Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #115 - 20 Things That Were Going to Kill Magic Part 2

Episode Date: April 18, 2014

Mark finishes his examination of 20 controversies of magic history.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last time I started talking about a column I wrote called 20 things... What was the name of the column? It was 20 things that were going to kill magic. And so I talked about the first 10 last time. I plan to talk about the second 10 this time. Basically, I wrote this article on the actual anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the game. And it was sort of a history of showing, I was talking about controversies. Things that really, over the years, have been very controversial. So last time, let's see.

I talked about the introduction of 60-card decks and 4-card limits. I talked about the creation of the banned and restricted list. I talked about the start of Type 2. I talked about Nalathni Dragon. Chronicles, the Reserved list, Pitch cards, Premium cards, 6th Edition rules, and Magic Online. So today, these are chronological, for those who didn't know. I pick up with number 11, 8th Edition card frames. So for those who don't know, Magic had the same card frame for a long time.

There were little tiny tweaks, like the white mana symbol, I believe, was tweaked right before Ice Age, and there were little tiny things. But this was the first big sweeping change we made to the card frames. The reason, by the way, that we did this, for those who might not know, is there was a legibility issue that was going on. It was very hard to read the cards. You would have the cards across the table and people just could not see them. In fact,

they were done in such a way in a couple different things. One was the font. One was it was white writing on a textured background. Anyway, we did a bunch of things to clean up the frames. A bunch of it was done to allow us to be able to print them.

A bunch of it was done for legibility. Basically, there's a bunch of reasons we thought we needed to improve the frames. But it went over poorly, mostly because it was a fundamental change to how the game looked. I know that some people complained that they felt it was too sterile and it got compared to a computer rather than an old fantasy

book or a tome. But the reality was that there's some logistics that are important. People being able to read the cards are important. And I believe that kind of the role of the new frames was to put less emphasis on the things around the art and more emphasis on the art itself. And the idea we thought was the art carries the fantasy message and that we needed it to be cleaner and easier.

And, you know, I mean, I think now that you look back, now that people are used to it, I think people realize that the value of the new frames. I mean, they're old timers that still like the old ones, but they were very impractical. And the other thing, I mean, I talked about the legibility, but we have to print them, and there were a lot of problems we had with printing, and it was very hard to print them. And I know you guys might not

care about that, but as the people who print the cards, a lot of times there's things we do that are not, you know, it's harder to see on the surface, because, you know, we need to do things that allow us to be able to make the cards. A lot of times there's things we do that are not, you know, it's harder to see on the surface because, you know, we need to do things that allow us to be able to make the cards and that as technologies change, it's important for us to be able to do things. And so there are a bunch of behind the scenes changes as well. Although, I mean, the legibility one, I think, was probably the most important. But there are a lot of printing things, too. So there are a whole bunch of reasons behind it.

Anyway, I think the reason that this change had such a strong reaction was it very much was a visual sort of representation of the game is shifting in a way that, you know, people become fond for things and how they look and, you know. For example, a lot of people really defend the art of the early days. And the reality is, I think purely from an objective standpoint, I think art has gotten a lot better. But there was just... People have fond memories of things.

And it's very interesting that when you sort of look at something and the nostalgia comes in, you really like it because it reminds you of something. It was what the game was when you first fell in love with it, that sort of thing. But anyway, 8th edition card frames were quite a stir-up. And the funny thing is, a lot of these, I talk about how they affect a card you can play. This was not at all a card you can play issue. This was an aesthetics issue, right?

Because now I had a mix of cards that looked one way with cards that looked another way. And people really wanted the cards aesthetically to all have a similar feel. And that was a big, big deal. I'm not trying to undercut. This was a big deal. I think the change was necessary.

