Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #903: Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Early Design

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

I tell the story of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty's exploratory design and vision design.

I'm not pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, well today is the story of Kamigawa Neon Dynasty vision design. So I'm going to talk all about how we made Neon Dynasty. So, okay, so first a little background for the story. Okay, so many years ago, Bill Rose got the idea that it'd be fun to do a block in which instead of starting with mechanics, we started with flavor. And so he had the creative team build this whole world based on Japanese mythology,

inspired by Japanese mythology. And then once the world was built, we then started attaching mechanics to it. The set did not go over all that well. I mean, it's interesting. So what happened is the set came out, it just didn't go over that well. It has the worst ratings we ever got for a set

since we started asking people and doing, you know, market research. It didn't sell well. It wasn't played as much as other things around it. It just kind of was a dud. In fact, probably, if we talk about whole blocks, it is probably the biggest, like, mechanical mistake of a block from a mechanical standpoint. The other problem is not only did we make some mistakes mechanically, but creatively there definitely were some issues. The biggest one being that Brady, Dartmouth, and team had really based a lot of it on elements of

I think Shinto it's called elements of Japanese mythology that the average person playing the game just wasn't very familiar with. And so to a lot of people it came across more like weird than Japanese. A lot of the kami were just floating objects and things and

on top of that it was a whole bunch of different things. I mean, also, one of the big mistakes we made is making the flavor first and then trying to adapt the mechanics to the flavor is problematic because flavor is way more flexible than mechanics. And it ended up, in order to do that, it just made it a very ham-fisted design. It was very parasitic, meaning it really relied on itself. And you ended up doing a lot of, like, all samurais did this, and all moon folk do that. And it really, it was a bit simplistic in the way it had to work to sort of match.

Nowadays, we sort of build them, like, we go back and forth. Here's an idea. Like, for example, creative might come up with an idea, and then we do some work on the mechanical side, on design side, and then they adapt things. We go back and forth and adapt things, so each side is working closer to the other, so we have something that optimizes what it needs

to be. Champions of Kamigawa was like, let's finish all the creative before we do any mechanics, and that really proved to be very problematic. Also, we had a theme. All the creatures at Rare and some at Uncommon were legendary. And at the time, remember, like, you know,

an average set had four or five, you know, legendary creatures. Not a lot. So this was a huge number of legendary creatures. And in the time, the thought process was we sort of besmirched legendary creatures just because, you know, they were so common. It became less special at the time. But interestingly, Commander would happen, you know, a bunch of years down the road. And all of a sudden, here's a set that has all these Commander opportunities. And it sort of found an audience after the fact.

And another thing I think about it was that a lot of the nuance, a lot of the stuff that Brady and his team had done at the time weren't really recognized. But what happened after that was Japanese pop culture, and again, I keep stating this, when I talk about Japanese pop culture, I mean, I keep stating this, when I talk about Japanese pop culture, I mean pop culture from Japan, about Japan, but from Japan, created by Japan,

not other people talking about Japan, became a lot more popular after Kamigawa had come out. And so there was a lot more understanding. Like some of the stuff that was kind of over people's heads, less of it was over their heads. But anyway, what happened was this set that was a huge sort of flop in its day became something that little by little started getting fans.

And on my blog, for example, like one of the running jokes on my blog has been there are themes that come up a lot. And the theme that was the most common recurring theme was when are we going to return to Kamigawa? And one of the challenges there is, you know, it's very hard for me to go to my bosses and say, hey, I think we should go back to this place that did horribly. The mechanics, you know, we know the mechanics weren't great. The creative didn't score well at the time when we did all the, you know. And it's just something that failed miserably. Like, they'll go, well, why don't we go to someplace that didn't score well at the time when we did all the, you know.

And it's just something that failed miserably. Like, they'll go, well, why don't we go to someplace that didn't fail miserably? And so it was always kind of this rough thing. And it would come up from time to time. But anyway, so what happened was we started talking about the idea of maybe, you know, like Japanese pop culture had grown in popularity, you know, and that we're like, what if we did a new take on a Japanese world? What, you know, with the current creative team, what if we said, let's just make a brand new Japanese world, forget about Kamigawa, and make a brand new Japanese world?

