Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #966: Rise & Fall of Blocks, Part 1

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

This is part one of a two-part series talking about the history of blocks.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I've dubbed the rise and fall of the blocks. So I want to talk all about sort of block evolution, how it came about, how things changed, and how we ended up where we are today. Okay, so our story begins back in 1993. Richard Garfield makes Magic the Gathering. So let me first start with that. So when Richard first made Magic, there was no way for him to sort of know what Magic was going to become. The idea that Magic would be this game that just does constant releases all the time,

that is hard to picture. Like, Magic became a phenomenon, but you don't make a game assuming it's going to become a phenomenon. So, Richard sort of made Magic with the idea that, like, he knew there would be updates. It wasn't that he didn't think they'd make more. Obviously, before the game came out, he had different people work on future sets. So, there definitely was this idea that more magic would happen. So it's not like Richard didn't think more would happen.

But I don't think he understood sort of the pacing of it. And not, how could he? You know what I'm saying? I don't think you make something that ends up being what magic became and really, I mean, it did something that had never been done before. So it's really hard to wrap your brain around it.

But anyway, so Magic comes out, and pretty quickly, you know, Wizard of the Coast realizes, oh, we need to put a lot of, we need a lot of content. So, you know, Magic comes out in the summer of 1993. Arabian Nights is the first expansion. I think it first comes out in December of 1993, January 1994. And they rushed to get that out. I mean, Richard worked on that really quickly. And they sort of realized that they needed to have expansion. So, you know, Richard quickly did Arabian Nights. The East Coast Playstafters were able to do Antiquities. By then they could

get to Legends, which is something that they, something that Peter had started early on talking to some of his friends. So like early magic expansions were sort of based on a little bit that Richard asked some of the playtafters to build things, a little bit of some people that Peter knew or people at Wizards made some stuff.

So like early magic was just kind of scrambling to get things done, right? Just scrambling to get things made. But around that point, once it's clear that magic is becoming what it was becoming, which was this product in which there's constant release, that's when there's this understanding of, okay, maybe we have to rethink how we do this another big factor that you have to take into account was that

when Richard first made Magic limited existed I know that the playtesters played around with limited formats I know that they did drafting I just had an interview with Barry where we talked about Barry made Booster Draft. So, like, there was definitely them playing around for a little bit. And I think that Richard, once Magic got going,

really said, oh, this is a fun way. Let's, you know, like, Richard understood that one of the key things to Magic was it was so modular and flexible that you could make a lot of different things with it, right? You could play it a lot of different ways. And so there was also that idea. So, like, basically what happens is Wizards gets up and going.

They start an R&D department. The R&D department mostly is filled with playtefters. So Scafalias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty. They hire a few, like Glenn Elliott. There's a few people they hire that weren't play tefters. But early, early R&D was definitely a little bit more of the people that had been working on Magic. Then we get to the second phase, which is where I come in,

which is me, Bill Rose, William Jockish, Mike Elliott. Bill had been an original play tefter, but the rest of us were just people with passions for magic that they had met that said, oh, here's somebody that seems to really enjoy the game and understand how it ticks. And so what happened was it's around, so early magic comes out,

you know, Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, The Dark, Thawne Empires. That's a lot of just scrambling to get things done. That's a lot of like, let's just get people to make sets pretty quickly. What happens next, though, is... So the following summer, which is 1995, is Ice Age.

The East Coast playstations make Ice Age. Ice Age comes out. And at this point, when Ice Age. The East Coast Playtesters make Ice Age. Ice Age comes out. And at this point, when Ice Age comes out, there's now an R&D department at Wizards that are looking at things and, you know, are making calls. And it's at this point that internal R&D sort of says,

you know, maybe we want some interconnectivity to what's going on. Maybe, you know, that... I think they sort of says, you know, maybe we want some interconnectivity to what's going on. Maybe, you know, that I think they sort of realized that there was a lot of like, I don't think world building was something that was done like early, early magic, kind of the people that made the set to the world building, the designers did the world building. But as Wizards started sort of forming, you know, as a company, I mean, I guess Wizards was already a company but Magic was forming as a game design group they started to realize that

