Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #913: Copywriting with Ari Zirulnik

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

I sit down with Senior Copywriter Ari Zirulnik to talk about what exactly Magic copywriting is. He and I also lightly touch on writing the names and flavor text for Unfinity.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So I've been using my time at home to interview people, and today I have a fun guest, Ari Zerulnik, who is, I guess on paper, is a senior copywriter. But we're going to talk about what he does today, and that one of the things, the reason I want to have Ari on is there's a lot of cool things that go on behind the scenes making magic, The reason I want to have Ari on is there's a lot of cool things that go on behind the scenes making magic. And I think people focus on a very few of them. So one of my goals is to sort of introduce you guys to other things that happen that you don't even think about but that are key to making magic. Hi, Ari.

Hey, Mark. How's it going? Okay, so we're going to break down. You actually have – I know you wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things. So we're going to start with sort of your official main job and then go to other things that you also do, because I know you do lots of stuff. Okay, so let's start by talking about package copywriting. What is package copywriting? What is that? Well, you see, Mark, the key component of package copywriting is first you have the package of magic cards and then you have the copy that's written to go on it but more specifically um i well actually up until this week and i can't later wrote all of the words that went on every single physical magic product so that's like uh

the tagline that's on the back of your box of draft boosters to the the sales text that's under it that's the extremely and delightfully unhinged secret layer product copy on the website um i don't do all the web copy just secret layer but if there was words on a box or pack or sleeve of magic cards i put them there and for those i mean it's funny that a lot of people don't think about, like, the packs on some level have to do more than sell themselves. Like, we have to, the packs themselves have to say why they're exciting and what's going on. That I think the enfranchised audience thinks, like, everybody knows everything. But no, most audience don't.

Most people who pick up a magic don't exactly know what's going on. They need more information. Yeah, and I mean, with us adding new types of boosters like collector boosters and uh set boosters the audience for each individual product we now have more direct audiences than ever before so the language that i'm using on a draft booster is kind of more open and acquisitional right we're trying to let anyone who's picking this understand they're doing but for a collector booster you know if you're buying a collector booster you know what it's about you love magic you want all the coolest shiniest toys so the copy on that is kind of more informative

telling you about what kind of cool stuff you're going to find and you know getting excited because it's an exciting thing to open yeah one of the things that is a theme that i always bring up is how there's lots of different audiences and every product is aimed at somebody different. It's interesting because I think in some ways it's very easy to think everything just happens, like it just magically somehow, and people forget

that there's somebody behind the scenes on everything, you know, like somebody had to make the logo, somebody had to do the packaging, somebody, you know, and I think that's fascinating. Now, another thing that you do beyond just writing the copy is you do a lot of work with the legendary creatures. So let's talk a little bit about what you do there. Yeah. And first of all, just for the sake of discussing this, I'm going to say I a lot. It's not just me. There's a whole team of incredible world builders working on everything.

It's not just me. There's a whole team of incredible world builders working on everything. Everyone is really talented and super smart and awesome to work with. So if I ever say I by accident, it's a we. But yeah, so Legendary Creatures, well, this first one's an I. When I first started here, it was like right after Eldraine had released. We'd been putting more Legendary Creatures and stuff than ever before because you know commander's popular legendary creatures are fun they're cool they have personality but a lot of legendary creatures were kind of falling through the cracks like uh like tell me the backstory for wrinkle uh but you you can't because he doesn't have one that's anywhere publicly visible. So we started a little bit with M20,

but then the first actual one of these articles was for Zendikar Rising. I worked with the team to create bios for every single legendary creature that comes out in every single set. Because when I build a commander deck, I want to know exactly what my commander's doing and I want to care about them and I want to be like, oh, this guy's cool

because he got this big sword when he killed the dragon. There's better bios than that one. So back in the day, just to get the audience some concept, some sort of larger subtext to everything, for example, when I started working on Magic

many years ago, there were like a set would have like three or four legendary characters in it and in order to become a legendary card you had to have a role in the story like, it's not as if we sort of made legendary characters and then figured what are they, it was like, oh well this

has to be legendary, this is so and so we would make cards to represent characters in the story. But pretty much one for one, if you were a legendary creature, you showed up in the story. So flash forward many years, you know, and now, like Commander especially, there's reasons to want more, you know, legendary creatures.

