Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #955: San Diego Comic-Con 2022

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

In this podcast, I talk about my latest trip to San Diego Comic-Con, including discussing the many things I talked about in my Magic panel.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for Other Drive to Work at Home Edition. So I just got back from San Diego Comic-Con, and the reason I'm recording from home is it was a big event with lots of people, and while I don't show any symptoms, I don't think I'm sick, I want to be safe and make sure that we're not infecting anybody, so I'm at home. But I have much to talk about. In fact, I have a whole convention to talk about. So today's podcast, if you can't tell, is going to be about San Diego Comic-Con 2022. Okay, so a little history, a little San Diego Comic-Con history. So I've been attending Comic-Con for a long time. I used to live in Los Angeles in the late 80s, early 90s.

And I used to drive down to San Diego every year to go to Comic-Con. It was a little bit smaller back then. It was still a decent-sized show, but it wasn't the monster show that it is now. I think now their attendance

is like 130,000 or something. Back then, it was probably like 40, 40, 50,000 maybe. Maybe I'm overshooting even then. But it was, right now it takes over the entire convention center and many hotels and, you know, it just uses infinite space. Back then it was like, I don't know, three of the room, you know, like it was a portion of the convention center, but not the entire convention center.

Anyway, it was there. I used to go there, and then when I got hired by Wizards, I went there a little bit in the early years, just because when I first got to Wizards, I just went to every event I could possibly go to. But then I got married and had kids and slowed down a little bit. Not that I did zero traveling, but not nearly as much as I did in the early years. And there was a gap of time where I didn't go to Comic-Con.

And then one year, Michael Ryan, the one who I co-created the Weatherlight Saga with, invited me down. He said that the company he was working for was there, and he had an extra bed. Like, he had a hotel room that had two beds, and he said, if you want to come down, I got a place for you to stay. And so one of the things about Comic-Con is

if you work within the field, you can register as a professional, which I was able to do. So he was like, oh, sounds fun. So I went down, and I really had a good time. I mean, once again, I had been to Comic-Con quite a bit, but it was a lot of fun just reminiscing and, you know, just being back there again.

And it really, I really do love, I mean, for those who don't know, I'm a giant comics fan. I mean, I know Comic-Con has become way more than just comics, but I'm a giant comic fan. So the idea to see all the people I love, all the comic people, comic panels, and all that stuff, even beyond the movies and TV shows, just the comic stuff itself

was a lot of fun. So anyway, I decided I had so much fun that I was going to go back for next year. I thought Michael was going to come too, but it ends up he couldn't, so I was by myself. And I really, I was just having such a good time. Um, that I said, uh, to wizards, I think I talked to Elaine. Um, Elaine Chase, uh, used to be the brand manager of magic. Um, and I said to Elaine, I said, Hey, I'm really having fun here. Do you mind next year if I run a magic panel? Could I do a magic panel? Would you, would it next year if I run a magic panel? Could I do a magic panel? Would it bother anybody if I ran a magic panel?

And Elaine was, oh, sure, fine. And then what happened was, I think Elaine came back to me and goes, well, if we're going to do a magic panel, why don't we make a big deal of it? So we ended up sending down a bunch of people. So the panel was like four or five people. And I think the first year, 2012, is that right? We were previewing original Zendikar. That's what we were previewing.

And so we had a bigger panel. Like I said, it was like four or five of us. And then for a bunch of years, we had some of the bigger panels, like four or five people. And then at some point, I don't know, we were cutting back on something. And they decided to cut back on the San Diego panel.

So again, I went back. I'm not sure whether Elaine was still brand manager. But I said, hey, look, I still want to go to Comic-Con. I'm happy to do a panel by myself. Is it okay? And they're like, yeah, sure. So then I started doing what I now call Blog-A-og Live, which is just me doing the panel. And usually I show something off and then, you know, for 15 minutes or so.