they wanted to do a little bit more, they wanted to do more world building they wanted to have more Magic couldn't be quite so off the cuff as it has been, they wanted it to be a little more integrated. And so the initial idea, and I talked about this when I talked about alliances, that alliances wasn't really designed to be an offshoot of Ice Age. It was made by the same people, but it really wasn't made, I mean, I think it was in Dominaria, only because at that point most things were in Dominaria but

it wasn't really designed like, oh this is an extension of that. It wasn't a mechanical extension at all. It was just them making more stuff. But I think internally they realized that A, we wanted to do world building and B, we wanted to have a little bit of sense of continuity. And so

what they did is they said and I was there for this because Alliances was the first set I worked on once I started working at Wizards. We said, okay, we want Alliances to feel like an extension of Ice Age. And so we spent a lot of time in development. Most of this wasn't in design.

But trying to make it feel connected. We added in some mechanical things. There's some snow-covered land stuff that wasn't there before. We added in some flavor things. They did a little bit of trying to make connective tissue. So I think there were characters that had been referenced in Ice Age flavor text that now will show up on a card. They just wanted to create a little bit of continuity

and a little bit of familiarity. The other thing to remember is back then, so we're talking back in 1995, the creative team, which was ironically then called Continuity, was just a couple people. I think it was two people. It wasn't a very big team. With time it grew, but it was just a matter of sort of like part of the idea of locking ourselves into a world was giving the people who had to build the world, you know, more ideas that

we could, we could stretch the resources we have. So what happens next is we get to 1996. So Ice Age comes out, we make alliances and sort of say, this is kind of part of Ice Age. But that was done sort of after the fact. Like I said, the designers weren't even involved in that. So the next thing to come out was Mirage. And Mirage and Visions had in fact been designed together. They had been designed as I don't know whether, I think what happened was Menagerie just was real big. That was a playtest name for Mirage.

And I think they'd been working on it so long, they'd made a lot of cards. But they had enough material for a large set and a small set. So that was the first time where there were two sets that were purposely made to be connected. They were mechanically connected. They were creatively connected. They were made by the same design team. That's the first time we're like, okay, we're consciously, we're not retroactively, we're consciously putting this together. And then I think what we realized was we started to understand

the cadence of what magic wanted to be. At least what we felt the needs were back in 1995. And what that meant was, okay, we're going to put a large set out in, I'm using Northern Hemisphere seasons here, in the fall. So like September, October. And then we would put a small set out in the winter.

I don't know, February, March. And then we put a small set out late spring, you know, April, May. And the idea is it'd be a large set, a small set we put a small set out late spring, you know, April, May. And the idea is it would be a large set, a small set, and a small set. That's kind of the cadence. And so the idea was, and this was sort of crafted during Mirage, okay, well, what if we sort of created this concept of a magic year, right? And the way we did that was we connect all the sets together.

So, okay, Mirage is going to come out. That takes place on Jamora. Then Visions is going to come out. That also takes place on Jamora. Then Weatherlight is going to come out. And that, well, at least takes place on Dominaria. Now, once again, the very first, I mean, Ice Age is the first block

in that we sort of said it was a block. Mirage is the first block where we meant it was a block, but even then, I will point out, that Weatherlight was pretty disconnected. I mean, the one connection is the story of Mirage, Mirage and Visions, introduced the Weatherlight. Weatherlight was

not a main character. Weatherlight and Sisay, the captain, it was a smaller part of it, but played a little bit of a role. There's a character that needed to get somewhere, and Weatherlight picks him up, and Sisay shows up. So we, for the first time, learn about the Weatherlight and Sisay. So Weatherlight was the start of the Weatherlight saga, but in some ways it was like, okay, we're extending the story,

