Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #10 - Time Spiral

Episode Date: November 30, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about the Time Spiral set. It's his most-requested topic!

Okay, I'm pulling on my garage. We all know what that means. It's another episode of Drive to Work. Okay, so, last week, the very first Drive to Work came out. Actually, the first two, because I did two in the first week. So, this is the first podcast I have since that information. What happened was, when I first made my first show, I thought I was just going to put it up on my Tumblr, maybe my Twitter. I wasn't expecting it to be a big deal, but then work, I went in to ask them about it, and they were very excited about it, and they wanted to put it up on the website. So it ended up taking a little while to come out.

So I was plugging away every week making an episode, and it took nine weeks to finally get it up, which meant I got a backlog of stuff, which means that this is the first week where I have some feedback from all of you about my podcast. So it turns out that the one set that the most people wanted to hear about was Time Spiral. Now, Time Spiral is a very interesting set in that it is beloved by some, but was very disliked by others.

And it was definitely a set where R&D learned some important lessons, which I will get to. But let me start from the beginning. Because according to certain nuns, that's a good place to start. Okay, the design team. So Time Spiral was led by Brian Tinsman. And the design team included him, Aaron Forsyth, Devin Lowe, and myself. So it was a four-person design team.

So it actually came from an interesting place. Both key mechanics in the set, both suspend and split second, both didn't come from the design. They came from other designs. So let me talk about how this all came about. So I think it was during Saviors of Kamigawa, which was also a Brian Tinsman-led set, they came up with the

suspend mechanic. I don't even know why, I don't know how they got to it, but they came up with it and I said to them, this is interesting, but I think it's bigger than just a small set, you know, a third set mechanic. I go, this is the kind of mechanic we probably would do all year long. And I really liked the idea of suspend. This idea that you were trading mana for time felt very cool. That you could get things very cheaply, but you had to wait for them. And I liked that idea a lot. And I said, look, let's hold on to that.

I think it's a neat idea. And I think that got in my head the idea of a block built around time, of time mechanics. So when Time Spiral started, it was going to be a time block. That was my idea. Now, meanwhile, kind of completely separate from this, Brady Dominus, the creative director, was interested in sort of revamping the creative. One of the problems was that long ago, when Magic first got created, the Planeswalkers, which were the player analogous, kind of got made into gods. I mean, you look at Urza or Yawgmoth. I guess Yawgmoth wasn't technically a Planeswalker. But if you look at the early Plan planeswalkers, they were insanely powerful.

I mean, to the point of making worlds and destroying worlds. It was not very relatable that we realized that if you're going to tell stories, it's kind of hard to tell stories about gods. And so we needed to revamp the planeswalkers. So Brady saw this as an opportunity to do that. So we're like, okay, we'll do a time thing. There's a time problem, you know, and we sort of revamp everything. So when we started down the path of doing a time thing,

one of the things that I'd started doing at that point was I'd become head designer in the middle of the Kamigawa block, but the first block I really had control over was Ravnica, and that obviously had a very solid block structure to it. We took, you know, ten guilds, chopped them up 4-3-3. You know, the whole block clearly worked together. So, Time Spiral was my second attempt at doing a block plan,

and Ravnica was what I call a pie model. Like, we took it and we divvied it up so that everything was kind of all there, but we chopped up through the block how we gave it to you. Times Row was trying something a little different. The idea was a sequential model in which there were three parts and each part was connected to a larger hole but sort of advanced in some way. And the idea I hit upon very early was, well, if you want to take time and chop time into three pieces, how do you do that?

