Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #158 - Block Plans, Part 1

Episode Date: September 19, 2014

Mark talks about what design changes went into the Ravnica through Zendikar blocks.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so recently, or somewhat recently, I do this ahead so it's always hard to predict. I had an article where I announced the end of the three-set block. And then when I was thinking back, I realized that I actually, since I've been head designer, have oversaw the block plan for ten three-set blocks. And I thought, you know what, I talk about individual sets all the time. I don't talk block plans all that much. So today, and probably next time, will be all about block plans. And I'm going to walk through all the three-set block plans I did as a head designer and talk about sort of how the block

plan itself came together. Not the individual sets, but how we formed the block. So we will start with the very first set that I led, very first block that I oversaw as head designer. I happened to also lead the first set. Ravnica, city of guilds. Okay, so one of the big innovations when I talk about sort of changes that happen over time is when I took over as head designer I was very big on the idea that we needed to do more planning for our blocks that there had to be more, you know, we had to be careful how we doled things out and before that

we had a few blocks that kind of backed into a block plan but the way we used to do it is we'd do the first set and then we were done we'd do the second set and we were done we'd do the first set, and then we were done, we'd do the second set, and we were done, we'd do the third set. And sometimes we'd leave something, but it wasn't really thought out, you know, we would back ourselves in a corner a lot, we're like, oh, uh-oh, because we did this and this, oh, it would have been nice if we had thought of that ahead of time. So, when I became hand designer, I said, okay, we're going to think about this,

we're going to plan our blocks out. Okay, so Ravnica, during design of Ravnica, I stumbled upon the I walked into it knowing that I wanted to do, it was a multicolor block, we knew that walking in, and I liked the idea to separate it from Invasion, which was the previous multicolor block, to

instead of focusing on playing lots of colors, focus on just playing two colors. In order to be multicolored, but be the other end of the spectrum, that's where you needed to be. And then Brady Donovan, who was the creative director at the time, came back with the idea of I said I wanted all ten color pairs played equally, and

he came back with the idea of the guilds. That we were in a city world, and that each combination was represented by a different group. I loved the idea. The second I heard it, I'm like, that's awesome. And I'm like, okay, that is going to be the backbone of our structure. And so what I decided was, there's a bunch of different ways to do a block plan. And so I wanted to experiment.

I wanted to try different ways. So one of the means that I was interested in trying is what I'll call the pie method. And the idea here is, is that the block is one entity, and all you're doing is chopping up the pieces. Like, on some level, I'm not sure Ravnica even necessarily had any chronological movement between sets. I kind of feel like the whole, all three sets took place at the same time, and we just were showing you different portions of it. That we had, we chopped it up like, like a pie. And like, you know, four-tenths of it was here, and three-tenths was here, and three-tenths was here. And so the idea was, what if we use the guilds and said, okay, let's show off the guilds. And the way to do that is, we would emphasize a certain number each time.

Now remember at the time, this was considered a somewhat crazy block plan. In fact, I mean, block plans didn't exist yet. But the idea that we were going to have ten colored pairs, and in the first set, only four of the ten would appear, was considered at the time pretty radical. But, once again, one of the things I was looking at is, how do I make you care about the entire block? Well, if there's a cohesive whole, and I only give you part of that, I only give you four-tenths of it, well, you know what? You want and I only give you part of that I only give you four tenths of it

well, you know what, you want the other six tenths I knew that if I did a set and there were four guilds well, humans are pattern completion it's like, okay, that's great, that's cool what about the other six guilds? and then I'm like, okay, we can dole them out and that would be something that would be cool

is that we do something, we give you part of it and then why do you want to play the rest of the block? well, we haven't given you all of it. And so that was the idea of this block plan, was the idea that we divvy things up. You know, that we take it, and then the reason you want to go to the next part is because, oh, well, we haven't given you everything yet.

We split it up on purpose. And really, one of the things that I wanted was, once I knew I wanted to do guilds, that I wanted was once I knew I wanted to do guilds once I wanted to build around guilds what that meant was I wanted to figure out

things that all the guilds got and then you would like there was a lot of parallel design in the guilds so that like every guild got thing A

and thing B and thing C and thing D which meant that if I showed you some of the guilds in the first set you had some

expectation for things to see in the second and third set. But there also was some surprise. It was like, oh, okay, well, each guild had its own mechanic. I figured out early on that in order to give factions separation and identity, you kind of need to give each one a mechanic. We've experimented with not doing that. Obviously, Ravnick was the first time we were doing it.

