Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #14 - Pro Tour

Episode Date: December 27, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about the creation of the Pro Tour.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for Drive to Work. Okay, well today, my ongoing quest to try to figure out different topics for the podcast, I've been thinking about different kinds of things that I can talk about. And one of the things I realized is, I've been a wizard a long time. I've been involved in a lot of things. And while I've been involved in a lot of sets, I'm involved in other aspects of magic. And so today, I'm going to talk about the creation of the Pro Tour, something I was involved in. So one of the things I've realized, by the way, I've been thinking about how my, like, I have a podcast. I have a column.

I want to make sure that I'm doing things that fit the medium by which I'm working with. And that I've come to realize that podcasts, I think they shine in storytelling. In sort of recalling things and, you know, where I think articles do a little better job of being, you know, talking about a very specific thing where I can rewrite and be very exact. So I'm trying to find topics in which I get to tell stories, because I think that's what podcasts do best. The reason I picked the Pro Tour is, it's one of the things that I was very involved in the creation of, and that I have a very first-hand viewpoint of watching it happen. And so, anyway, I think

the Pro Tour has become a pretty, you know, key part of magic. So today, I think the Pro Tour has become a pretty, you know, a key part of Magic. So today, I'm going to talk about the creation of the Pro Tour. And like I've talked about in a couple other podcasts, I feel that one of my roles is I'm one of the historians of the game. And that kind of one of my responsibilities of this podcast is, hey, to kind of fill in a bunch of stories for people that might not know. Because I want, you know, in time for people to sort of know about sort of how magic came to be. So anyway, today I thought I would talk about the Pro Tour. So, to explain the Pro Tour, I need to explain a couple of key things. First, let me talk about my background with organized play. Okay, so, what led to me being involved in the creation of the Pro Tour? I think the answer would be Magic the Puzzling.

Huh? So for those who don't know, I did a puzzle column. In fact, the very first thing I did for Magic is, I lived in Los Angeles, and the first Duelist came out. And I liked it, but I thought it was kind of light on material for more experienced players. So I ended up pitching this idea for a puzzle column, kind of like a chess puzzle, where the game's in progress and you have to solve it. Anyway, they accepted it. This is their own story for another day.

But anyway, I started doing a puzzle column in the Duelist. What does this have to do with organized play? I will explain. So what happened was they wanted me, the puzzles became very popular very quickly. For quite a while, they were the most popular feature in the magazine. And so they wanted my puzzles to be up to date, meaning if this was the article that premiered Ice Age,

you know, Ice Age had just come out, they wanted me to have puzzles with Ice Age cards. So because this was a magazine, you know, and we had to work months ahead, that meant in order for me to be able to do puzzles, I needed to see the cards ahead of time because there was no way for me to make puzzles with cards I hadn't seen. And I needed to see all the cards because I needed to be able to get context to build puzzles. And I needed to know what tools I had because a lot of times when you're building a puzzle, you don't know quite what you need. You have to see what's available.

So anyway, I ended up getting advanced knowledge of the sets. They would send me what we would call god books, where there are literally pages. This is before the internet. We would send internet images. So they physically would, in the mail, send me pages that showed all the cards. And so I knew stuff ahead of time.

And that was cool. In fact, it was quite exciting. But one of the downsides was I was not allowed to play in sanctioned tournaments. Sanctioned play had started a little before that. In January of 94, they created the DCI, the Duelist Convocation International,

if you didn't know what DCI stands for. And they started having sanctioned tournaments. Magic would go on to have a much more robust organized play system. I'll get into that in a second. But there was some sanctioning in the early days. Anyway, I wasn't allowed to play in a sanctioned tournament. Where that mostly mattered was the high-profile stuff, regionals and things. I couldn't play in that.

So since I couldn't play in the tournaments, I started judging. And most people don't know this, but I actually, for a long time, was a level 4 judge. I did a lot of judging reviews. I was very active early on in the judging scene. And what happened was, when I first got to Wizards, I learned that Scaf Elias was in the process of putting together a pro tour for Magic. Let's jump over and talk about Scaf Elias for a second. Now, I brought him up during the Alliances podcast I did, because he's one of what we call the East Coast Playtefters. He was on the team that designed Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires and Antiquities.

