Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #972: Unfinity Design, Part 1

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

This podcast is part one of a multi-part series on the design of Unfinity. ...

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, after many years, I finally get to start talking about Infinity, so I'm very excited. So, Infinity, for those that somehow are not aware, is the fourth unset. So, way back in 1996, Bill Rose and Joel Mick came to me with an idea. They said, we had this idea for this set with a different border that's not tournament legal. See what you can do with that. And they gave it to me. And I ended up turning that into the unsets.
Starting point is 00:00:39 The idea, it was something that just, A, had a humoric element to it, that played around in space that normal magic couldn't play around. And Unglued did a lot of things that have later actually made their way to magic. It had four land for the first time. It had token creatures for the first time. It had multiplayer play for the first time. It did a lot of things that have gone on to become something that magic does do, but at the time was a little out there. And so the unsets have become a place for us to sort of push boundaries and try different things.
Starting point is 00:01:12 So in 19, or no, sorry, 2000, what was it, 2006? In 2006, I made Unhinged. And then in 2017, we made Unstable. And then there was a product a few years later called Unsanctioned that was a box set that we made 15 new Uncards for. So that had some Uncards in it. And then finally, we came to Infinity. So basically, most unsets have been a struggle to get made in the sense that the first one, no one quite knew what it was. Unglued, I got to make. No one really got in my way. I then made a set called Unglued 2 that got put in my head. It got designed, put away, never made. Unhinged took eight years to get made, and it was a struggle. Unstable took 13 years to
Starting point is 00:02:04 get made, and it was even more of a struggle. But Unstable came out, and it was a struggle. Unstable took 13 years to get made, and it was even more of a struggle. But Unstable came out, and it was very popular. It got reprinted four times. So getting to make Infinity was one of the first times ever, at least for a non... for not the first of the kind. It was the first time that I
Starting point is 00:02:20 was able to make the set without a major struggle. Mostly people said, okay, go ahead, you know, make it, which was a different experience for me. So basically what we decided was we're going to put on Infinity four to five years after Unstable, and they sort of said to me, what do you want to do? What do you want to make?
Starting point is 00:02:42 And so it was really up to me to sort of figure out the essence of what I wanted. Oh, the other important thing to the story, I guess I should mention this, is when we were making Infinity, I went and talked to Aaron Forsythe, who's my boss, and I said, Aaron, I would like to do something I've never done before. I would like to leave this product from the very beginning of the product to the very end of the product. I would like to leave design the whole way through. Now, normally this isn't something we do. We tend to divide into two. One person does the early part of the process. One does
Starting point is 00:03:13 the late part of the process. Obviously, I'm the early part of the process guy. But unglued and unhinged, I was, well, unglued, I led sort of all the way through. There wasn't development or anything of it. Unhinged, I kind of led most the way through, although there was a point at which Randy Bueller was on the team where, you know, I listened to what Randy was doing. Unstable, I had a handoff, meaning I did the design and then handed off for development. I went through a couple different people. Billy Moreno did some. Dave Humphries did some.
Starting point is 00:03:49 Ben Hayes did some. So it was a bunch of different people that did the second part. But anyway, I was really interested in actually seeing the product from the very beginning to the very end, which, like I said, it's pretty much unsets. I sort of did elements of this, but not in the official capacity that I wanted to do this time. I wanted to do this time. So I had never done set design, for example.
Starting point is 00:04:10 I've done lots and lots of vision designs, plenty of exploratory designs. I've never led set design, and I wanted to lead set design for the first time. Anyway, I got a sign-up from Aaron. He said I could do that. His only caveat was I needed to have a play designer on the set, who I listened to very carefully, as he was aware that play design is not my strong suit. And at the time, it was an unset and no one would ever play it. Or not no one. People who like playing unsets would play it.
