Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #871: Midnight Hunt with Ian Duke

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

I sit down with Designer Ian Duke to talk about the design of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

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'm using my home time to do interviews because that's hard to do in the car. So today I have Ian Duke and we're going to talk about Innistrad Midnight Hunt. Hey, Ian. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me on. I can't believe in nine years I haven't been on this podcast with you yet. I know, I know. Especially now, I've been doing interviews every week. So I'm trying to get as many magic designers on my podcast as I can. So, okay. So let's talk about, so Midnight Hunt.

So I've talked a bit about my end, like the vision design part of it. So I want to focus a little bit more on the set design part of it. So the second, well, what's your earliest memory of the set? I mean, I know, let's talk a little bit about the team and how it was structured. And then I want to talk about sort of set design, getting the set and where it went from there. Yeah. So one important thing to mention is that I actually co-led the set with Eric Lauer. So kind of the flow of things was Ethan Fleischer led the vision design team and then handed that off to Eric Lauer who worked on the set for some number of months and then Eric then handed the set off to me. So my involvement with the set started probably a couple months into the set design

team when Eric was leading that portion of it and I came onto the team as a member so I could kind of spin up and learn the file and kind of get an appreciation for Eric's, you know, vision forward for the set. And then once I kind of got up to speed, he eventually handed off to me and I took over for the final portion, final several months of the set design lead. Okay, so I want to talk about various parts about the set and we'll talk about sort of where they were and what you did with them. So let's start with Day and Night, Daybound, Nightbound, sorry. Yeah, so Daybound, Nightbound was sort of the big mechanic that Ethan handed off from Vision, and we knew it was where we were kind of spending a lot of our, I don't know, complexity points,

equity for the set, that that was going to be a big focus and something that we really wanted to blow out and make a big part of the gameplay of the set. And it was more or less there all along as far as my involvement on the set. Eric had done some experimentation with it. We tried a couple different versions of how it would work. But eventually we settled on the coolest thing about day and night is that compared to the original Innistrad version of day and night, that we would have this persistent tracker that stays in the game for the entire time, and that everything would, you know, transform from day form or to night

form as a unified thing, instead of having, you know, some werewolves that were in their human form and some werewolves that were in their werewolf form, they would all kind of transform in unison, and there would be this global tracker that presided over the game. So that was the kind of thing that we tried to preserve the whole way through. But we did make some tweaks and experiment with a bunch of different versions of things. One of the changes that I made to how day and night work is that in the original Innistrad, you would be caring about both players' actions on a given turn. So if it's my turn and I want to transform my werewolves,

I could try to pass the turn to you without playing any spells. But if you had an instant to cast during my end step, for example, that would stop it from transforming to night. And we kind of, after testing a lot of different things, we kind of viewed that as maybe a little bit of a bug with the original day-night system. And so one of the fixes that I introduced is that you're only caring about what the active player is doing on their own turn, which fixed that problem of, hey, I want to transfer my werewolves. And then you kind of screwed me over by casting an instant in my end step. But it also fixed the problem of making it just generally easier to track, which is something that we were concerned about all along the way.

How did you... The one other difference, I think, from the original werewolves is the idea that werewolves come on their night side if it's night. That's right. And that's one of the really cool things about the day-night tracker being persistent is that even if, you know, a Wrath of God type effect sweeps the board away, if it's still night and a new werewolf comes down, that werewolf will immediately be in its night form, in its werewolf form. And that opened up some additional design space where we could do things like ETBs or enter the battlefield triggers on the werewolf side of the card. Or I believe there's even a werewolf form card that has haste on it because this is the first time they can actually enter in their werewolf form. Anything else? I mean, before we move on to we have plenty of mechanics to talk about any other quirky things about daybound nightbound yeah i mean one of the other things to mention is that one of the themes in the set um is that uh at least for