And then I answer questions because it's Blogatog, right? I answer questions. Anyway, so the last couple of years, so in 2000, 2000, sorry, in 2020, in 2021, the pandemic happened, and so Comic-Con went online. So I did do panels for those years. The first year, I think I was showing off Zendikar Rising.

In the second year, I was talking all about, I brought on, I had a guest, I brought on Jules Robbins, and we talked all about the making of Adventures in Forgotten Realms. Anyway, so we caught up to 2022, and it's live again.

Comic-Con is actually happening in person. So I was pretty excited, although I did, by the way, I took a lot of precautions, wore my mask everywhere. One of the things is there was a mask mandate. You had to get this orange bracelet that showed that you'd been vaccinated or recently tested. Everybody inside the venues had to wear masks.

So they were trying to be safe, and I was extra safe. Other than the staff dinner, I think I did all my meals takeout. I didn't eat in restaurants other than the staff dinner. Anyway, the—oh, so, okay. So they're going to do a thing. So I go to the of the Beast and say, okay, they're doing a magic panel. What do we want to talk about this year?

And normally the way the process works is I'll sit down with like the marketing people and sort of like, okay, at this point in time, in this part of the calendar, like what are we trying to advertise and stuff? And normally, normally since it's like late July is when San Diego Comic-Con is, normally I'm talking about the upcoming set, the fall set, is normally what I'm doing.

But it turns out that already planned on the schedule two days before that, on the Thursday, days before that, on the Thursday, so Comic-Con this year was what's the date? I think it was the 20th? 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th? I think that's what it was. My panel was on Saturday. But anyway,

oh, real quickly, by the way, a little behind-the-scenes thing. So the way it works if you want to have a panel is you have to sort of submit a panel. It's not guaranteed or anything. You have to say, hey, we want to have a panel. Now, not guaranteed or anything. You have to say, hey, we want to have a panel. Now, having had a panel and having a successful panel, it's much more likely for them to say yes when you have a track record every year of doing a panel. And I've done, I don't know, like 10-plus years of doing a panel.

And what happens is they like sort of familiarity, meaning I almost always, I mean, have been in the same room at the same time. I think we shifted maybe from six o'clock to 630 on Saturday, but, um, you know, we've been 630 to 730 on Saturday evening, uh, in the same room in 24 ABC for many years. So I submitted it. I mean, uh, you don't find out till... They tell you that you have a panel,

I don't know, a month, month and a half out. And then closer to the event, they tell you your date, your time. Oh, let me actually take that back. Maybe when they tell you you're in, they tell you your time, but they don't announce the time to the public. And so you can't say what it is

until they announce it. And they publicly announced it a couple of weeks before. Anyway, I put all my paperwork in. I get a yes, which I anticipated I would. And it was the same time, 6.30, 7.30, room ABC. So, I mean, everything that I expected. Anyway, so then I sit down, and I have to make my presentation.

So I sit down. So it turns out that Thursday they were planning to do already a Dominar United thing. So on my panel was the 23rd. On the 21st, Thursday the 21st, there was planned for they were going to do this Dominar United thing on the stream. So what they said to me is, well, you don't really need to talk Dominar United. We just talked about Dominar United. What do you want to talk about? Normally they tell me, I don't normally get asked what I want, so I

said, well, if you're going to ask me what I want, there's a set that comes out very closely after Domino United called Infinity. I said, I would like to talk about Infinity, and they're like, okay. So the next thing that happens is you sort of negotiate what you can say,

and one of the things about Infinity was there's a very tight timeline. I don't know the exact date, but Dominion United comes out September, or early September, I think. And Unfinity comes out early October, October 7th. So the preview

window is pretty tight, just the way things go. So one of the things I said is, can I give away a little more than normal than I would give just because our actual preview window is so tight that I would like to be able to get some stuff out there ahead of time. And they said, sure. So, the thing we decided

that we were going to talk about was stickers. That was going to be the big thing. So, Infinity has two major mechanics. One is stickers, one is attractions. So, I got permission to show off stickers, which I will talk about in a second. And So I got permission to show off stickers, which I will talk about in a second. And then I got permission to show off the frames for

attractions. So I had to cover up all the... I showed the names of the cars, but I had to cover up all the other text. So, anyway, that was kind of fun of getting to show off the frames of attractions. I couldn't really explain how they worked or anything. But they're interesting looking and they're different. So I'm hoping that generates some conversation.

