Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #911: Good Morning Magic with Gavin

Episode Date: March 5, 2022

I sit down with Designer Gavin Verhey to discuss the making of his Good Morning Magic videos.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So, doing lots of interviews at home. So today I have Gavin Verheed to talk about Good Morning Magic. Hey, Gavin. Hey, and good morning magic to everyone out there listening. Okay, so, um, really what I want to get into is you do, how often is the video how often do you do good morning magic three days a week normally although sometimes with preview season i'll do five days a week okay so i want to talk about sort of how this came about and then just a little bit behind the scenes of how one makes uh a weekly or you know twice weekly video twice weekly video okay so how did it begin how did good morning magic start well it's actually a really fun story mark that i don't even think you know, because you indirectly caused it to happen, which is pretty cool.

Oh, I did not know that. Okay. Yeah, I don't think I've ever told this story before, so you get a drive to work exclusive. So we had just started working from home, and if you know me, you know that I travel a lot. I love to travel. you know that I travel a lot. I love to travel. And so I was never at home. So I didn't really have a lot of time to make a video, but I'd always wanted to do it. And so early on in the pandemic, I was finally at home and I was like, oh, maybe I'll have time to do some video stuff. This is a really interesting idea. I've wanted to do this for literally years. And then one day I'm just browsing Reddit and your teaser for Aquaria was one of the top top voter posts. People talking through like all the hints you drop, you know, if you've been following Rosewater for any amount of time, you know that before a second drop is cryptic little hints or whatever.

And someone in the comments of that Reddit thread said, hey, someone should do this for Commander. And I was like, oh, that sounds really cool to do some hints for Commander for the Commander decks. So I emailed Blake Rasmussen, was like, hey, can I do some hints for Commander? I think that'd be really fun. And he said, yep, sure. And I told him the hints I wanted to do, and he greenlit it. And then I was thinking, well, what if instead of just writing it out on social media, what if I did it as a video? What if I tried doing Mark Rosewater's hints in the style of a video for Commander? So I made a little video. I put it out on Twitter. I had no clue what it would do. The lowest tech you can imagine, like my cell phone pointing at my face.

And the video did amazing. Like it went out. People loved it. They really enjoyed it. Like they loved seeing the hints and they loved the kind of the video format on Twitter. And it went so well that I was like, OK, well, let's try this again. Let's try this again with a different topic. And I talked just through the design of Edgar Markov in the next video. And these were all two minute long videos

put out on Twitter. It's basically straight from recording to print. And it did really well again. And so basically, I kind of kickstarted this thing on Twitter that did really well for about two weeks, making a video every day. And from there, I parlayed it into, hey, I basically showed it to Trick Jarrett and some of the other people on our social media team. And we're like, hey, this is doing really well. Can I start up a YouTube channel? And there was some initial, like, are you going to have the time for this? Is this going to work out?

You know, are you really committed to doing this for a while? And I said yes. And here I am a year and a half later, and I've grown the channel basically myself from nothing to I think today I just hit 50,000 subscribers. So it's really exciting. And it's become like a de facto place both for people, players to like hear all about what we're doing in our design processes. And internally, it's really cool now because I get pings all the time from marketing that's like, hey, Gavin, can you talk about this thing? Or hey, there's this really cool thing we want you to talk about. So I'd say my videos are like, you know, probably

two thirds me coming up with the topics and talking about them. And one third, someone saying, Hey, Gavin, you know, have you seen this? Can you talk about it? And, you know, I can say yes or no. And often I say yes, because making a video three times a week means you need a lot of content. So how long are the videos? Well, what is your average running length of a video? Normally, I try and make them about eight minutes or so, eight to 10 minutes normally, but they're varied wildly. I sometimes do shorts. For those who are familiar with YouTube shorts, those are 60 second or less videos, almost like a TikTok. And sometimes I'll do interviews that are 20, 30 minutes. And the one I have going up today as I'm recording this, it'll be old news by the time this comes out, I'm sure, is actually like a 40 minute video or so of me sitting down with Jonathan Young, who did the music of Kamigawa, which is really cool, by the way, if you haven't heard that soundtrack. And I also sometimes will do Twitch streams.