And the idea I came up with was, okay, past, present, and future. What if the three sets were about the past, the present, and the future? Now, I didn't even know what that meant at the time. It was just sort of like, oh, interesting idea. So when we explored the idea of the past, I don't even know what that meant at the time. It was just sort of like, oh, an interesting idea. So when we explored the idea of the past, what we got in my mind was,

well, how do you represent the past? Well, some of it was mechanics that represented things that had happened earlier in the game. But the thing that we kept coming back to is magic's past. And we didn't set out to have a nostalgia theme. Like, when we started the block, it was about time. But once we got the idea of the past, it just kept popping up. Like, the designers just kind of liked the idea

of referencing Magic's past. And it became pretty fun for us. The thing that I remember is, you know, all the Magic designers I'm talking about, so me, Brian, Aaron, Devin, like, we are old-time magic players. We've been playing for a long time. And it is a lot of fun to kind of play with magic and magic's past. I mean, I had done it with the unsets.

The unsets definitely sort of make fun of stuff magic had done before. But we'd never had a Blackboarder set that really kind of acknowledged Magic's past in a big way. And so once we started down that path, we were having a lot of fun. Like, oh, if you took Killer Bees and Aniaro's Bee Sting, you could marry them together and get Aniaro

Bees. And that tickled our fancy to no end. And so we made all sorts of stuff that we thought was just kind of fun. One of the ones we tried to do, but we didn't do. We did a lot of combining cards. We're like, what if card A meant card B? So one of the ones we tried to do,

and creative stopped us, because it really doesn't make a lot of sense, was Pirate Ghost Ship, in which we took Pirate Ship and Ghost Ship and mashed them together. I mean, creative is very backed off from the ship as a creature type, rightfully so, since, just like,

well, we still do walls, but just like walls don't kind of make a lot of sense in sentient creatures, ships make even less sense. But anyway, so we kind of got into that. We were very excited about exploring Magic's past. And as we did that, we realized the nostalgia thing

was slowly taking over. Like, wow, this was fun. And our thought was, we're having so much fun. Well, the players will have so much fun. And so we went to town. And like I said, other than probably the unsets, there is no set we've ever done that has more

things wedged in it. There's so many jokes and references. And I mean, time spiral, if you have no idea, I know that some articles have been written, but talking about just like all the jokes and things that are there. And people go, oh, I didn't see this. Oh, I didn't see that.

And it's just crammed full of a lot of stuff. So let me talk a little bit. I jumped ahead. See, one of the fun things of this thing is I kind of go where my mind's going, so you can see how I think, because I just hop around. The design team, before I get into sort of where

we went in the design, I realized I should talk about the design team a little bit. So Brian Tinsman was the lead of the set. So I'm trying to, in the podcast, sort of talk a bit about the history of all the designers in R&D. And kind of my thought is, as I come across them, I'll tell you a little bit about them. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about Brian Tinsman.

He was the leader of this set. This was his set. So where did Brian Tinsman come from? How did he get in R&D? How did he become a designer? So Brian's first job at Wizards of the Coast was actually in the market research department. So for starters, we used to have a market research department. It's no longer, now we outsource it. But at the time, we had a department in Wizards that did all our market research. And Brian, I think what was going on was, I think he was still in school. He was in business school.

And so he was working at Wizards and then not going to business school. And he first got in on the market research team. And then what happened is at lunch, our R&D people like to play games. And one of the people that's a big game player at lunch, that loves to lunch playing games, is Bill Rose, our VP. Bill is a monster when it comes to trick-taking games or card games. And anyway, I believe that Brian started playing some lunch with Bill, and so Bill got to know Brian. And then he realized that Brian actually was getting his business degree.

And so Bill proposed the idea to Brian that Brian come over to R&D and be the business manager. The idea was we didn't really have somebody who was managing things and someone who had sort of a business sense working in R&D. So Brian was not brought into R&D remotely to do design. In fact, he wasn't even brought in to be creative. He was brought in to be a business manager. But what happened was, you know, Brian really did want to do design. And so Brian did what a lot of people do.

There's a lot of stories at Wizards of, I started in job X, but what I really wanted to do was something else. And so Brian like said, hey, I'm here. I'm in R&D. You know, I would love the opportunity to show what I can do. And so he started by, you know, filling the holes for cards and, you know, just making up stuff. And then he had ideas he would show off. I think he made a mechanic or two he showed off. And then we finally put him on a team, and he was really good on the team. In fact, I think what happened with Brian was interesting.

