Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #952: Lessons Learned – Zendikar Rising

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

This is another podcast in my "Lessons Learned" series where I look back at sets I led (or co-led) to talk about the design lessons I learned. Today's podcast is on Zendikar Rising.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so there's a series I do from time to time that I call Lessons Learned. So I will talk about a product that I either led or co-led the design for, and then talk about what I learned from that experience. So I've done many, many sets, and I believe last time I did this, we did Ikoria. So that means we're up to Zendikar Rising. Okay. So, uh, Zendikar Rising, interestingly, um, originally the first set in that block, so that year, Zendikar Rising, uh, it was Zendikar Rising, then it was Kaldheim, then it was, um,

Kaldheim, then it was Strixhaven. In the early planning of the year, that first slot actually was going to be Kaldheim, not Zendikar Rising. But we decided...

I think we decided before Vision started, but very, very close to Vision starting, we decided... Maybe before Exploratory? Yeah, before Exploratory. We decided to swap the two. I think Zendikar was going to go second. vision started, but very, very close to vision starting, we decided, or sorry, maybe before exploratory, yeah, before exploratory, we decided to swap the two, I think Zendikar was going to go second, I don't remember all the reasons behind, but I wasn't going to do call time, so I originally wasn't going to do the fall slot, but when we swapped it, I think Ethan was interested in doing Kaldheim,

and so I ended up... Ethan and I swapped, I think. I think the plan was Ethan was going to do Kaldheim as the fall set, and then I was going to do Zendikar Rising as the next set. But anyway, so the set swapped early.

Before Exploratory, they swapped early. And so, like I said, anyway, just behind the scenes. So, Zendikar Rising was an interesting challenge in that it was a third visit. We've only had a few sets that we've had a third visit to. Obviously, Dominaria we've had many visits to. Ravnica we've had three visits to. And Innistrad. Although, at the time I did this, we had done three visits to, obviously, Dominaria and Ravnica.

But we hadn't yet done our third visit to Innistrad. That would happen last year. So, one of the challenging things about that was our first trip to Zendikar, I had pushed it because I really wanted to do a land-focused set. There were a lot of people that were very skeptical about it, but eventually I got to do it. I managed to convince all the powers that be that it was a good idea, and it ended up being an adventure set. So creative paired the land theme with this adventure theme. And anyway, it all came together,

and it was definitely, it ended up being a very exciting block, very popular block. We then chose to revisit it in Battle for Zendikar, but the way we had done original Zendikar was it had been Zendikar and then Worldwake, and then in the third set,

we were trying to really shake up third sets. So we did this brand. We had a large set with all the mechanics that we drafted by itself. But the creative team didn't want to create a whole separate world. So they came up with a reason why it was still on Zendikar. And that reason was the Eldrazi. That was sort of the existence of the Eldrazi. The rise of the Eldrazi, if you will.

But what happened was we ended that year on kind of a cliffhanger of, oh, the Eldrazi got out and dot, dot, dot. What happens? So when we went back, I felt pretty obligated to address that. Like, okay, well, what happened? So we had a giant war between the denizens of Zendikar and the Eldrazi. The battle for Zendikar. Anyway, the one thing about us doing that on the second visit

was it really shifted the focus. The set was a lot more about this war than it was about the things that kind of made Zendikar Zendikar. There were themes Landfall got used. I mean, it wasn't completely not Zendikar, but it really focused on some aspects that were not kind of what original Zendikar were. So when we came to Zendikar Rising,

one of the sort of guidelines was, let's get this back to original Zendikar Rising, one of the sort of guidelines was, let's get this back to original Zendikar. Meaning, we had kind of really deviated in the second visit. For the third visit, let's get back to what people kind of loved about it in the first visit. Which was, the Eldrazi were gone now as a result for Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. as a result for Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch, two of the Eldrazi were destroyed, and the third one ended up going to Innistrad,

were now trapped in the moon. So, anyway, Eldrami's in the moon. Anyway, that's Innistrad's issue. So, the idea of going in was, okay, we wanted to capture the essence of original Zendikar. That was sort of the goal of it. So, one of the things that really... So, first off, I think

Landfall was in the set from very early on. I think that Zendikar and Landfall are very entwined. I mean, in theory we could do a Zendikar that had some land elements and not have landfall, but landfall is such a perfect execution. I mean, it's just a really, really good mechanic.