And what I started doing was editing down the Twitch streams and turning it into videos. And I also do box opening videos where I open up boxes and talk through all the cards. And those videos can be two to three hours long, which is nuts. And let me tell you, when I started in this business or making this channel, I never expected that people would sit down and watch a two to three hour video. I was like, I don't have the time for that. Is anyone going to do this? But some of my most popular videos are the two to three hour box openings or the storytellings on Twitch. So I

think it's been really interesting kind of trying out a lot of different things and seeing what's popular. So, okay, let's take your normal eight minute video. How long does an eight minute video take to make? Yeah, well, so this will shock everyone out there. If you've never worked in video, you will might be shocked by these numbers. But that my general rule is about one minute of video takes about an hour to create so if i make an eight minute video it'll normally take me around eight hours if i'm if i'm editing it and doing doing the whole thing now in the cases of like the box openings and the twitch streams those the only way i can get them to be many many hours long or an interview um is because they're

basically with only slightly edited all the way from recording to final. I only do a tiny bit on those. But for a tightly edited video, like a lot of my eight or so minute ones are, it takes about an hour, an hour per minute of the video. Now, I'll say that you might be thinking out there, wow, Gavin, that sounds completely absurd. How do you have the time for this? The answer was I definitely didn't.

And for the first year or so of the show, it was finish my work day, do my video work, you know, video, video work, and I'd be up till, you know, one, two in the morning, getting my videos done. It was, it was, it was a lot, I was really rewarding. But it was a lot for that first first year. After a year, I actually was able to talk with my manager and be like, Hey, look, this is awesome. I want to keep doing it. But I'm really gonna need some help to be able to make this happen. And so we worked something out and I now have actually someone who edits a lot of my videos for me, which saved me so much time.

And he's absolutely fantastic. Shout out to Jonathan Choi, who takes care of that for me. I still do a video every now and then, but he does the bulk of it, which is important because as you and I both know, there's a lot of magic products that need designing and I got to be able to commit my time to those.

So yeah, it's funny. One of the reasons I really haven designing. And I got to be able to commit my time to those. Yeah, it's funny. One of the reasons I really haven't gotten into video is I just don't have the time to do it. Like you would never guess. Like you watch a four-minute video and you're like, whatever. You probably just turn on the camera and like, you know, shift it. It's like, nope. If you want to edit a video down and write, you know, write what you're going to say and get images in there and go through the whole thing.

It is a long, long, long process. And it's funny because everyone warned me when I was starting to do this. I was like, Gavin, do you know how much time this is going to take? And I'm like, ah, whatever, it'll be fine. What's the longest it could take? And then, you know, you start doing it and it's like, holy smokes, this is, you are in this really deep. And it's not just me either, right? I've talked with all kinds of other content creators, Jimmy, Josh, Professor, you know, all kinds of folks out there who make videos. And they're just like, yeah, it takes a long time and it it doesn't, it gets a little faster as you get better, but it always takes time. It's one of the things I admire about your show so much, Mark, is you found a great way with Drive to Work to make it fit into your life. I'm just like, hey, I'm going to turn it on.

We're going to record. I'm going to turn it off. No editing. We're done. That sounds amazing. Like you just gave me a little pre-roll before we started about like, yeah, we just turn it on and turn it off and that's the whole show. And I'm like, that world sounds like a dream to me. But, you know, it's a different environment.

This is the lowest tech podcast. I just have no time. So, like, I have half an hour to record and that's what I got. Yeah, totally. Okay, so what – I mean, my background actually, I went to school in this. So, I actually took classes in video and stuff. So what is the thing that the audience would least, other than how long it takes, what is something the audience would least understand from behind the scenes that they would have no idea in making it that this actually goes into making it? Ooh, that's a really good question, right?

