Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #959: Playtest Cards

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

In this podcast, I go through the history of playtest cards from Richard's first playtest through modern day.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about playtest cards. So you see, in order for us to playtest with things that don't exist yet, we have to have something to playtest with. And so the evolution of the playtest card is an interesting story. Something that R&D has had to deal with since the very beginning. And so that's my plan today. I'm going to sort of talk about the evolution of the playtest card. Okay, so we're going to begin our story before Magic even came out. We have to go all the way back to, I don't know, 1992, 91, 92, maybe 1990.

Well, Magic came out in 1993. I'm not sure how long Richard was working on it. A couple years. But, obviously, when Richard first made the game to prototype, there weren't cards yet or anything. So, when Richard first made the game, he made them on

tiny pieces of cardboard. You might have even seen these. They were about an inch wide, maybe an inch and a half wide, and maybe like two, two and a half inches long. They were definitely, they had sort of the look of a card, but they were tiny. So they were not the size, like

Magic cards right now, you know, they're standardized cards and they refer to them as bridge size and poker size for a normal deck of cards. Those have two different major sizes. And magic, I think, is bridge size, is what they call it. But the early playtest that Richard made, the early playtest cards, were teeny tiny. They weren't that big.

And basically what happened was the way Richard made them is I think he just got a thicker card stock, uh, and then he, he photocopied onto them. Um, and so I think the art, if you ever, I don't know if you've ever seen the art of the original playtest cards, but they were usually something he found, um, you know, for example, uh, uh, um, what's it called? Healing Salve was originally called Heal and it was Scaf Elias' Heal that Richard took they copied it on a copier

and I mean there was like a Calvin Hobbes cartoon clipped out there was a lot of when I say clip art I don't mean like computer clip art like Richard went and found something physically and cut it out. And then I think what happened was he sort of mocked it up on sheets and then he photocopied the sheets and then he chopped them up.

So the earliest playtards cards were not so thick cardboard. I mean, you know, kind of like if you've ever been to like a copy place. It's like, it's a little thicker than normal paper, but it's, you know, stuff that fits in a copy machine, but it has a little bit more substance to it.

And it was white. The only playtest card, well, some of them were white and some were gray. I mean, remember in Alpha, there was a bunch of different playtest periods. It went on for multiple years. So Richard had to remake cards a couple different times.

And while they were all the same dimension, I think all the playtest cards were basically the same size, how they looked changed a little bit. I think like the earliest versions of the playtest cards didn't have art on them. I think when like Richard first played, I don't think those had art. But as he was remaking them, he kept trying to improve them

and he would add art. I think he added art relatively early, just because he liked the idea that the art helped signify and have you remember what things were. The other thing about early playtest cards is Richard went for very simple names early on. So like Benelish Hero

I think was Hero. And Healing Zav was Heal. And like Drudge Skeletons was Skeleton. He was just trying to convey the essence of what it was. And naming would come a little later. And, oh, the other thing about the early playtest cards

just for... Richard's idea for how the mana system was going to work actually changed over time. So the original version... So let's say you have Grizzly Bear, right? Grizzly Bear is one and a green. Originally, the way he wrote it is... It would say two and green. And what that would mean...

Sorry, let me take a sip of water here. What two and green meant was it cost two mana, one of which must be green. That was how it was originally written. But what Richard found was it was confusing for people. So he went to the system where, you know, he showed you how much generic mana and how much regular mana, rather than doubling them up. Sorry. Let me take one more sip of water. I'm coughing here. Okay. Hopefully that's better.

So anyway, Alpha had his little tiny playtest cards and you know, I mean, that is how early magic worked. I'm so sorry. Okay. Now I'm done with my coughing fit. Um, okay. So at some point, um, you know, magic, magic comes out and, and it's a hit.

And so, um, we have to start making a wizard starts making more magic sets. So they hire an R and D, um, earlyards starts making more Magic sets. So they hired R&D. Early R&D are mostly early playtesters. Scafalias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Joel Mick. So the early R&D, most of them, not all of them, but most of them are people that were early playtesters. And so the next technology improvement on playtest stickers was making them more card size. They were still cardboard, but they were now closer to the size of cards.

Like I said, the alpha ones were teeny tiny. So when I came in the building, I started with alliances. tiny. So when I came in the building, I started with Alliances. And before Alliances, I was on the, I was an outside playtest team for Homelands. So the first ones I ever saw were bigger than the Alpha ones. They weren't quite the size of normal cards. They were close though. And so basically what they did is the next technology was, let's take Richard's technology of cardboard, but just make them a little bit bigger.