Could we do something cool? And the answer was, yeah, we thought we could do something really cool. And one of the things that we were interested in is what we have found over the years is people, if you live in a country you study the history of the country, you understand the mythology of your country because you're from it, if you're from somewhere else you're much more dependent on where you might see that

and what we discovered is pop culture does a better job of being recognizable to people. So, for example, people are much more familiar with Japanese pop culture, again, pop culture made by Japan about Japan, than they are about, for example, Japanese mythology. And interestingly, what people know of Japanese mythology outside of Japan, a lot of it comes from the familiarity with the pop culture coming from Japan. But anyway, so the idea was, what if we made a little more up-to-date sort of world, Japanese-inspired, definitely could be fueled a bit by some pop culture stuff, and just make a resonant Japanese world that's a little different from what Kamigawa was.

And so the idea was, what if we did that? And it eventually got on the schedule. Now, I, having been on my blog all the time and talked to a lot of enfranchised players, I realized that there was this desire. And once again, it's a very enfranchised desire. It's from sort of longtime players, the people that were loudest on something like social media.

I understood that. But I did know that there were, there were a lot of sort of fondness for Kamigawa. And so when we put this on the schedule, part of me said, Hey, could this be Kamigawa? Like I know that there's an audience that really wanted to see Kamigawa.

So on my blog, I asked a bunch of questions. So for those that don't follow my blog, I get asked things constantly. I'm always asking the audience things. So it's hard to tell when it's something that I care about for the future and when it's just generic interest, you know. And so I had the opportunity, because the topic comes up all the time on my blog, I had the opportunity to go, okay, well, if we did it, what would you want to see? And there were a lot of different answers.

The most common thing was the creature races. That's the thing that most commonly people wanted to see. But anyway, as I'm working on, as I get assigned to do this set, in fact, I didn't get assigned. as I get assigned to do this set, in fact, I didn't even assign. I think I volunteered to do this set. Um, normally what happens is we'll, we'll spell out the upcoming stuff and then I have

to, I and, you know, Aaron and other people sort of figure out like, um, uh, who is going to be on what team or these days I work more with Brady, uh, uh, who manages, uh, manages most of the designers. And anyway, we have to put together teams. And then I'll say what I want to do. And I usually have the ability to pick the set I'm most interested in. Usually, it's not just I'm interested in. It's like I know it's going to be problematic.

And so I tend to pick the harder sets just because I have the most experience. But anyway, I said, OK, I'll do the set. And in my head, I'm like, you know what? I would love if this set could be Kamigawa. And I didn't even know what that meant. Like, one of the questions that really, like, what would make this brand new set, it's just this cool Japanese world,

and we just said, hey, it's Kamigawa. And just said, you know, because it turns out that Kamigawa, even when it came out, was set in the past, and it's like 1,200 years from modern day sort of magic story. We're like, we could just make a brand new world and just say it's Kamigawa. But then the big question was like, would that be unsatisfying to people that liked Kamigawa? And then what I realized is I couldn't just say it's Kamigawa without something about it being Kamigawa. That's why I was asking a lot of questions on my blog.

Anyway, so I started this project saying, okay, I would like this to be Kamigawa without something about it being Kamigawa. That's why I was asking a lot of questions on my blog. Anyway, so I started this project saying, okay, I would like this to be Kamigawa, if possible, but it had to match and it had to make sense. I couldn't just make it Kamigawa. It had to make sense to the design. So the big thing when we started, what I said to everybody in R&D was, here's how I like to treat this. Let's not worry about whether it's a Kamigawa or not. Let's just make an awesome Japanese-inspired set and then sometime during Vision, we'll revisit this and say,

hey, should this or should this not be Kamigawa? Now, secretly in the back of my head, I wanted it to be Kamigawa, but I also knew that I had to be able to sell it as Kamigawa. And I didn't want to do something in which the fans of Kamigawa, but I also knew that I had to be able to sell it as Kamigawa. And I didn't want to do something in which the fans of Kamigawa were just like, we go, oh, it's Kamigawa, and they're not delivering what Kamigawa is.

I didn't want to make it Kamigawa in a way that wasn't going to make the fans of Kamigawa happy, and I didn't want to do if it didn't really fit what the design was doing. But my ultimate goal, I wanted to be Kamigawa if it could. That was my goal. But my ultimate goal, I wanted to become a god if I could. That was my goal. So during exploratory design, one of the things we were toying around with is trying to figure out the inherent conflict of the world.

Whenever you go to a world, you need some kind of conflict. It's a game about magically fighting. You want some sort of conflict built into the world. It's not that everybody's fighting. It's not that there doesn't have to be an act of war or anything. But you just want something that's an inherent conflict. Just like stories want conflicts, worlds want conflicts. That when you're building a world, the best worlds have a really interesting conflict built into them.