So we've expanded larger than the story. Like, there's no way for every legendary creature to play a role in the story. There's no way for every legendary creature to play a role in the story. That just can't happen anymore. And so we have the dynamic you're talking about where a card got made legendary because it's a cool commander or it's a cool character

but it's not necessarily being drawn directly from the story. The players are like, well who is this person? I get that question all the time. This is my commander. Can you tell me more about them? What plane are they from? What is this?

You know, who is this character? I don't know who this is. And I know you spend a lot of time and energy trying to make them know who that is. Yeah. That process has now kind of been spread out amongst the world-building team more. So I'm very excited it's uh i'm very

excited it's been widely implemented actually for neo i'm super excited about the face commanders in this one they're kind of the the characters i had my hands in the most like i uh i developed bios for them before we commissioned the art and uh then kind of handed it off to roy the story lead and uh emily tang everyone else who was developing the set to write these really cool side stories for them as well. So there's like a lot of layers to them. So pick one of your favorites. What are one of your favorite Neo characters? And we'll talk about the making of the character.

Yeah, sure. So we have Chishiro, who is the red-green snake commander. How do I say snake? Why am I blanking on the... Orochi. Yeah, Orochi. Thank you. He's the Orochi commander. And we wanted to hit some really cool resonant tropes with Japanese pop culture. He definitely has a lot of Kurosawa in him.

He's a wandering samurai. He's also really anime. Ultimately, if you read his story, it's kind of about the power of friendship at the core of it. So there's a lot of outside influences. And then we thought the floating, broken charge of the blade were cool. Don Morin was the art director for that card, and he turned out really, really awesome. Now now how often when you do characters like that how often are you working with the

artists so that the the visuals are matching the story of the character um the timeline keeps changing and evolving with how we handle the side stories like we brought them back with uh sunday car and have been kind of just trying to figure out the best way to line everything up. So it's different every time. I don't have a satisfying answer to that one. I'm sorry. Yeah. So when, I just want people to understand, like, how often is, like, what tends to come first in making a legendary creature?

I mean, I know it varies from card to card to card but like like when do you get involved normally like how early in the creation of a character do you even get involved so for me it's much later uh like the set lead and the uh card designers if they have come up with characters they know are going to be important in the story those come in ahead of time and kind of get work together to it's not really top down but it's like we need this this card to play like this character and they'll make that happen uh my role in this process is kind of picking up the pieces like it is right these are the legendary characters that we couldn't find a spot for in the story but we want them to be cool and exciting and have stuff about them so i kind of i'm feeling i'm a blank filler.

Right. So your job is sort of like, these are characters that didn't get the love in the main part of the story, but we, we want them to have some, some character work and stories built into that. That's some stuff you work on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I said that's, that's getting spread out a little more now, but for, for a while that was, uh,

just like me and the set lead for whatever given set, banging our heads together, making cool characters come out. My favorite bio that I ever wrote, if you look it up in Commander Legends, was for Obeka, the ogre who punches time, because she's really cool, and also

some of, there's some pretty good jokes in there. Speaking of which, a little throw forward here to a potential future podcast. You and I had a chance to work together because you were in charge of names and flavor text for Unfinity.

That is true. I was. I got to hire a very exciting team and Mark was also foist upon me and it was great. At some point we'll have a podcast. Sadly, we can't really get into it until it's all public because the audience has seen a few cards. So I promise you at some point later when the set comes out,

I will have infinite podcasts on Infinity. I promise you that. As someone whose second booster pack ever was unglued, that whole process was such an honor for me. I'm so excited to talk about it. Yeah, no, it's well, one of the things is you also have a comedy background. Sort of. I mean, I really like attention. That's true. But my background is straight up from advertising.

I worked in an ad agency before i came over to wizards but i did do a lot of humor based writing in a marketing context and i think i'm really funny and sometimes the people around me will laugh like a couple times out of courtesies and that's a win it's interesting like i always talk about how that lot of people say, how do I work on magic? And it's like, well, there's infinite entry points, right? Advertising is very interesting because marketing is a huge part of magic. I mean, you are sort of tangentially connected to marketing, obviously. Yeah.