limited themes certain cards and color pairs care about it flipping back and forth between between day and night and that's something that we experimented with a lot, just in terms of really unique and interesting gameplay, where you want to, you know, take a turn off and let it become night, and then maybe next turn you cast two spells, so there's really interesting sequencing puzzles and gameplay of, like, saving up cards so that you can transform it back to day later on. So we really had a lot of fun with those cards throughout the process. I'll also mention we did experiment with having a deck that wanted it to be day all the time to kind of counterbalance that the werewolves want it to be night. But we found that that created too much of a polarizing matchup where the deck that really wanted to be day kept making it day and then the

werewolves never got to transform. So the deck that the day deck would always beat the werewolves deck. And that's something we identified early on and moved away from in the process. Okay, so next I'm going to talk about what... I'm a big fan of Debound Nightbound but I'm going to talk about my favorite mechanic in the set which is Decade.

And this has an interesting history because Crimson Vow made the Decade mechanic um so let's talk a little bit how did it end up in in midnight hunt yeah so it was really interesting we were actually um designing and developing um midnight hunt and crimson vow almost in parallel midnight hunt of course was like a little bit earlier in the process but um the sets were being worked on at the same time and there were actually a couple instances where we kind of moved mechanics back and forth between the two sets, just

depending on what made the most sense in terms of the set structure, and Decade is one of the ones that we inherited from Crimson Vow and swapped over to Midnight Hunt. A similar thing actually also happened with the spirit mechanic, and I won't spoil too much about what's coming in Crimson Vow, but there was a little bit of a trading back and forth in terms of what the spirits were doing exactly between those two sets. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Decade, because it's something that I was very proud of my team when we made it, but it's a really weird thing. So let's talk a little bit about making Decade cards. Yeah, so what's interesting about

Decade is the keyword Decade is actually downside. So you can ask, well, what's cool about having downside? Like, why have a downside mechanic on things? And the answer is that by putting Decade on these tokens, we get to give you more of them and we get to give you them at less of a cost in terms of, you know, the mana that we're charging on cards and card advantage and things like that. And what makes it work really well is that we really want to capture that flavor of the zombie horde. There's just so many zombies and they're bearing down on you and they have that sense of dread and inevitability.

And by putting Decade on the tokens, we get to give you lots of them. Because one of the things that can be a struggle with tokens is that they really gum up the board, you know, normal, just a normal 1-1 token that is allowed to block can gum up the board and make combat difficult and mathy and things like that. But by putting Decade on the tokens, the fact that they can't block means that they're not just sitting around, you know, stopping your opponent from attacking you. And the fact that they go away after they attack means, you know, you get to get your one big attack in, but then the game progresses. And it's not all about those tokens kind of coming up the board and slowing things down. Yeah, one of the things I think is really fun about them is on some level they are a creature.

In many ways they are a creature, and there's things that care about creatures that care about them. But in some ways they're not a creature in that they don't have the full utility of a creature. That they're kind of this halfway in between a creature and not a creature, which is really interesting when you're trying to understand how they work. Yeah, that's very true. And one of the things that we tried to do with the set is give you additional ways for them to matter. You know, if all that the decayed zombies could do was just sit there,

not block and then attack at one point in the game and then go away, that's maybe not super interesting because they're kind of always playing out the same way. And in particular, we wanted to make sure that the zombies deck didn't always play out in the way where you built up a bunch of zombies and then did one big attack to end the game. We didn't want every single game to end that way and for that to be the only way that that deck could play. So we gave you a bunch of other ways to use Decayed Zombies. There's a couple creatures that let you tap multiple creatures that you control on the battlefield to get an effect so that you can kind of decide to keep your Decayed Zombies around for some time to get some value out of them before you make that attack. I guess one example of that would be

Larder Zombie. It's a blue mana for a 1-3 defender, and you can tap three untapped creatures you control to look at the top card of your library. And if you want to, you can put it into your graveyard. So as you're building up your horde of zombies and kind of controlling the game, this will give you a little bit of card manipulation and make sure you have the right answers to your opponent's threats, that kind of thing.