So it's a little bit more like handling a normal size Magic cards. And I remember, for some reason, I remember the Mirage cards. Mirage was green. We stickered them on green. Or not stickers, sorry. Stickers is green. We stickered them on green. Or not stickers. Sorry, stickers is coming.

We put them on green cardboard stock. And so all the Mirage sets were green. All the cards were green. And at that point, because we were sort of mass producing and making more of them, we weren't putting art on them. So the early playtest cards... Oh, but the one thing that did happen... So, the other important thing was

we made a program that could print up the cards so that they looked relatively like magic cards. I think Richard... I'm not quite sure how Richard did it, but stuff like mana symbols were all individual and probably glued on or something. So when we got into Wizards, they made a program that was able...

One of the things that we needed in order to make magic is we needed a database. And so early on, when I first got to Wizards, so Alliance-ish time, they had started using database technology. I don't know what Richard used. Like, I don't know if Richard had some kind of database. He probably more had like a Word document or something.

But by the time I got there and we're making a bunch of cards and there's an art process and everything, we had to have a database. And the database back then was a FileMaker Pro, I mean, basically. But they had made it such that they could use the database, but there was an output where they could print, like, for meetings, we like to print so many up, you know, like 3x4, whatever. It would print it looking like cards on a sheet. And that technology we could use to print on the cardstock.

it looking like cards on a sheet. And that technology we could use to print on the cardstock. So that was another big sort of evolution of the playtest cards was using the file, the database file, as a means to generate the cards. And so that

was the next big thing, is putting it into the database, having an output. And the output, basically the way it looked was, the art was blank, but it would have the name, and I think it was in the magic font, and it would have the mana cost using the actual symbols. So, I mean, it looked like a magic card in the sense that the dimensions were correct,

and it was using the symbols, and I think it was using the font. So, you know, it kind of looked like a magic card. Now, it had no art. It was on cardboard. But it definitely was sort of an early technology of, okay, this is something that's going to look like a card. And I think through Mirage Block, if I remember correctly, is cardboard. We used cardboard for that. Okay, I think the next big innovation, I think, was with Tempest. I'm pretty sure it happened with Tempest.

And that was stickers. So, at some point, someone realizes, oh, so one of the problems we had with the cardboard things is it was hard to tell about colors of things. So,

like, the way you would tell something was red was by looking in the right corner and seeing there was a red mana symbol but it wasn't in color or anything and so it was just kind of hard to tell things apart so somebody

my guess is Dan Cervelli is my guess but somebody came up with the great idea that we could take the same stuff that we were printing on cardboard, and instead of printing it on cardboard, we could print it on sticker stock. And it turns out that there was a sticker stock that was very close to being the size of a Magic card, but it was a little bit skinnier. In fact, sorry, it was longer than the Magic card, but skinnier than the Magic card. So what used to happen was we'd have to cut the cards.

So you would print the cards on sticker sheets, but then you would have to chop the card, and you would chop it at top and bottom of the card. And then if you stick it on an actual Magic card, the way it would work was it would fit in vertically if you cut it at top and bottom, and then it would be a little bit skinny. But what that meant is when you put it on, the natural color of the card would come through. So let's say you had a blue card, you could stick it on an actual blue card. And then when you're playing, A, it'd be on a magic card, so it'd function like a magic card. And B, because the blue would peek through on the sides,

card so it functioned like a magic card and B because the blue would peek through on the sides you could tell that it was blue and this was a huge step up this was like back in the day like I remember the first time we figured out stickers like stickers was light years more exciting than cardboard I mean cardboard is what we had and we played with it and I mean you know I mean you make do but actually getting it it onto actual magic cards so that you were actually playing with magic cards was pretty cool. Now the other thing that happened back in the

day was we used to keep a collection of all the cards that were in print, roughly. They would slowly disappear over time. So if you wanted to make a deck and you were making a deck with existing cards, you could go pull those actual cards out of the bins.

We had cabinets that had the cards in them in card boxes. So if you were making a deck, you would print up anything new, but then you would use anything old and you would just go get it. It would actually take us years to say, you know, we could just print the things we need that are old on the sticker sheets. I mean, we got there, but it took us surprisingly long.