but at least elements of it had shown up during the year. And then Tempest is where we said, okay, we're going to start thinking of this cohesively. And so interestingly, Tempest is when we first got a world building team. Once sort of Michael and I pitched the Weatherlight Saga and it all got signed off, they went for the first time and really made, I mean, there existed continuity before. There were people that were making sure that, writing names and writing flavor text and making sure that

the creative was connective, like things were true. But it was Tempest, which was the first time where we went and got artists. There was a team dedicated to building the world. And the World of Wrath was the first sort of crafted world. I mean, Dominaria and all the worlds before Dominaria were kind of made,

but there wasn't kind of the thought process. Like Ravnica, not Ravnica, sorry, Wrath was, okay, what is Wrath going to look like? What are the people going to look like? And there was actually concept drawing, and there was, like, world building. There was work done to scope out and get the general sense of how the world looked, so that the whole set would have a distinctive look to it. And so Tempest really introduced the idea of, we're going to go to a new plane, and that new plane will be continuous within

one block. So we're going to go to Wrath, and the story of Wrath is going to be all three sets. And in fact, when Michael and I did the original writing of the Weatherlight Saga, we wrote it as a three-act structure, and we made three stories, basically. A story in Tempest, originally originally a story in Mercadian Masks, or not Mercadian Masks, but Mercadia, and then a story back in Dominaria, the original version that changed. So anyway, so Tempest comes out and starts establishing this idea of, okay, we're going to do world

building, and one of the reasons that the block was so important for world building is, hey, we had one world building team, and one of the reasons that the block was so important for worldbuilding is, hey, we had one worldbuilding team, and that was how much they could do. They could make one world. And the idea also was, we were trying to stretch mechanics, you know, for example, the way it worked during Tempest is, okay, the first set introduces the two mechanics of the year, the two named mechanics of the year, which were Tempest. So it was Shadow and Byback. And then the sets that followed expanded upon that. Now, clearly, you know, there were other themes that would come along.

Weatherlight had a graveyard theme, so things could evolve. But there was a cohesive sense, a mechanical sense that drove through. And that really set the sort of tone for the years that would come, is, okay, we're doing blocks, the blocks will be large, small, small, they'll start in the fall, or, you know, in September, October, the magic year will run through, you know, like from September through August, and then there'll be mechanical and creative cohesion between the three sets of the year. So that is where we're at. So After Tempest is Urza Saga. So interestingly, Michael and I had set up this dynamic of

one world, one year, one world. And then it sort of got dashed a little quicker than we expected just because the people, Michael and I left the project, and the people that were in charge decided they wanted to tie it back into old magic lore a little more than Michael and I. Michael and I had it tied a little bit, but not as strongly as they wanted it. So, okay, now we're going to spend a whole year going back and telling the story. The story in the past involved mostly Dominaria. It wasn't completely Dominaria.

We go to Sera's realm. We go to Phyrexia. We get to see elements of other worlds. And so Urza Saga wasn't quite as cohesive as Tempest was. Meaning, yeah, it was a one story, but it jumps around a little bit. So after Urza's Saga is Mercadian Masks. And same thing, Mercadian Masks block jumps around. Mercadian Masks is in Mercadia. Nemesis is back on Wrath. And then Prophecy, I think, is back on Dominaria. So, there's a lot of kind of still jumping around. So, the idea that we had tried

to form of one year, one world, doesn't quite gel right away. So, the next set that happens is Invasion. So, Invasion is back in Dominaria. The whole year takes place in Dominaria. We kind of return to sort of the essence of one world,

one year. And it's the capper of this giant story we're telling. Oh, the Phyrexians are invading Dominaria. Okay, well, it takes the whole year to play out that storyline. So, and one of the things we realized is, since we were staying on the same world for the year, we structured the story. So one of the core elements of story, for those that don't know, is what's called three-act structure.

Basically, there is a rhythm to storytelling and it comes in threes. And so for those that aren't writers, there's three acts and the end of the first act propels you into action in the thing. There's a whole... I'm not going to get into explaining 3-act structure. But it's not just anything.

