Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #889: Secret Lair with Mark Heggen

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

I sit down with Producer Mark Heggen to talk about the creation of the Secret Lair product line.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for The Drive to Work, Coronavirus Edition. Okay, I've been using my time at home to do interviews with co-workers and past co-workers to talk about making magic. Today I have Mark Hagen, and we're going to talk about Secret Lair. Hey, Mark. Hey, Mark. How you doing? I'm doing very good. So, this is something most of the time when I talk to people, it's something that the two of us have worked a lot on.

I've done a little bit of work on Secret Lair, but not a lot. But this is your baby. So I brought you in so we can talk about the origins of Secret Lair and sort of what Secret Lair, like sort of the philosophy that's evolved on Secret Lair. Right. So let's go back to the very beginning, before there was a Secret Lair. Where did the go back to the very beginning before there was a Secret Lair.

Where did the idea come from in the first place? How did we ever come up with this idea? Yeah. All right, so I joined Wizards in 2016. I moved out here, started learning how the machine worked. And after about a year of just kind of like orienting myself and and um getting in on things we started running into this pattern where um

there were a lot of good ideas or interesting cards people wanted to make some of the cards some of the ideas were mine or other people people from creative people from um various parts of the building would have a lot of ideas as we always do um and i realized that many of the ideas we agreed they sounded like fun we smiled when we imagined these cards existing but for very good reasons we had we could not make them um and so uh it kind of fell into three i think it's kind of three three themes that that were causing these no's. One is that Magic is very, at the time, Magic was very slow before Secret Lair. I mean, Magic is still slow. It takes a long time to make a set of Magic cards. And so we're working years down the road. And so unless

you have an idea that is, you have it now, but we're excited to release it and confident to release it two or three years from now, that's one reason we could say no. It's kind of like, well, it'll take too long. Also, Magic, before we had Sequel Air and before we had Booster Fun, Magic just needed to creatively have a pretty tight wall around it. I mean, different sets would have different creative vibes, different products had their own energy. The sets looked different set to set.

But once you're within a set, there's a pretty tight wall around what makes sense to put in that world. We have an art style that is just beautiful and we do so much work, but it works so well because it holds together. And just creatively and the energy. So we had a lot of ideas for cards that we thought sounded like fun, but we thought, but you can't just put that on Ixalan. You can't put this illustration style in Dominaria. We can't, you know, Ravnica doesn't have that kind of vibe or energy.

And so we'd have to say no to a lot of ideas there. And then the third idea was just that, again, we didn't have any places to put them. Like we didn't have booster fun. We didn't do a lot of different products. Every year we'd do maybe a Comic-Con exclusive, which could have a small number, or we'd do a few promo cards that would go to judges, those kind of things. But most of the time it's like, look, we have a few giant chips that are moving.

They're sets. And if you can fit into those, we can maybe find a home for you. But if you're a card that just doesn't fill up an entire set or isn't the premise of a whole world, we just didn't have really a home for you um and so those three things were were just a big theme to kind of my second year here we just kept saying no to card in a way that felt uh disappointing it felt frustrating because they sounded like fun yeah another thing i just want to explain to people uh is we work in such large numbers that our systems are made for large numbers that when you get to small numbers our systems just don't work you know i'm saying

it's like you know okay let's say we're gonna do a small print run of cards and we want stores to sell them like if this print run is small enough there's more stores than there are cards you know you're saying it's like like some cards get one, you know, some stores get one card. Like it just doesn't work in a system that works. And so another thing that I definitely think that Secret Lair was trying to solve too was like,

sometimes you have systems and those systems do certain things really well, but they can't do other systems. They're just not made to do it. And I think the audience, one of the things that's hard for magic players to understand is there's a lot of behind the scenes of logistics and printing and there's all these things that

we have to care about to actually make the set and that just wanting it, just it being cool it existed doesn't make those systems go away. And so one of the things that Secret Lair also brought to the table was here's a completely new way to do things that allows us to do things right. There was no

set that could let us do that before. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. As you said, like, you might have a cool illustrator that draws really funny kitty cats, but unless you're prepared to print a tremendous number of the card and put it into all of the boosters on the planet and then

ship that to everywhere around the world. Unless you think it works to that scale, you don't really have a home for that kitty cat because it just, as you said, the whole system is predicated on these giant runs of these big sets. And so it just ended up having less homes for the experiments than we wanted.