Starting point is 00:04:34 But in tournament play. No, it wouldn't be in tournament play. So the play testing wasn't quite as crucial. But as you will see, the set ended up having some cards that are going to be outside of just purely casual play. Okay, so I started by saying, what exactly did I want this to be? So what I did with Unstable was I took a structure that had been very popular in normal Magic, which was the faction structure. And so I made a faction set. There were five factions. They ended up being ally color
Starting point is 00:05:12 factions based on one of the factions kind of had to be the steampluggers based on we were bringing back contraptions, and that kind of got us to red-green. It just didn't make sense in red-white or red-blue or red-black, really. So, anyway, we ended up doing ally factions.
Starting point is 00:05:28 But it was a faction set in the way we do faction sets. I mean, it was a little bit different in certain ways. We didn't give a mechanic for faction. But not all faction sets have a mechanic for faction. Anyway, we made a faction set. That's what we did. So, it was sort of like, okay, we're doing a brand new unset. What do I want to do with this unset that is something we know that has been successful,
Starting point is 00:05:56 but we've never done in an unset. And so the idea that I want, I mean, the thing that came to mind real quickly was to do what we call a top-down set. A good example of a top-down set might be Innistrad or Throne of Eldraine, or Pharos. You know, you take something that is a known quantity, Gothic horror, fairy tales, Greek mythology, and sort of do magic's take on it. And so, Dawn Mirren had been my art director for Unstable, and we worked really well together. She really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. We liked to work with each other.
Starting point is 00:06:27 And so it's pretty clear. I mean, Dawn, as soon as there was another unset set up, Dawn signed up to do it. And Dawn was very excited. So I went to Dawn and I said, Dawn, here's my idea. I really would like to do a top-down set. But I want to pick something that we just don't think we're going to do in normal magic. So something that sort of pushes boundaries a little bit. And so we went off,
Starting point is 00:06:52 and basically what I said to Dawn is, okay, let's take a little time. You think of what you want to do. I'll think of what I want to do, and we'll come back. So when we came back, Dawn said that she was interested in pushing into other genre space
Starting point is 00:07:06 because that's something that Magic, at the time, really hadn't done. So just so people are aware of the timeline of this, we started, as soon as Unstable came out and was successful, we started doing preliminary work on it. We didn't, the preliminary work lasted a while. We didn't get into the main design for a little bit, but when I'm talking about me talking to Dawn, this is super early. So I don't even know if Universe is Beyond was a concept yet. Or maybe it was in its early talking, maybe. But anyway, we really,
Starting point is 00:07:44 at the time, was like, okay, you anyway, we really at the time was like, okay, you know, it'd be fun to sort of push another genre space. And I think Dawn was really intrigued not just by the genre space itself, but sort of a particular take on it.
Starting point is 00:07:59 And she was infatuated by the idea of retro science fiction. So for those that are unaware, in the 1950s, 50s, 60s, there was this push of people trying to imagine the future. But it was a really, it was a very stylized look of the future that was very endemic of the way the 1950s captured the future. And Dawn was really interested in creating a set that had that sort of,
Starting point is 00:08:35 the future through the eyes of the past might be the best way to describe it. It was a very stylized look that came from a particular time period. And so she was very interested in the idea of doing retro science fiction. Meanwhile, I had always really wanted to do something with circuses. In fact, in the third Great Designer Search, we did a top-down design, and I sort of said,
Starting point is 00:08:56 man, I want to do circuses forever. I guess I don't think we're going to do them. And I gave a challenge with a circus theme. If you guys remember Greatest Dinosaur 3. So I was really interested in sort of, I loved the idea of taking a genre space that people knew well and circuses are something that both they exist and, I mean in real life they exist and they show up a lot in pop culture. There's a lot of circus archetypes that are pop culture circus
Starting point is 00:09:28 archetypes. I then realized that circus was probably not enough. We need to fill up a whole set. So we expanded from circus to amusement park to carnival. Those all kind of blend together. And so I went to Don with this idea of this Circus Plus. And what we realized is and so I went to Don with this idea of this circus plus. And what we realized is Don's idea and my idea, while they were very different ideas, had some ability to blend together.