It is a very carefully explained element of how stories are crafted. And so one of the nice things about making a block was we could one for one sort of tell a story in that world, break it up, and do a 3-act structure stretch within that world. And so that was very clean. And it allowed us to sort of reinforce how we were making things. Okay, so after Invasion, we get to Odyssey. So at this point, we, even though I had been very, like, I was a big believer of, let's get on onto the multiverse. When Michael and I were telling our story, part of it was like,

okay, we invent a ship that can travel the multiverse so we can see the multiverse. But we fall back a little bit into our ways, and Odyssey is, again, on the plane of Dominaria. It's a new continent. It's Otaria. We go somewhere new, but rather than being a brand new plane, it's just kind of a new place on the place we always are. So, it does follow the same structure, though, of, we in fact are in Otaria the whole year long, and we tell a story, but the weirdest thing there is

Odyssey and then Onslaught, which followed it, kind of tells a continuous story where the main character of the Odyssey story, which is Kamal, is the main character of the Onslaught story. So two years, I mean, each one has its own story. Each one is kind of its own place. I think Onslaught isn't all on Ontario, isn't on Ontario, mostly not on Ontario. slot isn't all on Ontario, isn't on Ontario, mostly not on Ontario. So we, you can see it's sort of, we're starting to get the, the sense of the block. But we're still sort of fussing around a little bit with what, what exactly does it mean?

What does a block mean? So the, what follows Odyssey is Mirrodin. Um, and this is where sort of, uh, the creative team goes through a little bit of a change. Um, uh, Tyler Beelman comes on to lead the creative team and Tyler and I get along really well. Uh, and I really say to him, um, okay, the next set is Mirrodin. The next block is Mirrodin. And I'm like, you know, I really want... Oh, one of the things we started doing with Invasion was

Bill Rose would become head designer during Invasion. And we started sort of doing themes for the blocks. So one of the things Invasion did to blocks that hadn't been there before was a mechanical theme. So if you look at blocks before that, okay, there's Shadow and there is Buyback. Or there's echo and there's cycling. You know, there's two mechanics. You know, there is phasing and what is the name? Blinking on it, what are you blocking?

Minus one, minus one. You guys know. Anyway, if you look back at the previous block, it was just kind of like, okay, there's mechanic cohesion, but it's just, I mean, it's cohesion in the sense of flanking. It's called flanking. Cohesion in the sense that, okay, it's the same mechanics, but it's not connected tissue. I mean, Tempest did try to make, you know, Shadow and Buyback play the opposite ends of a strategic thing where some is fast and some is slow. But it wasn't connected to tissue. So Invasion says, okay, we're a multicolor block.

Our block has a theme. Not only do we have a story, not only do we have an identity in a world, we have a mechanical theme. We are about multicolor. Odyssey says we're about graveyard. Onslaught says we're about creature types. Odyssey says we're about graveyard. Onslaught says we're about creature types. So when we got to Mirrodin, the thing I said to Tyler was, you know,

hey, I think where magic shines is where the world is reflective of what the mechanics are doing. Like one of the problems with Odyssey and Onslaught, like Odyssey, for example, we made this graveyard theme, but it didn't connect to the creative at all. What the story was and what the flavor was. In fact, the existence of Innistrad is Brady commenting on, wow, if we had just built the world to match what we were trying to do, we would have made a gothic horror world. And that really stuck with me. And we later made a gothic horror world. But it really stuck with me. And we later made a gothic horror world. But like, it didn't line up.

But Mirrodin, the idea there was me going, okay, I want to do an artifact block. Let's make a world where that is organic to what the world is. And Mirrodin really was the start of kind of the modern world building. That is the first time we sort of built worlds like we, like, I mean, we keep evolving how we build worlds, but it's the first time we built worlds that would, like, even in the sort of,

it sort of was the start of the modern world building era. And we spent a lot of time trying to figure out not just what Mirrodin was, but what was the cosmology of Mirrodin. How did it happen? Where did it come from? Why do the creatures look like they do? You know, we spent a lot of time really fleshing out the world.