Yeah, a lot of times people, I mean, one thing that's very interesting, people ask me all the time, why can't we do thing X or thing Y? And some of the times is we don't want to or whatever you know there's reasons mechanically or whatever not to do them but sometimes the reason is oh from a business standpoint we don't have the structure to do that thing and that it it takes a lot you're like for example just making a booster that doesn't have 15 cards in it is asking for the world. People don't realize this. But, I mean, just asking for that is a giant, giant ask.

Because not only are you changing the size of the booster, you're changing the size of the box, you're changing shipping. You're changing 8,000 things that you don't even realize. And that, to the audience out there, is like, oh, just make a different size booster. They're like, well, a lot comes with that. And I think that, right, a lot of what you were solving was, hey, could we deliver something in a way that people would love? And that's just another interesting thing about this product is there are things that a small number of people would adore and the larger audience wouldn't care less about, right?

That's another big thing about Secret Lair is before it's like either everybody loved it or, you know, a certain amount or it was hard to do. audience wouldn't care less about right that's another big thing about secret lair is before it's like either everybody loved it or you know a certain amount or it was hard to do you couldn't just say this tiny portion would absolutely love this but the rest wouldn't care our our systems didn't let you do that and i think secret lair said well what if we could make something that this small sliver would love beyond compare no one might care, but they would care that this could do stuff like that, that we could do very fine-tuned ideas. Exactly.

Yeah, I think of something like, I think back in the day, our idea of kind of a niche appeal product might be something like an unset. We know that not every fan is super into unsets, and so it's kind of a subset, but actually it's a pretty big chunk. I mean, I don't know the exact number,

but if you want to have 10 magic fans in a room and you say, raise your hand if you like unsets, we know it's not for everyone, but you're going to get a lot of hands raised. And that's a niche product at the time. Right. And that's a niche product that, you know, you know, right. And we're talking about. We wanted something that went all the way down to one. Like if I can get, if I can get a hundred magic fans and I can get two of you to raise your

hands about something really blowing your mind and making you smile, it was just so wonderful to imagine being able to give you that. And it's okay that the other 98 people, it wasn't for them. And we just, as you said, we just didn't have a machine that could, that could really do that.

Okay. So, so you recognize this. So the, the first big idea is, Hey, can we make, can we make this product that allows us to make things we can't make right now? Right, right. So, yeah, we started with that, you know, we kind of started with that moment where there's someone out there and they see this thing and they want it and they get it.

And then we work backwards and we just there's a lot of challenges and we kind of lined them up and then just took them on. So one is, you know, how do you, what is this thing? Is it a set? Are we making a set of cute cat cards? No, that's too heavy. So we said, okay, maybe it's just a little handful of cards. You know, we kind of set them on like maybe around five. Okay, well then how would you even sell this thing?

Because as you said, it doesn't work. We can't print hundreds of thousands of units of this and then ask stores to take it on as inventory. And then we don't know how many people that want it. And it's probably a pretty small number. So we said, okay, we don't think this works just running through stores the way that we run our regular booster products. It's just not built for that. We need something that's more targeted that people around the universe can kind of opt in or out. And we're not putting all this pressure on a store owner to take on this huge inventory load of a product that

may or may not sell to the customers that happen to be in their store. Yeah, let me explain that real quick. That's another really good point, which is, so another thing we have to worry about is there are store owners, right? So if you're a store owner, you have an inventory, meaning you spend your money, you buy things, and the way you get the money back is you sell the things that you buy. And so one of the things that's really important if if you're, you know, this is true for any retail, we care about game owners just because we're

selling games. You know, we have to be careful not to make too many what we call niche products such that the store owner buys it and then nobody walks in the store to get it. And what you're saying is, hey, maybe we'll make something that one out of a hundred people want.

You know what I'm saying? So a store owner could make it, and none of those people ever walk in the store. And so it's a really hard product to go through that channel because we don't want the store owners to buy something they don't know for sure they can sell. And so, once again, the system doesn't really match the need of the product. Exactly right. So, yeah, we had to think differently about how we sell these things.

