Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #948: Spice8Rack's Un- Video

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

In this podcast, I give my feedback on Spice8Rack's video about the history and influence of the Un- sets. You can watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYYjjrG-hCo

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for it to drive to work. Okay, so today is an interesting podcast. So recently for me, I actually recorded these ahead, Spice 8 Rack recorded a video, a pretty long video, like it's an hour and 49 minutes, on the history of the unsets and the influence of the unsets on magic. History of the Unsets and the Influence of the Unsets on Magic. So if you haven't seen it, ideally, you stop right now and go watch it. I understand it's about two hours long. But I'm going to talk today about my reactions and thoughts and stuff about the video.

So to optimize today's podcast, I would go watch that first. Now, if you can't or don't or don't want to, I mean, I'm going to be talking all of the unsets. I mean, it should be somewhat self-explanatory, so you don't have to watch it, but I am talking about it. So, if you've seen the video, this will be a better podcast for you. But I will try to make it entertaining, even if you haven't seen it. Okay, so, let me talk a little bit how the video came to be, or at least how my involvement came to be in it.

So Spice8Rack does a lot of videos. He has a humorous bent to them. And he was a fan of the Unsets. And so he decided, I think the original plan was he was going to make this video so that it would come out when Unfinity originally was going to come out, which was April 1st. And this project, I guess, turned into a much bigger project than he expected. Like I said, it's almost two hours long. So it turned into almost like a feature-length documentary.

And what happened was at some point he contacted Wizards and asked if I would be interested in being involved. I think at that point he had already interacted with Gavin, and Gavin had recorded some audio for him. I think Gavin had done something with him for a completely different video, and he had gotten Gavin to record some audio for this. So when they originally came to me, all they really wanted was, hey,

could I give some audio? Could I record some lines? And what I said is, hey, I'm more than happy to be on video. I'll do more than just record lines. You can interview me. Obviously, Unsets are a passion of mine. I was excited to talk about them. And I said, yeah, I would love to be involved. I do want to stress, by the way, the audio on my portion is not great. That is on me. I was supposed to record my audio. I misunderstood and I didn't. So he used the audio from his end,

which was not the strongest of audios, but that is not on Spice 8 Rack. That's on me. I was supposed to record it. And I even offered to redo it, but he liked what I had said. So we ended up using the slightly subpar audio. But I just want to stress, not on him, on me.

I'm the cause of that bad audio. Also, in the video, before I guess he knew I was involved, there's a bunch of articles that I wrote. Because I'm probably, no person on the planet has written more about the making of Unsets than I have. There's a lot of articles. He quotes a lot of articles in it. And because he didn't know I was going to be involved, he had people imitate my voice.

So just people asking, how do I feel about people imitating my voice? I guess the quote is, imitation is the purest form of flattery, I think. Anyway, I thought it was sweet. I mean, I don't... Nothing about this video, for those that haven't seen the video,

nothing about this video to me was of any ill nature at all. Clearly, he loved the unsets. Clearly, this was a passion project for him. And while he did get critical in some things, and I'll talk about that today, project for him. And while he did get critical in some things, and I'll talk about that today, I felt that nothing he said, like everything he said was him trying to be honestly critical of something that he truly did, in fact, love. And so I didn't think he took any unfair shots or anything. He was extra critical and unhinged, but we'll get to that. I do understand why. Okay. So part of what I want to do today is talk a little bit about, and then I want to

fill in the gaps. The idea of this podcast for me is, if you've watched the video, this is like extra footage. It's me sort of doing my director's commentary, although I'm not literally watching while I talk, but it's me doing my director's commentary. So I'm going to fill in some gaps on stuff. For example, the story of how it came to be, in a given, it was kind of based on my article, so once again, this is more on me than on him, but the explanation of how things came to be wasn't quite right, so I wanted to spend a little time explaining exactly.