Brian's first team, actually, Brian is in a very unique category. I happen to be in this category. His first team, he led. But in Brian's case, it wasn't quite the same as mine. I actually led my team. Brian kind of was lead by name. So what happened was, I think Judgment was Brian's first set that he was on, and Bill was going to lead it, but Bill ended up being busy.

So what Bill said is, okay, Brian, I'm going to put you in charge, but I'm going to oversee everything and make kind of all the big calls, but you'll be in charge of overseeing the set and making sure that everything gets put together. Because at the time, what happened was the lead designer not only oversaw everything, but they constructed the set and they took care of the file. Now, by the way, if you're interested, what we do is we have what we call a second on a design team, which is the person who's trying to learn about how to lead teams, and the file is now put in their hands. So for example, on Huey, Sean Main is my second,

meaning I don't touch the file. I oversee everything. I make decisions. But Sean's in charge of keeping up the file, because what we learned is there's a lot to learn about the structure by being the guy that keeps up the file. And once upon a time, it was the lead designer. Anyway, on Judgment, Brian was kind of made the second, but he was given actually the title, even though Bill really was behind the scenes making the key decisions on it. So Brian's first set, he was at least in name, the lead,

and he did very good. Brian did a wonderful job, and it quickly spun into this creative job where Brian started doing design work. And later, Brian would end up becoming the lead for non-magic design, just like I was in charge of magic design. If there was non-magic design going on, Brian was in charge of, well, mostly it was new games, what Brian was doing. Anyway, when we got to the set, I knew Brian had done a bunch of sets at that time. I know he had done Scourge. He had done Saviors of Kamigawa. And I think, I know he had done Champions of Kamigawa as well. And Champions, I'll get to that on my podcast on Champions, had its issues. I really felt Brian deserved a large set, and he seemed excited. His team had come up with Suspend,

so he was very eager to have Suspend. I think when design started for Time Spiral, in fact, Ravnica had pushed out Hybrid, so I had brought Hybrid over to Time Spiral with the idea of there's temporal chaos,

and part of the temporal chaos was making hybrid mana. Anyway, Ravnik would borrow it back. We would lose it. But what happened at the same time as that, Coldsnap was doing its design and Coldsnap had come up with a mechanic that was trying to imitate interrupts because the whole shtick of Coldsnap was his lost set hidden you know, hidden in the file cabinet. Anyway, that's its own story when I get to the Cold Snap podcast. But anyway,

we realized what they were doing was messing with time, because it was a spell that was so fast you couldn't respond to it. It was kind of faster than other spells. And so we said, hey, this would fit really well in our set, and so we borrowed it. So it's funny that the design team for Time Spiral came up with neither of the two main mechanics. So we had suspend, we had split second, so that was playing into our time theme, and then what happened is the nostalgia started taking over. And so once we realized the nostalgia was in play, we said, oh, well, might it be fun to maybe bring back some mechanics, you know, have some best of. And I think at the time, so here's one of the big things about Time Spiral.

One of the things that you always look at, or I look at, is I look back and say, okay, A, how did this act do publicly? Did the public like it? Did they not like it? How did it sell? How did it do in our polling and all our market research? Number two is, what did we learn from it? You know, and that some of the sets that have been the most instructive have not necessarily been the most successful. In fact, one of the things, I talk about this a lot, I used to do a seminar in R&D, and one of my seminars, and I think I wrote an article about this, but talking about mistakes, sorry, I was talking about mistakes. And what I was trying to say about mistakes is that I think people undervalue the importance of mistakes. People think of mistakes as being a bad thing. And what I try to say is, oh, no, no, no, no. Mistakes are your teachers. You know,

successes do not teach. In fact, successes lead to bad habits. Because what happens when you're successful is you go, oh, this worked. I should do that again. And it doesn't really cause you to stretch. It just kind of makes you repeat what you've done. In fact, being very successful, it can be very dangerous because you have to be willing to take risks. And what happens with mistakes is you are forced to take risks. You are forced to try new things. You are forced to say, oh, well, let's examine what I did and figure out what I did incorrectly.