As many of your listeners will know, to date, we had never sold anything this way. Wizards, if you went to the Wizards of the Coast website, there was no store button. There's no place to enter your credit card. Wizards doesn't sell Magic cards at the time. And so that's the world we were in. There's no place to enter your credit card. Wizards doesn't sell magic cards at the time. And so that's the world we were in.

And so we had to kind of rethink that and work with the entire building and the entire ecosystem and really think, OK, what is an interesting, responsible, appropriate way to figure out ways to kind of, again, reach the universe, find a few people who want this and not force other people like third party store owners into a relationship that may or may not work for them. And to be clear, as we're spitting this up and kind of brainstorming this, we have no idea how these are going to sell. We have no idea how they're going to sell relative to another. In the room, we can think, I bet some people would want kitty cat cards, and other people would say, I bet people would want cards by this artist or with this theme.

But we all agree. We just don't know. We can't, we have guesses, but they're just guesses. And so we, we had to figure out a way to go into this knowing that, um,

we were playing in a new territory and we, we couldn't be too confident that we knew how this was going to work out. Right. And so once again, uh, one of the things we do in magic normally is we have to set numbers, you know, that, that there's a lot of people that are, you know, we have all these normally is we have to set numbers. You know, there's a lot of people that are, you know, we have all these people that are really good at numbers.

But there's a point early in the product, long before anyone buys the product, like we have to sort of predict how much we're going to sell. And we do reprints and this and that. I mean, if it's large enough, you can do things like reprints. But the problem here is right we're making something that do a thousand people want it do two thousand people want it to ten thousand people want it we don't know and right that completely flies in the face of how we make cards so like one of the interesting little themes as we run through this hopefully for the audience is what what marking this team did is made a product that fit nothing that we did it It was, it was a very, it's very,

you know, wall breaking in the, like it took all of our systems and said, well, none of our systems do this. What if we did this? So it definitely is an interesting story and like, right,

let's find a product and figure out how to make that product exist in a way that was a huge huge challenge one of the reasons i i find this story very fascinating is you know as someone inside the building who gets all the stuff you're talking about and has watched this for years like when you first said you wanted to do this i'm like wow is that doable like you know it really was a big question mark hey uh it's interesting it reminds me so at the for most of the kind of pre-planning of secret lair we actually we were planning to do them as limited print runs so our plan for most of the time leading up to it was we will we will take our best guess of how many people are going to want

these we'll print that many and we'll sell that many and once those are gone then it will be sold out you know we do want these we want people who want these to have them but we also want them to be collectible we don't want these to just feel like, just kind of like kind of blowing around the ground. We wanted them to feel special. If you made the effort to show up for one of these sales, we wanted to, for you to have something that you could be proud of a year from now. So we were kind of on track to pick a number using our guests and then print that many and then let them sell out. using our guests, and then print that mini and then let them sell out. And it was only very close.

It was very, very late in the game. We were getting weeks away from actually launching the first one of these. We did a lot of thinking. I remember I had this one car ride. Oh, go ahead. Here's my memory of the story. Tell me if this is correct or not. So we were doing something somewhere else. There's other limited things we do i don't know whether it was like selling san diego comic-con cards online

or it was something in which it was something where people had to go to a place at a time to get something and it sold out instantaneously and the audience was really upset because people were like i literally showed up when i was told to show up you know and i wasn't able to purchase the thing and it made i know it made us go oh like we don't want to like say hey there's this thing and then if you are two minutes late you just can't get the thing like right that i think what happened was before this this this product existed we had similar things and the audience had such a negative feeling too, but I want to buy it. Why can't I buy this the day you sell it? And that, I think that shaped a lot of this philosophy, right? Exactly. Yeah, totally true. And you know, I think one of the things that

it kept us in that space for so long is we, we looked around the rest of the world and we kept seeing other examples of people doing it that way. So we looked at other collectibles or, you know, sneaker releases or limited edition. And we said, yeah, they're doing that. They're picking a number. It's selling out. Sometimes it sells out in one minute or one hour. And so I think, I don't know, it was a good lesson for me. It was easy to kind of use that as evidence of like, it's okay.

