Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #830: 2016

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

This podcast is another in my "Twenty Years, Twenty Podcasts" series (which has become more and more misnamed as I've done more of them) that walks through each year of Magic in detail. In this podcast, I talk about the year 2016 in Magic.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. Okay, so a while back I did a series where I went through every year of Magic and I talked about all the things that happened in that year. And I started in 1993 and I got up to 2015. Anyway, I'm going to occasionally continue on. Enough years have gone by that we have a few years under us so today I'm going to do 2016 the next in the series so these podcasts are meant kind of a little a little nugget of history

so if you ever wanted to sort of get a sense of what Magic did that's why I did these podcasts so anyway, let's start with 2016 so we're going to go chronologically okay, so January 16th was the pre-release, and January 22nd was the release of Oath of Gatewatch, codenamed Sweat.

I think this was Blood, Sweat, and Tears. We'll get to Tears in a second. So anyway, it was 184 cards, and it had a couple new mechanics. So it had three new mechanics. Cohort. So it was an ally mechanic, and it only a couple new mechanics, so it had three new mechanics. Cohort, so it was an ally mechanic, and it only went on allies, and you had to tap that creature plus another ally,

and then an untapped ally, and it would generate an effect. The flavors of the allies working together. There was support, and support always had a number with it. So what support and meant is put plus on plus mechanics on up to end creatures. Interestingly, for most, almost all of the both

design development of the set, you originally put end, plus one, plus one counters and or loyalty counters on creatures or planeswalkers. So if you put it on a creature, it was a plus one, plus one counter. If you put it on a planeswalker, it was a loyalty counter. And then at the last,

like at the slideshow, like the last, last, last minute, they pulled back and made it just plus one, plus one counters. The interesting thing about it, by the way, is if we had known that, we wouldn't have named it. I don't think we would have made it a name mechanic.

Put counters is a little, a little, a little spurt to make a name mechanic out of. Okay, and then surge was the third mechanic. So surge, you could cast it for surgege cost, which was cheaper if you or a teammate had cast another spell this turn.

So the Oath of the Gatewatch, the flavor of the Oath of the Gatewatch was the Gatewatch getting together. So we see Jace and Chandra and Liliana, not Liliana, Gideon and Nissa. Liliana doesn't show up until Shadows over Innistrad. But anyway, it's the

first four people to make the Gatewatch. And they come together. The characters show up in Battle for Zendikar, the set from the previous year, but it's not until Oath of the Gatewatch that the Gatewatch is formed. There are actually oaths in the set that are the enchantments that represent

them taking the oath to join. Anyway, so the design lead of the set was Ethan Fleischer. The development lead was Ian Duke. And it had a... Because it represented the Gatewatch coming together, it had a little bit of a multiplayer focus. For example, Surge, I think,

is the only mechanic in a premier set, a standard legal set, that references having a teammate or something. We've done that in commander sets and a few unsets, but it's not something we've done in we had done at the time

in a premier set. I'm just trying to play up the flavor of teaming up together. Okay, January 18th was a band restricted announcement. Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom banded Modern.

Cloud of Fairies banded Pauper. Splinter Twin being banned, there's, I don't know if I've gotten more feedback, negative feedback, from players than I did on Splinter Twin getting banned. It is something that was very controversial to the modern players. Okay, February 5th through the 7th was Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch in Atlanta, Georgia.

So the constructed portion was modern, and then it had Oath of the Gatewatch and Battle for Zendikar Booster Draft. So the USA's JC Tao defeated Slovakia's Even Flock. Interestingly, by the way, JC now works at Wizards. I've actually been on a team with him. And anyway, it's funny. I used to go to all the Pro Tours,

then I had my twins, and I stopped going to all the Pro Tours. So this is post me going to the Pro Tour. So I didn't really know JC very well. I've gotten to know him now working with him. But this was JC's win. Also, by the way, this was the 20th anniversary. The Pro Tour had started in February of 2006 in New York on a very snowy day in New York.

So it was 20 years later. This was the 20th anniversary back in 2016. So that means this year is the 25th anniversary. Okay. Next up. February 26, 2016. All these are 2016. Dual Decks, Blessed vs.