The other thing that's neat about Decayed Zombies is they die a lot. And since it's Innistrad, we have a lot of cards that care about creatures dying. So these give you a nice way to kind of get on-demand creature death happening and trigger various abilities. And in fact, the black-green limited archetype is kind of caring about creatures dying with some cards that either get bonuses or have mana discounts, depending on how many creatures have died this turn. So that obviously plays really well with decayed zombies as well yeah the one other thing that's really interesting is the first time you ever have a 2-2 up and your opponent attacks with a 2-2 decayed zombie and you're like oh wait a minute am i supposed to block it's a very i love when we give you sort of different problems that you've

never thought about before and you're like okay like normally i'll trade a 2-2 for a 2-2 because I get the body but like it's going to die so like what what does that mean that's really interesting to me right and things get even more interesting when there's like bluff type situations that come up so say I have the 2-2 decayed zombie and you have a 2-3 creature and I attack you with my zombie. What are you going to do now? Are you going to block? Well, then I might get to trade a combat trick for your creature or might have some kind of other bonus or pump spell or surprise. But from my end of things, the opportunity cost is very low because I have this very disposable token that's going to go away after it attacks anyway. So maybe I'm just bluffing entirely and you should just go ahead and block.

So there's a lot of interesting situations like that that come up. Okay, I'm going to transition to our next mechanic, using something you said about Decayed. You talked about how you could tap them, so I want to talk a little bit about the early states of Coven, and how we ended up with where we got to. So when the set turned over, we had a, I think it was called Witchcraft was the name of the ability, and it was like acraft was the name of the ability. And it was like a kicker-like ability where you had to tap three creatures to kick it, basically. Yeah, that's in my earliest memory of seeing the Vision handoff. I do remember that Witchcraft mechanic there.

That's something that I think was worked on during Eric Lauer's portion of leading set design. So I don't know much about what all was tried with that other than seeing a few of the individual cards there. But there was actually another intermediate step in between that original witchcraft and where we ended up with Coven. And that was a mechanic that we called hunting at the time. And this was another variant. So basically, all of these mechanics along the way, we were trying to capture the flavor of the humans working together against all the creatures of the night, the werewolves, the zombies, the vampires, and so on. And so we wanted to have a mechanic that conveyed collaboration between a bunch of creatures.

So Witchcraft was the first iteration of that, where you tapped creatures to get a bonus when you cast a spell or did some other action. Then we tried out Hunting, which was sort of like Convoke. It was a mana discount on spells that discounted a mana for each creature that you attacked with this turn. And we tried that out for a bit. One of the issues we found when we had lots of cards that did that is the games were pretty snowball-y in that either you got off to a great start and you were able to keep attacking your opponent with your creatures and then keep playing your cards for a mana discount, or things would be not going so well for you and your opponent would put up an early defense and then you wouldn't be able to attack, nor would you be able to cast your spells

because you weren't able to get the mana discount on them. So we found that that mechanic was cool on a small number of cards, but didn't play as well on a large number of cards, you know, blown out as a major mechanic um at least given the way the rest of the set structure was however there is one card in the final set that preserves that functionality which is called search party captain this is uh three and a white for a two two creature and it costs one less to cast for each creature you attacked with this turn and when it enters the battlefield you draw a card so that's kind of the one holdover from that intermediate step of hunting. And then after we decided hunting wasn't right,

that's when we explored yet another mechanic there. And basically I just did a call out for my team to submit a bunch of different mechanic candidates that would again convey this flavor of creatures working together. And the one that we liked the best was Coven, where you're trying to play this mini game of getting different creatures with different power

stats onto the battlefield. And we thought that was a really cool thing, both flavorfully and mechanically, and it ended up working out really well. So, yeah, one of the things that I like about Coven that, as a game designer, I always appreciate is

I love caring about something that's already in the game, but we haven't really cared about before that, that always is joyful for me when we find that stuff. Yeah, I totally agree. And it's also rewarding you for something that you want to do anyway, right?