That's just how the world needs to work. And we just assumed that that's how it should work for a while. Real quick, I have to jump in real quick just because you said this. So I have to jump in real quick just because you said this so i have to for those that might not know mark by visuals like you know i'm throwing a name he just mentioned shoes so mark collects shoes so you've ever seen the magic guy with all the shoes behind him that's who mark is that's me yeah so yeah so i you know i was going home you know i was working it wasn't all day i was waking up early in the morning to do these sneaker releases, and that was a big part of my thinking.

That's a world where sometimes these things sell out immediately. Sometimes bots will show up and buy out all the inventory before you can get enchanted. And it's frustrating. Sometimes that's how certain things will work, and that's the appropriate way to sell things. But as we got closer, we said, Secret Lair is supposed to be something that's fun.

It's supposed to be something people can feel good about. It's not for everyone. Not everyone, you know, it's optional, but let's double check ourselves. Are we making this as welcoming as possible? And so at the kind of late in the game, based on learnings, the experiences you mentioned and just kind of ruminating, we pivoted to this other model of what we call time box to demand, which is kind of an unusual thing. we pivoted to this other model of what we call time box to demand, which is kind of an unusual thing. We made up those words.

And the idea is we said, look, let's just pick a window. Let's pick a, you know, whether it's a day or a week or a month. If you show up during this window, we got you. And for the Secret Lair, for the Secret Lair Drop Series, which is kind of our flagship product line within Secret Lair, we'll sell them that way. And we will, if you make the effort and you show up, we will get you these cards. It might take us a while because now we have to wait and print them afterwards,

but we will do our part. And so that became kind of the main way that we sold these things. Okay, so before we get into, there's some fun stories about doing the very first one, but I want to, a question people always ask, so I'm going to ask you. I think I might know the answer, but I'm curious what the actual answer is. Why is it called Secret Lair? Where did that name

come from? Yeah, so we did a bunch of brainstorming. We wanted to give an identity to this so people could have an opinion. We knew the art was going to be so different, and the content would be so very, we wanted to have kind of a sub-brand, we call it, within Magic. So we did a lot of brainstorming,

and a few of us were brainstorming. We came up with like a hundred ideas, nothing quite felt right. And then we were walking back through the pit, and we saw there's a sign-up. Okay, I thought, I'm indirectly responsible for this. There's a sign-up which was...

Name it, kind of the informal name, or the sub-informal name. So what happened was, R&D moved on the third floor. We moved to a new section, and we made this new section where there's these tables where you can play tasks.

Right. So I got the idea. So back in Unglued 2, I made a card called R&D Secret Lair that said never happened. I then put it on Hinge, and we made new art for it. So, back in Unglued 2, I made a card called R&D Secret Lair. That set never happened. I then put it on Hinge, and we made new art for it. But anyway, there's a card called R&D Secret Lair.

So I printed a giant version of the card, and I put it up on the wall by this area. And then R&D just started calling it R&D Secret Lair. That was the name of the area, because I put the card up there. Anyway, it just was a running joke from long ago about you know like like somehow we sit in our vault and anyway it was just a joke from an unset many many years ago and i i put the card up but i that's what i thought you saw is the giant card they put up that said r&d secret letter yeah i mean it's just a perfect fit the whole vibe we're going for is it look these are they're kind of a secret they're weird maybe your friends don't know about them but you do um and also yeah the idea is that the whole point of these these are

cards that that the group of people who makes magic some of us are passionate about every secret letter card we've made like all of these come from a place of someone here in in these offices saying like this is fun this artist is cool this idea is funny this makes me smile let's get it made and then and then we're able to bring them to life in this real rapid fire way. So it felt like a good vibe for that kind of, yeah, from the heart of Secret Lair and from our hearts and minds out into the world.

So I remember the very first, so here's the story I'm curious to hear your take on. Yeah. Okay, the very first Secret Lair was five Secret Lairs, I think. There were five at once. Maybe, maybe seven. Some number, five, six, seven, some number.