And Chris Mooney suggested tradition versus modernity. And this is a very popular theme in Japanese pop culture because Japan has this duality to it in that they are very interested in the latest modern thing, very into, like, technology, but also very into tradition. And so if you've ever been to Japan,

you know, there's a lot of contrasts of old and new. And it's a theme that runs throughout a lot of Japanese pop culture. So Chris had pitched it of this idea. What if this was our conflict? And I liked that idea a lot. And one of the reasons I liked it is I knew we wanted to have some ties to the old Kamigawa. We wanted some connection.

And so the thing that really interested me was okay, well what if what if modernity is the new thing and tradition is the old thing? And that just seemed like a really cool idea. What that meant was the set could care about all the cool, like we had already done, the creative team had done a bunch of early work

on sort of cyberpunk Kamigawa, or cyberpunk world, whether it was Kamigawa or not. And it was looking cool. The early concept stuff looked really cool. And right, so I mean, the key is you needed to embrace, we couldn't make a world that didn't embrace that. That's kind of the new thing we were doing, but I also wanted to find a way to embrace original Kamigawa.

So the tradition versus modernity was like a, like it was just, like the second I heard it, it's one of those things where someone suggests something and you're like, that's it. Like the second Chris said it, it was very clear, like that's, and that's what we have to do. Now, the

first big challenge of making that work was... One of the things we learned from Scars of Mirrodin is that when you have conflict in the set, you have to make sure that if people want to play either side, they can, but you need to be able to cross over between the two. In my defense, I actually did build that into Scars of Mirrored, but it got ripped out in development. But anyway, when the set came out, it was a little bit too on rails for the two. Like, if you were going to play the Phyrexians,

it was hard to play not Phyrexian. If you're playing not Phyrexian, it was hard to play Phyrexian. And so one of the things we learned is, even when you have conflict, you really, you need to find a way to have something that it feels like a conflict, but the sides can actually be played together. So the idea is the players can play one side,

they can play the other side, or they can play a combination of them, but there's some strategy or theme that makes sense to why you want to play them. So what we needed to do was find a conflict that felt like a conflict, like find mechanical components that felt like a conflict, but that played nicely together. And so one of the ideas early on,

like, when you think about technology, the modern side, we have done technology before, and we pretty much, we've tied technology to artifacts. You know, Kaladesh is probably the most up-to-date world we've done. That was tied to artifacts. Esper was another very advanced world, that was tied to artifacts. So there's been a pretty high correlation between technology and artifacts. Now, we thought about artifacts, interestingly, in Magic,

even the word artifact, you know, mentions the idea of, like, an antiquity, of something of the past. We're like, oh, what if it's an artifact theme, and half is modern-day artifacts, and half is ancient, you know, dust them off artifacts. But the problem there was it just didn't feel different enough. It didn't feel like two sides. And so that's when they came up with the idea of enchantments. Well, enchantments do a really good job of feeling like the past.

And they definitely have this sense of oldness to them. You get a sense of enchantments that are as old as time. And so we said, oh, well, what if artifact was the modern side and enchantments was the traditional side? And the reason I particularly like that, by the way, is mechanically, artifact enchantments are almost the same thing. I mean, they're mechanically very similar. There are some subtle differences,

but the overlap between artifacts and enchantments mechanically is very, very high. So the neat thing about them is they do feel like a contrast, so you could set them against each other in a way that felt like conflict, but you also could do a lot of mechanical things to tie them together. And so that was very compelling as a way to sort of... I mean, once again, it was one of those things that we came up with the idea, talked about it, it seemed right, and we

committed to it pretty early. In fact, I think we came out of exploratory with the idea of modernity versus tradition, and modernity might be artifact, tradition might be enchantment. I think that all came out of exploratory. Very roughly. I mean, we didn't dochantment. I think that all came out of exploratory. Very roughly.

I mean, we hadn't really figured anything out yet. Figuring things out happens during Vision. So anyway, we had it there. And the real big question was, what I wanted was, I needed something, I wanted each side to have their own thing. I mean, first off the bat, there's some parallel stuff we did.

Okay, well, the modernity side will have artifact creatures. The traditional side will have enchantment creatures. The modernity side will have equipment. Maybe some vehicles. The traditional side will have auras. And

sagas came up as maybe something we could do. I'll get back to that in a second. And the idea essentially is, you know, the modern side cares about artifacts in all the different ways we care about artifacts, and the enchantment cares about enchantments in all the ways we care about enchantments. But the key is we...