And like I said, Tempest had done some of that. So it's not the first time we ever did it because Tempest had done it. But it's the first time we sort of created a process where it was the mechanics and the creative were ingrained in a way that they just hadn't before. A lot of the world building that happened before that was like, we're going to build a world and you build mechanics and we'll throw them together.

And then you get stuff like we make an enchantment themed set or block and you have literally Urza Saga called the Artifact Cycle. It's like the story is directly contradicting what the set is trying to do. Like, it literally, like, people didn't get the enchantment theme because the nature of what the story was so contradicted it that people couldn't see it. Not a good thing.

But Mirrodin's like, okay, okay, we're about artifacts, we're going to make an artifact world. We're going to core tie them together. And that is the start. Tyler would not leave the team for too long. He would eventually go on to do some other stuff. But so what happens there is Brady Dommermuth is in this group at this time. And it really sort of says, okay, we're really going to build our world and build new worlds to reflect what it is the world is about. And so what happens there is we look at our mechanics and we say, okay, how do we ingrain these in?

How do we explain the world that these elements are there? And so it is for the first time we really are building the world such that it's taking mechanics into account and it's reflecting the mechanics rather than mechanics just being an afterthought or, you know, like, okay, let's put them together and then after we put them together we'll try to see if we can change things a little bit to make it make sense.

It was much more ingrained. Okay. So the year that follows is Champs of Kamigawa. So that's Bill saying, hey, what if we built a world first and then built mechanics to match it? So that is Bill sort of thinking, like, kind of the idea of let's do a top-down set. Now, Bill made a classic mistake. I mean, we hadn't done it before. But Bill sort of put the dictum, we're going to do all the world building first and then do the mechanics.

And the problem we ran into was that mechanics are a little bit more flexible. Sorry, creative is a little bit more flexible than mechanics. So what happened was, we had this really flavorful world, but then in order to make mechanics match it, the mechanics were a little bit ham-fisted. All samurai have this mechanic. All ninjas have this mechanic.

All, you know, snake folk have this mechanic. All moon folk have this mechanic. And it ended up being, like, it was a very parasitic set. I think a lot of the problems with early Kamigawa, the original Kamigawa, you know, the original block, was that we kind of painted ourselves in a corner, that we did cool creative things,

but because we weren't working in conjunction with mechanics as smoothly as we could, it sort of erred in the other side, where the creative was really robust, but the mechanics didn't do a good enough job it sort of erred in the other side, where the creative was really robust, but the mechanics didn't do a good enough job sort of capturing what the world was. And that was a problem. Okay, so the following year is Ravnica. Oh, so the important part that happens here is

in the middle of Champs-Élysées-Kamagawa block, so Bill Rose had been the head designer and then he became the vice president of R&D. But for a while, he still was the head designer. And eventually, I think it was Randy Bueller that convinced Bill, like, Bill, you can't do both. Being the vice president is a full-time job.

Being the head designer is a full-time job. You can't do both. And then Randy pitched that I become head designer. And so, this is December of 2003, I became the head designer. And they said to me, well, part of being the head designer is we want integration

between creative and design. So, not only are we going to make you head designer, we're going to put you in charge of the creative team. So for two years, for Ravnica and Time Spiral, I was in charge of both. So one of the things that, and I think Ravnica in some ways,

for the first time, the person in charge of the mechanics was also the person in charge of the creative. That tiny window where that was true. And Ravnica is a really good example where I wanted to find something in which the two spoke to each other. And what happened there, for those that don't know the story of Ravnica, is we started with, I wanted to do 10 two-color pairs. Invasion had been a multicolor

block. I wanted to do another multicolor block. It was like four years later. I wanted to be not Invasion. Invasion was about playing lots of colors. So I said, what is the fewest colors you can play but still be multicolor? Two colors. So the idea that we started off with was it was going to focus on the 10 two-color pairs. And I wanted to focus on the enemies as much as the allies. From that idea, Brady gets the idea of guilds. What if we have a city world, and each of the two-color pairs represents this guild within the world? I loved the idea, and I ran with it. And that's what led to our 4-3-3 model, where the guilds are broken up between the sets. And another another big thing so another innovation of me becoming head designer was I wanted more block planning a lot of the way blocks had been