So what happened was, it is true that Joel Mick and Bill Rose came to me with the idea, but basically the idea they came to me with was, let's have a different color border. I don't know whether they'd pitch silver or not, but let's have a different color border. And it means non-tournament legal. That is the idea they came to me with. You know, I think what they realized was there were things that we can't make because of tournaments that, that the idea really was tournament play shouldn't handicap what magic could be. And they're like, there's a lot of probably fun things we could do that we wouldn't want to do in a tournament. And at the time, for example, a good example might be dexterity cards. Richard Garfield had made Chaos Orb in original Alpha. And kind of the thought process was, and there was, there

were one or two other dexterity cards that happened shortly thereafter. But the belief in R&D was, oh, you know, you really don't want dexterity cards in a tournament. There's a lot of space issues. Like it's just, it's not the kind of thing you want in a tournament. There's a lot of space issues. It's not the kind of thing you want in a tournament. But that didn't mean it wasn't fun. It didn't mean it wasn't enjoyable. That's the kind of thing that I think Bill and Joe were inspired by, saying, hey, there are things we know that are fun

that people would enjoy playing with, but trying to say everything that Magic could be has to be through the funnel of tournament play just seems you're leaving a lot on the table. there's a lot of fun things you could do that we might not do for tournaments now the interesting thing is the idea of it being humorous or it making fun of magic or like a lot the whole tone it came a lot of the sort of one-up-ness that like there's a lot of qualities to it that

was not at all asked by them Bill Bill and Joel, really, all they said is non-Tournament legal. And I've mentioned this in other places, but since I'm doing my podcast, I want to stress again, when it was designed, Tournament Magic was not what we call standard and vintage. At the time was, what, Type 2 and I'm not sure what. Type 1. Type 1 and type 2. So when Unglued got made, the idea was

it couldn't be played in standard and vintage, but it could be played in every other Magic format. The idea was anything that wasn't standard or vintage was casual and this product should be for all those products. It is interesting that over

time and in the video Spice Theater Act does sort of talk about a little bit of how what sort of the silver border was supposed to mean kind of warped over time and instead of being for all the casual formats became not for any casual format that sort of structured. That all of. It's off limits for all casual formats, which is kind of the antithesis of what the point of the product was. Anyway, so the idea of adding in the humor, like my background was comedy, right? I was a comedy writer.

So the idea of doing parody, of having a sort of lighter tone, that all came from me. None of that was asked for by Bill or by Joel. Okay, the other thing that happened in that, there's one point where he's talking and he shows this playing card that's like half a King of Diamonds and half a Ten of Hearts or something.

He is making reference to something that I've talked about in my article, but he really touched upon very briefly and I think might have been confusing had you not read the source material. So let me explain a little bit for those that might not know. One of the things that I did when I made Unglued was I was very inspired by what are cool things that I've seen. Either cool things I've heard about. For example, Full Art Land was because Chris Rush had a cool idea and no one would let him do it.

But he told me and I'm like, I'm going to do it. Or the token cards came from the fact that I saw in Japan when I went to Japan that they made these customized tokens that people were playing with. And I'm like, that's cool. Why can't Magic just have that inside the booster pack?

So a lot of things I saw were borrowed from things that seemed cool that magic should do. But one of my big inspirations was, it's funny, he made reference to the fact that I used to be a magician, which in fact is true. As a kid, I was called the whiz kid. That wasn't my name. I actually did kids parties when I was a teenager. So I used to be a prestidigitator. But anyway, one of the things that you do when you do magic is there are a lot of card tricks.

And a lot of card tricks, you buy that particular trick. And then there's, for example, a company who makes all those tricks. And their backs are all the same, because that's the, like, any one playing card company has a certain back, that's their playing card company's back. And anyway, this company had their own back. And so they put out a product, I don't even know what it was called, but it was a deck of cards, and all the cards were were weird cards, one of which was like the half king of hearts, half ten of diamonds. were weird cards.