Cursed. So this is back when we made... So Dual Decks was a product line we made for a while, where they were two 60 card decks that were designed to play against each other. These decks were built by Chris Millar and Sam Stoddard. They were Innistrad themed decks. It had humans in one deck fighting

dark forces in the other. And there were six preview cards that we were previewing of Shadows of Innistrad to come up. So we, I think at this point we were making dual, Shadows of Innistrad to come up. So, um, we, I think at this point we were making, some of our Duel Decks were teasing upcoming products, and this was teasing Innistrad

that was coming up shortly after, and it showed some cards from Innistrad that had not been seen before. Speaking of Shadows of Innistrad, um, April 2nd was the pre-release, April 8th was the release, for Shadows of Innistrad, Tears. So, Battle for Zendikar had been Blood.

So, Blood, Sweat, and Tears. There's another set. We'll get to that in a second. Okay, so this had 297 cards. The design lead was Mark Gottlieb. Development lead was Dave Humphries. So, this was a return to Innistrad. So, we'd been to Innistrad before.

Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored. We were back. And this had a little more of a cosmic horror. The original Innistrad was a little more of gothic horror. And so we were playing just... This is one of our horror worlds,

so we were having fun, you know, really sort of playing in a slightly different kind of horror than we had done in the first visit. So there was a bunch of mechanics. So Madness came back. So Madness was a mechanic we made long ago. Basically, it has a cost on it,

and if you discard the card for any reason, you can pay the Madness cost to cast it. One of the funny things about this is I have what's called a Storm Scale that you guys might know since you're blog listeners. Or, I'm sorry, podcast listeners. From my blog, but I've talked about it in my podcast.

And I grade from 1 to 10. 1 means very likely. 10 means not very likely. Madness had been graded an 8. And I always said that 8 meant the stars had to align for it to come back. And the stars aligned.

So what happened was we had one of the big flavors of the set was insanity. Sort of like, um, playing in the Cosmic Core, things going crazy. Delirium, which we'll talk about in a second, was one of our other mechanics. And Madness just fits so it just was the perfect fit. And so we had to include it.

Even though it's definitely a mechanic that has lots of issues. It's hard to design around. Anyway, but we did. We did include Madness. So Delirium was a mechanic. It was a threshold mechanic. So if you have four or more card types in your graveyard, things turn on. So a threshold mechanic means at a certain threshold of something,

things turn on. In this set, it was a threshold of having a certain number of card types in your graveyard. So there are eight card types, and so you had to get four of them in your graveyard. We had played around, like, obviously, threshold, mechanic threshold, was a graveyard threshold mechanic from way back in Odyssey.

We had talked about doing a threshold here, but it didn't quite work, so we ended up making Delirium, which was sort of a new take on threshold. Next, Investigate. So Investigate was a keyword action that made clue tokens. Clue tokens are artifact tokens. And they have the ability to sacrifice this token, draw a card.

So the idea is it sort of gives you a card, but you still have to pay something for it. And so it was the flavor of this world was Jace was the main character. He was trying to solve a mystery. He had Tamio's journal, which Tamio was missing. But anyway, Investigate really played into the mystery aspect. The second, the next set, which I'll get to in a second,

was Eldritch Moon was a little more about the horror. This set was a little more about the intrigue, you know, like, ooh, scary things might be happening, but we don't quite know. The other new mechanic in this set was Skulk. So, Transform came back, double-sided cards, Transform was back. Skulk was a new mechanic that says,

it's a creature mechanic that says this creature can't be blocked, but creatures with a greater power than it. We had thought when we made Skulk that maybe, maybe, this would be a new keyword mechanic, not keyword, a new evergreen mechanic, but it ended up having to sort of match against opponent and do the math was a little more than we wanted. So we ended up not doing that.

Okay, April 4th, there was another ban-restricted announcement. Eye of Ugin was banned in Modern, but Ancestral Vision and Sword of Meek were unbanned in Modern. So, actually, the ban announcement restricted, you were up one card. And then Lodestone Golem was restricted in Vintage.

Okay, April 8th, which is the same day that the Shadows of Innistrad got released, was the Deck Builder's Toolkit, Shadows of Innistrad. So, the toolkit is something that had 100 basic lands, 85 fixed cards, 40 cards of 125 semi-randomized cards, and it had certain deck themes,

so you could block up themes, so you could build decks out of it. All the cards in it were from Battle for Zendikar, Oath of the Gatewatch, Shadows of Innistrad, or the Welcome Deck 2016 that this product was tied with. There were four 15-card boosters, two from Battle for Zendikar, two from Shadows of Innistrad. There's a deck builder's guide with tips and a storage box.