And Scaf was one of the original playtafters of magic. He met Richard back in Philadelphia. If I remember correctly, Scaf knew Jim Lynn because they both went to Princeton together. And Jim Lynn had known Richard in Philadelphia, or UPenn. And I believe Scaf met Richard through Jim. I believe that is true. Anyway, Scaf and Richard became fast friends. Very close friends.

In fact, right now they're very, very good friends. And when Richard came out here to start to work at Wizards, Scaf followed very shortly thereafter. And so Scaf quickly became a mainstay. He was in R&D, but Scaf kind of did what Scaf wanted to do. Like I said, he was an executive vice president and kind of in charge of things Scaf wanted to be in charge of.

And, I mean, let me explain a couple things about Scaf. A, Scaf is intelligent, like nobody's business. I mean, most of R&D is on the intelligent side, but Scaf is very intelligent. Two, he is passionate mean, most of our indeed are on the intelligent side, but Scaf is very intelligent. Two, he is passionate. He believes things. I talked about the podcast one time, the argument Jim and I had all night long. Well, Scaf was passionate in everything he did, you know, or does.

I mean, not did or anything. And he really, like, he felt things strongly and he would, you know, he has read in his personality. He would drive, and if he felt something, he would really push it. Scaf also was a little eccentric. The story we often tell is that Scaf had a sleeping bag he kept under his desk, and often nights, instead of going home, he would just sleep under his desk. Scaf was also known for, in R&D, for eating just about anything. If there were leftovers of any kind,

no matter how old, Scaf would often eat them. But anyway, Scaf was very driven. He was very fun. He was playful. An awesome guy. I like Scaf a lot. But anyway, Scaf was trying to figure out where magic was going to go. And obviously, in the early days, Magic just kept finding new places because it came out in very limited release. And originally, it was hit on the West Coast, then the East Coast, then the rest of the U.S.,

and then Europe. And little by little, it was exploring new markets. And a lot of the growth came from finding new markets that hadn't had Magic before. But Scaf realized that that was only going to last for so long that at some point we needed to figure out how to sort of give the game legs.

So one of the things to remember about games in general is most games don't actually last that long. I mean, I think when you think about games, you think about the classics, and obviously the classics have lasted a long time, but the average game has a pretty short lifespan. And so Scaf was like, well, how do we extend this? How do we keep people playing? And Scaf realized that a key part of it was organized play. Because the number one reason people stop playing Magic,

a little trivia question, do you guys know, is the social network they play with goes away. Meaning they play with some people and then something changes. They graduate or they move or their friends move or something happens and that social network changes. Because the magic is what we call a core game made for core gamers. What is a core gamer? A core gamer is someone who gaming is a hobby for them. Which means that you know everybody has some free time and free money and like, what do they do with it? Some people might go play golf. Some might, you know, collect coins.

Gamers game. That's what they do. That is their hobby. And now games are awesome. There's a lot of positive things, you know, it definitely is very enriching and it's good mentally and does all sorts of positive things. And one of the big things about it is it's a very social thing. It's good mentally and does all sorts of positive things.

And one of the big things about it is it's a very social thing. But the downside is a lot of games, once you lose your social network, you stop playing the game. And so one of the things that was important is, well, let's create a place for people to be able to play. A, so there is always someone for them to play with. And B, that if people want to test themselves, that there is a means by which they can. And we talk about the psychographics about Spike, you know, and that there's a lot of players who really like to prove themselves through the game. And the tournament scene does a very good job

of letting you test against the best. Also, by the way, I don't know if I talked about this in the psychographics podcast, but look, all the psychographics like to win. The goal of the game is to win. How you win is different, you know, and how often you need to win to be satisfied is different, but everyone has a desire to win.

And the nice thing about going to a tournament is you really get to sort of try your hardest and get tested, and that is something that everybody can enjoy. Now, Scaf did some research, and what he realized is that having a bottom rung organized play is important, but it's part of a larger system. And part of that, he looked at a lot of other sports, was this idea of aspirational play. That I play because there's some goal I have in mind that I one day dream of getting to some level. For example, what sells a lot of basketballs? The NBA. What sells

a lot of mitts and baseballs? Major League Baseball. There's something to achieve and look up to. And so Scaf's goal was, what if we made a top tier of organized play? What if Magic had a pro tour? And what Scaf did is he did a lot of research. He went and talked to a lot of other sports, especially smaller sports, that had a circuit. I know he went and talked to beach volleyball. I know he talked to a bunch of different people. And he's trying to learn from them. He's like, well, how do you do this and how do you set it up?