The thing, because I already gave you the easy answer. I think it takes a really long time to do. The other things that you wouldn't expect is, so in addition to making the video, so you make the video, you spend all the time crafting it, you edit it. I use Adobe Premiere to edit. And, you know, you go search for music to bring in music and music adds a lot.

And you go search for card images and that all takes time, et cetera, et cetera. But there's a part that takes time that you don't even think about, even outside the video, which is all the stuff you actually do on YouTube once it's uploaded. So when you upload a video to YouTube, there's all kinds of different things you need to fill out. You need to fill out what search terms you want people to pick up as they're searching for the video. You need to add in,

if you watch a lot of YouTube videos, there's what's called cards that show up in the top right-hand corner of like your other videos. You need to choose when they appear and how often they appear. You need to make a they appear and how often they appear. You need to make a thumbnail for your video. So, you know, if you're going on YouTube, you'll know that there's like a little thumbnail image for every video. That's not usually a still from the video. That's handcrafted and I use Photoshop to create those.

So even outside of just making the video and uploading it, there's a lot you have to do that is just additional on top of that, which, you know, and getting that metadata right can be the difference between a great video and a weak video, right? Because, you know, if someone searches for Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, and my video is all about Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, but I don't have that in the title of the video, they're not going to find it unless I make sure to put in the metadata, hey, if someone searches for Kamigawa

Neon Dynasty, pull this video up. So there's a lot of careful stuff I have to do in making sure that the right topics are showing up there. It's a beast, really. And then monitoring all the analytics afterward, YouTube's data is really good. So I can see how long people watch a video for, when they stop watching on average, you know, like all this data on everything. And so I also spend a lot of time just like crunching the numbers, trying to see like, okay, what's worked? What didn't work? When did people stop watching? And so there's, you can spend infinite time on it. You truly can. And at some point I just got to be able to be like, I got to go design magic cards. But there is a lot of fun stuff there to dig into.

Yeah. Another thing that was really interesting, there's a famous quote, which is, I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time of when you do things very condensed, that there's a lot of work in condensing it. That in some ways, it's a lot easier just to talk for two hours than it is to condense it down to eight minutes. And that there's a lot of, a lot of what makes videos good is that it's, you get it, you know, you get it all done in a small, nice package, but there's a lot of work to getting it like that 100 mark i cannot agree more and i love that mark twain quote i think

who's who said that i say that all the time because if i want to tell you something i can sit and talk to you in a meeting room for 15 or 20 minutes just kind of ramble on going to all the asides and whatever and but that always doesn't make the most entertaining story right and uh if you're trying to watch a tight video or if you're trying to watch a video, it needs to be on the tight side. It's tricky, too, because, you know, you're not just like, is my story entertaining? That's not what you're fighting against. If it's you and me in a room, well, there's no one else there. I'm just going to tell you the story.

And if it gets a little boring at times, you're like, OK, well, whatever. Yeah, I'm telling the story. But if you're on YouTube, literally you could go look at any other video of millions and millions and millions of videos at exactly the time you're watching mine right and even in the magic content sphere if you narrow it down a little bit there are still thousands upon thousands of other videos and content creators making stuff all the time so you have to keep it yourself entertaining and keep it really tight and to the point otherwise people tend to get lost although i will say mark it is interesting to me that my tightly edited videos do really great.

But also my two and a half hour box opening videos where I just go straight, no editing, open a box and tell stories. Those also do really well. And those do get a little meandery. So, you know, there is room for that a little bit. But at the same time, it's got to be something special, like boxes or stories or whatever. If I tell you about the history of Lissids, it's got to be a much shorter little story there. So here's another chance, something you and I both have to do,

is, okay, a new set is coming out. Like, you know, one of the things that's like, okay, Neon Dynasty is coming out. Okay, well, what exactly do you want to talk about? You know, what are the interesting things? Where are the good stories? Where, you know, and like, it's very funny. You and I, independent of each other

for example both said I'm going to interview Daniel Holt like just like where's the like where is the voice of

where is the right thing you want to do who do you want to talk to what are the stories you want to do and it's kind of funny because you and I don't communicate at all