Okay, April 22nd through the 24th was Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad. So it took place in Madrid, Spain. It was standard and Shadows Over Innistrad booster draft. USA's Steve Rubin defeats Italy's Andrea Mangucci. Also at that Pro Tour, it was announced that all Pro Tours going forward would be standard, that the constructed part would be standard.

Usually they would boost or draft whatever the new set was, but the constructed part had changed from Pro Tour to Pro Tour, so they said, okay, we're just going to be doing standard from now on. Okay, May 13th was the Shadows Over Innistrad gift box, which was, we wanted to have a gift box. Which was, we wanted a gift box. Normally the gift box happens at the end of the year, around, you know, the holidays. But Shadows over Innistrad, that's when it came out.

So we did make a gift box. Okay, May 16th was the first one we called Announcement Day, where we announced more than a singular product. So we announced Kaladesh and Aether Revolt at this time. So the next set coming up was a large, at the time, blocks were two set coming up was a large... At the time, blocks were two sets. One large, one small. This was during the 2-in-2 era of Magic. So we announced the next

block, which was Kaladesh, which I'll talk about soon, and Aether Revolt, which I won't talk about today because that was in 2017. Okay. Next up. June 10th, 2006 was Eternal Masters. So Eternal Masters so Eternal Masters a 249 card, design lead was Tom

Lapilli, and the development lead was Adam Prosak, Tom Lapilli by the way I talk with about Dark Ascension so that's a podcast, I think it's the same, it's the other podcast today, so if you want to go listen to Tom Lapilli and me talk about making Dark Ascension, it's a fun listen

anyway so the idea of Eternal Masters was we had made Modern Masters and me talk about making Dark Ascension. It's a fun listen. Anyway, so the idea of Eternal Masters was we had made Modern Masters back in, I think, 2014. And then in 2015, we made Modern Masters 2. And then in 2016, we made Eternal Masters. So the idea of Masters products was they were products that were all reprint products that fell within the confines of the

format. So, Modern Masters, all the cards that were printed were legal in the modern format. So, Eternal Masters, which is kind of a bigger pool, it's legal in Eternal formats, which is most cards. There's some banned restricted cards, or some restricted, I'm sorry, some banned cards. Restricted cards are still in the format. Anyway, so this was an all-reprint set. It was designed to really have a fun and a little bit more complex, limited gameplay, just like Modern Masters had been. And anyway, very popular.

Okay, next up, July 16th was the pre-release. July 22nd was the release for Eldritch Moon. So this was, the codename for this one was Spheres. So what happened was, this was back in the time when we had codenames, we didn't tell the audience when we were doing the fourth set or not, whether it was part of the thing. And so, because it was,

we were shifting over, this was the first, um, this was the first set where we did the 2-in-2 model. So Shadows Over Indus, uh, sorry, Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch and then Shadows Over Indus and Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch and then Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon were the first two pairs of large, small, large, small years of which we had two blocks in a year.

What I called the two-in-two model. Because of that, the audience didn't know ahead of time we were doing that. And so we needed to name the first three sets under our normal naming conventions. So we needed to give this a name that connected to tears but that wouldn't give away that there was a fourth thing. So we needed to give this a name that connected to Tears, but that wasn't, wouldn't give away that there was

a fourth thing. So we ended up doing Fears. So a riff on Tears. So anyway, Eldritch Moon had 205 cards. The design lead was Ken Nagel.

The development lead was Sam Stoddard. So it used all the mechanics, it didn't have Investigate, but it used most of the other mechanics from Shadows of Innistrad.

But it had three new mechanics. First was emerge. So emerge had the card that went on creatures, it had an emerge cost, and when you paid the emerge cost, or sorry, you sacrificed a creature, and then you had to pay the emerge cost minus the mana value of the creature you sacrificed.

And the flavor was that this creature is turning into a bigger creature. The reason I'm sacrificing it is it's becoming this creature, and you're becoming the creature with Emerge. Next was Escalate. Escalate was a mechanic that gave you a cost

and every time you paid that cost you could target an additional target. So the first target was free, and then you could target an additional target. So the first target was free, and then you could target as many things as you wanted to target. Escalade's a very good example of, I think, an interesting mechanic, but an odd fit for this set.

It didn't really thematically fit, like Emerge and Melos, which I'll get to in a second, both really made sense. Like, this is a set, you know, it's a cosmic horror set. They made sense. Escalade, well, fine mechanic

was... And maybe we'll find another set where we can use it where it's a little more useful, a little more... fits the theme of the set. Anyway, it's a good mechanic. It's just... it wasn't quite evocative as the other mechanics. And finally, Meld. So, Meld...