Starting point is 00:09:55 What if we did a circus slash amusement park slash carnival that was done through the lens of retro science fiction? And that's when we came up with the idea of the Astratorium. It's a Meyer of the Magnificence Intergalactic Astratorium of Fun, I think is the official name of it. So the Astratorium, the idea was, it's a bus of spaceships that are the park that can travel from world to world. And so the idea is, it's a traveling sort of space carnival, if you will.
Starting point is 00:10:26 The center of it is a big top, so there's a circus there. But it's an amusement park. There's rides. There's games. It sort of had everything. And the nice thing that excited me about Circus Amusement Park Carnival is there are lots and lots of trope space to play in. There are a lot of cars that Magic had really never touched upon.
Starting point is 00:10:46 Magic had, by the way, dipped its toe a little tiny bit into circus with Rakdos. That Rakdos on Ravnica were performers, and there's a little bit of a really dark circus that they performed. One of the things that we want to do, and this is just the nature of unsets in general, was we want to do, and this is just the nature of unsets in general, was we want to be fun and light. Like, one of the things, so the philosophy for unsets have been since the very beginning. There's a spectrum.
Starting point is 00:11:12 There's a spectrum from very serious magic to very sort of lighthearted magic. Now, it's fine that if you want to be very serious about it and compete and, like, we have an entire pro tour and world championship and and sanctioned events like if you want to go play magic and see if you're the best and play really seriously you can't that exists that's something magic has access to but the other end of the spectrum the idea of i can just hang out with my friends and have fun and i can just it can be a social experience it can be something where know, it's not that you don't try to win. It's not that winning isn't something that you don't aim for maybe.
Starting point is 00:11:48 But it's all about sort of I'm enjoying the time with my friends. And I really wanted to make sure that magic had expressions for all those different aspects. And at the time I made Unglued, we were launching the pro tour and there's all this stuff pushed towards series play that I really wanted something that pushed toward casual play. And the unsets have always been that other end of the spectrum.
Starting point is 00:12:14 Like one of the things, for example, with unsets is I love the idea as a designer, well, what can I do that's normally off limits but not necessarily here? A great example is there's a lot of space in the rules where the audience will understand it. It's not complicated. You know, I can explain the rule to you and you can play it correctly, but the rules technically have a problem with it.
Starting point is 00:12:39 Last Strike is a great example that showed up in, actually, yeah, Last Strike showed up in... Originally in Unstable. We do have a card with Triple Strike in Unfinity. Anyway, the Last Strike is one of those things where it's not hard to explain to people Last Strike. The idea is the opposite of First Strike. That if I have Last Strike,
Starting point is 00:13:00 it happens after a sort of normal strike, if you will. But the problem is making it work in the rules is very complicated and would cause a lot of problems for rewriting the rules. Now, if last strike was something we think we'd do on lots and lots of cards, maybe we'd be willing to rewrite the rules. To stick on a handful of cards, not worth it. But it's something people can understand. And that there's a lot of stuff that falls in that space that it's fun, you know,
Starting point is 00:13:23 or even messing around with verbal components, dexterity components, outside assistance. There's a lot of fun things that are fun that, like, in a tournament might be problematic, but, you know, sitting around with your friends is not problematic. So that's another thing is that there's just a lot of open space and things that we can do. And on top of that, unsets have always been us pushing boundaries and trying to do things that are a little farther than the normal set that we can push things a little more
Starting point is 00:13:48 okay so I know that we're going to do a retro science fiction space carnival amusement park I know that before exploratory begins Dawn and I both say okay that sounds like a cool idea the one other idea that I had before design even began was we had done, we do what we
Starting point is 00:14:08 call a hackathon. So a hackathon is when we stop doing magic for a week, our normal magic, and we work on a project. We divide into teams and work on a project for a week. We did, for example, a hackathon on supplemental sets and both Modern Horizons and Jumpstart came out of that hackathon. We did a hackathon on future design space and keyword counters and some of the punch-out technology. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of things that came out. So we do hackathons.