It's in the colors, green and white, which are the most creature based colors. So you naturally just want to have a lot of creatures on the battlefield. And you know, when you do, then your coven turns on and things power up yeah and one of the cool things i know um uh in the uh commander decks they even have ones that are they don't they don't stop at three right they just care about how many different powers you have i think that's great too, and that was actually something we collaborated with the Commander team about. That was one of their suggestions

is like, hey, this coven mechanic is pretty cool. We think in the context of Commander, where the games go a little bit longer, a little bit bigger than they might in one-on-one competitive play, it would be really cool if there were some coven cards that continued to scale up as you had more and more and more different powers

in play. So really glad that that team added some cards like that. Very cool. Yeah, one of the fun things is that Commander can really riff off of ideas in the set, but then push more in Commander directions. That's kind of fun. Okay, so we've talked werewolves. We've talked zombies.

We've talked humans. Let's talk spirits. So the Disturb mechanic, what can you tell me about the Disturb mechanic? Yeah, so Disturb is just keying into something people know and love from previous Innistrad sets, which is getting cards into your graveyard, you know, via self-mill or looting. Traditionally, spirits have also been about flying creatures. So kind of tying all those things together we have creatures that are humans or other non-spirit creatures on the front and then they can come back from the graveyard via the disturb mechanic as flying spirits and i think

there's a lot of great opportunities for telling really cool and flavorful stories with these cards and they also just play really well in the context of the rest of the set mechanics in terms of filling up your graveyard. One of my favorites is the Beloved Beggar. This is one and a white for a 0-4 creature, and it has Disturb for four white white, and it comes back as a 4-4 Flying Vigilance, so almost like a Sarah Angel, if you will. And I just like this card because the story and the flavor on it is great you know just seeing the beloved beggar from town and then he's coming back as the generous soul and kind of protecting the village uh and also mechanically it's just really neat that you can play this early creature to defend yourself early in the game and hold off some early attackers

and then it also can serve as a win condition later on so the whole package there really came together for me so i want to address something. One of the comments I get about Disturb, and I want to talk about this in general. I know some people get concerned that Disturb costs are too high. We get this on Flashback as well. So let's talk a little bit about late game utility. And I think people I'm sort of curious to get your feedback on why you think people sort of look at these big costs, but yet they're very playable cards. Yeah, that's a great question for me, Mark, because historically I've been very much a game balance type of designer.

So I think a lot about power level and costing of cards. And I have noticed that it's very easy very easy to under appreciate things like disturb and things like flashback and I think a big part of that is it's not necessarily obvious but those mechanics are almost like drawing a card right so when you play a flashback spell you are almost in addition to whatever effect you're getting you're also getting another card which is that same spell in your graveyard now. So we have to charge you that additional amount as though, you know, we've basically stapled draw a card to that effect. And similar with the spirits as well. So like the Beloved Beggar that

I just described, sure, it's two mana for a 0-4 creature, which would be lousy by itself, but when it dies, it's almost as if you're drawing that six mana 4-4 Flying Vigilance. And so that's kind of baked into how we're charging you for the card, either upfront on the original cost or on the backside of the disturb cost or the flashback cost. And I think just, yeah, it's just kind of a subtle thing that it takes some experience playing the game to appreciate or some thought to kind of sit down and evaluate the cards. But I think players will find that when they actually play with the set, that these effects are

more powerful than they might read at first glance. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing from just doing a lot of magic design is there's certain things that players always overestimate and things they always underestimate. And late game utility, just like, this card does something

and then for free, kind of, later on you get to, you know, like the idea that I have this, right, six mana 4-4 flying creature, you know, like, late in the game, when you have nothing else to do with your mana, like, wouldn't you like a 4-4? Like, it's, you know. play in terms of as game designers, how we cost and position these cards. So I guess, for example, you know, we get to choose, do we want to give you, say we have a flashback card, we as designers get to choose, do we want to cost that card up front as close as possible to what it would cost if it didn't have flashback? Or we can charge you a little bit extra, but give you like a more efficient flashback on it so for example take the card lightning strike it's one one in a red for three damage to any target at instant speed now we could make a card that was lightning strike but it also had flashback for

