Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #984: The Brothers' War Design

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

In this podcast, I talk all about the design of The Brothers' War.

I'm pouring my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking about the design of the Brothers War. Okay, so the story begins a while ago. So we had what we called a hackathon where we come up with ideas for sets. And one of our hackathon was all about supplemental sets. And so Ethan and I individually pitched the idea that eventually we would become Modern Horizons. Ends up being a successful set.

So Mark Globus, one of our producers, goes to Ethan because Ethan had pitched Modern Horizons and said, hey, what other cool supplemental sets could we do? And so Ethan was really thinking about, okay, what is like really something that the infested franchise fan would just have a lot of, would really love to see? And one of his ideas was the Brothers War as a set. Now he pitched it as a supplemental set. You know, the idea being, you know, hey, this is a story that the franchise player

would love, and maybe we could do, you know, a supplemental set built around it. You know, we had done event sets for premiere sets, like, you know, War of the Spark, but we hadn't done that yet. And so he's like, well, what if we do an event set for a supplemental set that's, you know, the biggest magic story never told? So for those, real quickly, the history is Antiquities, which was the second ever magic expansion, told the story of the Brothers War. But through the lens of time, that you were digging up Antiquities, you were digging up artifacts from the past, and you were kind of piecing together this war that happened. And so there's a lot of names referenced, there's objects referenced, but it's not a really cohesive story in antiquities.

It's more just getting the hints of things. And the idea they were playing around with is, in archaeology, you have to kind of piece things together. And so it was a cool concept. The set was all about artifacts, and. And so it was a cool concept. The set was all about artifacts. And so anyway, it was a neat idea. And the first set actually ever to really have any story to it. The names Urza and Mishra showed up in Alpha,

but just as names. There wasn't any more definition to it. And so Antiquities really put on the map the idea that A, that magic can really have story, and B, who was Urza, who was Mishra, and started sort of giving the beginning of that. Now, Jeff Grubb would later go write a book called The Brothers' War, which was kind of the definitive telling of what happened in the Brothers' War.

But other than antiquities, it kind of teased at it, and a handful of cards, Urza Saga, Block had a couple cards that referenced it. But I mean, it was the kind of thing that got teased a little bit. But we really, there's characters that are pretty central to the Brothers' War that had never had a card. And it was just, anyway, so Ethan pitched this idea of what if we do the Brothers War? And people were very excited.

They thought that sounded like a cool idea. Okay, so flash forward. I'm having my one-on-one with Aaron. So Aaron's my boss, Aaron Forsythe. We meet once a week at Wizards. Managers and their direct reports meet once a week to sort of talk through, see how things are going. And so he and I were chatting, and he said to me, what do you think of the idea of a Brothers War set?

And I'm like, that sounds awesome. I think players would really like that. And then he said to me, Ethan pitched it as a supplemental set, but what do you think of it as a premiere set? And I was like, absolutely. I think that'd be an amazing premiere set. You know, I said, the only issue issue which is not even a mechanical issue it's more of a flavor issue

is our sets tend to be set in the present we'd have to explain like how is the Brothers War relevant to what's going on now and I mean I said there's a little bit of creative stuff to work out but I go from a mechanical standpoint we can make an awesome you know like I think Brothers War would make a great premiere set. So what Aaron said to me is, okay, well, I also think it'd be a great set, but I think that I have to prove this.

You know, there was some doubt from sort of, you know, the people he has to report to. And so what he said to me is, here's what I'd like you to do. Could you make me a prototype? Can you make something that I can play with other people to demonstrate the potential of what the Brothers War could be as a set? And I said, sure, okay, definitely I can do that. You know, from time to time, one of my jobs, sometimes, I mean, I often talk about sort of the making of the sets, but sometimes there's what I call the selling of the set, that you have to sort of make just enough to tantalize people

so the people that are unsure can see it and go, ooh, that's exciting, yes, let's make that. So Ari Nee had just won the Great Designer Search 3, and so he had started Wizards, I mean, he had won and then, whatever, it took a couple months before he came out to Wizards. But he had just started at Wizards. And so the idea was, I thought he would be a good person for this task.

