Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #124 - Creature Types

Episode Date: May 23, 2014

Mark talks the impact creature types have on design and vice versa.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, I thought I was going to talk about an aspect of design that overlaps with an aspect of creative. Today, I'm going to talk about the creature type. So, I'm going to sort of explain what it is and explain why it's a very interesting, uh, okay, so let me walk through what a creature type is and all. There's a lot of interesting behind the scenes about the creature type. Okay, so, um, on a magic card, uh, there is the title, there is the art, there's the card type line, there's the rules text, there's power toughness, um, you know, artist credit, other stuff like that. Okay, today we're talking about the card type line

and specifically, so the card type, there are seven card types right now. There's instants and interrupts, not interrupts, there's instants and sorceries, interrupts are long gone. There's creatures, artifacts, enchantments, land,

and planeswalkers. One day, maybe I'll do a history of different card types. But today, I'm talking about creature type. Actually, I'm talking... So, anyway, creatures are the most common card type. They make up like 55% of the cards, usually. Okay, so every type or some types can have what's called a subtype. And a subtype is a subcategory of the type.

So for creatures, we have what's called a creature type. A creature type, for example, and you guys are very aware of this, is goblin, soldier, merfolk. So when magic first started, in fact, instead of having the card type creature on it, it in fact said summon and whatever the creature type was. The word creature actually didn't appear on the cards that were creatures. Let's say it was a goblin, it would say summon goblin. The idea was that this was a summoning spell that summoned a goblin. that, you know, this was a summoning spell that summoned a goblin. The problem was it didn't say creature anywhere on the card.

And so, I think during 6th edition is when we changed, but at some point we changed, so instead of being summon goblin it's creature goblin. And the point of the creature type is twofold. One, it's flavor. It sort of defines what the creature is. And it's important, if you want to be able to mechanically interact with some aspect of the game, you need to be able to mark it. In fact, when people ask me things I would do if, you know, we did magic all over again, I would probably do a little bit more with super types and subtypes. For example, there really aren't a lot of spell subtypes.

I might play around a little more with fire or ice, or things in which you see on multiple spells that maybe you have a fire mage that interacts well with fire spells. Anyway, we didn't do that. But we did do it in creatures. Creatures is the one area we did do this. And so the idea is all creatures are something.

Now, in the beginning, they usually were one thing. So if you go back and look in alpha, they either were... So we've now since divided them into two things. We call races and classes,

which is, I think, based off D&D terminology. A race is like goblin, elf, merfolk. It's what or who you are. I mean, or, you know, what race you are from. Are you human? And the funny thing is, well, I'll get there. Then a class is the job you have. You're a soldier, you're a wizard. You're a shaman. You're a warrior. And so, early on in magic, you had one type. And what happened was

that if you were human, we tended to say what you did rather than you were human. Human wasn't a creature type early on. So let's say you were a human wizard, like Prodigal Sorcerer. He was just summon wizard. And what happened was, at some point, Prodigal Sorcerer. He was just summon wizard. Um,

and what happened was, at some point, in fact, it happened around Mirrodin. I think Mirrodin's the set that it first appeared in. Which is funny, by the way, because the set before it was Onslaught, which was the first tribal set. And the fact that we updated our creature types to set after, that shows that we weren't, uh, our ducks weren't in a row.

We really should have done that the year before but anyway we moved what we call a race class system which says if you have both a race and a class and by that we mean a supported race and a supported class then you get both usually the class tends to be on

humanoid things if you're a giant beast usually if you're a larger creature, you don't have a class. You're just what you are. You're just a beast. But if you have a role, let's say you're a soldier,

now you're a human soldier or a goblin soldier. And so one of the things that we've done is we've tried to make use of the creature type. I talked about how it has a flavor. It also has a mechanical means use of the creature type. I talked about how it has a flavor. It also has a mechanical means. And the creature type, the reason I decided to talk about it today

is it is a very interesting, I have everything on the card. If you took the components, you pretty much can divvy up who is responsible for the component between design development and the creative team. For example, the title, that's the creative team. Every once in a blue moon, in unsets especially, it can matter. But pretty much the title is the title. The only time it

mechanically matters, well, there's two reasons it can matter outside of creative. One is that sometimes you will reference the title on another card, although usually as long as the title is referenced, it doesn't matter. But we have made things where there's a connector. And sometimes we use the name to connect the fact that cycles are together or that cards are together or that we have a mechanic that's united, but the mechanic isn't keyworded but we want you to know they all work the same. So some of the time we use the title as a