So, if you get two cards in play, they're double-faced cards, and you transform both of them. If they're both in play at the same time, you can transform them. And you flip them over, and the back side was one giant card. This mechanic was kind of influenced. There's a card I made in Unglued way back in

1996? Is that right? Or 98? Anyway, 96 or 98. And there's a card called BFM for Big Furry Monster. And you had to cast both from your hand, but there was a left side and a right side. And so this was trying to recreate

how do we make left side and right side. And the idea was, oh, we could use the technology of transformation. So if you get the two things out, they can transform together and make the bigger thing. And I think there was one common...

I think we did a vertical cycle. I think there was a common and uncommon and either rare or mythic rare. The rare one was the angels. The two angels, two of the sisters, merged into a sort of abomination of merged angel. But anyway, there wasn't a lot of meld in the set.

There was a little bit of meld, but the people who liked meld were very fond of it. Okay, August 5th through the 7th was Pro Tour Eldritch Moon, held in Sydney, Australia. It was standard, as we announced. So standard Eldritch Moon slash Shadows of Innistrad booster draft. As I said earlier, all the sets we announced were going to be standard. So that was true. So Czech Republic's Lukas Bluhan defeats USA's Owen Turnwall to win a Protor Eldritch Moon. By the way, at that event,

so the first day, August 5th, the 2016 Protor Hall of Fame was announced. Yu Yu Watanabe and Owen Turnbull were inducted. August 19th, 2006, we released From the Vault Lore. So if you want to know more about From the Vault,

I just did a podcast a couple weeks ago on From the Vault. There were 10 From the a couple weeks ago on From the Vault. There were 10 From the Vaults. I talked about the whole line. This one, like most of them, had 15 cards. All but one of the From the Vaults had 15 cards, all reprints. And these were cards that were renowned for being powerful and having story behind them. And so there was a little booklet that talked about each card

and what was the story associated with them. And so these are all sort of heavy story-related cards. But also cards that people wanted. The whole point of From the Vault was kind of cards people really liked reprinted with a new treatment. And sometimes some of them had new art. But anyway, From the Lore. Okay, next. October 26 was the release of Conspiracy Take the Crown.

So a funny thing, this actually happened back in February, but I'll mention here because that's what I'm talking about. On February 26th of this year I'm sorry, on February 22nd of this year we announced Conspiracy The Reign of Brago, what we

said the name of the set was. And then two days later you find out that Brago is killed. the name of the set was and then two days later you find out that Brago is killed we're saying conspiracy the empty throne and then two days later on the 26th

you found out that Queen Marchesa is trying to take the conspiracy take the crown so we had a bunch we sort of gave some names and had story events happening

so the big story of conspiracy take the crown is the king King Brago who is a ghost, is murdered. How do you murder a ghost?

You get an assassin that can kill a ghost named Kaia. So this is Kaia's first appearance. But anyway, we're back in Fiora, which was where Conspiracy took place. So Conspiracy, this was led by Sean Mayne, who designed this set and created Conspiracy in the first place. Development lead was Ben Hayes. The idea was, it was a

multiplayer product that had a draft matters component to it. So you would draft, and had cards that affected the draft, and then you would sit and play, usually in four-person games. But the idea was, you drafted and then played in multiplayer play. This was the brainchild of

Sean Mean, who came in the second grade of Sound Research, who was in R&D for many years. I had Sean on not too long ago. He and I talked about the making of Kaladesh, which I'm going to get to in a second. So if you want to hear more about that, you can hear me and Sean talking about the making of Kaladesh.

Anyway, so the set had 221 cards. So in it had conspiracies. So conspiracies were things that you drafted that at the start of the game you put in the command zone and they did different things. Some of them were called hidden agendas. So hidden agendas was you named

a card ahead of time and when the time was right you revealed the card and something happened with that card. So hidden agendas had been a conspiracy and were back. There also were double agendas, which were hidden agendas happened with that card. So hidden agendas had been a conspiracy and were back. There also were double agendas, which were hidden agendas but with two cards. So that was brand new to the set. So there were draft matter cards and conspiracies.

Draft matter cards might be if you drafted something happened or if you drafted you got named something that affected your deck. Anyway, one of the fun things about Conspiracy and Conspiracy Take the Crown was the fact that there were things that literally affected how you drafted.