You know, they don't have they don't have a mana cost and they have these numbers on them, some of which are lit up. Anyway, there's cool things about that. Anyway, so I, so we decided that I was going to talk about stickers

and then they said it was okay because, like I said, there's so many cards to show up during previews. They said, okay, we can show some cards out there. Previews is going to be, I think, close to a week long. And, you know, there's... If you count everything in the set,

all the different component pieces, including sticker sheets, I think there's over 300 cards. Now, we've shown off some of them. We did the pre-beat in November. Oh, so real quick. Okay, sorry, I'm jumping around here. So in the panel, I was supposed to go over all the information we had already put out

in November. By the way, real quickly, what a pre-beat is, is we need the stores and the distributors to order their product ahead of time so they have it in time for the thing. So normally about three months out, we do a pre-beat giving stores time to order. So Magic was supposed to come out on Magic. Infinity was supposed to come out April 1st. And because of the holidays and stuff, we ended up doing it a little bit early, end of November, which is a smidgen early for a pre-beat. Um, but the unsets kind of stand alone, meaning they're not giving away story beats or something. So it was fine for us to do it a little bit early.

So we did the pre-beat back in November and, um, we, we gave a bunch of information back in November. Um, we said, we showed off the basic lands or the spasic lands, because they take place in space. There's two cycles of them. The planetary basic lands that are on the planet and the orbital spatial lands that are in space. The planetary ones are slightly more common than the orbiter

ones, but you'll get both. Then we also showed off the space shock lands. So I got permission to do the 10 Shocklands, but we put them in space. They're really cool looking. We talked about how there'll be 30 legendary creatures in the set, and we're going to have booster fun.

We did, I think they're called the Showcase Cards of Tomorrow. They're this, like, retro pop version, sort of like a cartoonish sort of take on it. They're really fun, and the way we did that is the artist would do the card, and then we send the finished card to another artist that does this kind of style,

and they would do their version of the first person's art. So the Booster Fun is stylized versions of the existing art. So it's a second artist sort of reinterpreting the first artist's art. Really cool. We showed off one of those. We showed off, I think we showed off four cards.

We showed off Assembled Ensemble, which is a robot card. We showed off Killer Cosplay, which is an equipment. We showed off Space Family Robinson, which is like a die-rolling card, a legendary creature, so we can show the art. And then we showed Saw in Half, which is like a die-rolling card, a legendary creature, so we can show the art. And then we showed Saw in Half, which is... So, Saw in Half and Space Fowl and Robinson were eternal. Oh,

we also talked about in this thing that for the first time ever, we were going to have eternal cards. Over half the cards in the set will be legal in internal formats. Meaning they'd be playable in Commander and Legacy and Vintage.

I shall stress, the reason we make them internal legal is because that is the formality that Commander gets played in. Commander is super, super popular right now. We understand that Legacy and Vintage have access to the cards. They are not costed to be viable. I mean I'm not

saying weird things can't happen but we were very conservative in their costing. Because we were making fun goofy cards we weren't trying to make cards that were going to like break formats or anything. We were trying to make cards that people could have fun with and so we were super super cautious about what and if cards, some of the

cards that we made Acorn and not Eternal were cards we thought it could possibly be a problem cautious about what and if cards some of the cards that we made acorn and not uh uh eternal were because we thought it could possibly be a problem in internal so we made them acorn to not be an issue in legacy or vintage tournament so we were very conscious about that anyway sorry so we showed all this off in the pre-beat uh we talked about the fact that half the cards so half the cards as a whole slightly over half are eternal legal and then a fourth of the rares and mythic rares are eternal legal. Anyway, so we showed all that information off.