I'm often the bridge between creative and marketing. I really enjoy being able to work with all the different departments. Yeah, and it's very funny that I'm so focused on design. Like, if you listen to my podcast, it's about making the cards. But there's a huge, like, once the cards are done, there's a huge gap between that being true and the set being out. And a lot, like, just for example, just getting back to your main copywriting job, like, there's a lot

of communication that has to go on. Like, we make a set, okay, the audience doesn't know what that set is, and we have to do a lot to sort of convey all that. And at every level. I think, I mean, my podcast listeners are a little more on the franchise end of the spectrum, right?

If you're regularly listening to a podcast about magic design, odds are you're very invested into magic. But there's lots and lots of people who play, and one of the things I always point out is there are basic things, like the average magic player doesn't know what a planeswalker

is. That blows people's minds, but, you know, that they, like, they don't open enough packs, they always see a Planeswalker. So they might not even own a Planeswalker card, let alone understand story-wise what a Planeswalker is. And I know for people who are very enfranchised, they're like, well, it's one of the card types.

How do you not know that? You know, and that's a big part of this, is every set, when we make a set, I mean, I guess your job is, why is this exciting? Why should a random person want this thing? Yeah, absolutely. And that's also why, like you said, people don't really know what a planeswalker is per se off the get-go. That's when we have stuff like the Welcome Booster that at its core level is just like this vertical slice of everything that makes magic magic like

for those i write uh bios each set about whatever whoever the main planeswalker is and we put there in there and you get like uh you get a planeswalker card and a foil and just a whole bunch of cool stuff that's a great way to just kind of induct people into everything that magic is about yeah and like i said it's it's my my background is communications right so you and I sort of overlap a little bit um I I was forced to take like uh advertising classes and PR classes even though I was on the broadcasting film side of the thing but um but it really made me realize like the power like one of the things where there's a lot of overlap between our jobs is that you know we have to use words to convey a lot of different things.

I mean, I'm doing it through rule text and you're doing it through copy. But there's a lot of sort of like, how do I get somebody excited? So let's just take Kamigawa as an example. So let's say you're making, okay, you've got to write text for Kamigawa. The really interesting question there is, how do you do that? And so one of the things that I'm interested in sort of having you walk through is there's a lot of different products. Like, I don't think the average audience understands maybe how many different things we make when you talk about something like Kamigawa. So here's what I like to do.

Let's talk about all the different products that came out of Kamigawa and how those are different from each other. So, where do you want to start? Pick a Kamigawa product to start with. Alright, sure. Well, I'll try to go in the order that I usually write my documents because that's what I've sorted in my head. Okay. So, we have the baseline product is the set and the draft boosters. is the set and the draft boosters. Those usually share copy. We developed a tagline for those that's kind of universal to the set

and indicative of the whole thing. What was Kamigawa's tagline? Oh, you're going to make me look it up. I know that the marketing tagline for that one was lighted up, but the marketing tagline and the packaging taglines are different because the timeline between those two things are extremely different so if you look at the back of

a set booster or a draft booster for kamigawa you will see that the i clicked the wrong button i thought i was being so smooth with my timing main package copy here we go so for kamigawa obviously i wrote this like over a year ago yeah yeah so for kamigawa it was the future is now was our tagline for for draft and set which you know um a big core of the set is the conflict between tradition and modernity and we're kind of also like this is kind of the biggest foot Magic has ever set forward into the future. So it's kind of just compressing this big birth of timeline into a single sentence was the goal there. It's up to y'all if we succeed in it, I suppose.

Yeah, so that bundle copy... that bundle is that copy is shared across draft set and bundle then you have the collector boosters which uh is much more about look at all this cool stuff that's it's really exciting you have the the samurai cards and the ninja cards and the the neon cards and the neon ink hit at sugu and all that crazy stuff so that one we uh it's cutting edge booster technology is how we describe that set and we can start the cards with it there's cybernetically enhanced neon dynasty boosters with tons of exciting cards just like that kind of like language that captures the cyberpunk feel of the set while still uh being very specific to this is the product that you are getting.