So what I did is I said to him, okay, you and I are going to make this. And I put him in charge of it. I said, you know, I mean, I will be helping you, but I'm going to put you in charge of sort of making all the cards. And here's what I want. This is what I said, you know, I mean, I will be helping you, but I'm going to put you in charge of sort of making all the cards. And here's what I want. This is what I said I wanted. I wanted two decks, one of Mishra and one of Urza.

And I think we decided that Urza was going to be white-blue and Mishra was going to be black-red. And I just want two decks that can play against each other. Aaron had mentioned the idea of maybe having a meld giant Urza. So we're like, okay, let's definitely do that. And, you know, so it's like, okay, we want to make these decks. Let's figure out how to do that. We decided we wanted to put a mechanic in each deck. Or one or more.

So I basically said to Ari, that's a general gist. We wanted these two decks to show off what this set could be like. So, for the Urza deck, because we were talking about doing meld for the Urza, and we ended up

doing meld for Mishra and Urza. Each deck had a meld card, like a rare meld card. There's an idea that I was toying around with. Host Augment had been a mechanic that I had made in Unstable that had been very popular. And it dawned on me

that you could use meld technology for Host Augment. So the idea is instead of being a host with a creature type, or was it a super type? I think it was a super type. Anyway, host went on creatures, and then augment was like an enchantment, sort of. I mean, it was technically a creature, but it acted like an enchantment.

It was technically a creature. But what if you had all the hosts and the augments were just creatures you actually cast that are on the board, and then if you had basically an A and a B, a left side and a right side, you could meld them together. And that the A side would be the trigger condition

and the B side would be the effect. So augments are the trigger condition and hosts are the effect. So the idea is, could we do that? So for the Urza deck, we made this sort of meld mechanic that was kind of a host-augment meld mechanic. And then

for Mishra, Ari came up with the idea of using Unearth. I forget whether there was any Unearth. There might have been a little bit of Unearth in Urza 2 or maybe it was just in Mishra. Anyway, it was a mechanic, Unearth was a mechanic, actually I had made,

back in Shards of Alara. We were looking for mechanic for Grixis. Ironically, I wasn't even, I was on three mini teams, not on Grixis, and I made the Grixis mechanic somehow. I think because they were having trouble finding quite what they wanted,

and my idea basically, Unearthed basically was flashback but for creatures. I think I called it Flash Dance of the Dead was my working name. But the idea was, how do you do flashback but on creatures? And the idea is, oh, well you get them once. You get them for a turn, they have haste, but at the end of the turn they get exiled. So you sort of get it back, but only for a singular turn. But anyway, if you know much about the Brothers' War, the story that both

Urza and Mishra are artificers, and both of them dig up a lot of Thran technology. So Unearthed was pretty on the mark for matching the flavor of what they were doing. I think Ahri also put in a little bit of Phyrexian mana into Mishra's deck, because

Mishra was influenced by the Phyrexians. So anyway, we made two decks. I helped make some cards, but Ahri was in charge of the decks. Ahri did the mountain share of the work on the decks. And then we played them with Aaron. Aaron liked them. Aaron then played them with Bill and Ken and other people he needed to.

They liked them. And so we got sign-off on, okay, we're going to do the Brothers War. And the creative team, exactly what I had said, they had to figure it out. And so we were in the middle of doing the Phyrexian

arc. The idea that maybe the solution to the Phyrexians lied in the past because Urza had interacted with the Phyrexians before and they play a role in the story. And so they came up with a reason

why Teferi goes back in time to witness the Brothers' War so he could learn something that could be valuable in the fight against the Phyrexians. So we found a way to sort of blend it in creatively. Okay, so, and then once it was time to do it, I was really happy with all the work that Ari had done. And I'd worked with Ari on a bunch of other sets, and I decided that I really wanted Ari to have this be his first vision design. So I put Ari on the set. And the idea was that we were going to use what we had done in the sort of the demo decks as a jumping off point.