One of which was like the half king of hearts, half ten of diamonds. There might have been a red ace of spades, or there might have been a three and a half of clubs. It just was a lot of really quirky, weird things. And the thing about it was that deck was

not a magic trick. That deck was not, it's not like you took it and went and did something directly with it. The idea was that you took cards out of it and you put it into your other decks to sort of make new tricks out of it. Like, it'd be really neat if I predict your card and it's a three and a half

of clubs or something. Like, somehow I figure out how to make three and a half of clubs relevant to the trick. And the idea was it just did weird quirky things and it let you, the magic, the magician, figure out how to use it. And that really, really inspired me. And so a lot of original Unglued was I was just going to make weird things that the idea wasn't Unglued and Unhinged that follow. The idea was really not it's its own cohesive separate thing.

The idea was here's wacky weird things. Go mix these in with your magic deck. Even limited. The idea of limited when it first made unglued was hey, you would take two boosters of some other product and two boosters of unglued

because they were 10 card and mix them together and that it would be this, like, you know, this fun thing mixed into your normal draft. The idea of being its own thing really did not happen, ironically, until Unstable. That it was meant to be this supplemental thing. Okay, so, let's get into Unhinged. So, Unhinged, if you've watched the video, Spice8Rack goes into great detail about all the problems with Unhinged.

And let me be the first to say, it is by far the worst of the Un products. There were a lot of mistakes made. But, but, I will say, my take when I look back at Unhinged, it made a lot of mistakes, but I think mistakes were more limited mistakes than constructed mistakes. Meaning, um, the mechanics we picked were particularly bad for limited. Um, so let me, let me get into a little bit of what the inherent problem was with the mechanics. Uh, uh, But I will...

Sorry, I keep deviating myself. I do think there are a lot of cool designs. Cheaty Face came from there. Who, What, Why, When, Where came from there. Blast from the Past and Old Foggy came from there. There's a lot of cards that people have a lot of fun playing with today that stem from that set. But so here, let me get to the core. And he touched upon in the video

but didn't quite hit exactly what the problem was. So he said that one of our guidelines was that we didn't do things that you could do in normal magic. The idea being is normal magic made cards for normal magic. We should only make things that normal magic, you know, that normal blackboard magic at the time couldn't make. But we had one other big problem. And the other thing was that I really thought of the unsets early on as an introductory

thing. As, hey, here's something that more, I made the confusion of connecting casual players with inexperienced players. And for those that are ever listening to me talk about casual, it turns out there's many type of casual players. But investment is only one spectrum of casual. There are very experienced casual players. Because casual, besides not being experienced, could mean not being in franchise or not being

competitive. And those second two groups could be very experienced, but not necessarily, you know, so I made this miscommunication, or I made this misassumption that I needed it to be simple. So I'd given myself the following task. Have things not be normal magic, but simple. And what ended up happening was,

I prioritized things that were easy to understand, but that didn't inherently make them play well or fun. For example, artist matters. Okay, it's easy to understand. Hey, check the artist, or pick an artist, or do you have two of the same artists?

It wasn't hard to understand what it did, but it really wasn't something that applied to Limited. We just didn't have the repetition of artists you need to make it relevant in Limited. And Spice8Rack points this out in the video. They just didn't matter much in Limited. Now, in Constructed, they did, like, it's funny. In Constructed, it does something kind of fun.

Like, I know people for casual players who would have fun making decks around a single artist. These cards enabled you, constructed-wise, to do that. But I think I put them in not just as a constructed tool, but as a limited tool. And man, they just fell as a limited

tool. It just didn't matter enough. And the other thing is, and we get to Unstable, one of the big issues we learned is that unsets draft better than they sort of play in sealed because the nature of making them work requires you to get a certain amount of something and that is hard to do. Like when you're drafting, it's a little bit easier to at least prioritize artists if you're going to care at all,

where if you're just opening a pack, you're in the mercy of what you open, and they might not even mean the colors you're playing. So it's the fact that like Infinity, you know, not Infinity, sorry, Unhinge, it really sort of lean

into the simplicity thing. Like Fractions is another example where a half doesn't take a lot of space. It's not that hard a concept in a vacuum. But A, it proved to be a lot more complicated than people think. When you have 18 damage and I hit you for three and a half, you have to think about what that is.