Maybe it was just fun playing with actual... I mean, I think the reason we liked mixing in the real cards is just they had art and stuff, and so it's sort of more entertaining to have the actual art. But anyway, so we did the stickers. But, so basically what would happen is, let's say you were making a file. I was in charge of Tempest, okay? So what would happen is

I would get the files to a place where we wanted to playtest. I then would have to print up on the, we had a dedicated printer for stickers. I would have to print it up on the stickers. And you had to go and make sure the sticker sheets were in it. Or actually, early on, early on there wasn't a dedicated printer. Actually, that's right. Early on there wasn't a dedicated printer. So if you wanted to print, you had to go make sure, you had to go put the sticker stock in it. And if you didn't, it would print on normal paper. And if you put the sticker stock in and forgot to take it out,

other people, when they were printing files, would print onto sticker paper. Eventually, we got the bright idea of having a printer just for, like, we had enough stuff to make that we dedicated a printer that was just for sticker stock. So if you wanted to print stickers, you printed on that printer, and then normal things went on other printers. And so we didn't have that problem. Anyway, okay. So let's say I'm in Tempest and I want to print something.

I have to go to the printer, put the sticker sheets in at the time. And then when I print it up, it's a little bit too long. So what I would do is I'd go get a paper cutter and then I would chop, you had to chop the tops and the bottoms off, basically. And so you would go and you'd chop out the tops and the bottom. And then the sticker would be, and you would end up making like sheets of, because you're, you're cutting them into, into strips and these strip would have like four stickers on it. Um, and then what you would do is you'd have to go get, we had sticker stock, we call it

sticker stock, which was just old magic cards. Like I said, we collected cards, um, for us to play with, but we, when we, we would, we would order cards. Like I said, we collected cards for us to play with, but we would order cards the way it would work was we would order cards from the printer and they could just print us one of everything, basically. And so when we ordered cards for our purposes for playtesting, we'd order some number of one of everything. But what that meant is, let's say it was a hundred of everything, I forget what it was. Some cards, okay, we need a lot if we're going to playtest it. But some cards, nobody's playtested.

Like, this is a card that no one's going to put in their deck. It was something for limited or something that was for, what do we call it, discriminator card. That was a fancy R&D term for a card that was bad. But, you know, players had to figure out it was bad. Although, we've gone away from it, truly, truly discriminator cards. And now they're like, you know, now they're not as good as the other cards, but they're still good. You still might play them. Anyway,

so we would have what we call sticker stock, which is basically the cards that nobody would play, put in separate things, and then you would have to go sticker them. And basically what you had to be careful of is you had to make sure that you were stickering the right color on the right back. Now normally on the, we would print up the file.

So, you know, the cards generally were together, but at some point white became blue or blue became black or black became red or red became green or green became multicolored, multicolored became artifacts. Um, you know, at some point you'd have the thing. So you had to make sure to sticker on the right thing. And stickering took time. Like, it was a dedicated thing. Like, if I was going to make a file and I was in charge of it, I had to go print the cards and then I had to sticker the cards.

And often what would happen is you would say, hey, I need help stickering. And then you would get other people to come help stickering. And sort of the given was because stickering was such a chore, other people would come help you with stickering. And then you would get other people to come help stickering. And sort of the given was, because stickering was such a chore, other people would come help you with stickering. And you would help other people with stickering. But anyway, I got really, really good at stickering. Because I stickered so many. I'm sure in my lifetime, I've stickered like tens of thousands

and not hundreds of thousands of stickers. I stickered so many cards. Anyway, I got very, very good at it. So you would sticker the cards and you would play with them. Back in the day, we didn't sticker lands because stickering was a lot of work. But one of the problems we had back in the day was the coefficient between the sticker card and the lands card were different.

So if you try to normal shuffle the cards, the lands and the non-lands would clump. And then, so you had a pile shuffle back in the day. Because if you normal shuffle, they stick together. Okay, so the next evolution, I mean, well, I guess the sticker evolution improved over time. Eventually, we started getting the technology to get art. And the way it would work is, so the way art works is we give it out to an artist. I think they have like seven weeks total.