connector to make you realize that these things are connected. Another thing is, and this doesn't happen a lot, the title is on the same bar as the mana cost and if your title is long enough, it can run into it can fight for space with the mana cost. And so what happens is sometimes, um, we will have to shorten either the name of the creature or we

have to shorten the casting cost. Well, how do you shorten the casting cost? And the answer is having less colored mana and more colorless mana. Because if you are three black and a black, you're three mana symbols. But if you're four and a black, you're two mana symbols. It's actually a third category, I just realized. If the text is very, very busy, and tech, T-E-K, is an example of this. If you have to reference the creature, and the creature has a long name, sometimes it won't fit in the rules text. And so in order to fit in the rules text, you have to have a short name.

And tech is the one I remember. The reason it has a three-word name is we literally couldn't do the rules text if the name was longer than three letters. So we made it short. Also remember, by the way, when you look at letters, all letters are not equal. An M is very wide. An L is very

skinny. You can have a whole bunch of L's versus one M. Anyway, so the title pretty much is creative. The art and versus 1M. Anyway, so, the title pretty much is creative. The art and the concepting and all that, creative. The car type line is mostly mechanical, but when we get to the creature type,

it's both. I'll get that back in a second. Get to the rules text, the non-italicized part of the rules text, that's mechanics, that's design development. The flavor text, that's creative. Then the art credit is creative, and then the power toughness is mostly mechanical,

although that's the one other place that creative gets involved. But the area where there's a lot of overlap is the creature type line. And essentially the way it works is if the card doesn't mechanically care what creature type it is then it's up to the creative team to decide what it is but if it's relevant

then R&D will dictate and there's two ways we dictate things one is this has to be a goblin we're doing goblin tribal this dictate things. One is, this has to be a goblin. We're doing goblin tribal. This is part of goblin tribal. This has to be a goblin. The other thing is, oh, we did goblin tribal last year. Goblin's really good.

This card, if a goblin is too strong, so in order to print the card, it can't be a goblin. So those are two different things that we'll dictate. And what we do in the file is we put an exclamation point after the creature type. And if the creative team sees an exclamation point, we're like, no, we need that. We need that. If there's not, that means the creative team can do whatever they want. And the way it works is usually at the start of a design, or early on, the creative team makes what's called a creature grid.

And what a creature grid is, they figure out what creatures exist in the world that we're at. And what they try to do is, magic has a slew of creatures. So other than a few places, Ravnica, for example, is made of this hub. So it has a lot more creatures than normal. But outside of a few exceptions like Ravnica, when you go to a world, they want to refine the world and give it flavor, and part of that is exclusion, which is, oh, these things are there, these things aren't there.

And you have to be very conscious. What's not there is often very important. Now, magic has certain iconics. I talk about iconic races and characteristic races. Let me talk about that for a second. So what we try to do is each race has a small creature that is kind of the one you see most often. That is what we call the characteristic race. So I'm going to go backwards today. So green is elves,

red is goblins, black, these days it's mostly vampires, but every once in a while it'll be zombies instead of vampires. Blue is merfolk, and white, I guess is human, it doesn't really have a characteristic race other than,

you can argue human is its characteristic race. White is more human than anybody else. White is definitely the most human-centric of the five colors. Iconics, now we'll go forward. White is angel. Blue is sphinx. Black is demon, although sometimes

we use vampire. The vampire is more characteristic these days. Red is dragon, and green is hydra. So, how did we get to those? So let me explain. Okay, so Alpha came out. And in Alpha, there were three cards that cared about creature types. There was Goblin King, cared about goblins. There was Lord of Atlantis, cared about merfolk. There was zombie, zombie, what was zombie called? Zombie master? Cared about zombies.

So early on, those are the three races that mattered at first. Elves did not matter, although there were a few elves in green. And elves were definitely something that was very high profile. Alpha had an angel, an insert angel, that became very popular. It had both a demon in Lord of the Pit, and it had a vampire in Sanger Vampire, that was very popular. Red had Shivan Dragon, so it had a dragon. Blue had Mahamori Djinn, which was a djinn, And green had Force of Nature, which I think was a force of nature at the time.