I mean we don't I mean we talk to each other but you and I don't plan together I'll make my content you make your content and it's fun to see where we overlap and where we don't i was i always i always find that kind of fun like where where do we find the same space and where do we just go in different

places yeah i find that really interesting too you know the case of daniel holt he's such like the face of kamigawa to me in a sense like he's mr kamigawa inside the building right he's he was there from the very beginning of the process to literally you know putting some final touches on the card so yeah he was a natural one to bring in kind of how i've deviated up mark is you often get into a lot of the gritty design stuff i find uh in your episodes and but it's not usually focused on commander and what i've kind of cultivated on my channel is a bit more of a focus on commander not every episode i mean i kind of go all over the place but i generally know Mark isn't going to touch the Commander stuff as much.

So that means that I kind of have the Commander area to work on. But yeah, when a new set comes out, we're both going to tell stories and we're going to tell a lot of very similar stories, probably. And yeah, we could probably coordinate more, to be honest.

But hey, there's only so much time in the day to make content. Well, I mean, the other thing I find interesting is it's interesting to hear the same stories, but through different mediums. I always find that very fascinating. One of the things that's really cool to me as someone who works in a lot of mediums, although less in video, I guess, but I have my article, I have my blog, I have my podcast.

And the stories are told very differently depending on how and where you're telling it. And that's one of the big lessons I got in communication school is that they say the medium is the message, right? That how you're telling the story really impacts what the story is. I think it's actually really cool too how we actually have this cool virtuous cycle all the time with our content because a lot of times

you've answered a question on your blog that then goes to be a big question on Reddit or something like that. Then I see that and I'm like, oh, I can also answer that question and I could expand on what Mark said. So it goes back and forth in that sense. Or when I'm making an episode about a new set, like say Neon Kamigawa,

I will go to your articles and read through your design articles and be like, oh, are there any fun snips from what Mark Rosewater has said here that I can actually put into my videos? And it's not even recent stuff too. I did a video on Lissids recently. And I went back and quoted some article from you like 10 years ago where you talked about Lissids, right? So all this stuff is actually relevant and all this information is really, really useful. I mean, I have gone back and looked at my own articles from 10 years ago.

I'm like, hey, is there a fun topic here I could tell better in a video format? One other thing about video, too, that I've noticed noticed is, and you know, you and I are both super plugged in, right? We're on Twitter all the time. We're reading Reddit. We're getting all this feedback from people. You have your blog. The YouTube audience I have found is way different from every other audience that I work with. They're less, generally, less enfranchised more uh casual on a lot of ways and so there's a lot of times they'll see stuff that to me is like everyone knows this we've been talking about this on our website for weeks mark's done a lot of talking about it like you know we had a huge promotion and let's be like i had no idea this was happening like literally last week i got a

comment on my video that's like i had no idea we were going back to kamigawa like they just didn't know and it's like you asked almost any magic player that we normally think about they're like of course we're going back to kamigawa we know this um or i mentioned we're doing the brothers war as a set later this year in one of my recent episodes and there are so many comments people just flipping out like what they're doing the brothers war no way and to you and me it's just like yeah we know this right but and and most players know this. But it really hits a different angle. And when I say most players, I mean most players who talk to us. But there are so many players that don't talk to us, right?

You and I hear from the 0.1% of people. Oh, yeah. So I'll give some stats that will blow the audience's mind a little bit, for this audience at least. Okay, so we did what we call a deep dive. So normally when we do market research, we have people come to us. Like we go to people who took us, like it's on our website or something. But that is a very enfranchised group of people.

So every, I don't know, couple years we do what's called a deep dive where we go to look at just normal people and find magic people among the sort of normal audiences. So instead of them coming to us, we're going to them. So we find people that are much more, like it's the one way to find what we call the invisibles, like people that don't come to us, that aren't playing sanctioned play. So one of the things is the majority of magic players do not know what a planeswalker is.