So the idea was, we had no idea. Like, literally one of the big questions was, okay, which of these are going to be successful? And we had this little, like, vote, you know, vote which one you think is going to be the best-selling of them. So talk a little bit about that experience of, like, okay, for the very first time, we put that

out there. Yeah, it was so fun. Yeah, we had this batch. You know, for the very first time we put that out there. Yeah, it was so fun. Yeah, we had this batch. You know, it's funny. We look back at them now. Some are pretty tame. I think they're all a little bit weird, but, you know, some are relatively tame. We had like these Eldraine Wonderlands, for example.

You know, those are snowlands set on Eldraine, which is kind of, if you're deep in, you know that Eldraine doesn't have a snow mechanic, so it's unusual that we would make such a thing. But, you know, they look like beautiful, basically, in our snow lands. We had kind of cartoony goblins. We had a bitter blossom pack. So we kind of were trying some different things on. We did not know how they would do. As you say, we found over time that one of our best predictive tools was to just ask. We would pull all of the buildings.

We would pull all of our building we'd pull all of our r&d like which of these are you do you plan on buying and which of these do you think will sell well and then if you kind of aggregate that together um you know so we had some sense then um also frankly we also didn't know the whole machine was new we had built this website we had worked with a um a partner who was actually fulfilling these and mailing these. All of our communications and PR and marketing, all of that was new for this. You know, we're used to selling sets, which are these big things with a trailer. And this was very different everywhere.

So we got together that morning and we're like, let's see what happens. And we opened up the store and we all held our breath, waiting to see if any of the numbers moved. Because there were just so many ways this could have gone wrong. And by the way, I remember there was a screen. Like, we were watching. Literally, as each person would purchase, the numbers would change. And we kept checking in all the way.

How are the numbers? How are the things doing? And I think we had, like, what we wanted. I think there were, like, low numbers and high numbers. Like, we'll be happy if we get to these numbers we'll be ecstatic if we get to these numbers you know right and it's funny because you know i think you know i've worked in digital gaming and mobile gaming and and that's kind of you know those there's whole buildings that are looking at screens all day and reacting real time most of magic doesn't get to do that we make a set and honestly i mean i don't think people at home quite like the feedback loops

are very slow we will have a set on sale for weeks before we really understand how it's behaving and and and and how it's working in the marketplace and this is the opposite all of a sudden we're like in real time we're watching tick tick tick tick we're watching the the kind of horses race to see you know uh will the wonderland will eldrian wonderlands be more or less popular than the goblins and that kind of stuff it was a real thrill so obviously the the first one's a success i mean i the other thing the audience uh we try things all the time and that one of the idea of trying things is they don't work they don't work so like no one knew like secret letter was an idea if it failed miserably then okay it was a one-shot thing. And, you know, Magic's done a lot of things we did once, and then we moved on.

So when did you notice the success? Like, what was the first metric of, I bet we're making more of these? You know, it was a couple days into the sale. We weren't sure kind of what the, if people were going to all buy these at the beginning, and then it would just fall off a cliff, or kind of what that curve across the sale would be. But once we got a few days in, we saw what was performing. We saw that the system was working and that people were, um, you know, kind of like literally able to get the confirmation email and all that stuff.

Um, and we started looking at the, the, and really sitting down and looking at the reactions, talking to people and seeing what people were saying about these. We realized, yeah, you know what? We pulled it off. Like, clearly, these aren't for everyone. Some people, not everyone certainly likes any given piece of this art. But every piece of art we put there had some fans. We were really diligent about looking around and trying to kind of earnestly assess what's working for people. What are people reacting to? What are people challenged by, what's boring for people.

And so, frankly, kind of halfway through that first sale, we were already planning, okay, I think we can do this again, and let's keep going. Okay, so what were the lessons? Like, what has proven to be what Secret Lair works best as Secret Lair? Yeah, so I think, to be clear this is a still a thing we're learning we have meetings every week including yesterday we had meetings where we're trying to kind of learn this in real time um there's so much going on but yeah i think you know some of the stuff we

learned right away was um uh we get better resonance and excitement with stuff that looks farther farther afield so the cards that we put through Sequel Air that just look more interesting and less like a regular magic card tend to resonate more widely. It's not always the case, but that's kind of a theme you can see. So when we've done stuff like, you know, we didn't do it to start, but later on we started doing what we call like a full illustration card where the artist is drawing, is writing the text and drawing their version of the mana symbols, that kind of stuff. Those things, they have a lot of fans. Those things are able to kind of break through the noise. Basic lands were a big one.