It was the clear and lowest hanging fruit. So we did the lowest hanging fruit. We've since gone back and looked, and I get to cons the Kareem Tarkir I'll talk about a little bit

because we actually tried there not to line them up. It proved to be actually really hard and not, it makes it hard for you to identify what the factions are

when there's not a crisp, clear definition. Anyway, in order to do that, in order to do the parallel that I wanted, because one of the things that people argued is, well, maybe what you want to do is put all ten sets in the first set, then all ten in the second set, and all ten in the third set,

but what they get, like, they get thing A and B in the first set, then thing C and D in the second set, and then thing E and F in the third set. But the reason I was very hesitant for that, the reason that I did not like that plan was I felt like if I gave you a little bit of all ten guilds

then none of them would stand out. Let's say you were drafting. None of them would have enough meat to them that you could get a full identity of who they were. But if I concentrated, if I said, you know what? I'm only going to do four guilds here. The other six guilds, they get their time later. By doing that, well, I gave them space

so that I actually could give them the room to breathe and for people to see what they were. And so anyway, that was the first block plan. That was Ravnica block. Okay, next came time spiral. So time spiral started as a set of a block that was going to be theme-centered. We had a bunch of mechanics,

suspend being the major one, but we had a bunch of mechanics, suspend being the major one, but we had a bunch of mechanics that were time-related. And I said, okay, well, maybe we could do some sort of time-related block. So when I got to the block plan, I was like, okay, well, I want it to be time-related, but there has to be three components to it. Time, three components.

And it just hit me. It's like past, present, future just made a lot of sense. So if Return to Ravnica was the pie model, which was I give you a unified thing and chop into pieces, the next thing was this was a sequential model. It's like, okay, I'm going to take three things that you know in order you know. You know, when you think of time, time does get chopped up into three components, past, present, and future. So that said, okay, what we need to do is do this. I'll obviously go in the order you would expect them, past, present, future.

And then the idea was to try to find the through line to connect them. Now, I knew that past, present, and future was a nice connector, but it didn't, I still needed one more thing that bound them together. And what ended up happening was, while we were working on Time Spiral, it became clear that nostalgia played an important role. Especially when you're talking about the past, that nostalgia was, you know, a lot of what makes the past the past is remembrance of things. And we had a lot of fun of riffing off the past.

And I had come up with the Time Spiral sheet, the idea of, well, what if the past was seeping into your pack what if every pack gave you a card from the past and the past frame they weren't new cards, they were old cards and we ended up with this bonus sheet which had 121 cards so every pack had this bonus extra card in it you only got 15 cards

but it was in place of one of the commons you got this card but the thing that was missing was it needed more of a connector You only got 15 cards. But it was in place of one of the commons, you got this card. But the thing that was missing was it needed more of a connector. And so once I stumbled on the nostalgia, what I realized was what makes... Okay, the nostalgia, obviously, the past is to find my nostalgia. So the interesting thing was I was trying to figure out how do I make the present and the future work. Well, the present was really tricky because isn't every set the present? How do I say, hey, I'm the present? And then I came up with the idea of an

alternate reality present, where it's a present, but not as you know it, that has been twisted in some way. And once I knew that, then like, oh, well, nostalgia becomes important because if I'm twisting things, then I have to twist known things. So the time-shifted sheet for the Plane of Chaos was

all cards that you knew, but color-shifted. In this alternate reality, we had changed the color pie, and so these were cards you knew, but not in the color that you knew them. And then for the third set, which was Future Sight, the same thing, which is... Obviously the time-shifted sheet would be cards from the future, much like the first know, the first set, the time-tripped sheet were cards from the past, and the second were cards from an alternate present. But it also is important to me that I use nostalgia. What that meant there is that a lot of what was fun for the future was to do extrapolated future off things that you knew from the past.