And I think it is very associated with Zendikar. So we did landfall. In fact, not only did we do landfall, but the decision we made with landfall was the first time we had done landfall, we had been very aggressive with it. For those that don't remember original Zendikar, it was a really, really aggressive environment, especially in Limited. And then the second visit we're like, oh let's pull back a bit and we really weakened landfall to the point where landfall just didn't play nearly as

major a role in Standard as it had the first time. So on the revisit, we're like, okay, you know, we're not going to have the fetch lands, which were in the second visit. That did a lot to power them up. Maybe if we don't have fetch lands, we can be a little bit more aggressive with landfall in a way to make landfall closer to how it felt in the first visit. So anyway, landfall was included very early on. It made sense to include landfall.

I'm glad we sort of found a way to make it a little bit more aggressive and memorable to how it was originally, because I think landfall was much beloved, and we wanted to sort of recapture the glory of original landfall, if you will. The other thing that got decided really early, interestingly enough, was, uh, when we had, we're planning out the year, uh, when we originally had planned Strixhaven, we had built Strixhaven around the idea of double face, of modal double face cards. So real quickly, for those that don't know, uh, double face cards are any card that has two faces. The, in Innistrad, we introduced what we now refer to as transforming double-faced cards,

meaning you play side A and then under some condition it changes to side B. And under some conditions sometimes it will change back to side A. So the idea is that you're always playing it from—you're always playing one side and it has the ability to turn into the other side. Mortal double-faced cards were a lot more like split cards in the sense of you can play side A or play side B. Both sides have a mana cost. And once

you play that side, that is what you have. It's that side. And the original plan, we were just going to blow this mechanic out in Strixhaven. That was the original plan. And the reason I think we liked it in Strixhaven was Strixhaven was That was the original plan. And the reason I think we liked it in Strixhaven was Strixhaven was going to have this

spell theme and oh, we could put spells on one side and permits on the other side and that was something we'd never done before and that was the original plan. Then along came well, two things happened.

One is Aaron asked me to do some early exploration with modal double-phase cards. There was some internal worry about it. And so Aaron's like, could you make a mini team and just do some advanced planning, do some designs? And so I did. I put together a team. We made the lands, the pathways. We made...

Really what we did is we did a bunch of experimentation. And what we discovered was there was a huge amount of depth. There was a lot of things you could do. And in addition to that, the other thing that happened is Throne of Eldraine, in development, added adventures. And adventures were a permanent that also had a spell attached to it. So the novelty of having a spell on one

side and a creature on the other side, which we were planning to kind of blow out in Strixhaven, really got undercut a bit by adventures. So what I realized was I felt like it had a lot of depth, it had a lot of variety and a lot of variety. And I'm like, you know what?

Rather than use this as a singular thing in one set, and that one thing that we'd want to do already issues because of adventures, what if we spread it across all three sets of the year? I've been looking more and more to try to get more mechanical identity between years. That's its own podcast. There are a lot of challenges of that. And it dawned on me that one of the coolest things you can do with modal double-faced cards, and

maybe the best thing to introduce with modal double-faced cards, is lands. So the idea is, one side is could be a spell, could be another permanent, and the back side is a land. And the original idea was that the lands would come and play

at lower rarities would come and play tapped, and at higher rarities maybe they could come and play untapped. We had made the pathways. I thought that was a really interesting series of dual lands that, you know, I love the idea that it could be either, but you choose

and then it's only the one you choose. We had messed with the space earlier in Magic, but it required, like, tracking and memory. And this was just so clean because there were two sides to it. So, early on, I'd wanted to do modal double-faced cards. Now, when I introduced them to the team, when we first got together, and I say, I want to do this here, there was a little bit of skepticism. But it was mostly they hadn't played with it. And once we played with it, once we started doing designs, they got aboard really, really quickly.

Like once they played with it, like, okay, these are actually quite fun. The one thing we discovered, which was interesting, is they were better than they looked. So let me talk about the lessons of better than they look. better than they looked. So let me talk about the lessons of better than they look. One of the things from time to time that we make is we make a mechanic that is good, but is better than it looks. Meaning the mechanic on the, like the first impression of the mechanic is not as strong as the final impression would be. Meaning that it, it usually comes because you undervalue something. In the case of MDFCs, it's the choice. In general, one of the things we've learned is players do not give enough credence to how powerful choice is.