So what happened was, let me walk through the mechanics. Meld. So we knew we wanted to do the rare melds. So when we had made them in the demo decks, Urza was a planeswalker that, I think he had six abilities. In the final version, he has one static ability

and five loyalty abilities. And Mishra, in our original version, I think he had six activated abilities that was just a little mind-melty. And so we ended up making sort of, I don't know what to call it, but a charm is three choices, pick one. A command is four choices, pick two. So we did six choices, pick three.

So we did whatever the next step up from a command is. Not that there's going to be a lot of them because you need a giant card to fit it all on. But we did a thing where when he comes in play, you get to pick three things out of six choices. So he generates some ability. And Mishra was influenced by the Frexian, so we showed that transformation in his meld card. We also decided Urza was white-blue, Mishra was red-black. We decided that we wanted to have a green card just to balance it out. Titania plays a big role in the story, so we made a Titania card.

So those were the rare meld cards. We tried the host augment thing for a while and just realized that it was a little more complex than we needed for what we were doing. I think maybe it might be the right set to do it. It's not that it couldn't work. It was more that it just wasn't a great fit for this set. We did try a version of meld at common where there was a common artifact creature

and then a common spell. And if you played the spell while the creature was on the battlefield, or you cast the creature while the spell was in your graveyard, you could meld it. But the problem we ran into a couple fold. One was there's some combinatorics to making meld work that But the problem we ran into a couple fold. One was there's some combinatorics to making meld work

that were causing us a little bit of pain. Not unsolvable. But probably the bigger problem was the reason we liked all the different meld things was the idea that it played into ingenuity. That, you know, Urza and Mishra were artificers,

and they really, you know, were hobbling things together and taking old tech and tweaking and doing cool things. And we thought that sort of played into the ingenuity of them as inventors. But what we found was we were doing the Brothers War. It wasn't called, like, Adventures with Urza. You know, it was a war. And so really the core of what the set was was artifact creatures smashing into each other.

Oh, and that's something, by the way, I didn't get into. One of the things we decided in the demo right away was because we were harkening back to early Magic, we wanted all the artifacts to have generic mana costs. Now, we knew we needed some color in them because we've made enough artifact sets where everything's colorless to know the problems that causes. So the rule was the mana cost had to be generic, but if you were unearthing it or you were

melding it or whatever you were doing with it, other costs could cost mana. You know, you could have other, you could have activation costs, you could have things that cared about certain basic land types. You know, you could do things in which to optimize the card, you wanted to have the color. But the card was playable without that color. And we felt that captured enough of the early sense of artifacts and magic.

Like, we wanted... Like, we had to sort of make it such that it worked for modern magic, but we did want to get a little bit of a sensibility of... Because we were making a callback to antiquities, which is pretty early magic, so we did that. Okay, anyway, sorry, back to, but we wanted giant monsters smashing into each other, and

so we finally decided that the meld on the rares showing final, you know, transformations of the main characters made a lot of sense, but the common meld was just kind of playing in space that didn't quite reaffirm what this set was about. And that's a common thing you find when you're making sets. You want to maximize the set you're making. Rather than, you know, like, here's a cool idea, but is this making the set as cool as it can be? Anyway, so that failed, by the way. We did a handover, by the way. The common melds were handed over from Vision to Set Design. So they got removed in set design.

Okay, next up. Proliferate. Not proliferate. The proliferate is in the set. Prototype. I meant prototype. So when we were trying to design, we were trying to figure out how to have multiple states of artifacts.