Now, we did some new things. We had some new mechanics, obviously. But we also had a lot of, oh, here are morph things that aren't creatures. Oh, I thought one day maybe they'd do that. We took a lot of extrapolation. We took cycling and turned it into wizard cycling. We just took different things that we knew.

Poison had existed, but we made poisonous. We sort of ripped off known things and then made things that were future things, but part of what made the future work is that you get to see them. And I used to talk about to my team during Future Sight that when you see a time travel movie where a character goes to the future, one of the things they always show you are things you know from present day, but the futurized version of them.

And the reason they do that is the future means more if you could see some recognizable things, but in a futuristic context. You know, whenever you sort of see a time travel movie, they always put a lens on it, which is, here's the past. Things you know, but the past. You know, here's the present, and then here's the future. Things you know, but in the future. So Time Spiral, like I said, it started as a time block and kind of morphed a little bit into a nostalgia block. But it also had a nice cohesiveness, which is the past, the present, and the future all meant something.

And they had a cohesive quality to them that, I mean, was self-defined. When you saw the past, you had expectations of what the past meant. But anyway, so that was TimeSpiral. You had expectations of what the past meant. But anyway, so that was Time Spiral. Time Spiral very much was trying to do a, have a sequential quality to it. Okay, so the next one after that was Lorwyn and Shadowmoor.

So from a block plan perspective, I thought of this as one block. They are two mini blocks. You could think of each of them as their own block. But the fact that they interconnect with each other makes me feel like, oh, well, really, this was one mega block in which it was made up of two mini blocks. So the impetus for this set started from Bill had wanted to do a fourth set. And two years earlier, because at the time, every other year was a core set.

And then every other year, we wanted to do something else. And two years earlier, it had been Coltsnap. And so Bill came to me and said, I'd like to do another four set. Do you have any ideas? I'm like, well, here's what I would like to do. Could we build it in so that the four set is not external to the block, but part of the block? Because with ColdSnap, it had some problems. And I had said to him, next time we do this, could you let me incorporate it?

So Bill's like, okay, you said you want to incorporate it. I'm telling you ahead of time, incorporate it. And so I was trying to figure out how to have a fourth set. So one of the problems I've talked about, mini, is the third set problem that we had. Back when we had blocks of three sets, that the third set was always problematic. So I knew doing a fourth set really was pushing it. If doing a third set is pushing it, doing a fourth set is really pushing it. And that's when I came up with the idea of mini blocks.

Instead of doing, you know, Flash to the future, instead of doing one three-set block, we did two two-set blocks. But I knew that I wanted the sets to have a relevance to each other, meaning I wanted each one mechanically to be its own thing and drafted by itself, but there was an overlay where if you played them together, they connected. I knew they'd be played together in block-constructed and obviously in standard. And so the idea we came up with was, what if there was some world in which some major change happened to the world? So we saw the world before the change, we saw the world after the change, and that way we could mirror it.

So this block plan is what we call a mirror, where we show you one thing, and then we go through a change, and we mirror that thing originally, but through the lens of the change. So the idea was, we're going to show you Lorwyn, then we're going to show you Shadamore. And that Lorwyn did a lot of stuff to set up things that Shadamore paid off on, and Lorwyn's like, these are the kind of creatures that are here. And so one of the things we did was, most of the creatures stayed the same,

but we changed them a little bit. We shifted some colors. We shifted sort of a look and feel of them. So the idea is, as, you know, Shadamore, sorry, as Lorwyn shifts into Shadamore, you could see traces of Lorwyn, but then also Shadamore had you could see traces of Lorwyn, but then also Shadamore had its own identity.

And the idea for that block was I wanted to do mechanical things that could overlap with one another. So the idea was, we walked in with the idea that Lorwyn would be a tribal block. That was the plan when we started. Well, tribal block is really nice, because the next block could give you things for your Tribal deck

without necessarily needing to have a Tribal theme. Now, it's funny. One of the decisions I made was, I made the conscious decision to shift the creature type some, so that every creature stayed in one color but shifted in its second color. In retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. I mean, I was trying to show the shift of the worlds,

but the sets would have played nicer together if I hadn't shifted where the colors were. And so maybe that was a mistake. I'm not 100% sure. Probably what I should have done was not removed a color but just added a color and that Shadowmoor had things that were in three colors we kind of backed into that a little bit