10 mana and people would read that card and be like wow why is the flashback so high on this card right but secretly it's because lightning Strike is a pretty powerful card just by itself, right? Like you would just play that card in a lot of decks, you know, especially in Limited or in Standard. And so we get to choose, you know, do we want to make that card where we're giving you the efficient version up front with the very inefficient flashback cost,

or we could take that same card, we could charge you three mana up front for it, and then maybe make the flashback six or seven mana, right? So we get to play around with kind of sloshing that power back and forth between what three mana up front for it and then maybe make the flashback six or seven mana, right? So we get to play around with kind of sloshing that power back and forth between what you get up front versus what you get later. Okay, well since we

got, you've transitioned to flashback so what did flashback do differently? Flashback obviously, we've done it many times it was an original Innistrad. It was originally in Odyssey. So what did we do with Flashback this time around? So this time around, the biggest thing with Flashback is that we have the first ever multicolor Flashback cards. Flashback is, like you said, a mechanic we've done several times in

the past, and it always plays really well and ends up being popular so it's it's one of our go-to's that we will probably return to again at some point in the future um though who can say when um but yeah we just really love how flashback plays and and um playing into graveyard mechanics and looting and self-mill and things like that um and this time around we thought we would give players um the first ever multi-color flashback cards so we've got uh for example a cycle of uncommons in each of the 10 color pairs, many of which are pretty exciting cards. And yeah, we've mostly had a lot of fun playtesting with them. It also gives this set a little bit more of a multicolor feel than the previous Innistrad sets, which helps spice things up a little bit compared to what we've seen before. So do you know where the multicolor

came from? A little behind the scenes here? I don't know for sure. I certainly remember, you know, working with Eric on the idea and some of the designs, but I don't remember who initially came up with the pitch to have multicolor flashback. So originally, Strixhaven also had flashback, and we had done multicolor on that

because it had an enemy theme, right? And I realized in Strixhaven, oh, we've never done multicolored flashback. Oh, okay, because flashback made a lot of sense in the Spell Matter set. And I'm like, okay, we'll do enemy colored flashback. We've never done gold flashback. And then when we decided not to do it in Strixhaven

and just do it in Innistrad, Eric was like, oh, multicolored, that sounds like a good idea. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad because it worked out well. I do remember when I joined the team under Eric's leadership, we actually had common multicolor flashback cards in the set that we played with for a few playtests. And ultimately, we felt that that made the set feel like a little bit too multicolor compared to what we were going for.

And in particular, in the draft, since there's only typically eight drafters in a draft pod, yet there's 10 color pairs, you would always end up with a few of the color pairs not being represented among the drafters. And then you'd have these relatively powerful multicolor flashback cards just going around and around the table and no one was picking them up. around and around the table and no one was picking them up and that just kind of felt wrong because we wanted to make sure that as multi-color cards they were you know pretty powerful at least in limited and felt rewarding for you to draft them but then whichever color pairs people weren't drafting you'd just see these powerful cards floating around and no one was picking them up and that that didn't end up working out all that well so we decided to move them up to higher rarities and i think things played a lot better since then. Yeah, it's hard to do common gold cards without something

to help you have access to them. Normally a gold set will have common mana fixing and stuff. Absolutely. And ultimately we decided we didn't want the set to have that much multicolor feel because we've done other sets where the shtick of the set is that it's a multicolor set, like

Strixhaven and so on, various Ravnica sets in the past and all that. And that's not quite what we were going for here. Okay. So we've talked about almost all the mechanics. There's a lot of mechanics in the set, a lot of named mechanics. So let's talk a little bit about Investigate. So I know in Vision Design, I think we turned over two. I think there were two in the Vision Design handoff,

and I think there was five in the finished set. So talk a little bit about that. Did you guys ever think of removing Investigate? Absolutely, we did. And one of the main reasons for that is, it may not be obvious at first blush, but Flashback and Investigate are really similar mechanics in terms of what they do for a limited environment, in terms of giving the players more to do in the late game and more card flow.