We liked the idea of evolution. Something we tried early on in the design was having multiple things. Like, you know, it's the normal ornithopter. It's advanced ornithopter. Like, you would see evolution. We ended up not having space for that. But it encouraged us to make the prototype mechanic, where the idea was you could see an early version or you could see a later version. And in some ways, it's a lot like a split card or MDFC,

you know, in that you have two options what it is. It's flavored as early version and later version. The early version is cheaper but smaller, and the later version is just, like, bigger. So the idea is what the card does doesn't change, just how big it is. And part of making cool prototype designs is a lot of the rules text varies depending upon how big the it is. And part of making cool prototype designs is a lot of the rules text

varies depending upon how big the creature is. So there's a lot of things we can do where the bigger the creature is, the more powerful the rules text is. It's not just a matter of the creature's more powerful, but the rules text interacts in fun ways. You can trigger up power, or you can do things in which it being bigger

just makes it a more powerful card. And then we decided we wanted color in it, but rather than kick them to make the more expensive thing the colored thing, we decided to make the cheaper thing the colored thing. So if you want to do the early prototype stuff, you need to be in the color. If not, you can cast it for the big version. And there's some archetypes in the set, red, green, and green, blue, that are very much about ramping into larger things.

Red, green is sort of the medium, and blue, green is kind of the larger stuff. But the idea is both of those can use prototype cards where you're not even playing the color of the prototype. The plan is not that you're playing the small version, you're going to ramp into the big version. And that was kind of cool that they could, that those decks can actually draft some of the big prototype cards,

even though they're not playing the colored mana with it. So we messed around a lot with prototype. I know in set design, the big question was, do you treat them like kicker or do you treat them like split card slash MDFCs, modal double-faced cards? Meaning, you know, when you cast the smaller one and you paid colored mana, is it colored? Does it have a mana cost? Is that

the mana cost? The reason we went down the split card MDFC route is it just made a more interesting card. There was less abuse with it. We didn't want you casting a high expensive mana value card but for a cheap cost. So anyway, we ended up making it so that if you casting a high-expensive, mana-valued card, but for a cheap cost.

So anyway, we ended up making it so that if you cast a small one, that's what you cast. It's that small thing. It's colored. It's that mana value. So anyway, that was Prototype. Next up, so we liked Unearth, but we experimented.

We were, you know, during Exploratory, we definitely tried some other things. And one of the ideas, we came up with something called Scrap. So the idea of Scrap was that you had an ability. It wasn't an artifact. It wasn't an artifact. Not just creatures. Not artifacts.

And then you could remove the card. You pay some mana, exile the card, and you could kind of, like of mutate it to an artifact on the battlefield. So the idea is, let's say I have a card that I can tap to gain life. Well, if I scrap it, I can attach it to an artifact

I have on the battlefield, and now, in addition to the other things it can do, it now can tap to gain life. It sort of adds that functionality. And the flavor we liked was, you know, this idea of they're finding things, you know, the Urza and Misha are finding things, literally they're digging them up

and they're adapting them. And we sort of, it has some of that flavor. And so, so what we said at a handoff is, look, Scrap and Unearth both play into a similar flavor of digging up stuff from the past. We think Scrap is a little more, you know, it's newer, it's novel. We haven't done it before. We've done Mutate, I guess. But, you know, it was a wilder swing. But we said, hey, if this is too much,

Unearthed is right here. You can use Unearthed. So what happened was, Yanni was the one who led, Ari led vision design, but Ari led set design. Ari tried a bunch of mechanics and had some playtests, one of which was with upper management. And the note back was, well, just too much going on. And so we ended up scrapping scrap and ended up making it into Unearth, which, like I said, was the plan

all along was if this was too much. I think pulling back a little bit on like meld, like I think there are other reasons with meld, but the complication was also a factor. So both meld and scrap went away. Also, when we handed over the file, I think we put raid on some cards. It was a war all about creatures fighting each other, and at the time, the mechanics were all very much about the artifacts, and we wanted something that encouraged attacking.

Well, when, for complexity reasons, Scrap went away and Unearthed came back, Unearthed does a job of creating aggression. When you Unearth an artifact creature, well, you might as well attack with it. It's going to die anyway. So there's a lot of... Unearthed does encourage some aggression. And that, mixed with some individual cards that push toward aggression,

allowed us to have that element. So raid, partly to simplify, partly because the adding of unearthed made it less necessary, raid went away. Okay, so the final component, as far as the mechanical component, which actually started all the way back, I think, in the demo decks.