I think it was a good change. I think it did a lot of positive things for us. But it was controversial. Okay, number 12. evergreen keyword reminder text. Okay, so one of the things that we decided was that we needed to be better about helping people learn the game, and that one of the ways to do that is to say, you know what, we can't assume everybody just knows what all the vocabulary of the game means. And so what we started doing was

in the core set and then on certain things at low rarities in the expert expansions we put reminder text which says, you know, we told you what the thing did. It's in italics, inside parentheses. But like flying, what does flying mean?

Reach, what does reach mean? First strike, what does first strike mean? We started telling it to you. And like I said, the reason for us doing this is we needed to help the players that didn't know what it was. And the thought process was, look, if you know, you'll see first strike, stop reading.

You'll know what first strike means. But there were a bunch of people that were upset. I think the idea is, once again, it's an aesthetics idea. You'll know what First Strike means. But there were a bunch of people that were upset. I think the idea is, once again, it's an aesthetics idea. It's like the less words that are on the card, the better the cards look. And this was adding words to the card that a lot of players felt was not needed. They knew what First Strike did. They knew what flying did.

And they, I know, for example, we did, what's that? Was it 8th edition or 10th edition? 10th edition, I think. I know, for example, we did the premiums. We removed the reminder text from them. And people were real excited to have reminder text-free versions of cards. The reason, by the way, we haven't done that again was it was a lot of effort on our production team. And the payoff, well, there were people that really liked them. We decided the payoff just wasn't worth the huge amount of energy and expense it cost

to do it. And so I know the people that love, love, love the premiums and love the, you know, and from time to time we'll do promos without stuff like that, but it's just not something that made feasible sense to do in all the core sets because it was, we didn't realize how much work it was when we came up with the idea. And then after it was done, and we have what we call the post-mortem, where we walk through what happened, the CAPS people, the production people, were like, holy moly, did you realize how much work this was? And we're like, oh, we didn't realize it was that much work.

So anyway, that is why we don't continue to do them. But anyway, this was another one that, I mean, I guess I wasn't surprised, but I think a lot of times people are very focused on what the game needs to me, what I need, and when there's things that to you distract from the game and they have no value for you, you consider it a downgrade. And one of my messages is kind of like, look, if we don't attract new players, I guarantee you old players, you'll be unhappy. And by the way, a lot of old players liked the change,

liked the addition, thought it was really good. I'm not trying to say that all players don't necessarily care about new players, but there's some that I think don't realize how important it is that we keep bringing new players in the game. Fresh blood is crucial. That, you know, if magic just keeps shrinking over time, that means it gets less and less resources

and that just things that you enjoy about the game would slowly drip away as we had less resources to maintain that. So us doing things for new players is, I believe, really, really good for old-time players, too. Okay, next. Planeswalkers.

So in Lorwyn, we tried to introduce it in a future site, but it wasn't ready in time. So in Lorwyn, we introduced what are now known as the Lorwyn 5. We introduced the Planeswalker card type. It was met with a lot of mixed reaction. There were people that were excited. There were different people that were like, what is this, a new card type? Ooh, they're Planeswalkers, awesome. But there were a lot of players that were like,

what are you doing? I mean, Planeswalkers were quirky. One, they didn't really come with the rules on them because we couldn't fit the rules on them. And so they were definitely this weird card that if you opened up, you had no idea what it was. You had to learn. It definitely changed the dynamic of the game,

and Planeswalkers really was us adding a new element to the game we never had. And some people didn't like that element, and some people prefer their Planeswalkers be the players and not be represented on the cards. Part of what happened also was in the previous year, we had depowered the Planeswalkers story-wise so that we could do things like bring them on cards and make them less god-like so that we can tell stories with them.

It is hard to tell stories with gods. And ironically, I say that in a year where we're telling stories with gods, but I think the Theros gods are not the main characters. I think that if Heliad was the main character's story, it would be much harder. Having Elsbeth be the main character is why the story is something we can tell.