And Scaf did a lot of research. And he came to the conclusion that, look, what would help Magic is to have this aspirational top-level play. So that meant, okay, we needed to create a pro tour. Now, what happened was I started in October of 95, and at that point, they had set up, I think they had rented the Puck building in New York in early February. But other than that, they knew they were going to do it, but they hadn't really put all the pieces together.

And I recognized this was going on, and I was excited. And I went to Scaf and I said, hey, I have a background in running tournaments. I would be very interested in being the liaison between R&D. And I don't know if a liaison position existed. I don't know. All I position existed. I don't know. All I know is I gave in to Scaf and let me help him. And Scaf and I were the two that worked really hard in putting all the pieces of the builders together.

Like I said, it was Scaf's idea, and Scaf had set it up. Scaf had gotten the hall rented. But I was there early enough that I helped Scaf figure out how to make it happen. So there are a bunch of things we were trying to solve because it's a pretty daunting thing. Okay, we're going to do a pro tour. Well, what does that mean?

Well, okay, obviously we need to have a series of events. That was understood. But, well, how do you get people there? How do you jumpstart the whole thing? Now, the big things we were concerned about, probably the number one reason of concern was, well, I guess there were two concerns. One was this idea of, is the game as skill testing as it needs to be? One of our worries was, well, what happens if we get people together and then it's just random every time?

And, like, instead of showing the game being very skill intensive, it shows the reverse. It's like, oh, wow, magic's really random. So to offset that, we said, okay, we need to get the best of the best players here. You know, if we're going to do this, this has to be the cream of the crop. It can't just be whoever's in the vicinity. We want the best magic players in the world. Well, how do we do that?

Well, the idea was, okay, let's figure out who we know are good magic players. So, we looked at all the data we had. At the time, there had been two World Championships so far. There was the 94 World Championships, where Zach Dolan beat Bertrand Lestray. There was the 95 Championships,

where Alexander Blugy beat Mark Hernandez. So we ended up inviting the top two from 94, mostly because we didn't have, actually, we didn't know a lot beyond the top two. I think we knew the top two from 94, mostly because we didn't have, actually, we didn't know a lot beyond the top two. I think we knew the top four, but the records weren't that great back then, so we didn't know everything.

But we invited the top two, and they were some of the celebrities of Magic because they had, obviously, the finals of the very first Magic World Championship. We invited the top eight of the 95 because that got us

Henry Stern, it got us Mark Justice, it got us, you know, Bloom, Keane Hernandez. It got us a bunch of names we knew Because that got us Henry Stern. It got us Mark Justice. It got us, you know, Blumkin Hernandez. It got us a bunch of names we knew that we knew were good players. And then we literally just started figuring out who were the good players. And then the criteria ended up being, like, for example, we knew that Dave Huntress was a very good player. And he had won the Ice Age pre-release tournament in Toronto.

There was one pre-release at the time, not a series yet. So we're like, okay, the winner of the Ice Age pre-release gets invited because we wanted Dave Humphries there. So what we did is we kind of picked and chose our categories to just get the best players there. And then we used our rating system to invite other players to make sure that other players got invited. And actually, now that I think of it, we might have invited just the top two from Worlds,

because I think Henry actually got in on a rating invite, now that I think about it. So maybe we invited the top two of each Worlds, but the ratings got in just as in... Anyway, I'm not sure exactly, but I know we went out of our way to make sure the named players were all there. But I know we went out of our way to make sure the name players were all there. And everybody was very excited because Magic at the time had had, I think, some $1,000 tournaments. I know Neutral Ground in New York at the time, Gray Matter, was running $1,000 tournaments. And I think Boston might have had a few.

But anyway, at the time, the first place prize was $17,000, which is funny. Modern day, it's $40,000, so that might seem like not a lot. But at the time, that was a lot of money. The winner gets $17,000 when previously the best you could do was $1,000 or maybe win some cards that are worth somewhere around that. And so we made a big deal. The other big worry we had was just how to get it started. It's it's one thing, like, once it's in place, people know to be excited for it, right? Like, once you see something, you're like, wow, I want that. But you have to make it happen first, and that's kind of tricky.

So, you know, it's definitely not something, it's kind of like building a house of cards where you kind of have to balance certain cards against each other when you start. And there was a lot of us trying to do that. Oh, the other interesting thing was, at first we were trying to get a name for it. So the idea we came up with at first was to call it the Black Lotus Protor.