And the problem with successes is every success has good and bad parts about it. But when things go well, people want to assume everything about it is good. And the reality is usually there's something good. That's why it was a success. But not everything was good. And it's hard to learn from because you are not kind of motivated to find the things that were a problem. Meanwhile, mistakes, they motivate you, you know. And Time Spiral had a lot of mistakes in it, one big mistake really, that taught us a great deal about magic.

And one other thing is, for a long time, there's certain metrics. We don't know who all the magic players are. I mean, we have a lot of different ways to capture bits of them, but we are most in tune with the people most in tune with us. Like, we know who comes to our website, but hey, you're already kind of enfranchised if you come to our website, you know? And so we're always looking for more information. So one of the things that we can do is we can make correlations between things. So for example, we used to look at people playing tournaments and look at sales and say, oh, well, it seems like when sales are good, attendance for tournaments is good. Oh, well, there's some correlation here. So clearly,

you know, when people like things, well, they come and play it. And so what happened during time spiral is those two numbers that had always been in lockstep, like when one did well, the other did well, started diverging. Sales were doing poor, but all the tournaments were doing well. And we're like, well, what's going on? If tournaments are doing well, why aren't sales doing well? And that's when we discovered, at the time we called them the invisibles, but the idea is there are a lot of people that we don't see because they're what I'll

call off the grid. And the idea of the invisibles is, look, a lot of people play magic, but only some percentage of them are people that we really see. And what happened with Time Spiral was, it was the first time that we kind of separated the two in a very easy-to-see way. Because what happened was, we said, okay, we're going to embrace Magic's past. And to do that, we sort of loaded up with a lot of things, a lot of mechanics and a lot of references. And the idea was, well, if you know Magic's history, well, this won't be so hard.

I mean, here's the crazy thing. I think there were 12 old mechanics or 12 mechanics total. I think the 12 doesn't count split second and suspenders were new. So I think there were 12 old mechanics. Anyway, between 12 and 14. Okay, think about that. Would we ever do a set with 12 mechanics in it. Anyway, between 12 and 14. Okay, think about that. Would we ever do a set with 12 mechanics in it? No!

Never! Never, ever, ever would we do that. But we had this mindset, like, wow, these aren't really new mechanics. Eh, the players have played these before. This won't be that hard for them. And we were forgetting that the newer and casual players that weren't so didn't know all of Magic's paths, well, we made a set with

12 mechanics in it. And that was just the first set. Forget that we added more in the second set and added, huh, way more in the third set. And so what happened was, we made a set that made all these references that a lot of players didn't get, that had all this complication that was only manageable

if you had already absorbed it. If you've been playing Magic for 10 years and then played Time Spiral, it's like, oh yeah, I remember this and I remember that. And the problem was, hey, you know, a lot of players weren't like that and it was overwhelming for them. They didn't get it, you know. And yes, there's always examples of people who started out and go, oh, it was the best of and I was excited.

Because at the time, the justification was justification was look if you never heard a band before and the first thing you heard was the best of well that'd be kind of fine you'd get a hit of some of the best things they've done but we did not take into account kind of the complexity you know and and I talk about how mistakes are important New World Order really the germ of it the first push toward it was Time Spiral because Because Time Spiral just bowled people over. Like, what? What's going on? Ah, brain hurt, brain cramp. You know, they couldn't get it all. And yes, yes, they established. And then this is the funny thing. I talk about how Time Spiral was a failure. Whenever I do, I get all these people coming out of the

woodwork getting really mad at me. And they're like, that was the best set you guys ever made. That was the best block you ever made. How dare, how dare you say anything bad about it? And the reality is, it's not that it was a bad block. Look, it's one of my favorite blocks. I enjoyed it immensely. I enjoyed making it. I enjoyed playing it.