And then at some midway point, they have to turn in a sketch. And then we give notes on the sketch they have to turn in a sketch. And then we give notes on the sketch, and then they turn in the final. So what we did is we figured out a way to get the art into the file so when you were printing out the stickers, if there was a sketch, the sketch would show up. And if there was final art, the final art would show up. And once again, the reason for that, just to explain, is the art

serves an important purpose of tracking things. One of the things about playing with playtest cards is it's not nearly as fun as playing with normal magic cards. Having all the component pieces together,

the final names, the art, the flavor text, the templated text, you know, if there's any frames to it, having that all together really is a very compelling thing. Now, when we're playtesting, we don't have that. And like I said, I've gotten really, really used to playing with playtest cards. So it's not like I need all the bells and whistles. I enjoy the bells and whistles. You know, whenever I get to play with a set where I get to see the bells and whistles, it really is a difference playing with actual

magic cards than playing with playtest cards. It's not that we can't playtest with playtest cards. It's not that we can't, you know, do our job and figure it out, and it's not that games aren't fun with playtest cards, but it is, having the full thing is much more exciting. Anyway, so over time with stickers, we started making improvements. I think adding the art was the biggest improvement. We did go through a phase where we started adding color. And so, you know, like, for example, the, you know, the red madness symbol would be red. you know, like, for example, the, you know, the Red Madness symbol would be red.

Then we got to the next phase we started getting with stickers was trying to actually mock what the cards would look like. And that include, right, going full color, having the full frame, having the art. So like I said, at one point there was just art in the field. So like art would show up or you get a sketch would show up. But then the next sort of evolution of that was, okay, let's make these sticker cards, as they went along, look as much like finalized cards as we could. And so now once again, in early playtesting, we wouldn't have art because art wasn't in yet. You know,

back then it was design. But, you know, early, early on when I would work on the set, the art hadn't been sent out yet so there was no art. But as the file progressed, so especially like development and later play design

who were playing a lot and were playing with mostly finished cards had stickers that were looking a lot closer to the finished card. And in fact, when we did internal play tests, we actually got the stickers looking pretty good of looking sort of like magic cards.

Okay, the next big jump, and this is kind of where we are now, the next big jump is, okay, stickering takes a lot of time. Can we skip the stickering process? So the next big evolution said, okay, can we just print on the cards themselves? So the other thing that we're able to do is we can go to the printer and we can ask for what we call blanks. So what blanks are are cards

that are magic backs, but the fronts are just white. And so, just real quickly, the way magic cards are made is we mass produce the back part. Like, every magic card, barring double-faced cards, has a magic back. So we print a lot of sheets that are the magic back,

and then they print on those sheets on the front, right? But I think the front of those sheets, until they're printed on, are white, I believe. Because when you print on it, you need white front. So, all that's going on is when we get blanks, it's like, just give us some of those sheets that you haven't printed on the front yet. And so that's easy for them to do. So they send us magic blanks. The reason magic blanks, originally we got magic blanks, was so that we could proxy cards. So like one of the things that was real common, oh, I didn't get into this. So let's say, for example, I was going to make a deck and my deck was mostly cards that

existed and I'm just testing, like I'm doing future, future league and most of my cards were existing cards that were already in print, but I just had a few cards that weren't the nice thing about blanks was that you could just write on the card that you need and so we had blank so when I was doing playtesting with the whole set that didn't exist yet I tended to use the sticker cards but later on if you were playtesting and you most your deck had existing cards you would just proxy on the blank cards. You would just write it up on the blank cards. And there's pictures of those.

A lot of times people would be very simplistic. Sometimes people would draw pictures, but it wouldn't be that odd to be like R, Bolt. You know, just R in the upper right-hand corner for red mana and Bolt. Oh, another thing, by the way, on the playtest cards. Early on in Magic's history, we didn't actually use the mana symbols.

Early on, so in the file, we used W for white, U for blue, B for black, R for red, and G for green. Real quickly, just because I get asked this all the time. The reason it's blue is U. Black and blue both start with B. Only one of them could I get asked this all the time. The reason it's blue is U. Black and blue both start with B. Only

one of them could be B. Well, the next letter in both of them is L, but we use L for land. So the next, each of them is A and U, but we use A for artifact. So we use U for blue. Now, it turns out that in printing, they use K for black and B for blue. We just didn't know that.

Maybe we would have followed that convention, had we known. But anyway, so early on in the cards, we didn't actually have mana symbols on them. Early, early Magic cards, like if it's a green card, it just says, you know, 3GG for green. It didn't actually have a green mana symbol. Now, eventually, we got to the point where we could print mana symbols. But early Magic cards, like if I go back to the Mirage green cardboard, I don't know if that actually had the mana symbols on them. Mana symbols came along not too long.