We talked about there's going to be draft boosters and collector boosters and a new galaxy foil that kind of looks like space that's going to be in the collector booster. So we talked about all that in the pre-beat. So I was supposed to, in my column, not my column, my panel, talk about that. Anyway, before I get to the panel real quickly,

since we're talking about San Diego Comic-Con, I will get to the panel. Let me quickly talk about that. Anyway, before I get to the panel real quickly, since we're talking about San Diego Comic-Con, I will get to the panel. Let me quickly talk about the other things at San Diego Comic-Con before we get to the panel. So, at Comic-Con this year, the big push for Wizards was, there's a D&D movie calling, Dungeon Dragons,

Honor Among Thieves. And so the big push for them was to hype, we have a movie, one of movie calling it Dungeon Dragons Honor Among Thieves. And so the big push for them was to hype. We have a movie. One of our properties, Dungeon Dragons, has a movie. So there's a lot of energy put toward that. From the magic side, at the booth, we were doing a promotion with Fortnite. We had taken a bunch of cards. They're existing magic cards, but we re-skinned them with Fortnite, kind of like Godzilla or Dracula.

And so they're existing magic cards, but we re-skinned them with Fortnite, kind of like Godzilla or Dracula. And so they're existing magic cards. They have Fortnite name, Fortnite art, but then the name of the actual magic card is written underneath that. And so we did that, that promotion, and that was at our booth. There was a live supply llama, I think it was called. It was a Therium sculptor.

But in Fortnite, there's these llamas that explode with prizes and stuff. And so it was one of the exploding llamas. And you could come take a picture with it. It was like three-dimensional, so you could stand in it and take a picture of it. It was very fun. And then my two other responsibilities is I did a signing on Friday for an hour and a half. So people would come, and I signed cards, and I signed play mats.

And I had a giveaway poster, which was the key art from Infinity that I gave away. And I signed. Also, by the way, I did... There was, all weekend long, there was places to play over in the Marriott. And so I visited there on Thursday and, again, took pictures and signed cards and stuff. And then I also...

This year, I only had one interview. Normally I have a bunch of interviews but because the PR focus was on the movie for Dungeons and Dragons I had a lot less interviews. Normally at Comic Con I'll have four or five interviews. If we have something big big to push sometimes I'll have a little more but

anyway I think I just had one interview this year. Okay so and then the nice thing for me is that I have some time to, like, enjoy the convention, like, as a huge fan. I actually went on a number of panels this year. I went to a panel on podcasting. I went to a panel on tabletop games, how you make a tabletop game. That was fun to see. I did a lot of comic panels.

I did some animation panels. Anyway, had a lot of fun. Um, okay, so now we get to the final day. It is time for my panel. My panel is Saturday night. It's just one of the last things, uh, basically at Comic-Con. I, I usually arrive on Wednesday. There's a preview night on Wednesday.

I'm there Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And normally I leave on Sunday. Uh, the con's a little, little more dead on Sunday. Um, plus I, I promised my wife promised my wife that I would make my trip. I try not to make my trip longer than I need to be, and Sunday gets me back. It also gets me back so that I'm at work on Monday. Anyway, so I was going to give the pre-beat,

which I did. I'm sorry. I was going to give all the information we'd already given. I was going to talk about stickers. I was going to show off some preview cards. So we ended up deciding that four of the preview cards would be about... Four of the preview cards would be showing off sticker-related things. Two of them would be Acorn and two would be Eternal.

And then I would show off just two exciting preview cards that weren't tied to stickers. One would be Eternal and one would be Acorn. So, anyway, so, and then I got to talk about stickers. I want to explain stickers for you, for those people that might not know

about stickers. I want people to be aware. Okay, so the way stickers work is in your booster pack, you have 14 cards, and then you have a sticker sheet. It replaces a common. A sticker sheet, if you can imagine, so there's stickers. The stickers, the glue is kind of like post-it note glue.