So we wanted a mechanic that represented the modern side, wanted a mechanic that represented the modernity side. We wanted a mechanic that represented the traditional side. And I wanted one or two mechanics that could sort of cross between them to help glue them together, if you will. Also, because I wanted this to be Kamigawa, I also wanted to sort of find things to be Kamigawa about it. I wanted to bring back... My goal was to bring back at least one mechanic.

And if you listened to my podcast from last week, I talked all about the Champions of Kamigawa mechanics. The reason I did that is that was a long discussion, so I could shorten up. Basically, when the dust settled, it's like... Channel's a bit broad, but is very useful and makes sense in this set because you could put it on enchantments and artifacts.

And it would let you get more spell effects. It would let you up the as-fan of artifacts and enchantments by putting spell effects basically on artifacts and enchantments. Um, and ninjutsu was very popular. Um, now ninjutsu had some problems, which I'll get to in a second. Um, so the original idea of ninjutsu was we were going to have commander decks. We'd have a ninja commander deck, and we'd make brand new Ninjutsu cards for that deck. That would be more of a Ninjutsu-themed ninja deck.

And so we would have some ninja cards for people who wanted new Ninjutsu cards, who wanted new Ninjutsu cards, but it wouldn't be in the main set was the original idea. Okay, um... Channel made sense. We're going to bring Channel back. And Channel just does some general good glue stuff. Other than Channel and Ninjutsu, there really was nothing great to bring back.

I mean, there were cards that we could hint at. Like, we could do a Bushido card, maybe. But we just didn't want to do lots and lots of Bushido. The mechanic doesn't play well in large numbers. So, like, it just wasn't something we wanted to bring back. So, anyway, we we just didn't want to do Las and Las of Ishido. The mechanic doesn't play well in large numbers, so, like, it just wasn't something we wanted to bring back. So, anyway, we ended up bringing up Channel, and originally, Ninjutsu was going to be in the Commander decks

in set design. Go listen to me talk. I have Dave Humphreys on, and you can listen to him and I talk about making the set design of Kamigawa, and we'll talk about how Ninjutsu sort of moved from the side of the set into the main set. And in it, we'll talk about how Ninjutsu sort of moved from

the side of the set into the main set. Anyway, okay, so for the modernity side, one of the problems we were trying

to figure out was the set really wanted equipment, but we just were having trouble fitting everything in. It wanted vehicles, it wanted equipment,

all of it was super flavorful, really top-down. I mean, for the source material we were playing around with, there was lots and lots of fun stuff we could do. But we were running out of space. And so we ended up coming with Reconfigure as a way to say, well, what if

the equipments are also creatures? You know, what if that, you know, you weren't losing creature space to put your equipments in? And anyway, I think kind of inspired, in my mind, by the Lysids from Tempest. I liked the idea, and also

there's a lot of flavor in the source material of things sort of like living things becoming armor and stuff like that. So, it felt like a fun thing to do. And I think the reconfigure we did in Vision Design, I mean, there were a few changes, and the templates

changed a little bit, but the crux of it, I know Dave worked really, really hard in making sure that there was answers to it and stuff. That was the bigger issue, is that environmentally there were answers for it, so that, you know, it didn't run away. And learning from stuff like Lissids, we made the cost reconfiguring

more expensive and stuff like thatysids, we made the cost reconfiguring more expensive and stuff like that. Okay, then on the tradition side, we talked about wanting to do sagas. The thing we loved about sagas is where sagas shine is when you get to tell a story. And there's two ways that stories

are really good. Number one is you're doing something top-down, like you're doing a set in which the audience might know the stories. Like we put them into call time, because there are a lot of stories we could tap into

that people might know from Norse mythology, for example. The second thing is they're good on revisits, because if we'd been to the world before, there are stories that we had made when we were there before. We had been to Kamigawa before. It was 1,200 years later.