Then, obviously, you have the commander decks, and the commander decks have a different tone than everything else. The commander decks are more like, this is social gameplay. We're going to all hang out. And so they're less about taglines and more about the names of the decks. We have buckle up for the vehicles. Yeah, so I name all the decks as well. We have buckle up and upgrades unleashed for those and um the tone on those are much more like hey get together with your friends and kick their butts but we're all friends but you're gonna win

but we're friends so that kind of a language and that's it for the outer package copy but uh we also have the inserts that's a big part of my job so i could talk about those so what what were the inserts for uh nyan dynasty so the neon one didn't actually have copies so i'm gonna rewind okay okay to mid and vow okay sure it mid and vow um had i thought pretty exciting inserts so often but not, the pre-release and the bundle share insert art. And our goal with the inserts, the packaging team's goal, is to kind of create an immersive object that looks really nice and it gets you excited about being there.

So for Mid and Vow, we got this artist named Jeremy Solomon, who's extremely good. got this artist named Jeremy Solomon who's extremely good and he did these kind of tarot-esque illustrations and for mid I wrote a prayer to Sagarda that goes around it and

it actually loops infinitely and I was kind of proud of that. And then for vow we had the vows between Olivia and Edgar. Yeah, spoiler alert for the plot of Crimson Vow right there. But, yeah, that was really cool. And so, now, do you, that's all the stuff that literally,

like, there's stuff inside or outside the booster pack. Do you do text beyond that? Like, is there other text that you have a hand in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just real quick, still within packaging, we tried to put some little Easter eggs somewhere. Like, as we've been losing the plastic from our packaging, something I'm very excited about, we have a lot more tear strips on stuff to make sure it's secure. So we're trying to up a number of hidden messages under tear strips.

Also, actually, real quick, as a challenge to everyone out there, there is an Easter egg on your spellbook, Chandra, that I haven't seen anyone talk about. So someone find that and tag me when you post it, because... Okay, a challenge! I was excited about it. We have a lot

of listeners here, so a challenge to find out what the secret message was. The secret Easter egg. Yeah, Easter egg. The secret thing. But it's true. My copy extends beyond packaging. I also do a lot of writing for Secret Lair. Before we get to Secret Lair, I just want to share one story and then we'll jump to Secret Lair.

So, I don't have a lot of experience writing packaging, but I did do one thing that was an Easter egg of my own doing. So for, I think it was Unhinged, they let me write the legal text for the packaging of Unhinged, and it is very silly, and I was very proud of it. The lawyer said, you have to say A, B, and C,

and beyond that, whatever. I mean, I had to show it to them so anyway if you ever get a package of Unhinged I wrote the legal text on the packaging and it is quite silly you did slightly contribute to some of the packaging for Infinity as well

oh I did ain't a certain Greg that made an appearance we can't get too much Infinity but there's I did. Ain't a certain Greg that made an appearance. Ah, yes, yes. There's, uh, anyway, we can't get too much Infinity. But there's, uh,

there was a character that didn't make it into flavor text that, uh, Ari so kindly got him into the, uh, the, the text on the box.

So, uh, anyway, uh, we'll, okay, we'll talk about Infinity. I promise, I promise we'll have an Infinity chat.

Okay, so let's talk, um, Secret Lair. So I know you Okay, so let's talk Secret Lair. So I know you have a lot of involvement in Secret Lair. So what all do you do in Secret Lair? Yeah, so I write, I think it's most of the art descriptions for Secret Lair. And I also do most of the creative text, most of the flavor text. Talk about the art descriptions first. Okay. most of the creative text most of the flavor text talk about the art descriptions first um so writing art descriptions for secret lair is not the same as writing art descriptions for

regular magic most of the time like regular magic there's a in general you want to leave stuff up to the artists because our artists are all amazing and we want them to put themselves into the work we don't want them doing exactly what we said yeah but for secret lair that's like to the infinite power like for secret lair we want artists expressing themselves and going wild yeah well yeah some of the art descriptions for secret lair are like this is a black sorcery draw the end of the world thanks and that's it and just really it's um certainly an easier task than uh writing the flavor tag or like the or the art descriptions for main set stuff. But you can get some really wacky stuff too. Like once I started working with artists for a second time and kind of have an idea of what they're about,

you can kind of start giving them suggestions and be like, hey, you know, it'd be really fun if you drew this goblin skateboarding or whatever. We can get that kind of stuff. Yeah, the interesting thing of working with artists is that you start, I mean, the more you work with them, you learn what they enjoy and what they're good at and you can sort of lean in. I know art directors do this all the time, of like,

oh, for this concept, this artist would be really good at it. And it's fun to let the artist play in areas where their strengths lie. Yeah, I me and i think to to the team secret lair is ultimately a passion project like it was initially pitched top it's a love letter to the game of magic the gathering it's just we're just trying to like do all this cool and fun stuff because it's a fun game and i don't know it's it's all different kinds of expression that you don't normally get to see within normal sets.