And maybe, maybe by the time we got there. I think Richard, now that I think about it, Richard didn't have mana symbols on his playtest cards. He just had letters. I don't think about the mana symbols. Mana symbols showed up. I don't know whether mana symbols showed up at the late stage of cardboard or once stickers happened

eventually they'd show up anyway okay sorry so now we're up to the technology where we print on the card itself and so we had to get a special printer to do this like this isn't something that you can just put in a normal like back when we were doing stickers you could just print stickers in a normal printer like Like most printers handle stickers. Like if you ever want

to print on labels or something, like, you know, printers can handle stickers. So that wasn't a problem. Once we got to printing on cards, that required a whole new technology. It needed a special printer. I know we've named them. There's a bunch of them now. The first one we ever had was called Sliver Queen. And Sliver Queen was infamous for constantly breaking down. And so the idea basically was, once we print the stickers, is we had the technology. We could do the full frame.

So basically when we print the stickers, it's printed in color, and it is printed as realistic as we can to look like a magic card. So for example, let's say we print a green card. It's got like, it has the frame, it has the texture. If art is in, it has art in it. Like I say, I play test early on on so I'm used to not having art. But as soon as art, in fact, as soon as the sketch exists, they put the sketch in. And as soon as final art, they put final art in.

So if you actually play with the cards sort of late in the process, I mean, they don't look as good as actual printed magic cards, but they look close now. They're in the ballpark. It's not that you can't tell the playtest cards you can, but I mean, they look a lot closer to actual Magic cards. And that has been, oh, the other thing now is, so let me talk a little bit about our database. So our database has changed over time. Our very first database was a FileMaker Pro. In that database, we actually had one person, a guy named Bill. Bill LaDrew. Anyway, Bill was in charge of keeping the database, which was FileMaker Pro. And if you ever needed something, you would just call Bill. So like if I ever needed functionality, I would just say,

hey, Bill, can you add this? And he would add it. Like it usually would take him a day or two, but he would add it. Now this is back when things were pretty small. And then what happened was people came to us and said, we think we need a new database. And I remember R&D said, well, we're happy with the current database. And the people said,

well, other people that use the database aren't happy because remember the database is used by all different sections. And while R&D might be happy, these other people aren't happy, so we're going to redo it. And we're like, well, other people aren't happy. We later learned that other people were like, we're happy. So we sort of got changed to get changed. But anyway, it made something called Multiverse, which was something that got designed specifically, like a tool that got designed specifically. We used Multiverse for many years.

And the thing to remember about the database is that R&D would work in it, but then editing would edit in it. And then the people that laid out the cards, like the printing and stuff, everybody at every level used it. The database had a lot of functionality. And there's a lot of things in the database.

Maybe one day I'll do a thing on the database. But anyway, the one point I guess was the database. And then Multiverse became Drake. I guess the evolution of the database may be for a whole other day. But as the database has evolved, one of the big things now is we have the tools in our current database to make whatever decks you want. So if you're going to playtest something, the way it works now is you just make the deck in Drake and then you can print the deck. So all the decks basically now, we no longer keep cards in the cabinet. All playtesting is done with printed cards. And we even print the lands,

although, funny, the way the lands are done is all it does is a blank card in the upper left-hand corner just says the name of the basic land, so plains or swamp or island or whatever. The idea being that, hey, it takes a lot to print

and there's a lot of ink and stuff and the basic lands, you kind of want to know the basic lands. We don't need to spend a lot on them. So we want the basic lands to be the same once again because if you use actual basic lands, the coefficient friction, the playtest cards are a little bit different from the normal cards and they clump if you use real land.

But mostly the lands aren't, they're the one thing in the deck that don't look like normal magic cards. I think when we make them for external playtesting, we will make fancy ones that show actual, so they look like the lands, so that for outside playtesting. Because one of the things when we were playtesting outside is

it's super, super important that they look like magic cards. Well, we have gotten very used to using playtest cards, and to be honest, it doesn't throw me at all anymore. Like, I can play Magic with playtest cards in a way that doesn't. Like, I think, for example, as someone who's used to normal Magic cards, if you sat down to play a game with playtest cards, it's a little disorienting. In fact, when new people start playing, it's a little, I mean, not that you can't play. Obviously, it's functionally playable. It's just you're very, very used to sort of all the visuals and everything. And the

first time you sort of don't have it, it's disorienting. Now, I've done it so much. I've played so much with playtest cards that it's second nature to me. But anyway, so playtest cards now have come a long way. They're a lot more polished. And we have the ability to make the final versions of them look pretty close. Once again, I mean, not that you can't tell that they're not normal printed cards. But when, for example, we do external playtests or whatever. So one of the things that happens a lot is late in the process, when we are done with stuff, we'll take people elsewhere in Wizards and stuff.