It's a very light glue. The idea is so that you could put it on your card. It'll peel off. It won't harm the card, and it can go on and off numerous times. So the idea is, the way stickers work is, there are cards. For example, one of the cards I previewed was Carnival Carnivore. So Carnival Carnivore, five and a black, four, six. Creature, alien, crab, whore.

It's got death touch. When Carnival Carnivore enters the battlefield, you get a little ticket icon. Then you may put a sticker on a non-land permanent you own. So the way it works is, on the sticker sheets, there are four kinds of stickers. There are three name stickers. There are three art stickers. There are two ability stickers,

and there are two power toughness stickers. The ability stickers and the power toughness stickers have a ticket cost. The lowest ticket cost is two. And so the idea is, when you play these cards to sticker things, they give you stickers. And then you can sticker. So you can always sticker a name or an art sticker for free. Those don't have any ticket costs.

But if you want to do an ability sticker or a power toughness sticker, you need to pay the ticket cost. Now Carnivore Carnivore costs six. So hopefully before you've cast this card, you've cast other cards that got you stickers, but let's say this is the first card you did. Well, then I can't play an ability or a power toughness sticker. I only have one ticket. I don't have enough tickets, but I can play a name or an ability sticker.

The set has a lot of things that care about names and care about art, so placing things. For example, I said in the panel that there's a theme of hat matters. So one of the, I showed off two sticker cards. Each of the sticker cards I showed off had a hat on it. So if my creature doesn't naturally have a hat,

I could sticker a hat on it, and now it's considered a hat-wearing creature for purposes of cards to care. Likewise, I showed off a card called Angelic Herald. Real quickly, one white blue 2-2 legendary creature angel performer flying. When Angelic Herald enters the battlefield, you need to 2-2 legendary creature angel performer flying. When Angelic Herald enters the battlefield, you need to put a name sticker

on a non-lamp permanent you own. Each creature you control with three or more words in its name gets plus one, plus one. So the idea is Angelic Herald, like it's a commander, it cares about wordy creatures, but one of its things is he can add a name sticker. Now he specifically

says just a name sticker. So if it doesn't say, like Carnival Carnivore didn't say, you can sticker any sticker. But Angelic Herald says a name sticker, so you can only do a name sticker. But this would allow you to put a name sticker on a creature and make it, like, Angelic Herald's two words, but if you put a name sticker on Angelic Herald,

you can make him three words, and then he'd grant his plus one plus one to himself, for example. Or he could put it on another creature. But that's a good example where names matter. So Angelic Herald is Acorn because names matter and it's something we can't do in the normal rules, so that's Acorn.

Anyway, so the idea is you have these stickers as a resource. The stickers stay on the card as long as it's in a public zone. So that includes in play, in the graveyard, in exile, and in the commander zone, because that's a public zone. If it ever goes to a non-public zone, which is your hand or the library, the sticker returns to the sticker sheet and comes off the card. But once it's on the sticker sheet, you're free to use it again. So, for example, I've had games where I've bounced one of my own creatures to get the sticker on it and then played a different effect so I could sticker it on something else. So sometimes it coming off, there can be advantages to that. Anyway, so the sticker cards and the sticker sheets themselves are just a tool.

Cards that say you can sticker things, the majority of them actually are eternal legal. The way to kind of think of stickers is they're kind of, I mean, they're not technically counters, but they're a lot like counters in that they allow you to grant things to your creature. From a more gameplay standpoint, they allow you to grant abilities and change power toughness. They can add to art, they can change

name, and in Infinity that matters. So those are relevant. But from a more eternal sort of way to play, matter. So those are relevant. But from a more, you know, eternal sort of way to play, you know, you need to deal with the ticket economy and stuff because it costs tickets to play abilities and power toughness changing.