Now we call it... Excuse me. Now we call it elemental. So early on, it wasn't that Richard was trying to make iconics. The reason that we started down that path was that you wanted the colors to have identity. And part of that was, you kind of wanted

some expectations of some things to be there. And so, the reason we started getting the characteristic, so the characteristic of races came about because we're like, oh, well, what's showing up enough that we want to care about tribal? And so, I mean, we would from time to time do

what we call lords. Usually a lord was a creature that grants an ability to all creature types of a certain type. Originally, the way lords worked, the way like Goblin King and Zombie Master, Zombie Master, and Lord of Atlantis worked was they would grant it to all creatures of that type. So, for example, not just your goblins got plus one plus one, all goblins got plus one plus one. The other thing that the original lords did is they themselves weren't the creature type,

which was confusing, because the goblin king sure looked like a goblin, and the lord of Atlantis sure looked like a merfolk. Maybe I argued the zombie master wasn't a zombie, but... And so a couple things happen. First off, we realize that it should only affect your creatures. We made that change, I don't know, six, seven years in.

And the second thing is we realize that especially flavor-wise, a goblin king is a goblin. Well, he needs to affect himself. And because it would just confuse people. Mostly we did that because it would confuse people. Um, also people liked when you stacked lords, the lords themselves beefed up, so they fit in the deck better.

Um, but I think it was done more for just confusion, in that you really expected a goblin king to be a goblin, so when it didn't get the boost, it, the gameplay fought your intuition, which we don't like. Um, so what happened is, we would make lords over time. And we tended to make lords of things in which, A, there was enough creatures to warrant a lord, and B, we thought that people would enjoy making that. It wasn't until Onslaught that we had the first what we called tribal theme. Although you could argue Fallen Empires definitely sort of Fallen Empires while it

didn't it definitely had tribes and there was a tribal war and it had sort of a feel it wasn't as mechanically tribal as Onflot or Lorwyn would be but it did have decks where it encouraged you to kind of play those things together and in Fallen Empires there was a little more

toward color force to there where when we started getting to Onflotught, we called out creature types by name. In fact, at some point I will do the Onslaught podcast, but the little story I'll tell is, when I was trying to convince Bill that tribal was a good theme, one of the things I pointed to was how much people liked playing tribal decks, even though at the time they weren't particularly good. And that what we found was people really, good. And that, what we found was, people

really, that, I refer to this as what we call linear, which was in design, there's two different mechanics, what we call linear mechanics and modular mechanics. A linear mechanic means the mechanic kind of tells you what else to put with it. So a lord is a good example.

If Goblin King says all your goblins get plus one plus one, or it says all goblins but the new ones say all your goblins, well, it says put goblins in your deck. If all goblins get bigger, well, fill your deck with full goblins. A modular card is a card in which it doesn't tell you that it just does what it does, but it doesn't

sort of say, hey, you want to play these other kind of things. People, I mean, magic is modular in nature. We want to make sure we have a lot of modularity to it. But people really do enjoy linear themes because it kind of tells you what to do. It's fun. Oh, I get it.

I'm supposed to do this thing. And the reason the tribal was very popular was that people enjoy, like, oh, I like, pick your race. I like that race. I'm going to build a deck out of that. So, anyway, the characteristic basically ended up being things that we just liked using a lot. And what we realized is because we did tribal things, people got extra satisfaction out of red things being goblins.

So we started defaulting is the wrong word, but making sure that, assuming the environment, assuming the environment, that was a traffic, ooh, somebody cut me off. Assuming that the world had the characteristic race, we want to make sure there's enough of them. And it's the kind of thing where we don't do tribal, I'm sorry, we don't do a tribal theme all the time, but we do a little bit of tribal all the time. For example, in Theros right now, it's not at all tribal block, but, oh, Minotaur tribal is one of the little themes that goes on in it. That every set, there's... I mean, we up how much tribal there is,

but it's the kind of thing we always do a little bit of because people really enjoy it. So the characteristic races kind of came about because they're the ones that we wanted to support for lords and things, for tribal stuff. People loved goblins. Goblins have always been super popular. People love elves. Elves have been super popular. Merfolk were popular, but for a while they went away because creative didn't really like Merfolk because we're a land-based game. We're fighting on land, and Merfolk were kind of weird.

And we took them away for a while, but players really, really wanted them. We finally said, you know, what are we doing? And we brought them back. And so Merfolk returned, and then they're back. And so they're pretty much part of Blue. Black, for a long time, zombies were the go-to characteristic race.