And if I combined effects, you know what I'm saying? Like he showed the giant growth in the set, which is plus three and a half, plus three and a half. Like, combining fractions is even more complicated. So, it was something that seemed like, oh, it was simple. Oh, it didn't take a lot of words. Oh, I don't have to be wordy. But it was neither particularly fun, nor as easy to grok as it seemed. And I think that was a lot of problems with a lot of the mechanics in the set was because I was trying to be simple, I erred toward, like, I didn't understand, like, one of the things that I, that on some level Unhinged taught me was the player will work for the fun. If the fun requires work, but it's really fun, players will work for it.

but it's really fun, players will work for it. And I really got trapped into trying to do things simple, but what I ended up making is things that didn't quite work, that weren't particularly fun, especially in Limited, and, you know, I just, it was kind of devoid of what needed to be. Interestingly, the one mechanic that was kind of made for Limited, which was gotcha, made a huge mistake. And the mistake, by the way, there was somebody in playtesting who came to me and said, I don't get this mechanic.

Won't people just not talk? And I said, oh, no, no, no, it's fine. They'll get into the spirit of it. Because not talking felt like, well, that's the spike answer. And this is not a product for spikes. That was my mindset at the time. Like, oh, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, you could not talk. But what's the fun in that?

And what I really, I mean, I've talked a lot about this. In my GDC talk, I talked about this, which is, look, players will do what you incentivize them to do. They'll try to win. If not talking is the best way to win, they'll not talk, even if that isn't the fun thing. And so my main mechanic, kind of like, the whole point of the environment, the whole point of Unsets, is to get people to sort of let loose and have fun.

And I made a mechanic that made you clam up and not interact. That was probably my biggest mistake in Unhinged was, gotcha. gotcha. It's one of those mechanics that, like, if you're playing in the way it's intended by spirit, and you get into that spirit, and it's like, okay, I gotta try to not use those words. But, like, for example,

he even points it out in the video, there's an unsummon where if the opponent names a number, you get it back. And it turns out, if you want to win unhinged games, draft as many of the cards as you can, it is very, very hard to not mention numbers. Because you are trained in magic. If I say to you, what's your life total? You are going to tell me

your life total. And so it is so easy to get people to say numbers. And that is... And now I put... The other mistake I made was there was not quite the development on unhinged that there should have been. I mean, more than unglued. And so, for example,

we shouldn't have put Gotcha on removal cards, on bounce spells, on kill spells. It's one thing to get back, oh, I can get back my giant growth or something, or I get back life gain. But to get back a kill spell? You know, it's just so

punishing. It's like, oh, heaven forbid you say this one word, and then your creature die. You know what I'm saying? It, it, it really didn't do a good job of measuring the cost of doing something wrong versus, so of course you shut up. If I say the wrong word, a creature dies every time I say the wrong word. Yeah, you don't say anything. One of the other things that got pointed on the video was the humor so interestingly one of the things when I made Unhinged was it was a struggle to get it made

like one of the things that he talks about is Spice 8 Rack talks as if Unglued was a smashing success and Unhinged was a horrible failure Unglued and Unhinged follow a very similar. No, no, no. Unglue and Unhinged followed a very similar pattern, which is they sold very well initially, but then they went down faster than a normal small set.

But they weren't a normal small set. Both of them were actually smaller than small sets, and they were a supplemental set. They weren't a traditional magic small set. And because of that, the other thing they did do, though, is they had a long tail. So what happened was they started high, and they dropped quicker than a normal set, but had a longer tail, meaning it sold at a certain level.

Normal sets sort of drop off the map at some point and stop selling. Or at some point we stopped selling them. But Uncars just kept selling. Like, they had a tail, and over time the tail went slightly up because there was nowhere else to get it, so if people wanted it, they had to go to Unsets. And so, one of the big challenges,

so anyway, it wasn't that either Unglute or Unhinge was a failure. What happened was, is they, we didn't understand the kind of set it was, we overprinted both of them. Anything's a failure if you make too much of it because you can't sell it all and then you have to

destroy some of it. So unglued that happened. Unhinged was a giant fight to get made. So when we finally got the go ahead, one of the things the brand asked me, and this was the brand team, is they said they wanted more juvenile humor. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know why they asked that. But the sort of the ass folk, there's a lot of juvenile humor in the set. It is not my style of humor.