If I was trapped on a desert island, and I could only play one block for the rest of my days, I'd probably pick Time Spiral block. That block has a lot going on. There's a lot of fun stuff. The complexity that's a negative for a lot of players is a positive for me. I get it. I understand why people like it.

I'm not really trying to diss something people like. I'm trying to explain in my role as the guy who's in charge of understanding what does and doesn't work, Time Spiral in that regard was a failure. Now, that doesn't mean we didn't do right things in it. Just as successes have problems, mistakes have things you did correct.

I do believe nostalgia on some level is valuable. You'll notice in both Scars of Mirrodin and Ravnagal, we've played into that. We've definitely nodded at, hey, if you're familiar, you will find this more enticing. But we tried hard not to make that stuff exclusive for people that didn't know the information. I mean, Time Spiral just, holy moly, threw you in the deep end. What does this mean? What does that mean? Oh, you'll figure it out, you know.

Oh, let me talk about another thing that happened. The thing I'm proudest of, of my contribution to Time Spiral. And by the way, I liked the past, the past, present, future. It did give a very strong feel. One of the things I like about block planning is that each set has its own identity.

Meaning, if I said, here's a card from the block, you could tell me which set it's in. That means I have to find the sets well. And the reason that's so important is good design comes from having a good bullseye. That's my job. My job as head designer, my job when I'm a lead designer,

is to say, here is the target. Here is the bullseye. When everybody's going in the same direction, we have an amazing group of designers. We have an amazing group of developers. They'll do good work. What causes them not to do good work is when they're working at odds with each other.

They're going in different directions. They're pulling in different directions. And so the role of head designer, of lead designer, is getting everybody focused in the same direction because when they all are working toward the same goal, amazing things can get accomplished. Anyway, so one of the ideas I had while we were doing this design was, I said, well, wouldn't it be fun if every once in a while,

since we're referencing the past, just an old card shows up? Like, you know, just drafting and like, there's Sulcanar, the Swamp King. You know, what's Sulcanar, the Swamp King, doing here? And I originally pitched it, I think my idea was it would be something we'd stick on the either the foils sheet or something

that would happen infrequently. When I first pitched it, I thought it was such a crazy idea at the time. I go, you know, well, it would happen every once in a once in a box maybe, or not very often. And then, as I pitched the idea, the team was like, well, why only once a box? Why not every pack?

So one of the things I've learned in R&D is when I tend to pitch things, I tend not to pitch the wildest versions of them, because if you go too far, people are like, oh, that's crazy. So I tend to pitch kind of smaller versions of them, and then if people get excited and fan it far, people are like, oh, that's crazy. So I tend to pitch kind of smaller versions of them. And then if people get excited and fan it along, I'm like, I'm there. So when they're like, maybe more than once a pack, I'm like, oh, every pack. That sounds good. I like every pack.

And then we got the idea of the time-shifted sheet. We called it the bonus sheet at the time. And originally the idea of the bonus sheet, so there's 121 cards that fit on the sheet. So, okay, we have 121 cards to play with. What do we want it to be? Now, the original idea was they could be anything from anywhere in Magic. I mean, they could be on the reserve list, obviously, but they could be crazy powerful cards. Because the idea was they were just going to show up infrequently, you know, limited can handle a random powerful card.

Um, and the idea was, well, these are was, well, this is going to be old frame because we wanted to show that they are old cards and differentiate them from new cards. And not everybody would recognize the old cards, so we put them in the old frame. And that would communicate the past. And we loved the idea of bits of the past slipping in because one of the themes of the set was time's broken

and the past is merging in with the present. And so once we had the idea of, okay, once per pack, we're going to do crazy stuff, just all sorts of things you would never expect. But then it got brought up that, like, are people going to understand they can't play this in standard? And we said, oh, well, that's a good point. How do they know they can't play this in standard? Every other time in Magic when you open new packs, that's playable in standard.