Planeswalkers, interestingly, have gone on to become super, super, super popular. In fact, when we first started making Planeswalkers, the idea was it's something we would do infrequently. Like, eh, maybe once a year, once every other year we make a few Planeswalkers. And then they become so popular, they now are standard. Like, every single set has a Planeswalker, at least one. Some have more than one. And it's become just a giant part of the game.

So it's funny how controversial it was early on. And now, like, if we had a set and didn't put a Planeswalker in it, we'd have probably more complaints than when they first showed up. So it's definitely one of those things. It's funny, a lot of these things, I think we look back, and there's a few examples that are not true, but a lot of these, like with time, it's like, oh, you know, this actually was good.

Yeah, we were upset, but with time, this actually was a good thing. So planeswalkers are one of those, I think. I think most people are pretty fond of planeswalkers. Next, Mythic Rares. Dun-da-dun-dun. Okay, soic Rares. Dun-da-dun-dun. Okay, so, this was controversial. This is one still controversial. So what happened was,

Magic was the first trading card game. Many, many trading card games followed us. And so one of the things that we did is, you know, we followed other trading card games to see what they're up to and what other lessons to be learned because other people might, you know, can't assume we're the only ones to know what we're doing, and other people know what they're doing, and we quickly realized that we were the only trading card game that had three rarities, or one of few that had

three rarities, and most trading card games had more than three. And we came to the conclusion that, you know what, part of what makes trading cards fun is having a little more of a chase, having things in which you're excited for things that you don't always get. And we decided that one of the things when we looked at the way we had done rarities over the year, that what rare had meant was a giant gap. And what we said is, look, we're willing to make cards at the low end of the gap and willing to make cards at the high end of the gap. Let's just separate those into two different rarities.

And so the low end of the gap became, now, rares, and the high end of the gap became mythic rares. And that, the idea was it allowed us to just have some splashy things and it's exciting when you get something that you don't always get. I mean, Magic had a rare in every pack, and yeah, you wanted certain rares,

but there was just something extra special when every once in a while you got this extra rarity, and so we put it in the game. I wrote an article about it. It was controversial, as most of these were. I think that it's definitely one of those things where making cards that are harder to get, there's a lot of upside and a lot of excitement that comes from them, but there's a lot of downside because people are like, wait a minute, those are harder to get. It's interesting, by the way, that one of the things that many people have written about the Mythic Rarity,

one of the things that Mythic Rarity did that was very valuable that I don't think people realize is it actually lowered rares and made rares easier to get. Because there was more emphasis on mythic rares the value of the rares went down. I mean mythic rares

kept the top level but the rares made it easier for people to get rares. So there were definitely things like lands and things that we

you know dual lands and things that we often do at rare that because they now become a rare thing and not a mythic rare thing, you just get them more often. They're more easy to get. And so it allowed us to sort of allow people to get the rare things easier and then still have some things that people could, you know, could desire to get.

Next, lands in boosters. So we used to have a product called the Starter Product. And the Starter Product was a 60-card deck. It had, I think, 24 lands. But anyway, it had a whole bunch of lands and it had a bunch of cards. And it was the way, really, when you were starting out. I mean, it was called the Starter Deck when actually Magic came out. It was called the Tournament Deck for many, many years.

My old terminology is showing through. And the reasons that we made it was it was a good place to start and it got your land and it was a good entry-level product. But what we learned was that people just wanted to buy the boosters and it was more expensive for us to make the tournament packs and that people really wanted the boosters. So we're like, okay, why don't we just make the boosters? That's what people want. Why are we spending a lot of extra money making something that people don't want? And that, um, so what we did is we said, okay, let's start making just boosters. The problem was how exactly did new players

get land? Um, now there's a few other products that have land in them. There's the fat packs and there's the, the deck, uh, deck, uh, builders toolkit. toolkit. But what we realized is that the land was an important part of the stats. We used the land to show off the new, you know, they're one of the best things to show off the new world. And we said, okay, what we're going to do is we're going to put one per pack. That would allow, you know, what will happen is the people that don't care, we'll slough them off. The new players will pick them up and it'll be a way for the new players to get lands. Did not go over well.