It is not what I would do in a vacuum. It is not the kind of humor that I appreciate. You know, I mean, I'm a connoisseur of of humor so I understand it and I get why people enjoy it and I've learned how to construct it but it's not my kind of humor so it's not as if unhinged was me just going ooh I'm just going to do what I want ironically I got asked

to do something kind of them saying we'll okay it was one of the parameters of them okaying it so the fact I had a lot of juvenile humor wasn't my doing. I was just trying to meet a criteria that I had agreed to. And in retrospect, I wish I hadn't. One of the big negatives with Unhinged was it made people feel bad.

And that's never the idea. The other thing that we did that we... I think early magic, the early unsets, was a little bit meaner in its humor of magic. And one of the things that I think the later sets do is I have no problem poking fun at magic. I think, like, I like parody. I think we've got a little bit of a lighter tone on it. I think some of the early criticisms were a little too hard in their criticism. That the parody went a little too deep.

That, in retrospect, I'm like, okay. So between the fact that there was juvenile humor, and I think some of it was a little too biting for what fundamentally the product wanted to be, meant that I think Unhinged, in some ways Unglued, did some things that I wish, in retrospect, we didn't do. Some of it was the time. I mean, it's just a lot of factors.

I look back at both Unglued and Unhinged, and the humor isn't quite where I want it to be in either of those two sets. But anyway, I think the reason that Unhinged failed was the mechanics fundamentally weren't good, especially for Limited. I think the humor was off. And I think that it...

I just made... The other big thing, for example, is we chose not to do dice. I was trying to do things Magic didn't do, and I needed simplicity. And the cleanest... Dice are awesome. I think what happened was when we got feedback from Unglued,

we got some feedback that people didn't like some of the dice cards. But rather than say, oh, they don't like these kind of dice cards, I just said, oh, they don't like dice. And that was a mistake. The other big thing that I didn't do in Unhinged, which I later would do in Unglued. Well, let me get into Unstable. I think the thing that Unstable did that Unhinged, which I later would do Unglue. Well, let me get into Unstable. I think the thing that Unstable did

that Unhinged didn't was it said, you know what? Unsets are best when they are doing what magic does in the way that magic does it with just a nod toward the things that normal magic can't do. So the thing about Unstable, and I think the secret of success of Unstable was

we treated it like a normal magic set. We, we, it has archetypes. It has, we built a world around it. It's funny that Spice Raid Rack spent some time with me talking about how, like it was a faction set, like how we did with it something we wanted to do in normal magic. He spent less time talking about how we built a world for it. Bablovia was a real world. We had world building. You know, the factions meant something. They interconnected in a way. That there was, that we took a lot of things that we had learned over the

years of how to make a magic set sing and really applied that to Unstable. Like Unstable, in a lot of ways, I mean, as much as it was not normal magic, so much of how we made it was normal magic. We didn't make it differently. We made it the way we made magic and incorporated a lot of elements that I hadn't really incorporated and glued or unhinged. And the big things I did, which I think was the giant jump, besides treating it like normal magic, was, A, I embraced the fun.