When we started this thing, I think some of us, I was always pushing to put basic lands in this. And there was a lot of people just weren't sure. Like, come on, who's going to pay this much money and wait this long to get a swamp? You can get a swamp. People will just give them to you for free at the game store.

And we realized no, there are a lot of people. I'm one of those people. All my commander decks, I do try to theme out all the basic lands. It means a lot to me when I play an island on turn one but it's an island that no one else at the table has seen.

Basic lands are a thing that you've seen us do a lot of because they make people happy, and it's something that people can, if you like that art style, you can kind of guarantee a home for that in your deck, and you can show it off a little bit. And every deck's have basic lands. I mean, it's something that every deck needs, so it's a very usable resource.

Right, exactly. Yeah, beyond that, I don't know't know man we're learning every day we're trying um some are very humorous some are very serious some are dramatic some you know we introduced the artist series where we pick some of our our great all-time magic artists who do magic cards for us already and we say hey go for it like you tell us you know we'll work with you you tell us the card you want to make we won't even send you an art proof we send them as like do your thing we're just surprised when it comes back in that's been a total thrill we're doing more of that it's super fun i mean one of the things that i've enjoyed so like

every once in a while we have a meeting where like we see we see like upcoming like you guys for the first time you announce all the stuff we're doing and um i've really enjoyed the creativity like we just keep doing you know in some level crazier and crazier things and you know it's always fun to sort of see what we can do and I think you're right the more not traditional it is the more people like one of the

truisms I have is that it's more important that somebody loves something that everybody like it that like when I'm making a card what I want is the person who's gonna, I want somebody who's really, really gonna enjoy that card to play it and love it. And if other people don't like it, hell, if other

people hate it, it doesn't matter. I mean, we wanna make sure everybody has something they love. But I think this plays into that very much so. It's like, look, this is very niche, it is very for a specific player, but the player that should love this should just love it to tears. And I think that's done a really good job of being that.

Exactly. And then, you know, it's great because we can do so much with that. Secret Lair can learn on that. We can, you know, do sequels or extend that more. We can also take some of those learnings and put them into the rest of Magic. Like, now that we have things like booster fun and showcase cards, I think the work we've done on Secret Lair has really helped that work because we've proven, look,

people have high tolerances, that people are excited for some of this stuff. People are okay with cards that look less traditional. And so it kind of helps us elevate on a bunch of fronts, which has been really exciting. Okay, so I'm not too far from my desk here. So two last things I just want to hit real quickly.

One is, so another thing that we've been doing more is what I would call sort of connected secret layers where they're tied to a product. That's something more where we'll put out a product and then, hey, here's a secret layer that's connected to that product. So it's not directly in that product, but it is thematically tied to it.

Where did those come from? Yeah, you know, that's a great point. I think think originally that's actually something that wasn't really on my roadmap but people kept saying like hey you know we started doing um showcase cards so now these sets would you know a set would have its own frame technique and someone asked the question like well should secret lair get in on the phone like what if secret lair took that you know that the set needs to have cards from the set in that frame obviously yeah but secret lair could take that same frame and put it on older reprints and we're not putting them into standard we're just making cards that kind of tie in we did it with godzilla um so you know we had godzilla show up in a chorea um and that

was on creatures but we said what about basic how cool would it be to have a mountain with godzilla climbing up the side of it and so again, we can launch it at the same time, and it can be a place to kind of keep the party going. We don't have to force everything into the packs now. If it's not a natural home, we can let Secret Lair just kind of join in on the fun. Okay, the last thing, this is the most controversial thing, but I'll sneak this in before we end, has been new content slash other properties.

Right. So Walking Dead was the first one. We've announced Stranger Things and stuff like that. So where did that come from? That definitely is pushing interesting boundaries. Right. I mean, at the end of the day, the real point of Secret Lair is to try stuff.