A lot of players were like, I don't care about land. I have land. You've shrunk the booster. That was the complaint. And like I said, I get it. I mean, once again, this is something where... I do believe there's value in lands. I do believe that having new lands

is something people are excited by. I think more people actually enjoy getting new art lands and kind of realize it. You know, that when we make cool lands and do things, there is something where it's fun to kind of play with the newest stuff

and see the newest things. But anyway, yet another controversy when we put it in. People were upset. Next, number 16. The Magic 2010 Rules Changes. Okay, so the Magic 6th Edition Rules Changes

I talked about last time. Those were a much, much bigger deal. The game actually had a lot bigger change. But 10th Edition Rules Changes had a couple big ones. The biggest one was

we stopped doing damage on the stack. And let me explain the reason for this. The reason for it was that there are certain rules. Basically what we say is when you're teaching someone to play and you have to teach them a rule, you're kind of embarrassed to teach them a rule because it's like, ah, this is the rule. And the person's like, really? Are you just

lying to me? Are you cheating? The person doesn't feel like what you're saying. It just feels kind of like a hack. That you're kind of like, well, you know. And this is one of the rules that we try to explain to beginners and they never quite understood. And the more we looked

into it, we realized that, you know, the damage on the stack really was taking away choice and was making it harder for beginners to learn. Let me explain that because it's important. I mean, clearly, beginners didn't get it. It didn't make a lot of sense. It wasn't intuitive. There's that. But the second thing was, what we found was, as we sort of explored removing it for purposes of the first reason. The second reason came up, which was that if I have a creature and I can sack him with damage on the stack,

well, the correct thing to do is that I'm supposed to wait to be able to use him where I can block, do damage to your creature, hopefully kill the creature and sack my creature. Now, let's say you attack and I have a creature that I have a sack ability. It becomes an interesting decision. Would I rather use this creature to kill your blocking creature, or I could block it and then sack it, so I prevent the damage, but I don't get to kill your creature, and sort of like, what do I want more? Do I want the effect, or do I want the damage? And before, it's like, well, I get the effect and the damage. There's no choice. I don't have to worry about it. And now it's like, no, there actually is a choice.

And obviously people get upset at first because the previous way was more powerful. But remember, what makes a game a good game is not that it's more powerful. It's that you give the players choices that are interesting choices. That people come to a game not because things are easy. I've talked about this before. But because there's interesting decisions to make. And so players will always ask for power,

but secretly down deep what they actually want is a good game. And what makes a good game is not power, it's not taking away decisions, it's giving them actual interesting decisions to make. And the idea of I block and I have a creature with a stack ability, do I want to kill my blocker or merely block it to prevent the damage and get the ability out of it, is actually a very interesting decision. Also, another controversial thing is we removed mana burn from the game.

It's funny, because we almost removed mana burn in the 6th edition rules, and the reason we didn't was because I passionately fought to save it. And then, many years later, I passionately fought to save it. And then many years later, I passionately fought to get rid of it. I came to realize that I was wrong. Manaburn is this thing that requires beginners to learn something that does not come up a lot. I understand it's flavorful. I understand in the moments where it means something, it means something. But those moments are few and far between. And the story I tell is, I said to my design team,

we're going to stop playing with Manor Burn so we can get a sense of what the world is like without Manor Burn. We went for an entire month. I got together with my team. I said, how'd it go? And it never mattered in a month. In a month of playing, it never came up.

And we're like, well, this is hard. And obviously, by the way, we were playing limited. It matters more in certain constructed formats. I get that. But the point is, there is so much complexity in the game. There's so much things you make people have to learn that part of adding new things to the game is taking old things to the game. And we have added so much to the game since the game's creation.