But, oh, and the other thing is you can have multiple of all the stickers except power toughness. You can only have one at a time. So if I have a 1-1 creature and put a 2-2 sticker on it, it's a 2-2. I can put another sticker on it. I can sticker over my 2-2 with a 3-3 but then now it's a 3-3 it's not multiple power toughness at once

it can only be one power toughness at once anyway did I mention anything? Oh, the other thing about stickers is in draft you just play the stickers you open so in draft you'll open three boosters, you'll have three stickers we tried drafting the sticker sheet.

There's just a lot going on in Infinity Draft. There was a bit much to track. So we decided that it was better just to play the ones you opened. Part of the fun of the stickers, by the way, is the randomness of it. You know, part of the fun is, oh, this time I have these sticker sheets. So we also kind of like that, you know, from game to game, you'll just have different ones. We thought that was cool. So we also kind of like that, you know, from game to game, you'll just have different ones.

We thought that was cool. By the way, if you and your friends love drafting this and decide you want to draft stickers, you can. You know, it just adds another layer of complexity on it if people want. So we're recommending that you play the ones you open. Anyway, in Constructed, the way it works is you bring 10, 10 unique ones, so sort of single 10, and then you randomly pick three. And what that is trying to do is to give you a little bit of control

so maybe you don't get what you consider the dud one or something, although they're all, I think they all have some strengths on them. But anyway, pick the 10 you like most, and then you don't have complete control because you're picking three, so you only have a 30% chance

of getting any one card. So one of the things we're trying really hard to do, and you can see this in stickers, is the reason we made this eternal legal is not to try to mess up legacy and vintage. We really, really cost the things conservatively to not mess up legacy or vintage. Just in order to make them playable in Commander,

we needed to make them eternal legal. That's just, that's what the, that's what Commander uses. And the big idea behind this, behind the sort of Black Border stuff, I explained this in my article, was when we first made the unsets, the whole idea behind them was that, okay, you can't play them in tournaments, you can't play them in standard vintage, but you can play them everywhere else. Um, and then over time, somehow that came to be, you can't play them anywhere except in unlimited events. And so what we realized was there's a lot of fun things that work in the rules that people should have fun with and that why are we gating things off just because they're showing up in unsaid.

So that's why anything that's eternal is like, look, the rules can handle this. And that the rules can handle all sorts of things. There's some stuff the rules can't handle or things that are, you know, physical dexterity or outside assistance or things that are like, okay, we'll put them in the box.

They're not going to make you opt into doing those things. But it makes me sad that there's things, for example, in Unstable that the rules really can handle and the fact that people really want to play them.

And I know a lot of people rule zero in Civil Border cards. I always encourage people to do that. But some people have players, you know, play groups that don't want to do that or they're playing at their local store where, you know, people tend to be a lot more like, well, let's play by the official rules. And so that's why we did that. Anyway, I showed off.

I did my whole presentation. Oh, the other thing I didn't mention is I got permission to show off a lot of art so I think I showed off like 40 pieces of art because one of the great things about it is I worked with Dawn Muir and she was my art director we built a world just like we would do

any magic set we had people in we did world building and we really built a fun world we had a really fun sort of aesthetic to it, Dawn and her artists did an amazing job, the set just looks so lovely, so I wanted to show off as much art as I can, and showing off art is kind of fun because it gets people excited, it's something you haven't seen before, but it's not giving anything away mechanically, or sometimes it might hint at things mechanically,

or sometimes it might hint at things mechanically. So you might want to take a look at the art I showed off. But anyway, it's fun to show off stuff. So I showed a whole bunch of art. Anyway, so I did that. We did the panel. I got a whole bunch of questions. Not all softball questions.

I got some hard questions. People asking about the reserve list and things. And I think, by the way, somebody taped the entire thing and put it up on YouTube. So if you want to watch it, I think it's up on YouTube if you search on YouTube. We didn't have the ability to record it.