So we also have a lot of flashback in the set compared to previous times we've done flashbacks. So the feeling at one point was that there wasn't room to have investigate on top of flashback, that that would just be too much card flow. People would never run out of things to do with their mana and the games would drag on forever. So that was something that we were really careful of. And know that eric encouraged me to be careful of as well that being said um just me as a magic player and magic fan i really love the mechanic investigate and i think it was really popular when we previously did it in shadows of renaissance block so i knew that players would expect to have some amount of investigate back so the little trick that i pulled was i put

investigate on a smaller number of cards and many of them are uncommon or higher rarity but i made sure that those cards are pretty prominent and powerful cards that will maybe show up and constructed a bit so it kind of feels like there's more investigate in the set when you're thinking about iconic and powerful cards from the set but there's not actually that high of a density of it in the limited environment because flashback is taking up that space. Okay, so we've talked through all the naming mechanics. So is there anything, what else about the set? What are you proud of as far as just from a set design perspective? Well, one of the

things that we identified early on is that the set had a relatively low number of legends around the time of the handoff that I got from Eric. And so I was encouraged by some of our other designers and product architects to explore ways to add some more legends to the set. So we did end up adding a bunch of them throughout the process. And some of the ones that I'm really proud of that we ended up with. There's Lear, Disciple of the Drowned, who kind of gives all of your spells flashback in your graveyard, which was at one point a non-legendary creature.

We had put it into the file and called it Snapcaster Master after the old Snapcaster Mage as a reference to that, but we decided that it would make a really cool legend since it's an exciting ability that doesn't stack anyway. Other legends that I certainly spent a lot of time on Tovalar, and I'm really excited to see that the community is pretty excited about that card. We knew that players would really expect to have a werewolf legend that would be an awesome commander for werewolf decks, something that we hadn't necessarily delivered on very well in the past. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that card and coming up with

various different versions of that. From the get-go, one of the things that I wanted to accomplish with that card was kind of unifying how all the werewolves worked. So at this point, we now have at least three different types of transformation conditions for werewolves. There's the original Innistrad werewolves with the original expression of day and night. Then there's the Eldrazi werewolves from Eldritch Moon. And then now we have the day-down, night-down werewolves from Innistrad Midnight Hunt. And I wanted to make sure that you could put all those cards in the same deck and not have it be an absolute tracking nightmare with all of them transforming under different conditions and not necessarily being synced up with them. So we tried a bunch of different versions of Tovelar.

One of the early ones, I think, basically gave all of your werewolves daybound and nightbound and enforced that they transformed with him in both ways. But we eventually found a cleaner version of that that was a little bit more intuitive. And I think we ended up in a pretty fun spot with that card. Yeah, I know, definitely. I've got a lot of very positive responses intuitive and i think we ended up in a pretty pretty fun spot with that card yeah i know definitely i've got a lot of very positive responses from the werewolf fans on tovalara

and then beyond that we just wanted to make sure we had a lot of um just recognizable and fun inclusions in the set um that people would associate with you know spookiness or halloween or um those types of flavors so making sure we had a jack-o'-lantern in the set was something that the team talked a lot about. And we really liked other top-downs like the silver bolt that kills werewolves. We thought it was pretty cool. And there's the stuffed bear, you know, kind of the spooky taxidermied bear that comes to life. There's another really fun top-down that made it all the way through the process. So I think having a lot of cards like that,