I mean, a lot of them I'm talking about today. That it's not as if there's not more complexity in the game than there was before. There is. But we're trying to put the complexity in the right places. And the reality is, having to know Manor Burn and learn Manor Burn for something that was a very, very corner case thing was not worth it until we got rid of it. I know there's people that are still upset about that. Whenever we take something away, anybody who loved that thing will get upset because they loved that thing and they have fond memories of that thing and it mattered. And the reality is I'm not saying it didn't matter. I'm saying it didn't matter enough. And that part of making an ongoing,

evolving game is not only must we add things, but occasionally we must take things away. And I still believe Mana Burn, the removal of Mana Burn was 100% the right thing to do. I believed it at the time. I now have, you know, a number of years to look back in retrospect, and I believe, I still believe it was the right call. And most players I've talked to, even the ones that really did like it, have begrudgingly admitted that the game doesn't need it. Next, New World Order, number 17.

Okay, for this one, I did a whole podcast on New World Order. I'll mostly talk about the reactions. I mean, real quickly, New World Order, we realized that we were having trouble with beginners. We needed to change the game to make it more accessible to beginners. The big idea was, New World Order was, let's change the threshold for complexity to common. We can push up the things we do at higher rarities so the game will still have them, but the beginning player that buys very few packs will have just a lot simpler gameplay in front of them because most of their cards are common. New World Order to this day is

controversial, but I think a lot of the controversy is people don't understand quite what it means. I get questions all the time on my blog about, is New World Order responsible for thing X? You know, like, I don't like this thing about mythics. Is New World Order responsible? Like, it's about commons. It's about complexity of common. It's got nothing to do with uncommons or mythic rares,

except in the sense that there's stuff that got pushed out that are now there. I think uncommon is slightly more complicated because common moved out some of its complications. But, and once again, I mean, I talk about this. There's this belief of what we call the dumbing down the game, that magic once was so complex and you've dumbed down the game, and now it's not as complex.

And the answer is, no, it actually is more complex than magic used to be. We've just shifted where the complexity is. There is plenty of complexity in magic. The early days of magic did not have planeswalkers, did not have equipment, did not have all sorts of things that do exist today and those are complicated things. What has shifted is,

and this is a very, very important part of the tenets of New World Order, is instead of making you have to monitor things and then rewarding you for being able to monitor things well, we instead are rewarding you for making good decisions on the key elements that matter when you make decisions. For example, interaction of spells and blocking and attacking. For example, what we don't want it to be is the better player is better because he knows obscure rules that the lesser player does not.

Or he knows corner cases that the other person does not know. Or he's able to remember these things that you have to pay attention to that don't matter most of the game but every once in a while matter. He or she has been able to take brain space and monitor that, and the newer player isn't able to do that yet. What I want to say is the better player is able to play his spells better, is able to take into account when and where and how to play the spells.

They attack better. They block better. They use their abilities interactively better. The reason that the better players are better is not because they know rules that the other players don't know or be able to monitor things that other people don't have the mental energy to monitor.

They're better because they play the game better. They make decisions the decisions within game about the game, they make better decisions and that's why they're better players. I think Magic is a better game when that is where the mental energy goes rather than remembering 20 things that

usually don't matter but might. Next! Double-faced cards. This was another one. We were trying to figure out how to make werewolves and how to make transformation in general. We had tried it before with flip cards in Kamigawa.

They didn't go over really well. And what we found was the double-faced cards. We tried a bunch of things. The original double-faced cards, you actually had a spell that you cast that then brought them into play and they kind of were like tokens. That didn't work for a bunch of logistical reasons, so we ended up just making double-faced cards.

This is like, I think they're like pitch cards. They just broke a rule that people thought we would never break, which is there's always a card back. The reason we broke it was we felt that the gameplay was so good and that the vast, vast majority of players use card sleeves, and we felt like, okay, there's enough positive gameplay here, and there's a lot of design space in them, by the way. There's a huge amount of design space.