But at the beginning of the thing, I always say to the fans, hey guys, take pictures and let everybody see what we're doing here. And someone recorded the whole thing, so it is on YouTube if you want to go see it, or it was on YouTube as of today. Anyway, so then after questions, afterwards what I always do is

I sign cards and take pictures out in the hall. It's got to be out in the hall because there's another panel inside. And there was, I took a whole bunch of pictures before it began, and then I took a whole bunch of pictures and signed cards after it was over. So if you ever come to one of my panels, I always do that.

I will sign all the cards. I'll take all the pictures. Part of coming to the panel is a chance to get to interact with everybody. And I had people ask me questions. Yeah, it turns out that there was a mistake on one of the... I showed off a card called Magar of the Magic Strings real quickly. One black red, 3-3, legendary creature, minotaur performer.

One black red, note the name of target incident or sorcery card in your graveyard and put it onto the battlefield face down. It's a 3-3 creature with... Whenever this creature deals combat damage to a player, you may create a copy of the card with a noted name. You may cast the copy without paying its mana cost. And if this creature would leave the battlefield, exile it instead of putting it anywhere else. That card is eternal, but the booster fun version of it accidentally had an acorn on it.

One of the things that's happening a lot is caring about the security stamp is kind of a new thing for us, and we've been making mistakes when we make cards for people to see. So anyway, I apologize for that. We also made a mistake on Water Gun Balloon Game in the original article, so I know that is frustrating. We're working to fix the processes so that doesn't happen. The one other card I showed off, by the way—oh, two other cards. I'll mention them. Wicker Picker costs three mana for two, three. Creature spells you cast have Sticker Kicker. Oh, by the way, it's an artifact creature Scarecrow guest.

You may pay an additional one as you cast a Creature Spell. If you do, you get a ticket, and you may put a sticker on it. Unless you're a Quicker, I wouldn't Snicker the Wicker Picker. And then the other card was Far Out, two and a white enchantment. Rather than choose the indicated number of modes for spells and abilities you control, you may choose one or more modes. You can't choose any mode more than once. So, that's the card that online

everyone's arguing about. Why isn't this Eternal? You're doing Eternal cards. And the answer is, we tried to make it Eternal. I've tried to put in numerous sets. This particular version was made by Chris Mooney. I did not make this version. But, I've tried to make cards like this before in Premiere sets. I haven't been able to. We made this card.

I had a long talk with Jess about whether it could he's our rules manager, whether this could be eternal. He's like, no, no, no. It's a good example of a card that is not workable in the rules for very technical rules reasons. So it's funny that

we announced all this and people are like, why are stickers in eternal? Why isn't far out in eternal? So anyway, it turns out stickers work just fine because they're a lot like, you know, from a rules standpoint, they work a lot like, not tokens, like counters. And the rules can handle counters just fine. But messing with modes is something that the rules don't really have problems with. Anyway, so I did the panel, signed all the cards and everything. Afterwards, we always have a tradition where we do a staff dinner for all the people that work there.

And we do seafood. And I get to have crab legs, which is always fun. So anyway, it is – so the convention as a whole went really well. It was really fun being back live at Comic-Con. I really had a blast. Hopefully next year the pandemic is a little less severe and we don't have to be quite so... I mean, like I said,

I was super cautious. Hopefully, I mean, I just got back. So knock on wood that I didn't catch anything. But like I said, I was extra careful. But anyway, it went really great.

The panel went wonderful. It was really fun to talk on Infinity. It's always fun to answer questions of the fans live. That's always exciting. Like, online, when I answer questions, I pick which questions to answer. But live, I'm going to answer the question after me, so that's kind of cool. Anyway, that was

San Diego Comic-Con 2022. It was a blast. I really had a fun time. I can't wait for Comic-Con 2023. And I will be there. I will be doing a panel. And then I'll have another podcast to talk about it. You guys can hear about this next year.

Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about San Diego Comic-Con and about Infinity. But I'm at my desk. So we all know what that means. It means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.