made um up until that point was we would make the first set and then we'd leave stuff for the second and third set to do but then it was kind of up to the second third set to figure out what they wanted to do and usually the third set was sort of like what it was kind of up to the second and third set to figure out what they wanted to do. And usually the third set was sort of like, what new thing can we do? And then what happened was during Invasion, we were making it, and I

and Henry Stern independently, by the same time, came up with this idea of what if the last set of the block was the enemy color? What if we did the ally colors for the first two, and the last set was the enemy set? And for the first time, there's this identity. Like, the last set had this identity to itself. And it really stuck with me.

So when I took over as head designer, I said, okay, I'm planning these blocks. They're not just going to be, you know, something, more of it, more of it. I really wanted to give them an identity. And Ravnica, for example, is me doing what I call the pie model, where the whole block was this whole thing, but we chopped it up.

So when you saw the first set, you kind of knew what was coming. You didn't know everything. But you knew, okay, there's two small sets. They're probably each going to have three guilds. And there's some amount of cycles that we created that you probably would expect to continue. The dual lands and the guild mages and things like that. But we really sort of made

this integration where there was this very themed thing to it. And then, as that went along, sort of in person with that, was the idea of, okay, we are going to also use

the story. And that's, this is the era where we... One of the big things, and Brady was a big believer in this, is, okay, he wants to be telling stories. We should be telling stories for magic. But the stories we should be telling should match the world we're on. So not only are the mechanics reflective of the world, the type of story, the genre, how we're telling it, should also be receptive of the world we're on. So not only are the mechanics reflective of the world, the type of story, the genre, how we're telling it should also be receptive of the world. And you know that really sort of got into us the idea of how we tell

the stories will be shaped by how the world is built. And so this is the era where stories were told... Earlier magic, the story had been done in books. I mean, very, very early magic, there wasn't any story. But there was a period in time where we kind of didn't do the story. We would just give the card set to a writer that was outside the building, that didn't work at Wizards. Or sometimes there are people that work at Wizards that were freelancing.

But anyway, we'd give it to somebody who would then sort of make their own story that kind of went along with it. And we had different successes. Like, I think during the Weatherlight Saga, we had a more planned-out story, so that matched a little bit more. There was a period of time after that where,

you know, we would figure out the general story we're telling and we would work with the writer, but it varied how much the story matched with the novel. I'm sorry, not the story. The cards that matched with the novel. Like oftentimes, for example, there would be a main character, like Xantcha was a main character in part of the Urza Saga story,

and there was no Zantia card. Because Zantia had been made up after the fact, past the point when we were making sets. And so you see a lot of that during that. What happens as we start getting into the Ravnir time period is there's more of a connection. And you start to see a lot of the writing gets done internally. People who are writing it are people that are familiar with what's going on and are working on the sets. And you start to see more integration between the stories and the sets. So that the sets are...

I mean, back during Tempest, there was a period of time, Michael and I did a lot of, like... In fact, if you took Tempest, you could storyboard it. In fact, we did this in the Duelist, and you can look this up on... If you Google Tempest storyboard. We'd actually told the story through the art. But anyway, when we left, that sort of got backtracked a lot, and things changed.

So Ravnica was us sort of rediscovering that and re-understanding that and really sort of re-concepting sort of how blocks worked and how blocks were structured. So after Ravnica was Lorwyn. Okay, so Lorwyn is interesting. So Lorwyn is the start of us saying,

hey, maybe large, small, small isn't the way we always have to do things. Up until that point, from Mirage all the way through Ravnica, our blocks really had been large, small, small. That had just been how we had done it. And for the first time, so what had happened was, and I talked about this during my cold snap, I talked about snow and cold snap. We had sort of at the last minute after Ravnica made a fourth set.