I think we liked that name because Black Lotus was the marquee card of magic. It had a sense of dignity, a little sense of beauty. And we felt like, oh, it has a nice sort of sound to it. But then we learned out that a Black Lotus in Asia has a connotation of drug running. So we needed something that we could use worldwide.

And in the end, we decided, what should we call the Magic the Gathering Pro Tour? How about the Magic the Gathering Pro Tour? How about the Magic the Gathering Pro Tour? It took us a while to come to that realization. Just call it the Pro Tour. I mean, the Magic the Gathering Pro Tour, obviously. Okay, so we get a list of players. How do we get the rest of the people there?

Well, PTQs wouldn't get invented yet. In fact, PTQs didn't start until the second Pro Tour, the one for Los Angeles. For New York, if you wanted to go and you weren't one of the elite we invited, how did you get there? The answer is, you called on the phone. Yes, we made an announcement that at a certain time, the first N number of people that called up could sign up to come. And so, a lot of people joked that it was a Pro Tour call-in, because in order to get there, you had to call on the phone. Now, as it turns out, the most dedicated people were the ones that were most active about doing it. And we actually had a pretty turnout in the first Pro Tour.

And like I said, we were concerned. I mean, there's a whole... The funny thing is, if you go back and look at the first Pro Tour, so much about it, like, in modern day, because, you know, we're 17 years in, seems, like, almost crazy in some of the stuff that happened. But, I mean, it all came together. It was funny. So, what happened was, I talked about how we had a Pro Tour in February in New York. Well, that turned out to be a little... Not the greatest choice.

So there was this giant blizzard. Giant blizzard shut down the airport. In fact, the very first Pro Tour was delayed. The opening of it was delayed. The first night, we actually had a cocktail party, believe it or not. Something we don't do anymore. And then we had to delay the start for the second day because there was this giant blizzard that shut down the city

and shut down the airport. But most Magic players luckily had gotten there early, and they trudged through the snow. Oh, speaking of which, this is an awesome image. One of the other quirky things about Scaf is Scaf liked wearing shorts. I don't mean some of the time. I mean pretty much all of the time. Scaf loved wearing shorts. So I remember us walking in New York in a blizzard. I mean, like, can't-see-10-feet-from-your-face blizzard, and Scaf is walking in New York in a blizzard. I mean, like, can't see 10 feet from your face blizzard,

and Scaf is walking in shorts. Anyway, a little moment of Scaf. Okay, so we had the thing set up. We got the people there. It's blizzard, but okay, we're going to start. Oh, we also did a junior division because the idea at the time was we thought that we were giving away scholarships and the younger players were going to play in their own division.

Obviously, since we morphed them all together in one kind of giant division. But the funny thing about the juniors is the juniors at that first Pro Tour was a good group of people. I mean, I believe the following people all played in the juniors. And this is just off the top of my head, so I'm missing people for sure. John Finkel was there. Zvi Mosiewicz was there. Pat Chap was there bob marr was there i mean a lot of like you know pro tour hall of famers played in the juniors juniors was pretty tough also uh so the format of the whole thing was it was a little tricky so homelands was the most recent set to

have come out and so we really wanted some whole some Homelands cards to show up. Because look, part of the Pro Tour is marketing. I mean, marketing dollars pay for it. And it is, I mean, we do want to test the best. We do want to have aspirations. But another completely different aspect of it is, look, it's a marketing aspect. And so, okay, we wanted to show off a latest set. It was Homelands. Okay, Homelands, not the strongest set. So we created a format that the players called Home Decapped. Standard Home Decapped, I think. So anyway, it was standard, but you had to play with five cards from every set legal in the format,

which meant you had to have five Homeland's cards. I think there was one other set that was a little bit of a pinch, but the real pinch was the Homeland's cards. Some players just played basically with 10-card sideboards. Some players found ways, I know Serrated Arrows got played a lot, and other people that were creative found a few cards to sneak in. The interesting thing was, by the way, is that with the cards available, it was possible to make a Necro deck, and that summer would become the Necro Summer, when Necro would go crazy. And by the way, part of the reason that Necro exploded was not just a matter of not quite finding the deck,

there also was the fact that Black Fights hadn't been restricted yet. But anyway, Necrodeck was legal at the first Pro Tour. So who played a Necrodeck? In the top eight, Leon Lindback was a Swedish player who played an early version of a Necro deck. But the real Necro deck, the good one, was actually played by the winner of the juniors, a guy named Graham Tattemer, who had what many consider retroactively to be the best deck of the tournament,

which was, I mean, it was an early Necro deck, but the more evolved version than Leon's version. Anyway, so a lot of things that people think of as staples of the Pro Tour didn't actually happen at the first Pro Tour. For example, let me talk about feature matches, because this is my baby, the feature matches.