Choice is very powerful. And usually when we give people a choice, they go, oh, yeah, I have a choice, but they don't realize quite how powerful that choice is. And in particular, giving go, oh, yeah, I have a choice, but they don't realize quite how powerful that choice is. And in particular, giving you a land that, you know, I mean, it's very, very nice because it allows you to sort of play things in your deck that are lands when you need them, but not lands when you don't.

And it allows you to sort of have more access to land than normal. So it's a mechanic that sort of does mana fixing in a very good way. It's one of the reasons they were really popular is it lets you sort of sneak in more spells into your deck. Because if you really need them to be land, they can be. But if you don't need them to be land, all of a sudden they have this extra utility to them. And that extra utility is very powerful. So what that meant is in order to make them, they had to look kind of weak.

And in general, so here's the thing. When you make a mechanic that is better than it looks, the problem is it has what we call first impression problems. That when someone sees it for the first time and they haven't played it yet, and they're just gauging it based on their gut instinct, it's going to read as weak. Meaning the first impression is going to be,

oh, these aren't very good. Now, I am fine making cards that in first impression don't seem good and later do seem good. That is a fine. The reverse is much more of a problem, which is, oh my god, it seems amazing. It sucks. Right? And we can do a problem, which is, oh my god, it seems amazing, it sucks, right?

And we can do a little bit of that, but that is a much worse, like, I care more that when you play your games of magic, the games of magic are fun, than I care that when you first read it, it's exciting as it can be. Now, it's not that I don't want cars to read exciting, but it's the priority of having better gameplay supersedes having the absolute positive best first impressions ever. First impressions are important. And so one of the things about better than they look is you can't do tons of that in a set.

You can't make a set of nothing but better than it looks. It'll just, you know, like you want, you need people to sample your product, right? If the whole set just looks, eh, the people go, I don't know, nothing looks good. Maybe I'll just skip it. So you need to have a mix. So I do respect the fact that first impressions matter. I do want to make sure in any set there's something that sort of excites people when they first see it.

So that is important. But, but, and the big caveat here is I don't want, I want to prioritize gameplay over impression. That gameplay is more important than impression. So if I have a mechanic that plays really well, that is fun, that will I think really will make better magic, I'm going to include it even if the first impressions aren't great. LAN and BFCs are a perfect example of that. Now, once again, with the audience,

there is a wide range of experience. There are some people, and usually a smaller percentage, that are just more skilled Magic players that have been playing a long time, and they've picked up the skills of recognizing what's going to be good or not. A lot of those people people or some of those people are people who tend to communicate with other people because they write articles like the people that have the best skills are people who have made it their job to figure that out because

they write articles or something and so usually there are a small voice of people that at least can communicate to the audience i know these don't look, but they are. And so we knew that that audience would recognize... Like, LAN MDFCs, if you really understand kind of the mana system from an organic level, it doesn't take a lot to realize these are going to be good. But the backside has to be relatively weak. And the thing that we were interested in was, are there things we could put that wouldn't normally go on a magic

card? Like one of the things we're always looking for is there are effects that are not worth a full card. And those are hard to do. Because if I can cost it at one mana and it's still not worth it, well that's a hard effect to do. Now one way we got around, and this are cantrips. Cantrips allow us to not make you lose the cost of the card, so we can do smaller effects, and we've done that. But the backside of MDFCs also allowed us some of that.

It also allowed us to do some narrow things that maybe you wouldn't normally put in your deck but were fun, but the fact that it can become land makes you more willing to put it in, and then, you know, it just gives you extra reason to want to play them. So, one of the things we spent a lot of time looking on at MDFCs is how to maximize what the back was in a way that led, like, one of the things you're always trying to do when you're making a mechanic is, am I making choices that maximizes that mechanic being the best that it can be?

And so part of that was figuring out how to do the backs correctly. I'm also happy the pathways got accepted. There were a lot of discussions. Aaron and I both wanted them to come untapped. We sort of came to the conclusion that not having basic land types was enough. And in the end, it turned out it was. And Pathways were good and saw play, but not too good, it seems. So I think we made the right call. The other big mechanic from the set was Party.