It is our experiments laboratory. And so we, you know, as we started thinking about stuff like Universes Beyond and what would it look like to invite, you know, the cast from Stranger Things into Magic overall, Secret Lair quickly became a, it kind of prevailed as a pretty powerful place for us to start testing that we're you know we weren't ready to start doing a whole set of uh walking dead cards nor did we think that we wanted to make that many cards but we wanted to start testing and learning and seeing what it felt like and so secret lair became a place to do that i think you know we people have seen we we learned a lot we learned so much the first time we did it you know the way that stranger things works is a little different than than walking dead you know we're doing the in-universe alts that appear later to kind of break down that barrier of mechanically unique content being exclusively behind secret

layer but frankly you know this is a journey that we're on like we're learning this as we go we're trying stuff and paying attention and listening a lot um and and it's one of the real strengths of secret layer secret doesn't have to get it perfect because we can learn and kind of apply those learnings. And there's another thing, you've mentioned this, I just want to stress this a little more, is one of the things Secret Lair does is not everything is, like, we make sets.

So, like, there are some things, like Lord of the Rings, it's a whole world, it's something where we can make a set out of it. But something like Walking Dead is hard. It doesn't lend itself quite as easily. Like, it lends itself to a bunch of cards, which are really cool,

but it doesn't lend itself to a whole set. And that one of the things Secret Letter can do is say, hey, if this is really cool as six cards and not as 300 cards, we can do that. And I think that's another interesting thing is like, some properties, look, the coolest thing we're going to do is, you know, hit the

main characters and get out. That's the best we're going to do with that, because not every IP lends itself to this ever-evolving combat game, right? Exactly. Yeah, and so Secret Lair has always been, and it will continue to be this place

where, frankly, part of its job is to take the pressure off all the other stuff we do. We don't have to take a full set swing. We don't have to sign an experimental artist and give them a bunch of main set myths or whatever. these things, learn from them. And as you said, we've already taken a lot of those learnings from Walking Dead. And we are like the Lord of the Rings that will be much better because of what we did with Walking Dead. And that's just a wonderful thing that I think is going to make a lot of people happy, even if they never saw the Walking Dead cards or cared about them. They're part of this journey and they're kind of making us better at our jobs across the board. Okay. So since I'm now at my desk and I'm at work, I want to ask one final question before we wrap up for the day, which is what are your final thoughts?

It's sort of, you know, we're a year plus into Secret Lair, or years plus into Secret Lair. What are your final thoughts? Sort of like when you think of Secret L where, where's your brain at right now? Yeah, it is. I mean, it is a deeply fun project to be a part of and to get to work on. Um, I'm really honored to be able to be part of it. We, we are working on a lot of fun stuff. Um, as you mentioned, you know,

we just got through some meetings where we kind of looked at some stuff we're doing next year on a bunch of fronts um but you know from from new cards to new approaches to looking at the packaging to looking at the experience of going to the website um there's just a ton of stuff where every day we can come in ask some questions try some experiments and tee some stuff up so um sequel air is going to be weirder and bigger and better next year than it was this year. And I think it'll be even weirder and bigger and better the year after that. And that's, uh, that's just a great feeling,

uh, to be a part of. Yeah. One of the things I just want to say as, as, I mean, not that I'm not involved, there's a few things I had a hand in,

but, but as more a spectator of the secret layers than as participator, um, I'm amazed, like every time I see new ones, like I'm, my job on the magic side, you know, on the normal Premiere set side of things,

is to keep pushing boundaries, right? So I really appreciate when other people and other places are pushing boundaries. You know, I really, like, every time we see new stuff, you guys keep trying, like, and there's some future stuff the audience hasn't even seen yet. Like, you are not resting on your laurels. You guys are pushing boundaries and doing cool stuff, and I love that.

Yeah, it's a great team that works on it, and we're constantly like, okay, what's next? How do we push ourselves? How do we challenge ourselves? And so, yeah, we truly hope people see stuff in here that we're doing now and next year and the year after that. I hope somewhere in some of this, people see something that just makes them smile.

It makes them grin. It makes them be a little bit extra happy that day that they're part of Magic because there's just a lot of cool stuff. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to put something out into the universe that speaks to everyone out there at least once. So it's a fun

project. Okay, guys. Well, I'm at my desk, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. And I want to thank you, Mark. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

And, yeah, it was super fun. And I'll see all you guys next time. Bye-bye.