So we decided, okay, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to take this and make it so all the cards are playable in standard, which made us revamp the list significantly. I mean, there were lots of crazy things on there. And Aaron was in charge of the make-out of the sheet. And the console was changing,

and we kept suggesting different things. But once we knew they were going to be standard legal, we ended up changing things around a little bit. And we knew we wanted a wide range. Because one of the things that's important is you want to create all sorts of expectations and excitements. And that you want some sort of suspense and surprise. And I talk about this in my bad card article. I'm sure I'll do a podcast on bad cards one of these days, because

it's very, very worthy of a podcast. But the, one of the things, one of the reasons bad cards are important is, you need to have something, like, you need low lows for high highs. So we knew on the bonus sheet that we needed you to have things you

literally would not expect us to print. I think Psionic blastast didn't being like the, holy moly, I cannot believe they printed this. And the athlete I expected was Squire. And, I mean, we knew Squire was bad. We knew Squire was a horrible card. It was bad on purpose, you know. Now, I mean, Oratog was on the bonus sheet as well.

That is a, you know, 1w12 with an ability. So clearly we were aware that it was bad. But like we were clear, Sonic Blast was good. We needed the range. We wanted you to, who knows what was going to happen. Who knows what you could get. And we tried really hard on the bonus sheet, time-shifter sheet, to make sure that it was just from all over the place.

I think the only limitation we had was it had to be standard legal. It had to not be on the reserve list. And it had to be in the old card frame. We decided that that's the point we were going back. Because we wanted all the cards to show up in the old card frame. But anyway, other than that, Aaron, we redid the list a countless number of times.

I have no idea how many times we redid that list. Another thing I should mention is Brian Schneider was the lead developer of the set and a lot of stuff this was a very complex set Brian had a lot to do with some of the changes in the set, like stuff like

sapperlings and how morph was done Brian had a lot to do with that I mean when I thought this was complex, this art was complex through and through. I mean, it was complex in the art, you know. I know it was complex in the rule text. It was complex in the naming and the flavor text.

Like, the number of flavor texts that make references to old, like, if the card was referencing something, then the flavor text made reference to that card. I mean, there's all that sort of stuff. But anyway, we put it all together and it was fun. I mean, it's funny. I know I doggone it a bit just because it ended up being too complex, but it was a blast, a blast to put together. I mean, I remember having meetings where we could just like put things together and we would be laughing hysterically,

and we're like, could we do this? I don't know! Yeah, we can do this! And we, I mean, it's one of the sets that I just remember having the most fun time with. You know, like I said, Brian and Devin and Aaron were all old-time players, like, all of us were very well-versed in,

you know, the magic, the IP, and the magic, the IP, and the depth of the history, and the games, and the mechanics. The other thing I decided to do, which is funny, I decided to say, okay, if we're going to the past, that means we'll explore

the color pie of the past, which has lots of mistakes in it. For example, I do not like Hornet Sting. In fact, I hate Hornet's Sting, with a blinding passion. Yet I was on board with Unyarub's, which is a green card that has direct damage. And my thought process was, look, we're exploring the Path,

I'm willing to inset where there's a strong thematic reason to do it, to do a little bit, not too much, and not make things too strong. And Unyarub's was not particularly strong. But I said, okay, part of doing this, that's why Psionic Blast is sitting in the bonus sheet, is like,

okay, if we're going to revisit the past, we're going to revisit a little bit of where magic was. And in retrospect, looking back, I mean, Planar Chaos obviously took the color pie and messed with it in a completely different way. I am a color pie purist in the sense that I think the color pie does a lot of

very important things. And I've realized over time that like, it is so easy to be lured to mess with it. And like I said, I was lured in time spiral and planar chaos. And that I've since then sort of said, okay, I got to be more of the hardliner. I've got to try to toe the line because, man, does inertia push people to just want to stretch and bend and break. But, I mean, at the time, it's kind of you learn from your mistakes. I guess I understood why I did it at the time. I mean, I appreciated it.