I mean, the set had Landfall, the set had Kicker. Landfall had been in every Zendikar set. Kicker had been in an original, but not in the revisit. But Kicker just does a lot of good things, and Eric Lauer led the development, co-led, with Andrew Brown,

and Eric loves Kicker. Go look at any set Eric has led, there's a good chance Kicker's in it. Not always, but there's a good chance Kicker's in it, because Eric is a huge fan of Kicker. Anyway, so one of the things when the creator first decided that this was

going to be Adventure World, one of the things we realized was that it tapped into a lot of sort of dungeon and dragon feels. That when you look at the adventure, the genre you're playing with, you get into like, you know, Indiana Jones, you get into a lot of pulp novels, like Tomb Raider. There's a certain style of, I mean, it's really about a world where the adventurers are sort of going places they're not supposed to and finding treasures and this and that. It has a certain vibe to it, and D&D really played into that. Now, at the time we made Zendikar Rising, we did not know we were going to do

Adventures in Forgotten Realms. I know that sounds odd, since a year later it came out. But what I'm trying to say is, when we started Zendikar Rising, we did not know that. Adventures in Forgotten Realms came together quicker. Originally it was going to be a core set. Core sets take less time. So anyway, when we were doing Zendikar, we didn't know that it was coming. In fact, it wasn't coming. It wasn't yet on the schedule. So one of the things that I was really interested in at the time was, hey, maybe the set really wants to tap into a lot of D&D vibes

to it. And so one of the things we did early on was looking at ways to really capture some of that adventuring party flavor that had been there in original Zendikar. We definitely had all the kinds of characters there, but we hadn't ever grouped them. And the idea of an adventuring party was really the thing that I got locked in on.

So let me talk about another thing that I learned from this, which is about the changing of the environment. So for a long time, Magic was standard-centric, which meant that when we put out a set, the format we cared absolutely the most about was standard. And so we made a lot of decisions in how we made our sets and how we made our mechanics to maximize them for standard. Now, obviously, you know, other formats came out of standard.

You know, there was larger formats. Vintage existed, modern existed. There were other formats. Pioneer, I'm not sure Pioneer was a thing yet, but it might have been. I don't think it was, though. Anyway, there were other formats that mattered, but they always went through

the prism of Standard. But one of the challenges of sort of what I'll call the Eternal World, with Commander being so popular and being... So in tabletop, we think it's the most played format. One of the tricky things about Commander

is because it's casual, we can see sanction play and we can see digital play, but a lot of Commander falls between the cracks. It's not played on Magic Arena because it's not coded for Magic Arena. It is played on Magic Online, but Magic Online is a smaller ecosystem.

And there are sanction tournaments, so we can monitor the sanctioned tournaments. But there are a lot of casual Commander games that we don't see. So, to the best of our knowledge, in tabletop, Commander is the most played format. Because of that, we need to care about Commander. When we're making tabletop magic, and the number one format being played is Commander, we need to care about that, down to the core level of mechanics

and stuff. So here's one of the fundamental problems of an internal format. So, Commander, or at least of Commander, I guess it's a little bit different for Vintage and stuff, but for Commander. Commander is a 100-card singleton format. That means your deck has to have 100 cards, including Commander,

and you can't have any repeats other than Basic Land. Standard is a 60-card format with a 4-of rule. So other than Basic Land, you can have 4 of every card. Okay, so if we have a new mechanic, something that we've never done before, and we want to make enough cards that Standard can care about it, we need to make N cards.

I'm not exactly sure of a number, but we need to make N cards. Now, if we want to do the exact same thing, but for Commander, if we have a brand new mechanic that you need to have enough cards so that you can play it as a dedicated theme in Commander, you need six times the volume. Six times the volume. So whereas we could make enough cards in a single set, in standard, in a single premier set, to make the mechanic viable and standard in one set it would take us six sets

so that's two whole years of one mechanic in every set for six years six consecutive sorry for two years six consecutive blocks that is just not something i mean even in the block system even when we had three connected blocks we only did three sets that connect even a block was not enough to not enough for Commander to sort of be the main theme of a deck. So what that means is that now we're going to

make what I call linear mechanics. And that means mechanics that say, hey, I need specific things. We're going to make linear mechanics, especially ones that are parasitic, that, look, it's going to take, mechanics, especially ones that are parasitic, that, look, it's going to take, we have to revisit that a bunch of times. You know what I'm saying? Like, there are mechanics we've made in the past that just aren't super viable in Commander because there just aren't enough of them. Now, we revisit mechanics, we do things again. Some of those we'll

have to, like, hopefully over time we'll maybe make enough that Commander could care. But one of the things we have to look at is, can we make mechanics that are linear, but still allow you to build around them in Commander? And the answer to that is something we had done in Dominaria. So we were trying to solve how to do historic, like how to care about history. We came up with historic, and historic would be called batching,