So what happened was, at the first Pro Tour and at the second Pro Tour, we let people, any spectators who showed up could just walk through and watch people play. You know, just walk through the tables and watch people. Now later on, we would, you know, keep people from being able to do that. But in the early days, you could just walk through.

And I realized after the first one, so for the second one, I said, hey guys, I think there's an opportunity to let people know where the cool matches are. I think I'd come up, I think during the first Pro Tour, I'd come up with it, but there wasn't a neat system to do it, so I would write things, but for the second one, we made a big sign. It was actually called Rosewater's Picks, where I would say, hey, this round,

check out table 88. You know, Mark Justice is playing Hammer Ragnar, you know, and so I would have you, I would point out where to go to see them. So, come the third Pro Tour, we figured out that we didn't want people wandering through, that's the one in Columbus. So what we did is, we created a feature match area where we took them and pulled them, and so the matches you wanted to watch, we put them

in an area where you could watch them. Now, this was early. I don't think we even covered them in coverage yet, but it was live for the spectators. We started doing them coverage at some point, and eventually we put them on camera. Also, by the way, they were trying to continue calling it Rosewater's Picks, and I actually was the one that said, I don't think so. Can we call them, how about feature matches? And then what happened was, I actually worked on the Pro Tour for a long time. I was in charge of the feature match area. I was the judge in charge of the feature match area for many years.

In fact, for eight years, I went to every Pro Tour. Well, almost every Pro Tour. In fact, I had the streak for the longest Pro Tours until I missed one, the New York that Sigurd Eskelen won because my daughter Rachel was born. And then when my twins were born, I had to give up the Pro Tours until I miss one, the New York that Sigurd Eskelen won because my daughter Rachel was born. And then when my twins were born, I had to give up the Pro Tours because I couldn't travel as much. But for eight years, I was at just about every Pro Tour. In fact, online, I wrote a two-part article called On Tour, in which I went through the

first however many years of the Pro Tour, mostly up to the point where I had been there. And it's a very interesting, like, story by story, looking at each Pro Tour and talking about, you know, the time I had to tell someone they didn't really make top eight or a bunch of different stories like that. So anyway, so we had the first Pro Tour. It went off surprisingly well for all the chaos. I mean, we didn't quite know we were doing uh like i said like for example the commentary so the commentary in the first one was me and

two other wizards employees another rmd person named glenn elliott and someone from eric was eric's last name eric was in customer service. And we, I'm not sure if that commentary was ever seen by anybody other than live. It was pretty sad. Starting the one after that in Los Angeles, what we did is I was doing play-by-play, and I would pull in a player from the event. Mark Justice, actually, was the player

I pulled in from Los Angeles. Oh, funny story, just because it's a funny story. We needed to have a sound booth so that we could do our commentary, and it turned out that the only place they could find that was contained was a phone booth. This was aboard the Queen Mary. So it was a big phone booth, but still it was a phone booth. And the finals between Hammer and Tom Gavin,

Sean and the Hammer, Ragnier, and Gavin were the finalists of PTA LA, the first one, was long. I think it was longer than the first one. Oh, brother, I didn't even talk about that. So we had the thing.

The event's kind of chaotic. The finals of the first Pro Tour was Michael Locanto from the United States versus our finalist from 94, Bertrand Lestray from France. And the match took, I don't know, seven hours, I think. I know that Bill Rose went to dinner with friends in New York, came back.

He had left during the finals match and came back during the finals match and had gone out to a fancy dinner in between. And then the second one, we had Hammer versus Tom, and it was a long match. I know that because I was in a phone booth for the entire thing. But anyway, for example, the commentary started to evolve. We started having color and play-by-play and having more experienced people do commentary.