I think we had some early versions. Or at least, sorry, I think in the demo decks. Okay, they weren't in the demo decks, but Ari had made a note about how maybe we want batteries of some kind. So in the story of the Brothers War, the Power Stones are the batteries. And so I think what happened was, Ari was interested in making something that represented Power Stones, and then Zach, one of the designers in Dominaria United,

also came to the idea of maybe we want to hit upon Power Stones, because the Power Stones play into the Brothers War, but also it's an element of Dominaria. So the idea originally was that the Power Stones would first show up in Dominaria United, and then they would go on to be a thing in the Brothers War. By the time the dust settled, I think there was one, maybe two Power Stones.

I mean, I know Karn made Power Stones. So Dominaria United more nodded to it. Kind of what we call a throw forward. Where it's like, here's the thing. It'll matter more later. But we're sort of exposing to you it. Kind of like in the original Tempest. The spikes had been pushed off to Stronghold.

But we had one spike in the first set to show you that was coming. So we do throw forwards every once in a while. Now the earliest version of the Power Stone they always tap for colors. They always were an artifact token. They always tap for colors. The earliest version didn't let you use the mana to cast spells. And so the idea originally was you were using it

to activate things, mostly artifacts. Then it got changed so you couldn't cast colored spells. So the idea that you could cast all the artifacts in the set because once again barring one artifact that is there is one artifact in the set that represents the thing that lets Teferi go back in time

meaning it's an artifact from the present day and so that's the only colored artifact in the set because it's the only thing not from the past but anyway other than that all the artifacts in the set were generic mana so if you can tap for colorless and you can

cast non-colored spells you can cast all the artifacts in the set but as play design was playing with other sets you know

there's a lot of colored mechanics in magic as a whole that it felt weird the power stone they were only helping your colorless artifact

so the final tweak was to make it so what's the final one was to make it so... What's the final one say? It says you can't cast colored... I'm sorry. You can't cast non-artifact spells. So it lets you cast artifacts,

even if they're colored artifacts. You can still cast those. And those were... I think that Ari... I mean, ever since we started... Clues got made in Shadows of Innistrad, we really liked this idea of, from time to time, much like we have creature tokens that are unique to a set,

we can have other tokens. Artifact tokens usually is what we do, although enchantment tokens aren't off the table. And the idea is we've done Clues, we've done food, we've done blood. We've done a bunch of different things, and Power Stones is just adding another one in there. It was super flavorful. Now, Power Stones had their own issues, one of which was

it's ramping, and ramping is dangerous. That's why Power Stones always come in a battlefield tapped. And why we kind of cap what you can do with them. So, like, we don't want you running Power Stones in every deck. It's okay to run Power Stones in a dedicated artifact deck. That's kind of what they're for., we don't want you running Power Stones in every deck. It's okay to run Power Stones in a dedicated Artifact deck. That's kind of what they're for.

But we didn't want them just being uniform, ramping in every deck. Like, every deck just used them because they were ramping. So, that's a lot of the tweaking to make them happen. The other thing that went on during set design. So, Vision Design handed over prototype melds, including common melds, Power Stones, Scrap and Raid. Scrap and Raid got removed. Power Stones got tweaked. The common meld went away.

Unearthed came back, although once again, we'd handed it with Unearthed as the backup. So that was... Vision Design did make Unearthed cards, so they were there. As far as things that got added in set design, probably the biggest,

splatiest things that got added is they decided to add in a command cycle. Commands are spells that have four modes and you choose two of the four. First made, interestingly enough, by Aaron Forsythe

way back in Lorwyn. And we, Lorwyn had done monocolor commands, but since then, while there had been individual monocolor commands, there hadn't been a cycle of monocolor commands, but since then, while there have been individual monocolor commands, there hadn't been a cycle of monocolor commands since Lorwyn had introduced them.