As a designer, it's one of the things we in them by the way. There's a huge amount of design space. As a designer, it's one of the things we've introduced in the last like 10 years that are like, wow, there's a lot of interesting space here. We're not going to do it all the time because it is expensive to make and there's some complications that comes with it and we don't want people constantly having to deal with double-faced cards, but it's something

we'll do from time to time. And yes, it means we will do them again. But anyway, like I said, there are people to this day that felt like we broke a fundamental rule we're not supposed to break. Imagine, oh, we're supposed to have a card back.

We broke the card back. I find it interesting that some people say that, you know, you said you've never changed the card back and now you've changed the card back. I'm like, well, it's not really a change in the card back. I understand it doesn't have a card back, but not having a card back is not changing the card back and now you've changed the card back. I'm like, well, it's not really a change in the card back. I understand it doesn't have a card back, but not having a card back is not changing

the card back. But anyway, definitely something people were quite compassionate about. Next, number 19, organized play changes. So this is another example. The Lasting Dragon was an example last time where we did something. It wasn't that bright on our part. Basically what happened was we made a whole bunch of changes to organized play. We got rid of worlds. We severely changed how you got to the Pro Tour. We changed a whole bunch of things. I don't even want to go into it here.

The important thing is players, especially people who participate in organized play, were really upset. There were articles written. There was basically a very loud response from the players, a very loud response saying, this is a mistake. And it made us go back. We rethought it. We changed a bunch of things. Worlds got added back in, in a different context,

but worlds got added back in. And I believe the change in the end was very good, but we did make some poor choices along the way. And we definitely, this is an example where we did something, I believe we did it incorrectly, the public made it loud and clear they felt we did it wrong,

we fixed it, and we listened to what they had to say. And one of the themes I want to say here is that one of the goals of these two podcasts is I'm not trying to belittle people being upset, and not at all. I love the fact that people care so much about the game that when something changes and it matters to them,

that they are vocal about how they feel about it. Some of these things, I truly believe we've made a mistake. It was really important that people told us. Other things, I felt like we did something that was pretty radical that we did think was, for the long-term health of the game, something that was needed. So I did think was for the long term health of the game something that was needed so I believe it's the right choice but I understand completely understand why people

got upset you know and by the way when we do something big we understand there's going to be a reaction I think we're trying to get better at writing articles and doing a better job of explaining why we're doing these things so people understand but my goal of these two podcasts is not to say that I think it's...

I have to stress this twice. I'm not belittling people being upset. That's awesome that people care enough about our game that if they see something is wrong, they let us know. I never want that to stop. If you don't like something, I have lots of social media. I got Twitter and Tumblr and Google Plus and Instagram now. I have my thread.

I have my email. I read every email. If you want to say something to me, you can say it. You don't like something about the game or do like something about the game, let me know. I do want to hear. I'm almost to where I'm going to get to number 20. Number 20 was New Slivers in Magic 2014.

This is probably not quite as big as some of the other ones. I just, it was frequent. I wanted to do a frequent, a recent controversy. So what happened was we brought slivers back. We made two changes that I think in concert really, if we had made one of the changes, maybe we would have been okay, but two of the changes together really seemed to upset people. One change is we changed how they function.

Over the years, we've changed how the lords work in that it used to be that, you know, Goblin King affected all goblins, and eventually it's like, well, it's better gameplay, and it's more intuitive to how people expect it to work if the Goblin King or, you know, the Lord of the Goblins affects your goblins and not all goblins. And so we previously, the last time Slippersivers come back, it was in the Nostalgia set, we decided to keep them the same way, but this time, like, you know what, we need to fix them.