Yeah. Which I also think finds its way into the flavor text. Like, so they know the, the flavor text that I wrote for a void slime in the, the wizard of barge prime slime set. I know a lot of people were really excited about that. That's just like the,

the person getting slimed in the face when they're trying to cast Cyclonic Rift. And we can't really make that kind of tongue-in-cheek joke in the main set very often, but we have that kind of room to play in Secret Lair. Yeah, the interesting thing for me, I think the same reason I really have joy making unsets is the same reason you like playing Secret Lair,

which is it's kind of fun when the boundaries aren't there. It's like, I can do almost anything, you know? And it's intimidating. That freedom can be intimidating, but it's also really exciting just pushing in places that normally we don't get to push. There's a lot of fun of just doing things you normally aren't allowed to do. Yeah, I've definitely elicited some eye rolls from the audience that i've seen that you know like all right i won't do that again definitely it is a product a product that we enjoy having push boundaries and actually the really cool thing that i've been able to do

with the text is with the artist series is that you get to uh get to really like collaborate with the artists we've been reaching out to the artists and be like hey i'm ari what do you want to do here yeah do i like um like vos wrote that haiku that spanned across the sport cards we have we have more poetry coming up we have people whose family wrote we have uh yeah some stuff that i can't mention yet. It's awesome. Yeah, it's fun that you really get to push boundaries. And even for those people who don't necessarily purchase Secret Lair, it's a lot of fun to look at. I would always recommend for the people,

even if you never actually purchased a Secret Lair product, look at the Secret Lair cards. They're very, very fun. I mean, not saying you can't buy them. You want to buy them, also buy them. But they're a lot of fun to look at please buy them yeah no it's uh no it's a pure joy and also if you go to the secret letter website and read my product descriptions they become more unhinged over time and i'm getting encouraged to do that

so there's an extra level of silliness if you want it. So real quickly for the audience who might not know this, so there's a Secret Lair website. How do you find the Secret Lair website? Well, you see, you go to secretlair.wizards.com. It's a really badly kept secret, actually. It's kind of embarrassing, but it's really easy to find. It's just secretlair.wizards.comcom and there's actually a sale going on right now. I didn't even get into how exciting it was to write art descriptions for

Street Fighter cards. As a lifelong Street Fighter fan, I jammed as many Easter eggs as possible. Yeah, one of the things that's a lot of fun is like, something I'm hoping people are getting from you from this is that one of the things I love about Magic is everybody really enjoys what they do. You know, everybody really has a passion

for like, I'll bring on art directors and they love art, you know, and bring on designers and they love making cards or play designers love playtesting and balancing, you know? And so you and I have a share for words that we have a love of love of words. And it is, I get a great kick. I always love reading your copy because it's fun to see how do you take this very complex idea and boil it down. Like Neon Dynasty is a great example of, there is so much going on in that set. There's a lot, you know, we packed a lot in.

And there's something really challenging about how do I take this large concept and bake it down right into a line? How do I get a single line or a few sentences that describe the essence of what it is? And that's always fascinating to me. Oh, yeah. It's a lot of fun to do. Like you said, a passion for words is definitely the required baseline. But there's so many different ways to express that passion.

Yes, definitely. I can see my desk here, so i'm not too far from work um any stories you want to share any fun stories of the making of of your job uh let's see i i accidentally said them the one the ones i had in the game as we were going. But, um... How about this? Here's something we can do that might be fun. Can you pull up the Unhinged cards that... Infinity cards that are public.

Oh, yeah. And we will share a story about the making of... Let me look real quick. So... We'll share the story of one of of... Let me look real quick. So... And we'll share the story of one of them. Let's see. Okay. Killer Cosplay.