We had this problem with the iconics, that black was fighting between demons and vampires, and finally we decided that maybe a better way to use vampires is not to restrict them to just have one or two, but make a whole race of vampires, that you could build, you know, you can make a vampire deck. I mean, vampires have clans and things, and so we thought we would make black a whole race of vampires that you could build, you know, you can make a vampire deck. I mean, vampires have clans and things. And so they thought we would make black a characteristic race. Now, black is the embarrassment of riches color

for creature types in that it has two different characteristic races. It can also use zombies. Zombies are also very popular. So we go back and forth between zombies and vampires depending on what the set needs or if the set's like Indostrata

you get them both white's been a problem child we've kind of for now settled on humans humans show up do show up in all five colors

so the quirky thing about it being a characteristic race of white is while white has more humans all the other colors get humans whereas other than us bleeding for tribal purposes characteristic race of white is, while white has more humans, all the other colors get humans, whereas other than us bleeding for

tribal purposes, now when we make a tribe something that we push, we tend to put it in a second color, just to give you a little more flexibility on how to build a deck and what you can do with it. Not that you can't build a monocolored deck, because you can, but by having two colors, it just gives you more options and more choices, and one of the problems sometimes with linear decks is if you don't give enough space, all the decks look the same.

And so that's why, for example, you'll notice now, like in Innistrad, in Lorwyn, with Minotaurs and Theros, we give you a second color to give you some options of what you can do. Iconics. So, Dragons and Demons and Angels. So, dragons and demons and angels. Well, angels and dragons showed up in the very first set, were beloved in the very first set.

We've kept them, you know, I mean, from time to time we have a world where they don't show up, although dragons show up in most worlds. Angels will disappear

a little more often. Like, angels aren't in Theros, for example. Black, we had demons and vampires we went back and forth for a while we took demons out of the game just like merfolk

the reason that happened was we were a little gun shy we were worried that maybe demons would create some bad publicity and so we took them out when the game was young we were a little more careful we didn't want to offend anybody

what happened was they were gone for a couple of years and finally we just looked at mass media, you know, and like, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just other things that were like very accepted, very popular things, and like, look, there's demons all over the place. We're like, okay. And so we brought demons back. I wrote a whole article called

Where Have All the Demons Gone, where I explain this in a lot more detail than my quick story. So, we decided to make demons Blex Iconic and push Vampires down to be a characteristic race from time to time we'll make an Iconic Vampire but really the

more Iconic race is Demons the thing by the way about the Iconic is we want them to embody the essence of the color, so the reason we like Angels is Angels are protective and they very much are defensive in nature, and they have sort of this moral sort of quality to them that very well represents white.

Dragons are fierce and want to be free and kind of like do their own thing, and they definitely have a lot of the red feel of kind of like don't tell them what to do, they're going to do what they want to do. And the red dragons that we play up in red are much wilder. And, you know, we don't tend to play the smart dragons up in red. Then black, demons. Well, demons, they're all about power and making, you know, and being sneaky and making you try to make deals you shouldn't make. And so those three were very good.

So the problem we had for a long time is blue and green, trying to find the iconics for blue and green. So for blue, we tried a couple different things. We tried djinn for a while, but what we found was we liked that djinns have a sense that they fly, which was good, because blue was one of the things is the color of the air. And so not all the iconconics have to fly. Demons don't always fly.

We do make angels and dragons always fly, because angels have wings, and if you have wings, you fly in magic for Confucian purposes. And everyone assumes dragons fly, so we make dragons fly. So angels and dragons always fly. Demons sometimes fly, sometimes don't. If you see wings on them, they fly, but some demons do not fly. But we wanted a blue zyconic to fly. Djins, I kind of felt that just they,

I don't know, I think they felt they were a little too, a little more humanoid than they liked, and they didn't really, they were weird in that they came with sort of an implied ethnicity that was a little quirky, that kind of the way they dressed made sense in a certain world, but other worlds just wouldn't make any sense,

and that they, a lot of the trappings of djinns didn't translate well to a lot of different worlds, and so they decided that djines just weren't a good fit. So we tried a bunch of other different things. Eventually we settled on the Sphinx. Now you would argue the Sphinx isn't that Greek mythology, and the answer is its origins is Greek mythology, but it has less trappings of Greek mythology.