Eventually, I got replaced because my play-by-play was not that stellar. I don't know if you ever dig up an old tape and watch. The only thing I was good at, by the way, the one thing I was good at, I was not the best color commentator, was when someone won at the end, I would get very excited and I would go, Oh my God, so-and-so! Michael Oconto is the winner of Pro

Tour New York! And if you ever see the ESPN shows, we did a clip where we would recap the season, and it always was me screaming that at the end of the thing when so-and-so would win. You would see them winning and screaming, and me yelling, oh, so-and-so's the winner! And that was my favorite thing I did.

So, anyway. Eventually we started getting a little more professional commentators in. One of my favorites for a long while, I mean, there's been a lot of awesome commentators. For a while, I was in charge of doing the video of producing. Maybe this is his own, probably it is his own podcast,

but that's the whole thing. Anyway, sometimes I'll go talk about it, about sort of putting together both the Pro Tour and doing ESPN and all that. That's a whole bunch of stories unto itself. Also, another thing I'll do a podcast on at some point is we made a video of New York, the first Pro Tour, which is,

if you guys have never heard, I did a director's commentary on the video that we did as a feature article once, where I talked about this. It is a crazy story, but it is much more, I need a whole podcast to do it justice, because it was a quite crazy story. So anyway, eventually we started finding our heads.

We did PTQs with the second one. Like I said, Feature Masters started up the second one. Grand Prixs would start a year later. Oh, here's something else that's interesting. Limited play. So the first Pro Tour was constructed, was the standard home decapped variant. The second one was us doing a draft. I think what we did is we did limited for the first part, and the second day the cut was draft. And here's the interesting thing at the time. The European offices did not like draft.

The European, basically they were convinced it was too luck. There's too much luck in limited play, including draft, ironically. And so, they really just did not push limited play in Europe.

They didn't play it. You know, and so we came to the Pro Tour and, now the Americans, we had pushed it. So the Americans had played it. I know the Japanese

had played it some. And so, the cut to day two at Los Angeles was 61 Americans, two Japanese, and a single European player.

Which just goes to show, like, if you don't know the format, you don't know the format. Which reinforced our whole point of, hey,

it's a skill-intensive format. And the other interesting thing, just looking back, was originally we created two different draft formats. There was Booster Draft

and there was something called Rochester Draft. Rochester Draft is where you take the cards, place them all face up, and then players take turns drafting them. And in the early days, our thought was that Rochester Draft was the superior draft because you had a lot more control, you had more knowledge, where Booster Draft was like, well, you don't know as much of what's going on. But what ended up happening was Boosters took off in local stores and Rochester did not. Why is that? Because booster drafts are much easier to do and take less time,

where Rochester's is a lot slower. And what we found was people liked booster drafting. And so eventually what happened was we phased out Rochester drafting and booster drafting became the norm. But it's interesting to point out that early on, that like for a long time, we thought Rochester was going to be the norm, and Boucher was just as variant we were trying. And like I said, it is hilarious when you look back at early Pro Tour days that we

did a lot of things because we were finding our feet, you know. And, look, I think the Pro Tour has evolved into an awesome thing. And I love the fact that we keep evolving it and improving upon it. You know, like as one of the guys that used to do the coverage, holy moly, watching the coverage now is amazing.

You know, I mean, I didn't have the tools back then. No live streaming on the internet back in 96 and 97. But it just, it is fun to watch. And I love, I mean, I was very, very involved in Pro Tour for a long time, and now I'm much more, I get to go visit every once in a while. Usually once a year I'll go to a Pro Tour. And to me it's kind of fun. I have very nostalgic feelings about it.

I remember sitting around with Scaf in the early days, just like spitballing ideas, and it's kind of neat to see one of your ideas evolve over so many years. I mean, I definitely have sets where I work on and I watch them change, and it's kind of neat to see one of your ideas evolve over so many years. I mean, I definitely have sets where I work on, and I watch them change, but they change, and that's a small part of the time they come out, and they're done. The Pro Tour is kind of a living, breathing thing, and so it really has been fun seeing it just become better and better. I was very excited about the Hall of Fame, which I was involved in its creation,

but I'm still excited to see it happen. But anyway, I'm now at work. I'm sitting in a parking spot. By the way, somehow I talk about my parking spot. People think I have my own parking spot. I do not have my own parking spot. I park where I can. But anyway, I'm here, and it was fun talking about the Pro Tour today. I hope you all enjoyed the stories, and it looks like it's time to go make the magic cards.