And I think that was... Anyway, it was a very cool thing. Okay, new mechanics in the set. So Monarch... So Monarch was... Somebody becomes a Monarch. When you become the Monarch, you get a Monarch token. There's only one Monarch token. At the beginning of your end step, you draw a card. So if you have the Mon the monarch, you get a monarch token. There's only one monarch token. At the beginning of your end step,

you draw a card. So if you have the monarch token, you get to draw a card at the end of each of your turns. But whenever anybody hits the player that has the monarch with a creature, they can take the monarch. And so the monarch tends to get passed around.

The crown is passed around as people are... Fiora is all about sort of political intrigue. It has sort of a Renaissance about sort of political intrigue. It has sort of a Renaissance Italy sort of feel to it. Anyway, other mechanics in it. There's a new mechanic called melee. Melee are creatures you get plus one plus one for each different player you attack.

So the idea is encouraging you to attack a lot of players and make your melee creatures bigger. Goad is a keyword action that forces a creature to attack someone other than you. So it makes them attack, but they're not allowed to attack you. Also introduced a thing called Council's Dilemma, which is an ability on activations where you have to vote.

It was a riff on Will the Council that was in Original Conspiracy, where you would play a card, and then everybody at the table had to vote about what the card did. It was called Will the Council. Also, Monstrous and Cycling were in the set. Those were, Monstrous first showed in Theros. Cycling was originally in Urza's Saga, but Cycling's been back numerous times. Monstrous, well,

at the time, this was the first time I think Monstrous had been back. We have since, I mean, we've renamed it, I guess, but we've done Monstrous-like things in other sets. Okay, September 24th, pre-release,

September 30th, the release of Kaladesh. So there's 264 cards. So the design lead was me and Sean Mayne. We designed it together. So once again, I just recorded a podcast

a couple weeks ago of me and Sean talking about it. Go listen to it if you haven't. The development leads was Eric Lauer and Ian Duke. So what was happening was we were training people. So I led with Sean to help train Sean. Eric led with Ian to help train Ian. I think Sean and Ian had both done core sets before, but not.

This was their first premiere set, I believe. Anyway, so the set had a bunch of fun new mechanics. So energy was a new resource. So you would get energy counters that you, the player, would keep. And then certain cards will let you spend the energy. So it was the energy source of the world. Kaladesh, by the way, was an inventor's world. And it was a very Johnny, Jenny-centric,

artifact-themed set. And it was very much, very bright, bright flavors. The world had sort of an Indian, we used India as a flavor for a lot of the world, so a lot of stuff had an Indian feel to it. Okay, so Energy was a new resource. Fabricate was,

Fabricate came with a number. When you cast a Fabricate card, you would choose either to get N-1-1 servos, which were a token type, or to get N-plus-one-plus-one counters. And so you could go tall or sort of go wide. And then this was the set that introduced vehicles. So vehicles have now become evergreen,

or deciduous, I guess it's more deciduous than evergreen. They're not in every set. But we do them in a lot of sets. And this is where vehicles first appeared. And we were... One of the things that's tricky about artifact sets in general is, especially when there's a lot of colorlessness, they're hard to balance.

Kaladesh definitely had some power issues. There were some very powerful things. A bunch of cards got banned or restricted in different formats from Kaladesh definitely had some power issues. There were some very powerful things. A bunch of cards got banned or restricted in different formats from Kaladesh. Oh, Kaladesh also had what was called Kaladesh Inventions. What we called Masterpieces. Where some of the time,

but much, much rarer than Booster Fun, you would get, we took popular artifacts and put them in a special new Kaladesh frame. It was a very pretty frame. Nowadays, we do Buster Fun, which is playing in similar space, except it just shows up way, way more

often than it used to show up with the masterpieces. Okay, next up, October 14th through the 16th was Pro Tour Kaladesh in Honolulu, Hawaii in the United States. Standard and Kaladesh butchercher draft for the formats. So Japan's Shota Yasuka, the 2006 Player of the Year,

was up against Brazil's Carlos Romão, the 2002 World Champion. So both of them had won a Pro Tour slash Worlds before. And who would be the one to win a second one? Not a lot of people have won two Pro Tours. There's a handful, but not a lot. And so Yasuka ended up winning and beaded Carlos to take his second Pro Tour. And this is one of a couple of Pro Tours we've had in Honolulu.

