to the events and i went back to r&d and i talked to rose and i'm like look why don't you as long as they're willing to pay

for it can i have the time to just keep going to the Pro Tours, right? Am I allowed to, you know, stop doing my day job and go off to the Pro Tours, collect information to bring back to R&D and then also do the top eight broadcasts that the OP team needed somebody to do. So yeah, I just kept doing commentary. I didn't miss a Pro Tour.

I mean, I went to my first Pro Tour in season two, you know, and from the one that i won i went to i don't know a ton i didn't miss a pro tour for i don't know eight nine ten years something like that it was probably more like 11 years and did commentary basically every single one of them i loved it i you know i definitely grew up watching sports with my dad so it it had this, you know, sports fan element to it. And I was pretty good, I think, at being able to figure out what players were up to. That was always one of the things I thought, you know, coming from being a player and being a developer,

I was able to, one of my strengths as a player is, I think what I'm trying to say, one of my strengths as a player is that when my opponent made a move, I was pretty good at figuring out what are they up to, right? What does this move actually tell me about what's going on in the game and how they see the game and that translated directly to commentary where you know people would move plays i was able to kind of narrate the action by sort of understanding what the players were up to so commentary was super fun i think i was pretty good at it and yeah that was

my way of staying in touch with the game while i was in R&D. So I did that all the way through my Wizards career, even continued doing it after I left R&D for the last couple of years with the VP of Digital Gaming role. Still went back to the Pro Tour. Those were my people. That was definitely the place I felt most at home. Okay, so two last things I want to hit before we run out of time here. One was a big event that happened to you.

We skipped over, but you got into the Hall of Fame. So what was that like? That felt spectacular. I mean, that definitely felt like this vindication of the way in which I had chosen to spend my life. And, you know, I'm definitely weird as a Hall of Fame candidate, right? I don't have the counting stats that everybody else has.

For the two years I was playing, my results are kind of awesome. Like if you look at rate stats, like how average finish or accumulating, I had like seven Grand Prix top eights in two years, I think is what it was. And my average finish on the Pro Tour was 16th or 17th or so. So I had this awesome couple of years, but then I went inside, right? I went to R&D. I think people gave me credit for that, right? I think I got voted in without quite the counting stats. I didn't have the raw top eight counts that you would think.

So I look like a statistical outlier. But I was definitely – it felt great that people recognized I both, you know, was playing at a Hall of Fame level for these couple years. And I think people gave me credit for my impact on the game both inside R&D, but I actually think from a pro tour point of view as a commentator as well yeah I used to joke that I think I could get the Hall of Fame if I just could get 100 pro points

maybe the Hall of Fame should be a magic Hall of Fame rather than a pro tour I think it should be but anyway that's a topic for another day I kept doing the commentary even after I left Wizards I left left wizards went off you know work for other companies continued to do commentary for a while uh left but then it came back even later and just that commentary piece was just it was a thing that i enjoyed it was a thing that people seemed to like a role people seem to enjoy me in so that's just i don't know that's been my connection to the game

longer than i was than i my connection to the game longer than i was than i was a pro tour player longer than i was an rd guy i've been a commentator longer than i've been basically anything else in my life okay so the last piece before we wrap up is something you've been doing more recently is uh being sort of a producer of putting on sort of online events you want to talk a little bit about that yeah i mean when it's funny it all happened because vintage masters was coming to magic online at about the same time there was this new website called twitch i don't know if you've heard of it but people would stream video games and then other people would watch them and like i'm looking at this new website twitch is like our commentary from the pro tour we've been streaming top eight since the 90s right

wizards was super cutting edge from the point of view of streaming a game to the internet. And eventually this upstart Twitch thing shows up. And you go, okay, fine. The Pro Tour started getting streamed to Twitch. But I'm looking at that saying, what can I do with that and with Magic Online? And I knew as soon as Vintage Masters came out that I was going to draft the hell out of that set. I was going to acquire a set of power. I was going to be playing Vintage on Magic Online. I was going to acquire a set of power. I was going to be playing vintage on Magic Online.

I just, you know, vintage has always been fun for me. You wouldn't want all your magic to be vintage, but, you know, occasionally to feel the power sort of coursing through your veins. It's, you know, the kid looking at the candy shop. That's fun for a little while. I mean, he wouldn't put a steady diet of candy. But anyway, I got into

producing shows because I thought vintage was just a super spectator friendly way to play Magic. And so, you know, my first insight was just vintage is super spectator friendly. Let's see what we can do with vintage on Magic Online through Twitch. This turned into the Vintage Super League. The Vintage Super League turned into a bunch of other Super Leagues. Wizards loved the show that I was making. I initially just made the show to see if I could do it. To see how compelling this would be. First time

we went live, we went up over a thousand concurrence for a brand new Twitch page, brand new show. I was like, alright, there's something here. That's been awesome. So I've been doing that for, what was that? I think that was 2014, 15.

I mean, it's been over five years of Super Leagues and various incarnations, vintage Super League, you know, when we've gone back to sort of the most often. And then as well, having demonstrated that I could make Magic Online look good on Twitch, I got the gig from Wizards to do the Mox broadcast as well. So sort of the same people who were putting the Super League together. It's not all me by any stretch of the imagination. Got the gig to do the Magic Online Championship broadcast.

And yeah, that's been fun. It's certainly been content I am proud of. Well, I see my desk, which means that I've actually made it to work. So as we wrap up, any final thoughts about your many years on Magic? I'm impressed that you managed to cover the spectrum in just whatever it's been, half an hour or so. Well, I've been doing a lot of these interviews.

I've been getting good at getting things to half an hour or so. Can be hard to keep me on task like that. That's fun. So anyway, guys, I can see 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 Randy, I want to thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me. It was fun. And guys, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.