Starting point is 00:14:42 We explore stuff. Things come out of them. So one of the hackathons, I think for the supplemental set one, we looked at, so there's a series of games called legacy games, where you play a game and then they're usually existing games that already exist. But there's a version now that when you play the game, you modify the cards as you're playing. And then in future playing, those cards are forever changed. That you might, you know, like you'll put stickers on a card. So that card,
Starting point is 00:15:12 let's say in game two you sticker a card, then in game three, and game four and game five, all future games, that sticker card is just what the card does now. Meaning things can change, that the game can change over time. And usually a legacy game you play it a certain amount
Starting point is 00:15:27 of times. Like, it's an experience. It's meant to be played ten times and, you know, the first game this change happens, second game that change happens and it's an experience that things change over time. And so there was a team exploring the idea of Magic Legacy. And so
Starting point is 00:15:43 they were playing around with stickers. And then there was a different hackathon where we played around with stickers in a different way. But anyway, and I was on that team. The first team, I saw their work, but I wasn't on the team. And the second team, I was on the team. So, and there was a product, D&D did a product, I believe, or one of the D&D board a product, I believe,
Starting point is 00:16:07 or one of the D&D board games, anyway, it came with stickers. So I learned that our production team had made stickers. I had had a chance in multiple hackathons to see sort of that stickers really opened up this interesting space. And so I was intrigued by the idea of, was there something we could do with stickers? So I went and talked to our production people and what I said to them is here was my goal. This is what I wanted
Starting point is 00:16:32 out of stickers. I wanted stickers that you could put on cards that would peel off the cards, that wouldn't harm the cards so that if you were sticking it, it wasn't permanent. It wasn't like, in the legacy version we were forever changing the cards. Once you stickered it, there was no intent the sticker came off.
Starting point is 00:16:48 But I'm like, could we do a lighter glue? I wanted to do a sticker that went on the card, but then would come off the card, and it wouldn't harm the card. And the idea was that you could put it on multiple times. I sort of compared it to Post-it Note. Turns out the glue in the actual product is a little stronger than, I mean,
Starting point is 00:17:04 it comes off your card. It's a little bit stronger than post-it note, it turned out. But it's something that can go on and off multiple times, and it doesn't harm the card. So I went to Tom Wanderstrand, who you might know as an artist of magic, oversees
Starting point is 00:17:20 our production. There's a whole team that sort of figures out card stock, and like the actual, the act of printing things and making things. So what I learned from stickers was we could do stickers. And the way stickers worked is that you put stickers on kind of like a card sheet. And then you sort of, there's a device that punched, made an imprint. Because with stickers, you want to peel them off and you want sort of them to be cut around the sticker.
Starting point is 00:17:50 And so what I learned was, the way stickers would work is, we would have a grid of space that for magic cards, I think was 6x8, so 48 cards. And then each card individually, it's not that you have individual die line. You have a die line for all the cards together. That makes sense. I mean, you print them as a six by eight thing. And then every card is in the exact same place every time you print it. And you make one giant die cut, if you will. So what that means is that you're going to print them on a sheet. And there's a sticker stock. So you have to print them on a sticker stock, and then this die cut comes,
Starting point is 00:18:26 and it cuts it so that now they peel off. It cuts around the shape, if that makes sense. So anyway, I talked with Tom. I got a sense of what we could do, and we could put four color on the stickers, meaning they could be in full color. Sorry. When you print, you want to print know how many colors you can print in.
Starting point is 00:18:49 We had access to full color printing. Like I said, they had made stickers before. Wizards had made stickers before in a different product. So we had some expertise with stickers. Not in a magic booster. There were challenges to making a sticker sheet on a magic card, sort of. Or at least something that was the size of a magic booster. And there were challenges to making a sticker sheet on a magic card, sort of. Or at least something that was the size of a magic card.