Not a lot of creatures were going to still be alive 1,200 years later, but we could tell stories about the ones that were from then, and that seemed really compelling. We tried a bunch of things, and the thing we ended up liking most was we wanted to give them a slightly different feel. We were doing

sagas for the umpteenth time. And so the idea is, what if when it, because we had enchantment creatures in the set, I think the original idea was, what if the final chapter made enchantment creature tokens? So there was kind of a permanence, there was a permanence to it that sagas don't

normally have. And then it ended up being easier, rather than making a token, just what if this thing became, you know, the final chapter was this enchantment became an enchantment creature, and then now you have this creature. When we turned it over, by the way, we had turned it over as a single-faced thing, only because there was so much double-faced stuff going on all around us. But, and Dave and I talked about this in

the other podcast, it just was so much better as a double face. So in set design, they ended up making double face. I think when we handed over the document and the handoff document, I'm like, we made a single face, you might want to make a double face, set design, figure that out. And so they did. But that was a fun way

to do something that was super flavorful. Sagas do a great job. And we were able to tell stories of things from original Kamigawa. So it really ingrained the old and bringing back old Kamigawa. Okay, so the next thing to worry about was how to bridge them, right?

How do we make people play some of one and some of the other? And there were two things we ended up doing. One was sort of the low-hanging fruit, but it made a lot of sense, is I think we called it Harmony in design. It ended up not getting a name. But the idea is cards that say

I have a bonus if you have an artifact and an enchantment. It's not looking for you to have a lot of anything. I just want you to have one of each. Some of those are like you get a bonus if you have both. Some give you a bonus for one and a different bonus for the other, but together they're synergistic, so you really do want

both of them. And then we centered that, I think we centered that in black-white. Oh, I didn't talk about this. So one of the things we did very early on is we mapped out, we said we wanted this conflict to have colors pick sides, and it's not that all the cards in that color, but it would lean

in certain directions. So the modernity side really wanted blue, the tradition side wanted green. Modernity versus tradition is a blue-green conflict fundamentally. And it just made sense. It was a blue-green conflict, so it made sense that blue and green are on the ends.

We then made red lean toward it because red does more artifact stuff with blue, and we made white lean toward green because white and green do enchantment stuff. And then black made sense in the center as black will do whatever it takes. So, like, enchantments, artifacts, whatever I need to get the job done, sure, I'll do that.

So we ended up putting balance in black. I think in Vision we put a little bit in white and a little bit in red. And then in set design, they took it out of red and just made it a black-white. It was the draft theme for black-white. So that ended up going there. The other mechanic we did, we had made a mechanic for call time. I forget what it was called in call time.

Enhanced, I think it was called in call time. And it ended up, we handed it off from Vision, but it ended up being cut. Once again, not that it was a bad mechanic it just didn't fit with the other things around it and so I kind of had it in my back pocket and one of the things we realized about Equipments and Enchantments is I'm sorry, Artifacts and

Artifacts and Enchantments is Artifacts have Equipment and Enchantments have Auras, both of which target or not target, attach. So we said, well, what if we care about that? And we also decided to care about counters. So the idea is, we came to Modified.

Modified just says, okay, do you have equipment on you? Do you have an enchantment on you? Do you have a counter on you? It made it an interesting way to sort of care in a way that crossed over. So I think red-green is the draft archetype that cares about modified the most. So anyway, so we put that in.

And the nice thing about that was that it... So basically, the unnamed harmony mechanic and modified did a nice job of giving you reasons and explanations for why you want to cross the sides in a way that'll make a fun, compelling deck.

So, and then, like I said, for Channel, we ended up putting Channel only in Artifacts and, oh, I'm sorry, in the handoff we said just put those in Artifacts and Enchantments. In Set Design, Dave did add them to a cycle of lands because he wanted to do some legendary lands

and an offset of legendary lands, which made sense. Okay, what else was going on? Oh, another thing. So every set wants to have a little bit of tribal. And when you say to me, okay, we're going to do Japan, what tribal are people most excited by? It's going to be ninjas and samurai. That was true from original Kamigawa.

So, like, we had the data on that. The only problem was it's hard to do tribal when nothing around you, like, ninjas are very specific to this world. Samurai, very specific to this world. There's just not, you know, for example, right before it, we had two Innistrad sets, and before that, you know, we had the Dungeon Dragon set,

and before that, we had, what did we have before that? Strixhaven. None of those, like, ninjas made no sense in any of those places, right? And same with samurai. And the sets after it, not particularly ninja or samurai friendly. So one of the things we did in vision design, which stuck all the way through,

was we said, okay, why don't we attach each of these to the most similar like, if ninja and samurai weren't named, what would they be? And ninjas would be rogues, and samurais would be warriors. So what we did is we linked them together. So whenever something references a ninja, it references ninja or rogue. Whenever it references a samurai, it says samurai or warrior. And that allows us to make something that, within the context, within the

biodome, if you will, within limited or something, okay, mostly you're making a ninja deck or samurai deck. There are a few rogues and a few warriors in the set, but mostly you're making specifically that. But outside of it, once you go to larger context, just adding in the Rogue and the Warriors

really gives you a lot more choices and options and allows that deck to have more breadth than we normally have. Oh, anyway, okay, so let me talk about... So what happened was I figured out this... I mean, I, my team. My team figured out that we can do this modernity versus tradition thing.