I really said, look, I want this to be about, you know, I think the earlier sets skewed a little bit more toward going, hey, this reads weird or different or crazy. And more of, I wanted it to play well. Like, it's funny, the mystery cards, you ever heard me rant a little bit on mystery cards? One of my complaints about a lot of the mystery cards was they read interestingly,

but they literally don't play well. Like, if you play with them, they're fun like once, and then they're just not fun. Like, one of the things Unstable did and Infinity does is really say, it's not enough to be novel or to be cool. You have to play well. You got to put your reps in. You got to make sure that this thing has the fun in it. And Unstable and Infinity really, really did that. Another big thing that I did was embrace the idea that stop worrying about complexity. That if something is fun, it's okay to be complex. And what it turns out

is when you're trying not to do normal magic, when you're trying to do your own thing, that if you try to embrace simplicity, you just get into a almost unwinnable situation. It's very hard to do things magic wouldn't do that are simple. Now, dice is one of those things. That's why

dice came back. So, I mean, I think dice are a great example of something. The other thing that dice talk about is, and something I really embrace in Unstable and Infinity, is the importance of high variance. One of the things I realized is one of the things that normal magic can't do because of tournaments is super high variance.

Where, like, I think the example I used in my, I did a whole podcast on what tournaments don't allow for unsets. So you can listen to that if you want me to go more in depth. But I used Elvish and Personator as a great example where you roll two dice, powers first die, toughness the second die. That's a really fun and cool card. It's a really neat card

that has a lot of weird interactions. But the fact that I could roll and get a 1-1 or get a 6-6, we sort of can't do that normal magic. Like, even in Adventures of the Forgotten Realms, when we did dice, we really did a lot to pull down how much there is, how much variance there is, because sort of tournament magic can have too much variance.

But the crazy thing is, casual play loves variance. Variance is a lot of fun. Variance is stuff that is really cool. And just interact. It's fun. It's fun. So we embrace high variance. The other thing we did in Unstable was

I really pursued things mechanically that I tried to do in Black Border, that I tried to do in Normal Magic. It wasn't me, like, at some level, we'd never try to do fractions or try to do Artist Matter. It was me going, like, in some level, we'd never try to do fractions or try to do artist matter. It was me going, what's a

weird thing we could do, rather than say, what's a really fun thing that I wanted to do, but I couldn't. Both contraptions and host augment were things I tried to do in normal magic, and the restrictions of Black Border sort of kept me from doing it the

way I wanted to do it. And the freedom of the Silver Border let me do that. The other thing is I think contraptions did a nice thing that it kind of tied it to the past a little bit. Like, here was something people had been waiting for for a long time, and I think contraptions grounded it in a way. So I think there were a lot of stuff we learned there. Next, unsanctioned. I think the thing about unsanctioned,

this is the other product that Spice8Rack is critical about. I think that the product was more made to be a way to give people uncards and less, more attention was made for that and less was made as, here's a standalone product that in a vacuum is the most fun played by itself. I think it turns out the half-deck idea

does not lend itself well to Un. Why? There's just not, being that the product had to be mostly reprints, there's just not enough to pull from. There just wasn't. I mean, in retrospect, one of the things we could have done is mixed in some not-Silver Border cards,

but that was one of the real challenges of that product was that structure of half decks. And in retrospect, we probably should have done something a little different than that. I think the half decks were struggling. And a lot of the cards in the half decks just needed support

that not only did the deck that had it not have, but the other decks didn't necessarily have either. So like, it was just hard to get support. Oh, I care about squirrels, but only black and green even have squirrels. I'm not playing black and green. I don't even have squirrels. Even then, even on the black green deck, I don't have enough squirrels to really make it matter consistently enough. So I think the structure of that was the wrong choice for that. And a lot of the uncards we made weren't made to maximize that product. They were made to be uncards I knew players wanted.

For example, the cycle of the off-color activations, we had never made enemy two-color uncommanders. I wanted those to exist. So I used the product to make those. And yeah, we put the underdomes in so that you could play them. I mean it like we we clearly made decisions about the product to maximize this being

an awesome product for people who enjoy it on the unsets to get their hands on uncards but I don't think in retrospect I think we picked the wrong model for it's playable by itself the half deck why I love the half deck I love jumpstart I think it's a cool

model. I don't think we had enough cards to make the model work. And I, so, the interesting thing about Unsanction is, if you're just trying to pick up Uncards, it's a bargain. There's lots of cool Uncards in there that we had never

ever printed Uncards. We went out of our way to try to print a lot of ones we thought people would enjoy. All the new cards in the set were really made to just be new cool things. Some of them, I'm sad, will never be in, like, there's Boomstacker. It's a really, really fun card where you're stacking dice.