Starting point is 00:19:10 So there were challenges. And I wanted it to be glue that came off and went back on again. So that was a little bit different. But anyway, I talked with Tom. He and I figured out the parameters of what we could do. The other thing that was really important for me with stickers was that I want,
Starting point is 00:19:26 I want, whenever I make an unset, to have high variance. I want the stickers to be, or sorry, not stickers. One of the things about casual play, so another real quick thing, is variance is something that tends to be a lot of fun. And what I mean by variance is just something can happen, but there's a range of things that can happen. And the way I like to think about it is,
Starting point is 00:19:53 let's say you play with a deck. You make a deck and you play 10 games with it. How different will those games be? The lower the variance, the more exactly the games will play out. The games will have a low variance game. They play out exactly the same. High variance, they play out very differently.
Starting point is 00:20:11 Normally, in sort of traditional tournament magic, we want to keep variance to a certain level. Not no variance. We get some variance. And shuffling cards is obviously variance as well. But we try to keep our variance to a certain level because we want skill to matter in high-end tournament play. We want someone to win the game because they're the more skilled opponent and not because, oh, somebody got lucky, right? We don't want like the world championship
Starting point is 00:20:37 coming down to somebody flipping a coin or something, right? We want it to be something in which skill wins the day. But one of the things we know from game design is that variance is a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. Like, ooh, what's going to happen? And so what we, one of my maxims for unsets
Starting point is 00:20:55 has always been, just as it's the spectrum of the highest amount of social play, I always want it to be the highest amount of variance. Because variance is tons of fun. It's a lot of fun not to know what's going to happen. And there's a lot of exciting moments of variance.
Starting point is 00:21:11 And once we get away from the competitive play part of it, like this product is designed specifically not to be in competitive play, I'm like, I'm going to up the variance. I want variance to be high. So one of the ways whenever you make variants high is you want a lot of possibilities for different things to happen. So when Tom Wanderstrand told me that we were going to have 48 different sticker sheets, I knew from then and there I didn't want to repeat things. I wanted the stickers to be all different. That was my plan. And we knew from looking at a sticker sheet that you could get a bunch of stickers on it
Starting point is 00:21:45 and so the big thing that I was trying to figure out was okay, I knew I could get a whole bunch of stickers on it, I knew we could be in full color I knew we had lots of printing we could do, I knew that we could make them, or Tom had every belief that he could make them restickable
Starting point is 00:22:00 we had to prove it, there was testing to do but Tom was very confident he could do that mostly because it has to do with what Tom was very confident he could do that. Mostly because it has to do with what they call the tackiness of the glue, which is how sticky is the glue, essentially. And glue is one of the things you can control. So it was just a matter of how tacky did we want the glue. Anyway, so we went into exploratory design. And what I said to the team is,
Starting point is 00:22:24 look, I don't know what we're doing with the stickers. I don't know how the stickers are going to tie into this retro science, you know, the retro science fiction carnival amusement park circus. Like, I didn't know how it was all going to tie together. But I said exploratory, I'm really, I'm intrigued by stickers. I think stickers are a cool component, and kind of what we want to do in Unsets is push in space we've never pushed before, do something we've never done before. And I know stickers is a little bit out there,
Starting point is 00:22:57 but on some level, I feel the Unsets aren't doing something you go, what? Like, then Unsets aren't being Unsets, right? I have to do something where you're a little taken away, that we're pushing things a little in new space that we haven't pushed before. And so I knew that we wanted to do that. And so what I did is I started an exploratory design. I just said to my team, okay, you can do whatever you want with the stickers. No holds barred. All I'm telling you is there's a sticker sheet. Okay.
Starting point is 00:23:24 I said the following. There's going to be one of, instead of a card, we're going to have a sticker sheet that's going to be on a card, but have stickers on it. There can be multiple stickers on it. They can be however big you want them to be within the confines of fitting on a card. They're multi, you know, they can be multicolored. They can be colored. What do you want to do with it? What can we do? And so a lot of exploratory was just blue sky design, as we call it, for stickers. So one of the things that's really interesting is the team really, like, obviously the low-hanging fruit of stickers is you sticker cards. But the team wasn't restricted to that.