Honolulu's very nice, and so we've had a bunch of Pro Tours in Honolulu. Okay, next up. November 11th was Commander 2016. So this was five four-color, 100-card, singleton decks. So it was five commander decks. The theme was four-color.

Design lead was Ethan Fleischer. Development lead was Ben Hayes. So the big, big flavor of this was four-color decks. Not a lot of four-color legendary creatures. So not a lot of commanders that can be four-color. We introduced some new ones, plus introduced two mechanics. One

was called Partner. Partner were creatures that you could take two different creatures with Partner and have both of them be your commander. And so one of the ways to let you play four-color was we made a bunch of two-color partners that you could mix and match to make various combinations. It is tricky making four-color commanders. They're not easy to make. It's why there's not a lot of two-color partners that you can mix and match to make various combinations. It is tricky

making four-color commanders. They're not easy to make. It's why there's not a lot of them. But the whole idea of this set was that we wanted to sort of... I mean, we started making commander products back, I think, in 2012, I think. And it had become popular, and we started making it

every year thing. And so each year had different themes. So this year's theme was four-color. Oh, and we started making it every year and so each year had different themes so this year's theme was four color oh, and there was another mechanic so the set had a mechanic called Undaunted so Undaunted are spells that cost one less for each opponent, so the idea is they get more powerful the bigger the game is, the more opponents there are

so just to one of the fun things about Commander products is because it's geared toward the Commander format we really can experiment and try things that play into that particular thing. So that was kind of cool. Okay, November 25th was Plane Chase Anthology. Okay, so what it did was it collected cards from Plane Chase, the original Plane Chase, Plane Chase 2012, and then we made some promo cards along the way.

So the idea, so for those that don't know, real quickly, what Plane Chase is, it's a format where you have these giant sized cards that are planes. I think originally we said everyone has their own deck, but the way most people play now is just a single deck that everybody uses. Oh, I think, but there's always

only one plane in play at a time. I guess different people had different decks to draw from. Nowadays, most people just use one plane deck. Anyway, the way it works is when you have a die that you can roll, I think you start with a plane in play, and then you can roll the die once for free each turn, and you can pay mana to roll it additional times,

and it gets more expensive the more you roll it. And the idea is when you move and go to a new plane, it changes what's going on. Plane Chase was based on the thing we used to call Enchant World tournaments based on an old card type called Enchant Worlds and now we call it World Enchantments that came from Legends,

the third ever expansion. And the idea is it was a tournament in which there would be a in the original Enchant World there would always be an Enchant World. Later it went on to just be Enchantments. But the idea is the environment keeps changing

because there's some static ability that changes. And so when you play Plane Chase you have this Plane Deck that represents places from various planes from across the multiverse.

And so when you go, there's a die you can roll to move, and also you can sometimes roll a thing that triggers an effect on the world. So there's a static ability on the world, static trigger ability, and then there is an ability that happens when you roll the right thing on the die.

Anyway, so this product, it had the four Plane Chess 2012 theme decks. when you roll the right thing on the die. Anyway, so this product, there were four, it had the four Plane Chase 2012 themed decks. It had 86 oversight cards, the 40 planes from Plane Chase, 32 planes and eight phenomenon cards from Plane Chase 2012. The phenomenon cards were a thing that would happen where you would flip them up,

something would happen, and then you flip the next plane up. And then six promotional planes. We'd made some planes along the way that we had done promotionally. There were some slide deck boxes, decks that started to slide open. There were four for the four decks and there was one oversized one for all

the giant cars for the plane deck. There were 35 double-faced tokens. There was a special edition planer die. There was four spin-down counters and there was a strategy insert. And so the idea basically of this product was we had made a lot of Plane Chase before. This was collecting everything we'd made. So if you wanted to play Plane Chase but hadn't gotten all the pieces to it,

we just put it all in one package so people could buy it all together. The Anthology series, we'd also done a Commander Anthology in previous years, collects old stuff, but usually a bunch of different products together in one product. collects old stuff, but usually a bunch of different products together in one product. Anyway, guys, that, in 30 minutes, was the main events of 2016 in the world of magic. So if you enjoyed this podcast and haven't listened to my other ones, you are in luck. 1993 through 2015, each year has its own podcast with me going through and explaining what's going on. So if you ever wanted to kind of catch up

on the history, this is a series to let you do that. Anyway, guys, I can see 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. Hope you guys enjoyed the look back at 2016. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.