which just said, okay, I want you to care about these three things. Now, one of those three things was unique to Dominaria at the time, which was Saigas, although Saigas have gone on to be pretty deciduous. But artifacts and enchantments, not enchantments,

artifacts and legendary creatures were something magic had since the very beginning. There were thousands of artifacts and probably over a thousand legendary creatures. So there were a lot of those. So when we say

care about these things, it was a brand new thing to care about, but it used existing resources. And so that is something we very consciously think about now is we need to make sure that some of our mechanics, it's not that we can't have some parasitic linear mechanics

from time to time that are more focused on, let's say, standard and limited, for example, but we need to make sure we have mechanics that can go broader. So the thing about Party that was very exciting to me was it was playing in creature type space. Like it cared about creature types, but it cared about them in a new way. Previously, when we cared about creature types, it pretty much was much more monotonous, right? It was much more, I care about creature type X. I care about goblins. I care about elves. You know, you very much were focused on, like, make your deck all of one creature type X. I care about goblins. I care about elves. You know, you very

much were focused on, like, make your deck all of one creature type. But the idea that we were playing around with party was, what if instead of caring about one particular thing, we care about different things, and it's about having a certain variety?

Because one of the things we realized early on was that there was a way to represent a party. That if you look at sort of traditional D&D parties, for example, which was our inspiration, you have a fighter, you have a wizard, you have a rogue or a thief, and you have a cleric, usually. Well, cleric, rogue, and wizard are literally creature types, and we decided Warrior was the closest to Fighter. We looked at Warrior, we looked at Soldier, but decided that Warrior, like, Soldier really implies you work for an army,

and in adventuring, usually you're not part of an army, so we thought Warrior was a little better. But the point is, we had the four class types that you would see in a normal D&D adventure thing, adventure party. And I'm like, okay, what if we just built the mechanic around that? And that had us exploring this idea of, instead of playing lots of one thing, try to

play a number of things, and then you want to get a little bit of each. So instead of playing lots of one thing, you want to play a pretty equal amount of four things. That was really new space. We had not done a pretty equal amount of four things that was really new space we had not done that before um one of the things i'm always excited about when we're looking at mechanics is can we take known existing things but find a different venture to look at them like that's the reason i was very excited by party was that it allowed you to care in a way

you hadn't cared before and with the backward compatibility thing it allowed you to care in a way you hadn't cared before. And with the backward compatibility thing, it allowed you to care in a way that you could care about sort of historically. Like, we had been making warriors and wizards and rogues and clerics since the pretty early days of Magic. In fact, most of them were in Alpha. Wizard was in Alpha. Wizard was in Alpha. Rogue was in Alpha. Cleric was in Alpha.

I don't know if Warrior... Warrior might have been in Alpha. I'm not 100% sure Warrior was in Alpha. But anyway, they all go way back. And the other interesting thing there that we learned was whenever you do something but new, like whenever...

One of the things we tried was, okay, how do we care about having four different things? And so it made us map it across colors. So one of the things we did is for each of the classes, we said you're primary in a color, secondary color, and tertiary in a color. And then what we did is we took green out of the mix so that we could have four things in four colors. And then green we did is we took green out of the mix so that we could have four things in four colors. And then green was sort of, I'm sorry, not primary, tertiary.

It was primary, secondary, and absent. So you're primary in this color, secondary in this color, and absent in this color. And then green was tertiary in every color. So green was the only color to have all of them, but it had it at a lower level than everybody else. So the idea was if you're primary, you had the most. Secondary, you had some. Absent, you had none. So the idea is you could look at something like wizard.

I think wizard was primary in blue, secondary in red. Absent in, I forget what was absent in. White, I think it was absent in. But anyway, it allowed us to sort of craft a thing to give definitions. Then the thing that happened in development, what Eric realized was, because you could draft subsets of it, we had originally, in Vision Design, avoided doing wizard tribal, warrior tribal, cleric tribal. We were like, oh, we're a robot party. You want a mix.