Starting point is 00:24:04 Like, for example, Annie was the first one that just said, what if I just sticker objects? That's how animate object came about. What if I just sticker an object? I think it was hand sanitizer. And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to turn my hand sanitizer into a token creature and attack you. And that was just sort of really out sort of like really out of the box thinking
Starting point is 00:24:26 that was very exciting for us. We talked about stickers going on players, maybe much like curses or something. Maybe you could put it on a player and it signifies something about the player. We use stickers to attach cards. Maybe, you know, you sticker two cards together and now these cards are attached in some way.
Starting point is 00:24:45 We explored a lot of really outer-bounds cool stuff, and a few little things like animated objects stuck around. But the space that we were most intrigued by, which, like I said, a lot of times, when we call something the low-hanging fruit, being obvious doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do. So we looked a lot about, okay, if I can stick around cards, what do I want to stick around cards?
Starting point is 00:25:08 And essentially there were a couple major categories. The first big thing we could do was we could add things to cards, right? We could, well, we could either change things on cards or we could add things to cards. Those are the two biggest things we could do. We could also remove things from cards either by covering them up or by, like, for a while we just had blank things
Starting point is 00:25:32 and all you did is just, like, we played this mechanic we tried at one point where you were taking out words. The problem we found with the taking out words thing, by the way, was every once in a while there was something cool you could do with it that you can remove a word but a lot of times it just you didn't know what happened
Starting point is 00:25:48 it's like the rule system is not so robust that I can just take out a word from any card and just go well clearly there's an answer to what happens here but anyway mostly replacing like things being replacing or additive were the two things that were the most showed the most potential.
Starting point is 00:26:07 Right. Like I could add something to the card that wasn't there before, or I could take something on the card and change it. So what we did basically is we said, OK, what is everything on a magic card? What could I replace? What could I add? And we sort of wrote down all the different aspects of the card. to add. And we sort of wrote down all the different aspects of the card. And pretty much, I mean, essentially what we found is there was the name, there was the mana cost, there was the art, there was the card type line, there was the rules text, there was the flavor text, there was the power of the toughness, and there was a few minor things like collector number or, you know, artist credit. In the end, what we found was anything that was too minor like collector number, it wouldn't come up enough.
Starting point is 00:26:52 So let me walk through what happened. Names we found to be interesting. And one of the things we're always looking for is what are effects that we can do. Like, remember, when we first started making the set, it was an unset in the sense that no card we played ever in any tournament format.
Starting point is 00:27:10 So when we started inventing this and we were working early on, we had no idea the eternal path of what happened later on. We didn't know that yet. So, we, names were something that we could care about that normal, you know, normal magic can't.
Starting point is 00:27:28 One of the rules about sort of the normal rules is that all cards must be equivalent to their English version. And so all cards with the same name are equivalent to the English version. And what that meant is if I have Grizzly Bear, it doesn't matter what set Grizzly Bear is from. Grizzly Bear might be reprinted lots of times. So anything that might be different between different printings of Grizzly Bear, or any card that might have multiple printings, can't be something we mechanically care about. Well, cards will have different art and artists. Cards can have different expansion symbols.
Starting point is 00:28:03 Cards can have different watermarks. They're just things that aren't the same between cards. So magic normally can't care about rarity, can't care about watermarks. Also, we need to treat all cards the same regardless of language
Starting point is 00:28:20 and all of them function the same as the English language card. So for that reason we sort of can't care about names or at least we can care about whether it's name A or not and whether it's you know is it named blah that that we can care about. Oh if blah is in place something happens. You can care about it as a whole entity. What you can't care about is are there two words in it? Does it start with a certain letter? Qualities of the name you can't care about.
Starting point is 00:28:48 So one of the things that when we're looking at stickers, one of the things about name stickers was, hey, names is something that we can care about mechanically, so that's kind of cool, because changing names could mechanically matter, because we'll care about names. So names seem good. Mana value, the problem
Starting point is 00:29:03 with mana value is mana value wouldn't mean anything unless you could sticker people's cards in their hand. And mana is sort of, you know, there's a certain amount of safety valve to mana. Mana is a means to make
Starting point is 00:29:19 sure that things don't break. So messing with mana, both the cards, you'd have to mess with things in your hand and we like to keep information secret. But like if you're going to sticker something, you kind of have to know what they're stickering and stuff. So mana presented a bunch of problems.