I kind of wish that was in a set that would see more limited play than that set would see, because it's a really, really fun card that's just probably not going to play nearly enough as it should. And it's the kind of card that really excels in limited, in that it's not, you're not going to build your whole deck around it, but it's this fun experience

that you get to have that's very memorable. Anyway, finally, he talks a little bit about Infinity. So, one thing I want to point out from behind the scenes. I don't think... He didn't really plan to talk about Infinity.

I mean, I think that he was going to interview me. I think he had one question about it, just to like... He definitely, at the end of the video, wanted to do a throw forward to Infinity. But I... I was excited to talk about Infinity, and I wasn't going to pass the opportunity. Like, I recognize that this product

had a lot of ability to help sort of get people excited for Infinity. One of the reasons, I mean, I think I would have been involved even if Infinity wasn't coming out, but, like, the fact that Infinity was coming out, I did, look, I, it's part of my job to, you know,

sell magic sets, and so I'm always very conscious of that. And like, okay, here's an opportunity to get people excited about unsets. And we have an unset coming. So I very much want to talk about infinity. So all the infinity talk and that, that was me, about 98% of that was me saying,

hey, I'd like to talk about infinity. Is that okay? And of course, like any smart interviewer, of course, please say whatever you would like. So that was really, that was not, he did not ask a lot of questions about Infinity. I think he asked one or two. I really went off and talked a lot about it because I was

excited by it. So anyway, I'm almost to work here. The thing I do want to say about this video, I was honored that Spice8Rack made the video. It was a lot of fun. A lot of me explaining things today is just talking through little tiny hiccups of things,

either explaining concepts or, in a few cases, just correcting facts, most of which were based on my articles. So I think Spice8Rack was trying to do the best job of being 100% here's exactly what happened. I just happened to be the guy

that was there for all of it. So I think on any documentary, if you watch, it's like, well, this is mostly true. And so I hope today it's just a few points to pick out. But I do want to thank Spice8Rec. I really did enjoy the video a lot. It was a lot of fun to see. And one of the things he spent a lot of time on that I didn't spend much time at all talking about today

is one of his hypotheses about it was that it really helped make magic what it was. That the unsets and I think that the unsets not only did the unsets just help us find mechanics, you know, I don't know if meld would have existed. I don't know if the packs

would have existed. There's a lot of things that magic has done for lands, tokens, like, I don't know, maybe we would have got them lands, tokens. Like, I don't know. Maybe we would have got them. Maybe we wouldn't. I don't know. I do know the unsets sped up some of that stuff. And in other cases, literally got us there. Like, split cards, I mean, Unglue 2 didn't come out, but I made them for Unglue 2,

and I don't think I would have made split cards if I wasn't trying to just make something crazy. Like, the fact that I was trying to do something so offbeat, I don't know if I would have got there otherwise. I don't know if split cards would have existed. So, um... But, the other thing that's important

that I want to stress before I end here is not only did it affect magic in the sense that it affected ideas that other people or even me would later revisit, it also affected me as a designer. And the fact that I've been the head designer since 2003,

so I've been the head designer for the majority of Magic's lifetime, like I was saying. In a couple years, it'll be 20 years. Yeah, 2023. So next year will be my 20th anniversary of being the head designer. Unsets have shaped me as a designer, and I know I've shaped magic in many ways. And so the Unsets had an indelible influence

on the game. And so I just... His hypothesis is correct, but not only did it affect the mechanics itself, it affected the people that made it, especially me. So anyway, thank you so much to Spice8Rack. Let me stop by saying, if you haven't watched the video,

actually, I forgot the name. If you put Spice8Rack in unsets or something, I'm sure you'll find it. Anyway, if you haven't seen it, please go watch it. It was a lot of fun. I had a great chance to watch it. I really enjoyed it. I was glad I was able to take part of it. But anyway, guys, I'm at work,

so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you next time. Bye.