And so they thought it might be a cool place to do some monocolor commands, a cycle. And then they came up with this neat idea of what if we tie them to characters? So the white's tied to Kayla, who's Urza's wife. The blue is tied to Urza. The black is tied to Gix from the Phrexians. Red is tied to Mishra. The green is tied to Urza. The black is tied to Gix from the Frexians. Red is tied to Mishra.

The green is tied to Titania. So here's major characters in each of the colors and so the commands represent sort of who they are. But also their commands which commands are fun. The other thing they spent a lot of time on, some of this, Vision did some of this but set design had to do even

more which was okay, we're in the Brothers War, so I know Ari went through the book and, like, tagged every character that was in the book, and then tiered them, like, here's tier one, like, we know we have to have Urza and Mishra, and here's tier two, we want Ashnod and Taunos,

and here's tier three, where maybe we want these characters, you know, depending on who we need, and I think what happened was I think in happened was, I think in the main set, they ended up making one new character. There's a white soldier they had to make. But in general, they really went through the book and figured out how to repurpose things. And like, like one of the things that's tricky is, you know, the Brothers War, when it was made, was written as a novel. It wasn't written to be a magic set. And so one of the challenges is, you know, there are a lot of elements of the Brothers' War

that we needed to bring through. There were characters we wanted to do. Got to figure out who the characters were, what colors they were. You know, wanted to get some balance in color. We needed to figure out what are the objects, you know, what are the places, what are the moments that matter.

So, you know, there was a lot of, you know, if you're going to capture a story top down you want to make sure you're capturing all the component pieces of the story but also you're capturing moments of the story so there's a lot of time spent saying okay what are the moments we want to capture and then okay what cards you know

some of the time it could be well this card already exists but this could be that moment and sometimes like oh there's nothing that exists we got to make it. If we want to show this moment, we have to make something that lets us show this moment. And so there's a lot of time spent on working on characters, working on, you know, moments,

and getting all that stuff together. Another decision that got decided was that we would have multiple Urzas and Mishras and also ended up having an extra Loren who is another student along with them. And then so the idea was at Uncommon

there is a student version of Mishra and Urza and Loren actually. And that represents sort of the young them. Then at rare, there's an artifact creature, not artifact, sorry, a legendary creature for Urza and Mishra that represent them kind of in adulthood,

kind of in the middle of the war, middle to late part of the war. And then when they meld and transform, it's the final stages the stages they are at the very end of the story Urza becomes a planeswalker, Mishra gets corrupted by the Phyrexians, so you get to see

so there's three different versions of Urza and Mishra essentially there's the uncommon young version there's the rare older version and then there's the melded I mean, I guess Mishra dies at the end of the war, Urza goes on then there's the melded fight, I mean, I guess, Mishra dies at the end of the war, Urza goes on.

There's more story with Urza past the Brothers War, though. That's a big part of his story. I mean, yeah, there's other Urza stuff, but anyway, and so just doing all that and working with the team, the story takes place I think over seven decades. Like, it's a long

story. They start as, you know, teenagers and when the story ends, they're old men. And so part of doing that also is figuring out what parts of the story are we telling when and how do we show... In some ways, War of the Spark

was the last kind of event set we did, where the set was top-down built around an event. But the War of the Spark was like a day long. There was morning, afternoon, and night. It was a very condensed event. This was not condensed. And so, oh, the other thing that we needed to do was mechanically, this set was inspired by Antiquities. And so we knew that we wanted to have as much sort of

throwback to antiquities as we could. And so some of it was, I mean, I guess a throwback to both the novel The Brothers' War and the set antiquities. So a lot of The Brothers' War was getting the characters and stuff right. A lot of antiquities was, okay, what was mechanically Antiquities? Could any of this be reprinted? Could some of this be tweaked? And there wasn't lots to reprint. There was a little bit. But more than that, there was a lot to be tweaked. There was a lot of cool things we could do.