That wasn't part of Ravnica. It was, in fact, the missing Ice Age set. But we made a fourth set for the year. And so, oh, I'm sorry. I skipped a whole block. I skipped Time Spiral. Okay, let me talk about Time Spiral and then we will get to Lorwyn.

Sorry, I skipped Time Spiral. So Time Spiral was the same animal. Time Spiral, in fact, was the last year of the just large, small, small as we knew it. And so that year, it was the last year that just large, small, small as we knew it. And so that year, it was the second year that I was the head designer. And that year, I tried a different approach. I said, what if there's a theme that runs throughout the year, but we each set did its version of the theme.

So the theme was time. And what we had done was past, present, future. So time spirals all about the past, and there's a bonus sheet about the past, and it's making reference to the past, and making a lot of nostalgia calls about magic that had been, and there were legendary creatures that we had never seen before from magic's

past, and all this stuff. And we were pulling back mechanics from the past. Then, Planar Chaos was this alternate reality present. What if magic had been different? And we really explored this what-if quality to magic. And then Future Sight was the future. We were appearing in the future, and we had future shifter cards of mechanics that didn't exist yet,

and cards that didn't exist yet, and really sort of hinting at where magic might be going. And I think that the time spiral um really was sort of demonstrating how you could start to give sets unique identity like both ravnica and and time spiral sort of a lot of the influence of what i was trying to do as the head designer was i wanted the year block to have a theme i wanted the theme to be cohesive i wanted to feel like we're on Ravnica. It's Time Spiral. But I wanted to do so in a way that each set had its own identity.

That I didn't just want a thing, more of that thing, and yet more of that thing. I wanted to try to craft something where I go, okay, you know, past, present, future, they were each different from one another. That you, if you looked at a card from a set in the Timesboro block, you could tell me what set it was from

because each of them had a very distinctive quality to them and that was an important part of trying to continue blocks and give them an identity and make it feel like they were cohesive yet separate, that they came together to make something

and the story there, by the way, one of the things that we had decided, and this was a big thing of Brady to push for, was we had really wanted to integrate planeswalkers into our stories in a way that they hadn't been. And part of what, in order to do that, we realized, like, now we didn't want to integrate them. We wanted to make cards out of them.

We wanted to bring them into the game. The Planeswalkers were so core to what magic was, but not in a way the players were connecting to them. And part of it was they were a little bit too powerful. They kind of acted like gods. It's a little hard to relate to gods. So we wanted to empower them a little bit and we wanted to bring them as cards and we really wanted to rethink how we were doing them. We really wanted to sort of reshape the cosmology of magic. And so the idea was we were going to do a year-long story of this mega, you know, we're going to go back to Dominaria,

and time's falling apart, and the multiverse is falling apart, and we were going to do something big and grandiose. And in some ways, I think Time'sarrow was our first sort of giant story. We talk about event sets, sort of event block. But the first really large, scoping, giant story where everything's on the line, there's major stakes. And so we really used that to craft this large story and at the same time really make this evocative set.

craft this large story, and at the same time really make this evocative set. And so that was kind of the hurrah, in some ways, of the old block system. Of the large, small, small sort of system. Anyway, what I'm realizing here, guys,

is I'm almost to work, and I am nowhere done with this story. This was a much larger story than I realized when I started on it. So what I think I'm going to do is I am nowhere done with this story. This was a much larger story than I realized when I started on it. So what I think I'm going to do is I am going to wrap it up for today. And then on my way home tonight, I am going to finish this story. So I'm going to make it... I've been doing a little bit more drive from home just because I don't go to work as much, so I get less driving time.

But anyway, this is a fun story, and I had a really good stopping point because I think that Laura Wynn is starting to introduce a whole new thing to the story about, hey, maybe large, small, small isn't the way we should be doing things.

And so I'm going to stop here, and we'll tell that story tonight when I drive home from work. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this. But I can see wizards, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.