But what Eric realized as they were sort of building for limited was you couldn't always get the mix so one of the things that we want in draft especially is we want to give you options what am I doing um we want to give you options so one of the things that happened was they really were thinking about how else you could draft it. And what Eric realized was, oh, well, one of the ways you could draft it was, hey, maybe I can clear out warriors. Maybe I'm in warrior colors, you know,

or whatever, wizard colors, I'm in blue and red. Okay, I can just make a wizard deck. I can draft wizards. So I think that was smart. Like I said, one of the things I always learn when we mess in known but altered space is you make some gut

things but sometimes when it plays out it doesn't quite play out that way so I understand our idea originally is sort of avoiding those specifically I also get why Eric and Andrew in the end had to do that and I like I said I think if we had had more playtests, I mean, we had plenty of playtesting, but if we hadn't yet got to the archetype building, which is where those lessons came

out, but it had, sometimes we do get to archetype building in Vision, depends on how the set's going. We, in theory, could have figured that out, but we didn't. We didn't get till it got there. The other big lesson of the set was let me talk allies for a little bit.

This is one of the mistakes. So one of the things that we originally did when we made the party mechanics, we said, okay, well, allies were the mechanic that represented adventure party. You know, in both the first and second visit,

we cared about allies in different ways. We cared about allies working together. We made you want to have a deck of allies. So the mechanic that we had used to represent adventure parties in the first two sets was also tribal and used allies, but it was a singular creature tribal. So one of the problems we ran into is like, okay, well,

I can't do a separate ally thing because it's just eating on the same basic space that party was. Like, I can't make you care about wizards and care about allies. So my answer to that was, I just made every warrior, every wizard, every rogue, and every cleric an ally. And the idea was, I went back and looked at the earlier allies, most of the earlier allies were one of those four creature types. Not all of them, but I'd say over 80%, a good number were, because we were playing in the same trope space. So the idea was, I just put ally on them, and what I said was, well, you know, they're not giving you more things to do with ally tribal, but they are giving you more allies to put into your old decks that used ally tribal. So the idea was, like, it wasn't advancing ally

tribal, but at least it gave you more allies to play in your ally decks. Then, when we got to editing, what happened was, it just made the creature types really long, and especially with legendary creatures, of which we do more nowadays because of Commander, it didn't always fit. And so the question was, do we do ally as much as we

can, but some legendary creatures just aren't ally, even though thematically they should be allies? Or do we just drop ally um i was in the camp that we should have ally i believe that the audience the allies really had a big fan base and that dropping ally really would upset some people um so i was the big advocate of keeping ally but when i was sort of when editing came to me and they brought all the issues before, I understood the issue. Like I, one of the things that's challenging when you're making a set is

there are a lot of competing interests that you have to meet, that you have to think about lots of different things. So I got what editing was coming from. I got that it didn't fit. I got that we wanted to be consistent. And so making it inconsistent and just crowding up a line, you know, was not great. And it didn't matter internally to this set. It didn't matter for limited. It didn't matter for standard. Yes, it did matter for larger formats. But we had made a lot of other concessions, other places for larger formats.

So I begrudgingly said, I mean, I wasn't, it wasn't like it was my say or not my say. It wasn't my say. But I understood what, I understood the reason behind it. And I said, I know why you have to make this decision. So like, I understood the decision. I think in a vacuum,

if it was my decision, I might've said, like maybe it would be worth shrinking Legendary Creatures, the text of Legendary Creatures. But once again, we have limits that we can shrink to. So, like, it might be possible

there were just cards that could not be ally if they were legendary. And is the inconsistency of that worth the backward compatibility? And I'm still up in the air. I mean, I get the choice we made. It made me sad not to have allies there.

And it was the number one thing that people kind of complained about was that while the concept that allies were got representation, the Adventure Party did, allies itself did not. There were almost no allies. There was one ally, I think, in the set. So, anyway, I do

kind of bring up that. Anyway, I look back at Zendikar Rising. Like I said, there's a lot of fun stuff there. I think Party had some challenges from a constructed standpoint. And one of the things I always have to think about is, are we building mechanics that people downstream of me can work with? And I think Party caused some problems for play design that were interesting. And, you know, when we go back

in this kind of area again, we have to think about. I think MDFC, especially LAN MDFCs, were a giant hit. So I look at Zendik Rising, I was pretty happy with where it came out. I generally like what Party was trying to do. There's some issues in future things like that I've got to think about. I do like

the background compatibility of it. So in general, I was pretty happy. There were things I might change. Like part of looking back, part of lessons learned is what did I learn that I might have done differently? There's some small things I might have done differently. But anyway, that is Zendikar Rising. But I am now 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 make it magic. So I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.