They're like, it's a card type. How do they not know what a planeswalker is. You're like, it's a card type! How do they not know? It's literally one of the seven card types of magic. The average person, like, we're very used to the enfranchised audience, but one of the things to forget is the average person gets, like, they buy a few packs and that's how they're

exposed, and, like, things that we think are obvious, they don't know at all. And that's, I think YouTube, you see that. I see that on Tumblr some, although I've crafted an audience on my blog, so that's much more franchised, but when I search for, like, Magic the Gathering on Tumblr, I'm just looking at random magic things, you give you, it's very interesting when you go on different social media, like, one of the things, I'm on a lot of different social media, so I can talk to audiences in different places, and yes, it's a very different audience, the Twitter audience is very different than the Tumblr audience, which is different from the YouTube audience, which is different from the Instagram audience, which is different from the TikTok audience.

Like, there's just lots of very different audiences. And that's one of the fun things of doing what you and I do is one of the reasons, like, we tend to repeat ourselves in lots of places is because not everybody knows it. And it's like one of the things that I've really trained myself on my blog, on my podcast especially, is when I mention a magic card, wait, let me say what the magic card is. Because the assumption that everybody knows what every magic card is, is very, you know, like a tiny, tiny percentage know most of the magic cards. Right. a tiny tiny percentage know most of the magic card so right there's a lot of things that to me are obvious because you know i've been playing for 20 years or whatever and designed for 10 then i realized someone who's even started and been playing for like five years has no idea about right so i've made some videos telling stories just stories that to me are so ingrained

in in magic and they'll hear them a lot of people hear them like i've never heard this before that's brand new information to me so it's easy to forget how things that are ingrained to us that players don't even necessarily think about and understand. I think that's really, really interesting. And another piece of that that's super interesting to me is also what you're talking about with the medium and how the medium and the message really go together, right? If you think about how all these different platforms work, they work in very different ways. On Twitter, you have to follow people if you want to see stuff from them for the most part, right? On Tumblr, you mostly go follow people. There'll be reblogs and stuff like that, but it's a little harder to find people

where on something like TikTok or YouTube, it's constantly serving you videos, right? You load up YouTube and it's like, here are videos you might like. You watch a video and it's like, here's a bunch of videos you might want to watch. So discoverability, I think, plays a really huge part in the audience that you get. Because on on twitter i feel like my audience is mostly enfranchised because people have to know to look for me or look for you but on youtube it just pushes those videos out to a ton of people who aren't deeply as enfranchised maybe they played magic previously maybe they just like gaming in general and it showed up and they click on it and watch it um and so i think that's why you kind of get that less enfranchised audience there yeah and one of the things that's cool and the reason i'm

glad there's so many different people on so many different mediums is like there's just a lot of audience out there and i'm happy that people can you know we can reach wherever you're at like you know whatever whatever magic player you are wherever you're at we'll try to reach you somewhere uh and so i think it's cool that you're on youtube just because like there's a place for videos like that's how hey to some people that is how they get content. They don't want to listen to a podcast. They don't want to read an article. Give me a video.

I'll watch a video. So. Yeah, I mean, I it's funny before I started making YouTube videos, I was not a huge video watcher. I'll be honest. I mean, I very much come from the school of like read articles and listen to podcasts, stuff like that. But being more deeply in it now, I've actually started watching more videos. One, because I have a better idea of what goes into it. And two, it's really cool to see what other people do in their videos and then be like, oh, that's a really cool thing I could learn from.