And we mapped the whole thing out. So it was like maybe, we were maybe two months, two and a half months in vision design. I'm like, okay, clearly, clearly, clearly, like in order to make the tradition work, we needed the past. Now, true, we can make up a past,

but why make up a past when there is like a whole block of pasts that we did? Like, there's this audience that's craving the past of Kamigawa and half the set cares about the past. It just seemed like, of course it had to be Kamigawa. But I then had to convince other people.

And really what happened was I had a bunch of allies. Jess, who oversees all the creative. Aaron, who's my boss. There were a bunch of people that really did also want to be Kamigawa. And we sort of, we joined forces. And I think what happened was that once the sort of upper management saw a lot of the creative takes we did on it, the look of the world, and I was able to explain sort of the larger philosophy.

Like, it wasn't Kamigawa for no reason. It was Kamigawa in a way core to what the set was. Like, this set would be less if it wasn't Kamigawa. And I said to them, I go, look, we can go to a brand new world and we can make up a past, but A, it's a lot more work because we have to make it up,

and B, it's less resonant because that past wouldn't mean anything to the audience. But if we go to Kamigawa, all the past becomes this resonant, it's actual past from magic. And that's so much deeper. Whenever you can tie something,

it's one thing to make up a past, it's another to have a past. But anyway, I, with my allies, were able to convince that, okay, this makes sense. That, like, it makes sense that it's Kamigawa. And the other thing that I think they really liked was the process we made sort of said,

hey, if you really love old Kamigawa, you know, guess what? Half the set is us returning to old Kamigawa. And even some of the new stuff is making reference to old Kamigawa, you know, guess what? Half the set is us returning to old Kamigawa. And even some of the new stuff is making reference to old Kamigawa. And like, if you, if that wasn't quite your cup of tea, but you know, you really would enjoy sort of a more modern cyberpunk and you, a lot of the, you know, Japanese pop culture influences, if that would be fun for you, we have that as well.

And so I really think we sort of had our cake and ate it too, which is, hey, here's two, like, in my handoff document, I said, we came into this thinking there was two possible ways to do a return to Kamigawa. You know, we could go back and revisit what it was, or we could make something

brand new, and like, let's do both. You know, it's been 1,200 years. Kamigawa can change. And another important thing before I wrap this up, you'll notice is I never, my goal is never, like a lot of our visits are all about sort of recapturing mechanically what the original set was. Look, I knew Kamigawa.

The reason it is popular is none of those mechanics were necessarily the ones that made it popular. It's a lot more of the creative and the legends and a lot of the overall look to it. So like, this set is spiritually connected

and we did, even in vision design we're like, oh, let's do the dragons. We can do a new set of dragons. We came up with a cool thing where, well, what if when they die, you have a choice of two things rather than before they were one thing? You know, we could do shrines again. People like the shrines,

but what if they were creatures? You know, we found ways to sort of do a new thing, but pull back. And there's a lot of, there's infinite references. Even in the modern side, there's still references that go back to the old Kamigawa.

So we ended up getting a total package that I thought I'm really happy with. Because for people that follow me on the blog, I've been asked forever if we'll ever go back to Kamigawa. And I said no. And for years and years and years, I really believed we would never go back. Just because it seemed like such a hard task. So the fact that we did, and we got there, and we did it in a way that both sort of honors what it was, but allows it to also be something new.

Anyway, I'm super happy with the set, if you can't tell. I know I'm normally optimistic and happy. But this particular set, like, I really, this was a really hard thing to pull off. And I'm very proud of my teams. I'm proud of Dave and his teams the play designers, the editors the creative team, anyway

so many people put so much time and energy and made what I think is a really cool set so anyway that is the story of Vision Design if you haven't listened to it I also this week I sat down with Dave Humphries and we talked about the set design of it.

So, um, anyway, give that a listen if you haven't to yet. And I hope you guys are enjoying, I hope you guys will enjoy, uh, Champions of Kamigawa. Not Champions of Kamigawa. Uh, Neon Dynasty. Um, I hope you guys enjoy it. It's, it's a lot of fun. And, uh, I'm, like I said, super proud. But anyway, I can see my desk.

So we all know what this means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.