Every other lore to the game now works that it affects your stuff, so we changed slivers so it affects your slivers and not all slivers. It's interesting, the only reason it ever matters is in sliver mirror matches. I don't personally believe it makes mirror matches better,

but as with any change, there were people that liked it, you know, and they did enjoy it, and we took something away from them. So, you know, hey, rightfully so. You know, there were people that really felt that in mirror matches it added extra, you know, strategic play about when to play them and not to play them. And I'm not an expert in sliver mirror matches, so I'm willing to accept that possibly

sliver mirror matches got slightly worse. I'm not 100% sure that's true, but even assuming that it is true, I believe it is the right decision to make. Most sliver play is not mirror match sliver play, and I believe that the change we made to the Tribal Lords is correct. That affecting your stuff is the right way to do it.

It's how most people intuitively expect, and I much prefer you play your cards, because I don't like when you have a card and play, go, oh, wait, let me check the board. Is it good for me to play this? Oh, no, they have goblins. Oh, they have more goblins than I do. I better not play my goblin game. I do not think that was good gameplay. The second thing is we changed how the slivers looked. I can't talk too much about that, only because that's not my area of expertise. I know that the creative was trying to give them

sort of a different feel. That did not go over well. So a combination of changing how they mechanically function and a combination of changing how they looked got people in a big uproar. Slivers are very much beloved. People felt we shifted them too much. I mean, maybe the correct thing was to change one thing and not change the other.

I don't know. I mean, the mechanical change... I will defend the mechanical change. I can't defend the art, because that's not my area. The mechanical change I think is important. I want the game to be consistent. I want things to work the same. I do not like when all things work one way, but this one thing works

different. That leads to people making mistakes and not playing correctly. I will stand by the mechanical chances livers. I believe it is correct. People can disagree with me, but I do believe it's correct. Okay. That, my friends, was 20 things that were going to kill magic.

Once again, tongue-in-cheek. So, I'm almost to work, so let me make this point, which I was making before I got to Slivers, but it's an important point, which is, Magic, one of Magic's great strengths is all of you guys,

which is we have an invested player base. I talked before about, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how do you get good at something. And it's 10,000 hours with constant feedback. The constant feedback part is really important that people gloss over. It's not just putting the time in. It's not just spending the 10,000 hours.

It is having the feedback. And the audience, you guys, you guys, you know, we've had our 10,000 hours and you guys provide excellent feedback. I'm not saying you're always right. Obviously, we've had our 10,000 hours, and you guys provide excellent feedback. I'm not saying you're always right. Obviously, we'll do some stuff you guys complained about that I believe we did the right thing. But I love having the sounding board that is the player base.

I love having a communication with the player base that you guys tell us what you feel. If you like something we did, you tell us. You don't like something, you for sure tell us. And that there's a nice two-way interconnectivity between us and our players. And I believe one of the reasons that Magic is so good, the reason Magic is the best game in the world as far as I'm concerned, is because we have been able to fine-tune it over 20 years using our audience as an amazing resource for feedback. And the reason Magic, I mean, I think magic is the best

it's ever been, and a big part of that is all of you guys, is you play and you voice to us what you like and don't like, and that is super important. I know on my blog I talk all the time about market research, and it's funny because some people get really mad that we rely too much on market

research, and I'm like, that's you guys! That's you! That's us listening to you! That's important! Us listening to you is really, really important. The reason Magic has grown, the reason Magic continues to grow, is we listen to our customers and we provide for them what makes a better game.

And like I said, I think Magic is an awesome... as awesome as it is because we have such a dedicated and invested player base who are willing to help steer the game in an even better direction. And so I want to thank all of you. I want to end today by saying,

you know, these were not 20 things that almost killed magic. I think these were things that helped magic grow and become a better game. A few of them were mistakes, but when we made mistakes, you guys caught us on that and corrected us, and we fixed them. But anyway,

I hope that these two podcasts have been illuminating. I like doing history a little bit, and this is more about history of the games, of the controversies and changes, and so those people that didn't live through all of them

might have a better understanding, and those who did, a little walk through memory lane of angry posts maybe you made. Anyway, I always love talking about magic, and especially talking about magic history. But even more, I like making magic. So I'll talk to you guys next time.