Or, hey, they mentioned a topic that maybe I could talk about even more. So there's like some good back and forth that goes on there. talk about even more. So there's like some good back and forth that goes on there. And, you know, now I'm able to talk with folks like, you know, Jimmy Josh, professor, like all kinds of people that make videos and just be like, hey, what are you all doing in your videos? What can I learn from you? And we'll, you know, share stuff that we've done that was really successful because the YouTube algorithm, while it's, you know, serves people videos, is a very fickle beast. And so knowing like exactly what you have to do to get the algorithm right, um, is something that every single content creator is constantly talking about and trying to figure out. And it's like,

you know, for a while it was short videos that it wanted now, then it was like over 10 minutes, you got videos gotta be over 10 minutes. And now they're trying to push shorts again. And there's like all this stuff, right. That you're trying to constantly figure out, okay, how can I make the right contents? People will actually go see the video? Do you ever make a video mark or do you ever make a podcast mark that you're like, this is awesome. I'm really happy with this podcast.

It's amazing. And then it comes out and people are like, it kind of falls flat with the audience or an article that way. Do you have that happen sometimes? So here's one of the things. You talked about the data, how you do YouTube, you have all this data.

I get no data. Every once in a blue moon, literally, like every like three years or something, I'll get like podcast data. So I can see like how many people listen to a particular podcast. But it is crazy in that so much of how I gauge things is just looking at the response I get on social media. Because I don't really have access to all the data. It's funny. It's a lot of the anecdotal data that I get of what's successful and what's not successful. But a really good example that recently for me was the pandemic started. I started doing interviews because I was trying to do something at home I couldn't do in the car. And I started by interviewing people. And when I finally saw some data on it, it was like, really hit or

miss. Like, if people liked a particular person, they'd listen. But then I started doing interviews about magic. Like, let's talk about a set we made together. And those were way more popular. So, it's, yeah, it is interesting to sort of get feedback and then, like, adjust. Like, a lot of making

something is trying to figure out what you're doing that's working and what you're doing that's not working um and then like my my article i'm 20 years in like it's so sexy i i've so like fine-tuned what people want that it's almost uh it's so structural right now because like like i took 20 years of iterating to figure out what people like and so a lot of my stuff right now is I do A, then B, then C, because I just sort of fine-tuned it over so many years. Yeah, it's – getting that granular on the audience is super interesting. I'm glad you're getting a little bit of feedback on trying to figure out stuff with the show. On YouTube, I mean it's almost like I get – I'm honestly not sure which world I'd rather live in.

Because on one hand, it was kind of nice to just not know. You put something out there and it gets popular. Is it not? I don't know. I love, it's almost like I get – I'm honestly not sure which world I'd rather live in because on one hand, it was kind of nice to just not know. You put something out there and like, is it popular? Is it not? I don't know. I love making it. And now I make a new video and YouTube will be like, sorry, Gavin. This video is performing worse than normal. And you're like, ah, it's doing worse than normal.

And it's like I was so proud of that one or whatever. So I mean it is useful, but it's also this double-edged sword that kind of occupies your time a little bit that you tend to think about. The interviews one is really interesting because I've actually had a very similar experience to you doing interviews of some interviews are just total gangbusters. I launched them. It's about a topic everyone's excited about. It's with the person that they recognize and they love it. And there's some that I've done that I was really proud of, where I would like bring in someone who is kind of like adjacent to magic to do something really interesting, put a lot of time into it. And then just totally falls flat right i did this um i love experimenting much like you it's kind of like design where you try stuff out to the audience thinks and then you like you

know iterate on it so i love experimenting with different kinds of episodes i remember one time i did this cooking episode i was like i'm gonna try something really weird i'm gonna do this cooking episode where i got a professional chef and she made went through the whole process of making like these mana buns that looked amazing like was super cool to watch and i thought it was fascinating and i was like there's a huge cooking audience on youtube and and i put this is back when i was editing all my videos myself and i put so much time into this it was like a 20 minute video i probably spent about 20 hours across a week like editing it or whatever and i launched it and just did horribly right so i think

when i work for videos of all time and this just like oh well maybe i wish i didn't know this no one wanted to watch this video but uh them's them's the beats i suppose um but it is true that over time you do hone in a little bit on what your what your audience likes and um also i found that maybe you found this too if you want to do something kind of unusual if you want to bring in some kind of unusual topic, it's great if you can ground it in something people understand, right? Like, hey, we're going to talk about Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. We're going to talk about a weird part of Kamigawa Neon Dynasty or something adjacent to it, but the core is you still know it's Kamigawa.