And I'm not sure whether it'll be an article or a podcast. At some point, I'll go through the set and just talk about all the different antiquities. There's a lot of Easter eggs from antiquities. And the Brothers Ward in general from the books as well. But anyway, there's a lot of working that in. I think that's the main thrust of what the set was about. Yeah, the other interesting thing, oh, the one other factor that came out,

I should mention that, I'm almost to work, is one of the concerns about the Brothers War, the reason Aaron wanted me to make the prototype and all that stuff, was would it be relevant to somebody that wasn't an enfranchised player? Okay, you've been playing Magic forever, and you know the Brothers War,

and you played Antiquities, and you remember the references in Urza Saga, and you know the references. Okay, if you're someone who's been bugging me to make an Ashenod card or make a Gix card, okay, yeah, you're going to be very excited we're doing the Brothers War.

We knew the enfranchised player. I mean, why Ethan pitched in the first place as a supplemental set. We knew the enfranchised players would really mean, why Ethan pitched in the first place as a supplemental set. We knew the enfranchised players would really enjoy it. The question was, in the premiere set, hey, the majority of people playing aren't enfranchised players. Yes, there's a lot of enfranchised players, but there's even more than that of non-enfranchised players. And so one of the big questions was,

is this cool in a vacuum? If you don't know who Erza and Mishra are, is this cool? And the idea of what we said is, look, when people first heard the story back in antiquities, it was cool. Antiquities was cool. Why? Because it's a grand, you know, it's a grand story.

You know, two brothers falling apart, having a war that, you know, lasts decades of smashing giant artifact creatures into another. That's a cool idea. The thing that made it cool when it first appeared is still cool. And part of that was making sure that we, like, while

we had plenty of Easter eggs, we wanted to capture all the story, we also just wanted to make in a vacuum, cool stuff. That if you know nothing about the Brothers War, if you've never heard of it, but you open up the pack, you're like, ooh, look at all these giant artifact creatures and these battles and, you know, like, look at all these giant artifact creatures and these battles. And, you know, like that would seem cool.

So that was an important part to making sure that, you know, the Brothers War wasn't just, you know, a love letter to fans, you know, and franchise fans. It is, but it's not just that. You know, one of the things to always remember when you're making a magic set is you have multiple audiences. And you're trying to make all the audiences happy, not just one audience. Supplemental sets sometimes lean in and will push more toward a particular audience. Premiere sets, I mean, I'm not saying different premiere sets don't lean in different directions. But we do try to make sure that everybody can love the premiere set. That's important to us, being our major sets. And so that was a big factor

that we really had to think through when making Brothers War. But I think we did a good job. I'm happy with how it ended up. Like I said, I'm really excited for everybody to get a chance to play it. As of my recording, you guys have not.

I'm recording this before. I've already written my articles on it, which is why I was well-fresh with the story. I had to remind myself of everything. But we haven't... We've only done a few previews so far. This is before Magic 30. Magic 30 is going to be the big blowout. You guys won't be hearing this until after Magic 30, since I'm telling

you stuff that you have to know the set before I can tell you this. But anyway, I'm recording this ahead of time, just trying to get further ahead. But anyway, I think everyone's going of time. Just trying to get further ahead. But anyway, I think everyone's going to love The Brothers War. Early response to it's been really great. And it was a lot of fun.

Like I said, I am an enfranchised fan. It is a lot of fun. Like, it is fun making things in which there are elements for the enfranchised fan being an enfranchised fan. Antiquities was my...

There was a point in time where it was my all-time favorite set. And, you know, I, I read the Brothers Warrior, like,

I have a lot of fond memories of all that stuff. So, it was very fun. I'm glad Ashnod and Gix and other characters finally got a card. There's some characters

who had a card but got a better card. Anyway, so, I'm excited for you all to get to play it. It was a lot of fun making it. I want to thank Ari and his vision design team

and Yanni and his set design team and the play designers and all the people. It takes a giant team to make these sets. But it was a lot of fun. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this story. That is the making of The Brothers War. So anyway, guys, I'm now parked. So we all know what that means.

I mean, this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of making magic, it's time for me to be... I'm sorry, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.