It did have value. One of my big things is you don't break rules to break rules. You break rules because they accomplish something in a way that no way within the system can work. My quote I used to give Brian Tinsman is, don't look outside

the box until you look in the box. You know, and that, I think a lot of design is saying, for example, there's a great scene in Apollo 13 where something goes wrong in the ship, and they go to the scientist, and they have a box. And they dump the box on the table, and they go,

this is what they have up in the capsule. In 16 hours, they run out of air. I forget what the problem was. They're going to die if they don't solve it. Here's what you have to solve it with. You have 16 hours. Here's the things go. And the point is they solve it because, as I like to say, restrictions breed creativity. And that part of, I look at the color pie, is it is a good set of restrictions. It is something to force designers and developers

to do better work. That one of the things that I believe firmly is when you have no rules, when you can do whatever you want. I mean, I talked about this in my article once. So David Lynch did a TV show called Twin Peaks. It's a while ago, so let me explain it. So David Lynch is a very eclectic director, made very weird films. Like I took a class in cult films in college. I watched some of his films.

He's the kind of guy, he did Blue Velvet and Eraserhead. Anyway, originally his idea was, the show was about a murder mystery. A girl named Laura Palmer is murdered. And what was supposed to happen in the first episode is a naked Laura Palmer washes up on the beach. But this is TV. And they go, David, this is TV. You can't have a naked woman. You know?

So he ended up wrapping her in plastic. So she washes ashore naked but wrapped in plastic. Now, here's the interesting thing. Naked girl wrapped in plastic is infinitely more interesting than naked girl.

You know what I'm saying? Naked girl is like, I don't know, she was swimming or something. Who knows? You know, A, you've seen it before and B, it doesn't have the sense to go, what? But you see it wrapped in plastic. Huh? Why would she be wrapped in plastic? And all of a sudden, you're off somewhere, you know what I'm saying?

And I think some of David Lynch's best work was on Twin Peaks because he had restrictions, because he couldn't just do whatever he wanted. And that, I think, for an artist, saying to them, hey, there's some constraints. You can't just do the first thing that comes to your mind. You have to work within some constraints. There's a great exercise that goes on where writers will go to other writers and say, you do this thing all the time.

I, your friend, the writer, recognize that you, the writer, do this thing. So here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to make a rule for you. You have to follow this rule. And then they write following the rule set recognize that you, the writer, do this thing. So here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to make a rule for you. You have to follow this rule. And then they write following the rule set by their friend, which is trying to get them out of the habit they always do. And supposedly, it is a very liberating sort of experience to try to go, oh, I always rest on this crutch.

I don't have it anymore. I'm going to have to do things a little differently. Anyway, got a little tangent there. I'm arriving at work. So let me sum this up about Time Spiral. I believe it was good for its time. I believe we learned a lot from it. I would never want to not have done it.

And I'm kind of glad that it exists in Magic's history. I'm glad we kind of did that kind of set. I don't think we can do that set ever again. I think that it's, or at least not where the game is right now. I mean, if the game ever shrinks greatly, where all we have is a small, tiny core, I guess we could do this again. But I am glad we did it.

We learned a lot from it. It was immensely fun to do. It's one of my favorite steps to put together. but I'm glad we did it. We learned a lot from it. It was immensely fun to do. It's one of my favorite steps to put together and it was, you look back, I mean, I think when you look back

at your career, you sort of highlight and Time Sparrow to me was one of the highlights. I really enjoyed the people I was working with. I enjoyed the work. I did enjoy

the player response. I mean, the players that loved it, players that were enamored of it, loved it. Even to this day, it's the favorite set I know of a lot of players. And I respect that. I don't mean any disrespect. When I say it's a failure,

I only mean from a marketing sort of, as a game standpoint, like trying to sell a game and make it for a lot of people. I mean, it was successful in that. Look, it impassions people. It is hard to make people's favorite set. And so I'm glad that I had my hand in a block that to many is a high point for them. And that's exciting for me.

But anyway, I'm now here at work. I've got to wrap this up. It's time to go make the Magic Cards.