So, hey, you're going to be interested in watching for that reason. So there's a lot of little techniques you can use like that. Yeah, well, one of the things I've learned essentially is, um, uh, I call it hugging the tree. Like the, the core of what everybody loves is the game itself. And so like, right, you don't, don't get too far away from the game itself. Um, like I said, I, one of the interesting things about making content is that you have a lot of content to make you know like this podcast right now is like i don't know 900 and something you know like i've made 900 podcasts so like what what's something i haven't talked about yet it's one of the reasons i love having guests on because

i'm like they haven't heard your stories yet you know right right i mean i was on once i don't like five years ago or something like that it's been a been a minute i am i actually have the same experience where so i was like hey literally i don't know um a few months ago i was like hey i should do something really special for it was like my 250th episode or something like when i do episode 250 i should do something really special for it and then i went to go look at how many episodes i'd made i made like 400 episodes i'm already way past the number that i thought i was approaching so uh you know when you're making three videos a week or whatever it adds up quickly um and uh and also as you know when you're trying to make content it is voracious like you always need something new to talk about

and what so you know some weeks it's like hey kamigawa is brand new i have infinite to talk about kamigawa and other weeks it's like all right time to reach into the back pocket for a weird story and figure out to figure out what strange thing i can tell people from 10 years ago you know um but like you know sometimes those do really well and i would never guess it like i made a video called um the 10 worst design mechanics of all time it did amazing everyone wanted to watch that video that has nothing to do with anything that's on right now. Another popular one I made was my five designs I regret making. It's like people – it's like, oh, I want to go see what this is about, even though the cards are from six years ago or something like that.

I like how you're naming topics. Yeah, I've done that one. Yeah, I've done that one. I mean, I'm not going to lie, Mark. There's a number of times where I'm like, what would Mark Rosewater write about in this situation? Well, okay, here's a fun old topic you talked about once. Mistakes or, you know, sad sir, trivia, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's interesting that you definitely one of the things you you love as a content producer is when you find a category of something that people like, you know, like, oh, well, this is people like this thing. So I can come back and do it again, you know, and like, in fact, in my column, I have the problem right now that I have so many of those that I run out of time for just to do normal stuff. You know, it's like, oh wait, I have to do my nuts and bolts column or I have to do my state of design. Like there's all these things I do every year

that like, it just chews up to space, which is kind of my blog. That's not my blog. My podcast has been fun because I make content fast enough that I can't quite, it's faster than I can produce stuff. So I get to make things up and do interesting things. Well, speaking of interesting things, one thing that I think is actually kind of fun to talk about here on the show really quick is – I love your quote, of course, restrictions breed creativity.

I say it all the time. And that has been no more true than working on this show. I don't know if you found that with the podcast or with your articles as well. But there's so many times it'll be like, oh, I'm restricted in some way. I got to get creative about how to solve this and ends up being awesome. I'll give you a great example. One time over the last summer, I was gone. I was traveling. I wasn't at home. And I left my camera accidentally at home. And I'm like, oh, no, I don't have my camera. How am I going to make my show? How am I going to do this? And so so i was like here's what i'm gonna try i've got my microphone i'm just gonna try recording something and doing no no i'm not on the screen at all in

this episode i'm just gonna like you know animate images and put everything up or whatever and i released it and it did really really well and i was like oh this is good to know that i don't have to actually be on the episode and people actually enjoy this kind of overlay thing i've incorporated that into my work another one one is over the holidays, like, you know, we just had whatever the Christmas holiday. And I was like, I don't, you know, I want to be on the joy of the holidays. I don't really have the time to be making a million videos. So instead, I just made these short videos, a minute long or less talking about some story from a card that I designed super fast, super snappy, somewhere like 30 seconds long.