It comes across more like a wild creature, but Sphinxes are tied to knowledge and being smart and they had a very distinctive look the other problem I think with djinns is the only way to really give djinns a distinctive look is to go super super kind of Arabian Nights sort of look and we can't always do that

and that once you start taking away a lot of those trappings can you tell it's a djinn? whereas sphinx has a very distinctive look and you can tell taking away a lot of those trappings. Can you tell it's a djinn? Whereas Sphinx has a very distinctive look, and you can tell. And we like the idea that the Sphinx connected to knowledge, and that blue is all about wanting knowledge, and Sphinxes are all about knowing things,

so that felt like a good fit. Green was the last one we figured out the iconic with, which was we tried worms, we tried tree folk, and we tried beasts. People didn't really warm up to worms tried tree folk and we tried beasts people didn't really warm up to worms or tree folk beasts were a little too nondescript

and also the icon should kind of not show up on a regular basis and beasts was too of a catch all and we used beasts at common

we also kind of liked using tree folk at common so Hydra it took us a while to get Hydra because Hydras were originally

in alpha were in red rock Hydra and I think the reason it was in red because it was a, Hydra, it took us a while to get Hydra, because Hydras were originally, in Alpha, were in red. Rock Hydra. And I think the reason it was in red, because it was a rock Hydra, and red is high to the Earth. But what we realized was, Hydras are all about growth, right? You chop off one head and two more grow, and that, you know, the thing about them is

that they're feral, and they're wild, they live in the jungle, and so we said, okay, we thought it was neat that Hydras had this cool quality and that we started sort of building more exciting Hydras and people really seemed to like them. So we've made Hydra the green iconic. Anyway, so the way it works is,

I explained this earlier, is when design is making a card, if we care about what the creature type is, we mark it. If not, we don't. And then the creative team figures out what it wants to be based upon the grid that it made. Did I finish this story?

At the start of a set, what happens is they figure out what they want in the world. They'll sit down with design. More often, if there's tribal needs, like Laura, when we sat down and hashed out what the tribes we were supporting, and that was a give and take between

things we knew we wanted to do and things Creative felt would fit the world, and that we started with a few things we wanted and went back and forth. Usually something like Theros is like, well, we knew we wanted to do some tribal, we decided to go on Minotaur tribal, we knew Minotaurs would be there.

I mean, we double checked with Creative to say we want to do this. Do you mind having these in volume? Now the other thing that comes up is the Creative team will also dictate size because this happened with the Minotaurs in Theros which is they have a

general sense of how big things are supposed to be and so if you want to make something and be a certain type of creature, sometimes they'll say, oh, well, it needs to be bigger than that and smaller than that. The classic example, though this card didn't end up being, didn't end up coming, was I had made a

Hercules card for Theros, a legendary creature, and it was a 12-12. And Creatives were like, look, we get he's the strongest man ever to walk the face, he's a demigod, but 12-12 is just too is like, look, we get he's the strongest man ever to walk the face, he's a demigod, but 12-12 is just too much. You know,

that, we look at, like, human warriors, like, I think they get up to maybe 6-6 or 7-7, and those are like

the best warriors you've ever seen. And so, we have to be careful that part of making the flavor make sense is we have to have,

we have to match the essence of what it wants to be. Now, one of the things R&D has done, or design development has done, is certain creature types we have tied to certain iconics. For example, if you see a wall, it will have Defender. Wall, by the way, like Demons and Merfolk, we took away. I was part of this group in which I'm not a big fan of walloping creatures. They're not sentient or most of them aren't sentient. You know, they're like wall of stone is literally

it's an object. It's not even a creature. But all the players, they love the walls. So we brought them back. You guys, it makes no sense, but you like the walls. So we bring them back.

I don't know what accents I'm doing. I'm just making random accents up. So walls will always have defender, although it used to be that walls came with rules baggage that basically said they had defender, and legends came with the legendary rule. And we decoupled those so that wall no longer means defender, although every wall happens to have defender. Other things that are tied. We tend to tie specters to hit you. Combat damage does discard ability.

Usually specters slide, but not always. Shades we tie in black to pumping, which is if I spend black mana, I get plus one, plus one. Sometimes you get increments, but shades always pump. That's a shade thing. Trolls always regenerate. Those are in green, so if you have a troll, they have the regeneration ability.