And we can play test stuff and get feedback on things. In fact, we have what's called a play day. So once a month, all the meetings of the day are canceled, at least within R&D. And everybody plays some set. It's an upcoming set and there'll be drafts and there'll be commander play and there'll be jump start play and there'll be

all the different ways that you can experience that set. And you can sign up to do different things and then you give notes. Maybe one of these days I will do a podcast on play days. Play days are fun. But anyway, and at the play day, usually by the point we do the

play day, the file is pretty locked. I mean, not that things can't, not that numbers can't change or small tweaks can't happen, but the cards are pretty locked so that when we do that, the cards for the play day usually look pretty nice so that when we do that the cards for the playtest they usually look look pretty nice usually but anyway

that my friends that is playtest cards so like I said it's been interesting when I think back to all the different oh here's a little story I'm almost at work

so I'll share my little story so one of the things that I decided early on was that I wanted us to have a memory of our playtest cards. And so I convinced the powers that be that we should have a little place we save them. And like every set, let's save some. So I think at one point I was saving like a box each set, like a full card box. And then that got a little bit too much, so I cut down. And then eventually, I don't know, many years ago, they're like, you know what? We don't need to keep these.

And they got rid of them. So I, from time to time, you know, whenever I see an opportunity, I've shown some of the playtest cards, by the way, in my articles and stuff. So if you want to sort of see over the years, there's some visual pictures of them. It's kind of fun. It really takes me back. The other fun thing about playtest cards, when you look at old playtest cards, is the way you know where they're from other than recognizing the card.

So one of the fun things about looking back at playtest cards is, especially if it's earlier on, that not a lot of cards... Like, a lot of cards get dropped along the way. Not a lot of cards make it all the way from the very beginning to the very end. So one of the things that's really entertaining about looking at old playtest cards

is a lot of times there's things that didn't make it. And so it's fun to look at mechanics that didn't make it or individual things that didn't make it. And so it's fun to look at mechanics that didn't make it or individual cards that didn't make it. But anyway, on it, there's a three-card code. So the way that you can tell where it's from, I mean, sometimes you'll recognize it. Oh, you know, it's such and such a card. Now, it might have a playtest name,

so you have to recognize, oh, this is this card, but this is the playtest name. But sometimes it's maybe using a mechanic you've never seen, or a card you've never seen. And in that case, you look at the code, and the three-letter code is always based on the code name. So, for example, if you're looking and you see B-A-C, oh, that's

Bacon. Bacon is Mirrodin. And so, there are also when you see playtest cards, part of understanding playtest cards is being able to interpret what the three-letter code is, what the codename is, and then what the set is. And so it's fun. We have a small handful of playtest cards.

Most of them are gone, but there's a few. And it's fun. I do love going back and looking at old... Playtest cards tickle me to no end, so I think they're a lot of fun. Oh, oh, so the one chance for you all to maybe have seen a playtest card on a printed magic card, there's two places. One is in the mystery booster

packs, we did the playtest cards. Those were basically made to look like playtest cards. And so those kind of mimic the way playtest cards look. The other way to see it is there's a card called Look at Me, I'm R&D, which was in Unhinged. And that is done on what was at the time a sticker. I mean, it looked like a sticker. In fact, the funny thing about it is it's stickered on a moat. Oh, so here's a real funny story since we're almost at work. So back in the day, in the early version of the stickering, we would just grab, like, instead of sorting out the cards and taking the cards that no one wanted to play with, we would just, like, okay, well, we ordered 100 cards.

Well, these 20 we'll just sticker on. But some of those cards would be good cards. And, like, for example, I never sticker tomorrow. Whenever there was a tomorrow to sticker, I'm like, I can't sticker this and I wouldn't sticker it. And so the idea of the white card in Look at Me on R&D being stickered on a moat was a little nod to like, back in the day, sometimes we'd sticker like on good cards. If you guys knew some of the stuff that there was sticker stock of,

it would probably make you cringe. But anyway, that is that. So that, uh, um, I can see Wizard here. So, hopefully you guys enjoyed. Like, I, uh, I like doing what I call my history podcast, which is just letting you in on some small facet of magic

back in the day. Um, and, like I said, it's the kind of thing that you're not going to get on another podcast. So I enjoyed that. So I hope you guys enjoyed the story of the playtest cards. Like I said, it's nitty gritty, but it's fun. And it's kind of cool to hear about sort of how we did things. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed that.

But as I'm literally parking my car, we all know what that means. That this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I apologize for all the coughing today, but I'm better now. And anyway, I'll see you guys next time.

So, bye-bye.