And those videos did really, really well. I'm just like, hey, people love seeing, I think like my video about Retrofitter Foundry has over 100,000 views at this point of people just wanting to like watch a 30 second video about this card. And I would have never done that if I hadn't put on the restriction of I'm trying to do something. Yeah. One of the things that was really interesting is when we first started doing the website, we had theme weeks. And the theme weeks were so helpful because it just told you what it is that you had to talk about. And so like, oh, it's merfolk week. I can talk about merfolk.

So, yeah, I love in some ways the hardest part is when you can do whatever you want. You have absolutely total carte blanche. And then that's the hardest stuff to do and right when there's this the slightest something telling you to do something it just makes it infinitely easier yeah totally uh and i'm sure i'm sure with like you said with the podcast right you start interviewing people now that you're at home right well i can't drive to work every day and tell these stories i'm at home i'm gonna try these interviews out and it sounds like they've been pretty good for you right so once oh yeah that's restricted one of my big challenges is because some point we will go back to work uh is am I spoke I can't do interviews I mean let's sort of in the car it's

hard to do interviews in the car um do I want to occasionally just do an interview even though like I'm not actually driving to work and like I don't like it once I can drive to work am I am I breaking something and occasionally I'm not driving to work work. So I've been wrestling with that of how much, like, I've done some stuff here at home that I can't do in the car. And so it's sort of like, how much am I beholden to the concept of drive to work? So, although I am excited

again to drive to work and have a podcast while I drive to work. It actually saves, right now I have to use work time because I'm not driving to work, although I guess I'm saving my drive to work. But anyway, I am getting back to actually talking in the car again. One of the things that I do in the car that I don't do at home is I really only have one take at home. Where in the car, like, I have four trips every week, but only two podcasts. And so I can, like, do second takes and third takes.

And sometimes I just get better versions of it, and I release that. I don't get to do that at home as much. I do appreciate that. Anyway, speaking of seeing my desk, I'm almost at work here. So any final thoughts on making Good Morning Magic? Yeah, I guess I'll just say, well, first, of course, like, comment, and subscribe. Come on, check it out. It's great.

I also have started releasing some episodes that are good for non, they're not visually heavy as podcasts. So if you enjoyed Mark's podcast, you can go, you know, subscribe to me on whatever podcast medium you use. And the final thing I'll say is this is something I took on during the pandemic. I had no idea how much work it was going to be. And it caused me to have to learn a lot of new skills. I had to learn how to use Photoshop and use, um, like I'd never edited a video before. So how to like use Adobe Premiere and Photoshop and how to use YouTube and all this stuff. It was a ton of work, but it has really been so useful for me as a person just learning this new skill. And now I've actually like, you know, made fun videos for friends as gifts and like done other stuff with the skills that I've learned here. So I just really

encourage everyone out there that when you see a mountain in front of you like this, it's very daunting to try and climb it. But if you do take the time and put in the effort, I found that it's rewarded me in so many different ways in my life. So, you know, don't be afraid to go try and tackle that mountain that seems so far in front of you. And maybe you'll end up

with something really great. Yeah, I actually, ironically, this podcast started the exact same way. I was listening to Kevin Smith talk at San Diego Comic-Con and he just sort of said, hey, if you want to do a podcast, just do it. And I think that's one of sort of said, hey, if you want to do a podcast, just do it.

And I think that's one of my big advice to people is, if you, like, you're talking about how you always wanted to do something, well, just do it. Just try it. And even if you fail miserably,

even if it doesn't succeed at all, you will feel really, just that you tried it will be important. And so I can't stress more to people that that thing you've always wanted to do, do it. Try it.

And it's okay if your early ones are bad. I go back and watch my early videos, which I assume are not quite what they could be. I get that. Anyway, it is time. I've now made it to my desk. So we all know what that means. It means instead

of driving to work, it's time for instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Gavin, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me on, Mark. And I'll see all of you next time. Bye-bye.