really capturing just the flavor and the theme of what people love about horror and what they've loved about previous Innistrad's is definitely something that the team spent a lot of time thinking about. Okay, so there's one card I want to talk about, just because it's a very set-design-y thing. So Delver of Secrets, which was obviously a very powerful card from original Innistrad. Tell me the story of how this actually got in the set and stayed in the set. Yeah, so this card was in the set when I joined the team. So somebody at some point thought, let's try out Delver of Secrets. It might

have been Eric. I don't know for sure. I would probably guess it was Eric. And the idea behind Delver of Secrets is it's a very powerful card in the greater scope of Magic history, in that it's powerful in non-rotating formats like Legacy, where there's lots of cheap spells to play with it and lots of card manipulation. And it was certainly very powerful in the original Innistrad Standard when it came out. Although, it's a very context-dependent card, right? In the original Innistrad, it had other cards to work with it, like Snapcaster Mage, Vapor Snag, Gitaxian Probe, Mana Leak, just very powerful blue, Instants and Sorceries,

and card manipulation. And so while it was really, really powerful in that environment, we thought that we could maybe bring it back in a new environment where it was still very powerful, but not too powerful to bring back in Standard. So we decided to give it a try and we put it in the file, knowing that when we eventually got to the FFL process, the Future Future League process where the play designers test the cards in Standard, that we might find out that it's too powerful and have to reject it and go with something else instead. But everybody seemed really excited about it all along the way, and again, we knew as

long as we were careful about what other instance and sorceries and other card manipulation effects we included in the environment, that we could kind of tweak and tune the context around the card and hopefully get the card to be in a good spot for standard. And ultimately, we think we were able to do that. And yeah, people seemed really excited

to give the card another try, and I'm happy that it made it through the process. Yeah, it's very funny because there are a lot of cards, like, we try cards all the time. We always will put reprints in and try them, and a lot of times we're bold and we try things, and then they get knocked out and they don't make it all the way. And so it's fun to, like, more times than not they don't make it,

so it's fun when they do make it. Yeah, and certainly I've been on sets where we've tried cards that didn't make it all the way through. And in fact, I'm working on sets right now where we're trying some ambitious reprints that we still aren't sure whether they will or won't make it through.

So it's something that we're definitely willing to experiment with in the future. And we know that there's a certain section of our players that love when iconic and powerful reprints come back. So we try to do them when we can, as long as we pace them out judiciously and make sure that we're being responsible as far as game balance goes and so on.

Yeah, I think it's funny because to the audience perspective, to my perspective, it's like we try all the time. So when one makes it, I'm so excited when it makes it through. Yep, for sure. So, well, anyway, I can see my desk here, so I'm not too far from work. Do you have any final thoughts on Innistrad Midnight Hunt?

No, just that I'm really excited to see everyone's reaction to the set. At the time of recording this, the set just came out on Arena yesterday. So I spent a lot of time watching people stream, drafting, and the new standard environment. And I've been following social media. And so far, it seems like there's a lot of positivity and excitement around the set, and that makes me really excited too, you know, both as the set lead and just as a Magic fan and player myself. So I'm really, really curious, as always, to see, like, how the limited environment plays out and what people think of it, and then, of course, you know, how the new standard environment rolls out with the rotation just having happened as well. So there'll be lots of new exciting stuff there. And then, you know, some of the mechanics in the set, too. I really want to see how people end up evaluating them once they get to play with the cards.

Disturb and certainly Daybound and Nightbound and the Day-Night Tracker are the foremost in my mind. Like I said earlier, we kind of knew we were spending a lot of our complexity points equity on that mechanic. And I'm really excited to see, you know, hopefully it turns out fun and people enjoy it. And we'll see how it goes. Well, I want to thank you for joining me, Ian. It's fun. It's always fun talking magic sets, but it's fun also to talk, like, just coming out magic sets. That's extra fun.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm happy to come back anytime well so everybody else I want to thank Ian for joining us and I will talk to all of you next time so instead of

talking magic it's time for me to be making magic I'll see you guys next time bye bye