So there's Assembled Ensemble, Saw in Half, Killer Cosplay, Space Family Gobinson, and then Lots of Lands. Okay, Killer Cosplay. Let's talk the story of Killer Cosplay. Oh, sure. So let me read what the card is and then I'll read the flavor text and we'll talk about how we got there.

So Killer Cosplay costs a green artifact equipment. Whenever Killer Cosplay becomes attached to a creature, choose a creature card name with an identical mana cost. That creature becomes a copy of the card with the chosen name until Killer Cosplay becomes unattached from it. Equip three. And the art is of

a little bear in a Lurgoyf costume, walking with their mother. And then the flavor text is, Ak Hans Run, get the camera, he's adorable, Steffi Bob's daughter, next words. Okay, how did we get that flavor text?

How did that happen? Well, I pulled up our history of text development here. I got the full scoop. But yeah, actually, it looks like Killer Cosplay was actually the very first name submitted for this card, so that one was easy. Okay. Oh, so the way it works, by the way,

there's a place that everybody who's on the team submits stuff so that everybody who's submitted can see everybody else's submissions so that we can riff off each other. That happens a lot. And this might be, like, a little pretentious and writery, but I think that there's some significance in getting very modern terminology like cosplay into magic. Like, obviously that word would not fit in a normal magic set,

in a standard one, rather, but Infinity is where you do get to push those boundaries and put in more recent terminology and concepts. Recent from, you know, not that recent. You know what I mean? As for the flavor text, it looks like... We have a submission from Mark Rosewater.

It says, you are such a cute little Tarmogoyf. And then immediately we have Graham Stark of Loading Ready Run fame coming in with the Lurgoyf reference with, ah Hank, look, it's adorable. And it kind of everyone really leaned into the Lurgoyf

reference and it kind of evolved into where we got here. I think the next words is a very us joke, isn't it? Yes. As opposed to last words. Yeah, so the original quote

from Lurgoyf is Aak had run, it's the Lurgoyf. Safi Eriksdottir, last words. So part of what we get to do in Unsets is we're making fun of, you know, we're doing parodies of something.

The art in the card is a character dressed like a Lurgoyf, so we're making fun of, you know, we're doing parodies of something. The art in the card is a character dressed like a Lurgoyf, so we're having fun with Lurgoyf. And Akhan's Run, there's few pieces of flavor text that inspired more cards than that piece of flavor text. There's a card called Akhan's Run, Eric Safi's,

sorry, Safi, Eric's daughter became a card, Hans became a card, so like, you know, there's this infinite, that flavor text is much beloved by the audience. And I think, right, what happened was I said he's adorable, and then Graham came

back with, let's do it as a reference to Lurgoif, Akhans run, or Akhans, he's adorable. And then, I think I'm the one that said, well, can we weave the Han's run back into it, right? Why would you tell Han to run? And it's like, well, he's so cute.

Okay, go get your camera. He's so cute. I think I pitched that, right? Is that how the order went? That sounds right to me. And then you and I had a lot of discussion about the attribution. Yes.

And I think I submitted Steffi, Bob's daughter. So the original character is Safi, Eric's daughter. So we wanted to sound like Safi, Eric's daughter. And Eric's daughter means like literally Eric's daughter. In whatever, in Swedish or whatever language that is. It's some Scandinavian language. So I liked the idea that, well, it's a modern day. So instead of having older names, let's use modern names.

So instead of Safi, we did Steffi, because Stephanie is a more, you know, current name. And then I just was trying to come up with the silliest name, like somebody's daughter. And I don't know and Bob's daughter struck me as being funny. Bob is a go-to. Apologies to all Bobs out there. I usually

immediately go to Greg. Also apologies to all Gregs. When the set comes out, there is a Greg, although I guess he's in the box text and not on the card text. That's a story to be told in the future. Anyway, this is a good example

where there's a lot of fun riffing on the card where the writers got to see all the components. We got to see the art and everything. We were working to make a whole cohesive card. That card is really cool. I'm excited to play with that one. That's really fun.

Okay, why don't we share one more story, and then we'll call it a day. I want to talk about... Ensembled Ensemble. Ensembled Ensemble, yes. Ensembled Ensemble. This card took forever for us to do. Yeah, I think...