Starting point is 00:29:36 Both in sort of execution and in balance, you know, play design issues. So we decided not to do mana value. Art seemed flavorful and cool, and much like names, we can care about art in unsets in a way that you just can't care about in normal sets.
Starting point is 00:29:52 The other problem with art is there's some subjectivity, and rules for tournament purposes do not like subjectivity. But when it's fun casual play, is that a hat? Is it not a hat? Some of those conversations can be fun in a more casual play. You know, is that a hat? Is it not a hat? You know, some of those conversations can be fun in a more casual setting. And also, we knew that if you're going to make stickers,
Starting point is 00:30:11 one of the funnest things to do with stickers is art stickers. Like, we understood how compelling art stickers are, right? It's just a lot of fun to put stickers on things. So art seemed cool. Card type was one of those things that it just didn't matter enough. Changing the card type wasn't super relevant
Starting point is 00:30:32 and again caused some rules issues we had to explain. Like yeah, I mean, oh, the other thing we decided I think super super early on, in fact this might have been when we started exploratory design, was this idea early on, this might have been when we started Exploratory Design was this idea early on. I'm not sure when we officially
Starting point is 00:30:49 decided this. But we decided that we didn't want you stickering other people's cards. That even though we were going to make it safe to sticker, other people might feel uncomfortable. We didn't want you messing with other people's cards if they didn't feel comfortable about it. We didn't think that was okay.
Starting point is 00:31:10 So we said you can't sticker other people's cards. So when you started getting into card types, you can change your own card types. What does that mean? And if you turn your creature into not a creature, then it can't attack. What's the value to that? So card types, and you couldn't do your opponent. the most valuable thing is I turned your creature into an artifact
Starting point is 00:31:28 so now it can't attack. But if I can't sticker your cards, then it didn't mean anything. So, card type just didn't have enough function to it. And card subtype, we just didn't have enough cards that mattered. Like, yeah, you could change creature
Starting point is 00:31:44 type, but there wasn't a lot of cards that you, like, the set didn't care about creature type too much. I mean, a little bit on individual cards, but not enough that, you know, it just didn't make enough sense. And we wanted these, we wanted the stickers to matter most of the time. Rules text, yeah,
Starting point is 00:31:59 there's a lot of things you can do with rules text. That made a lot of sense. It was cool things. You could add abilities and stuff. Flavor text, we talked about it. That it might be fun to make flavor text that you put on cards. But it was sort of like
Starting point is 00:32:11 changing flavor text didn't mean much. Like, we can care about flavor text. There are cards in the set that care about flavor text. But it wasn't like changing flavor text did all that much. So, we did talk about having flavor text for a while. It just didn't seem like it was relevant enough.
Starting point is 00:32:29 And also changing flavor text while it might be, I guess, in a vacuum fun. It proved to be something that just didn't have the impact a lot of other choices had. And then the last thing was power toughness. Yeah, that had a huge impact. So when the dust settled, we realized there were four things that were relevant, which was name, art, ability stickers, and power toughness. Anyway, guys, so one of the things definitely about Infinity is going to be I have a lot of depth of information, and I know a lot about it.
Starting point is 00:33:03 So there will be a bunch of different podcasts. In fact, this is part one, and I'm at work, and I barely got through stickers. So there will be a lot of podcasts on Unfinity just because I have a great amount of detail on it. But anyway, guys, I'm literally not part of the work. So we're going to wrap up our story right now. We get to the point of figuring out what the four stickers are
Starting point is 00:33:21 for the sticker sheets, and we'll stop our story right here. But I will pick up and tell lots more Unfinity stories, and I will continue telling the story of its design in future podcasts. But anyway, guys, I'm now parked, 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
Starting point is 00:33:37 next time. Bye-bye.

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