Certain creatures like angels fly, dragons fly. Generally, all birds fly. But what about birds that don't fly? Well, we try not to do those, because it confuses people when they see birds that do not fly. The famous example is a card called Whippoorwill in the dark, in which literally, in the art, the bird is shown in mid-flight, except the card didn't end up flying, and it confused people because, oh, look, flying bird. I can't block it. So one of our rules now

is it has to be very, very clear that if you look like you fly, you fly. If you don't look like you fly, you don't fly. And in fact, we've had art come back and have

to go, oh, I guess this won't fly or, oh, this must fly because the art implies something that the card didn't previously do. So there's certain, I'm blanking right now,

like harpies fly. Anything that has wings, sphinxes fly. Anything that has wings, Sphinxes fly. Anything that clearly looks like it flies must fly. Other connectors we make mechanically. There's some general size restrictions. Most of the characteristic races

we tend to not make much bigger than 4-4. I mean, there's exceptions. There's Super Special Goblin or something. But the average Goblin usually is 4-4 or smaller. And even the 4-4. I mean, there's exceptions. There's super special goblin or something, but the average goblin usually is 4-4 or smaller. And even the 4-4s a lot of times are a bunch of goblins. Although, creative does not

like us doing bands of things all that much. They prefer that the card represents a single thing, not a bunch of things. The other thing that's quirky is that if you show something on a mount, that the mount is not referenced in the creature type. So a horse is a creature type we support,

but a knight on a horse is not knight horse. It's just knight. And so the mount is not referenced in the creature type. What else do we do mechanically? I'm sure I'm missing something. Oh, basilisks and medusas tend to come with death touch. Or some ability that implies that they have the death gaze. Death touch is the most often.

There's a few other things. Usually they have to have some killing ability. What else? The size restrictions. I mean, so pretty much when we make cards and we care about the creature type, sometimes what happens is we in design will put down creature types we'd like it to be.

Theros is a really good example where we spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that we did a bunch of top-down Greek mythological things. And so what we would do there is we would put them in the name. We didn't put an exclamation point because it didn't have to be that. But we went through and let the person who was doing the concepting know, look, we went on our way to concept some stuff that could be creature types that made sense in Greek mythology.

And so that's kind of a soft suggestion. It's more like, well, we did make this to be a Cattle of Lepus. If it could be a Cattle of Lepus, that would be nice. That kind of thing. Maybe there was a symbol. I don't remember this. I didn't. Ethan was my strong second

so he did the file, so I'm not sure if he notated that in the file so when we do top down more often we're more likely to go, oh, this is a zombie card like a good example is, well actually, Innistrad's a poor example

only because it had a strong tribal theme, so we had a lot of exclamation points because of the tribal theme. A better example might be I just make a card where, you know, a bunch of zombies come back and attack you, like, well, this is a zombie, and that, you know, we try to let them know when we do top-down that we're really trying to

hit something in particular. There's some classic cases where we, in the past, when we didn't dictate what we were doing, we didn't explain the flavor, and then they would completely change the card. And like, oh, well, I had a card in Mirrodin that's called Magnetic Man,

and it had the ability to force artifact creatures to block it or keep artifact creatures from blocking it. But I didn't really communicate that well to the creative team, and so it ended up being a juggernaut or something. The ability seems like the weirdest thing in the world when it was actually a top-down design that, you know, it could attract or repel metal.

So, anyway, I'm driving here to work. Mostly what I wanted to explain today is that if you take any small nuance of a card, like, literally, I'm just talking about the subtype to creatures, and there's a lot that goes into it.

In fact, in this particular case, there's two whole teams that care about it. Three teams, I guess, if you think of design and development as being different teams. It's something in which a lot of different people put a lot of different energy and care in, and that... And I didn't...

I just partied. I didn't even talk about the great creature update. This is how much stuff that goes on with creature types. Real quickly, we realized at some point that we had done a poor job retroactively

and we went back and we said, oh, well, this is clearly this. You know, it's clearly a goblin. Okay, goblin rocksled

actually is a goblin. It said rocksled rather than goblin rocksled. We made it a goblin, so we went back. And that was its own controversial thing. In fact, I've run out of time, but real quickly, the reason it was controversial is

we like when cards tell you what they say, and so obviously Goblin Rocksled, you kind of think it's a Goblin, even though it doesn't say Goblin, but some of the cards that were human, where we marked as human, was it clear they were human versus something else? It wasn't always as obvious.

And so there were good pros and cons to the Great Creature Update. I think it did a lot of good, but it also did some bad. It was kind of mixed. But it's hard in the sense that once you're saying humans are human, well, isn't that a human? And if it is a human, you need to mark it as a human. Anyway, my point today is there's a lot that goes on. This is just one little tiny aspect of a card,

and the amount of energy and time and thought and process, and just during the course of magic, how much has changed. A lot goes into it, and that's kind of my point today. It's the creature type. It might just be one tiny aspect, but it's important. Okay, well, as much as I love talking about magic and talking about creature types even more, I like making magic.

So it's time for me to go. Thanks for chatting or thanks for listening to me today, guys. Talk to you soon.