Oh, my God. I'm trying to pull it up here. I just found the right name. All right, there we go. So here's the history of this card. When we did the world building, the initial world building, one of the artists who did the world building made this giant robot that played the triangle.

And we thought that was the cutest thing in the world. So we said, okay, we're going to make a card for this giant robot that plays a triangle. And then the artist ended up making a whole band. I mean, the centerpiece is the giant guy playing the triangle, but there's a whole band playing. The clowns in the set are all robots,

for those that don't already know that. To make the clowns fun and science fiction-y and a little less creepy, we made all the clowns robots, and they're very colorful robots that are very fun. Okay, so we had to name this card, and we knew that we wanted it to represent, I mean, we had the art, so we had to name this card, and we knew that we wanted it to represent, I mean, we had the art,

so we had to represent a band. So what did we do? Yeah, so this card, when we finalized the creative text process, the super-duper final creative text process, which, spoiler alert, it was not the final creative text process, we shipped this card with the name Ding-O-Matic

as a triangle-playing robot. it's the ding-o-matic that name from kathleen de vere and um we had a actually so the text that i had for a really long time was 45 tons one clear purpose but you're looking at the art and you're like yeah it's it's really not that clear that it's playing the triangle right off the bat. That text is not quite going to work. So we put our heads together. Let me explain that really quickly. The way the picture got laid out, the main character is playing the triangle,

but there's so much else going on that your attention isn't drawn there visually. And so you more notice it's a band of clowns than it's specifically this one. And we were trying to focus on the triangle player, but it was throwing the joke and it just wasn't working. That was the problem. Yeah.

And so saying that it was clear and the flavor text was absolutely not working. We're like, all right, well, we need to get this text final. It's still dingomatic in our hearts. So we developed a new flavor text, which is 1,267,594 Blorb Alloy Gears, 876 meters

of iridium-plated wiring, one slightly used triangle. And we're like, alright, this is great. We still have our triangle joke, still a joke about how big he is, and we shipped it, and we were done forever. Isn't that right, Mark? We were done, except we worked. And that's why the card standing in front of you looks completely different.

So what happened? Why didn't we use that flavor text? Oh, because we showed it to a lot more people, and they were like, what is this business with the triangle? We see a little clown robot orchestra. This is a band. This isn't a triangle robot. And we were like, ugh, fine. Right.

We had to focus on the band. The problem was we couldn't focus on the triangle player. We had to focus on the whole band. Yeah. So we had to completely rewrite the name and redo the flavor text. Yeah, it was me, you, and Matt Tabak at the last minute, right? Matt was the editor for the set, so yeah. Yeah, so we got to Assembled Ensemble, which is the card that you have before you today right so the name now references the name now references

the fact that's the whole band and not just the triangle player exactly actually i believe this this player effects come from tabak i don't know it's very funny what's on there right now i'm a fan i think you i it was a combination I think what happened was we liked the idea that since it was a band, let's talk about what their song is. And then we were riffing on songs. And then we came across Your Weight From This Point

is some number of hours. And we argued about how many hours was the funniest number of hours. And because of since it's an acorn card, it has the stamp, it has the little bump on the bottom of the card yes where like the rare stamp would go the time couldn't be too long because like anything longer than the word seven would push the flavor text into the bump so there's a lot of like weird little considerations like that when it comes to

fitting text on cards yeah and i think early on we had, like, a two-digit number. Like, that's funny, you know, like 22. But then we said, oh, well, it wouldn't fit. And now, like, maybe we need a weight that's long, but, like, you could imagine it could be that long. So... That was a funny number. It's like someone tried to draw a straight line and they messed

up really bad. They're like, ugh. But this is just a good... I mean, I promise when the set comes out, you and I, I'll get Ari back and we can do more of this. But it's fun talking about

how you think you have something. And this is true, by the way, for any naming or flavor text. We're just talking about the unsets.

And because it's comedy, we're obviously trying to be funny on top of everything else. We're also trying to be funny. So hard. I know, comedy,

comedy ain't so easy. But anyway, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I want to thank you, Ari, for coming and sharing, talking about all you do with magic. It was my pleasure.

So thank you so much. And to everybody else, I will see you all next time. Bye-bye.