the third color definitely showed up a little bit I think what we did is it shifted to two colors but we made some hybrid cards of the remnants from Lorwyn probably we could have handled that in retrospect I could have handled that a little better and then the idea was we wanted something else that would matter in the third set and that ended up being color um because the

second shadow more was up ended up being a hybrid block and and hybrid very much is about color and so the first set hey the cards all had color the second set hey the cards all had creature types we could line them up and we can make them play across each other um but the build for that block plan and the idea behind um lore and shadow more was that I wanted to build something up get you and we can make them play across each other. But the build for that block plan, the idea behind Lore and Chattamore was that I wanted to build something up, get you used to it, and then make it go through a shift and make you realize,

oh, I recognize the things, but they've gone through this change. One of the big things, one of the tricky things about doing block plans is change is important. Ravnica's kind of the exception to the rule where really nothing changed. It was just you seeing the whole block.

And we were able to chop it up into pieces, so it took the whole block to see all the pieces. Usually during a block, there's some kind of change. We're trying to tell a story. Usually something's happening on some global scale. So normally during a block, part of the block plan also is showing whatever the change is. So with Laura Windham and Shanna Moore, obviously there was this giant shift to the world.

The world literally changed from, what I'll say, the day version to the night version. And the creative team worked really hard, and we worked with them, to make sure that we... One of the things in screenwriting that they explained to you is, wherever you're going to end your story, you want to figure out how to get your beginning of your story as far away from the end of the story as possible

to give yourself a lot of room to get there. So, for example, if the end of the story, your character is very generous, beginning of the story, they're probably not. You know, Christmas Carol is a good example where, look, at the end, Ebenezer Scrooge has to, you know, realize the error of his ways. Well, you better start him, you know, he better be really, really a penny pincher

in the beginning to show the change in him. That if you want him to leave being miserly, he has to start really miserly. And obviously, he does. It's almost a joke how miserly he is when the story begins, but that's kind of how you need to play it. So Shadowmoor and Lorwyn was the same thing, which is in order for Lorwyn to be as dark as we wanted, we wanted Shadowmoor, sorry, in order for Shadowmoor to be as dark as we wanted,

we needed Lorwyn as light as we wanted. And we went very light in tone, you know, not just in light, but it was very fairytale-ish. And, you know, the things, there wasn't a lot of harm. Like, maybe someone throws a fish at you. You know, it wasn't, you know, the things that were mean were tricky, but not as vicious as they become when you get to Shadowmoor. And anyway, so that block was very much all about trying to create this parallel structure with this mirroring.

Okay, the next block was Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara is interesting. So Bill Rose, who's the VP of R&D, was the lead designer for Shards. And Bill really had a vision for the block, and so I let Bill run with this one. So Bill really loved the idea of having a set that was all multicolored cards. But Bill realized that you couldn't just start there. That a large set was going to be too many

to function in. Having a set in which there were no, like, starting with just multicolored, you'd be missing some key ingredients that you needed. But Bill said, okay, well what if we built toward a set of all multicolored? And so Bill's master plan was to try to create a world in which you could then make, you know, you could then end up with a set that was all gold.

That was the plan. And so what Bill did was he decided that because it was a multicolor set and we had done five color in Invasion and we'd done two color in Ravnica, that he wanted to try three color. So the plan was that we'd start with three color, then in the second set we'd ramp up, go up to five color,

and then the third set would give you all these gold cards and you had the opportunity to draft smaller numbers of colors if you wanted to. You still could play five color, but he enabled you to probably be able to pull off playing two color. You still could play five color, but he enabled you to probably be able to pull off playing two color. That you could play two, three, four, or five color. And so that was a

block plan that was very much it's kind of, it was building towards something, meaning he had a goal, he wanted that to happen, and so he maneuvered things around it so that the block plan led toward the goal that he wanted. He wanted a finale all gold set.

And so he said, well, what do I have to do to make that happen? And one of the things I should stress as I talk about the different block plans is each block plan

dictates different things. You know what I'm saying? The Ravnica block plan was about separation of the guilds. So it's very important to maximize showing off the guilds. Where Time Sp very important to maximize showing off the guilds.

Where Time Spiral was trying to show this evolution and that we were trying to take different themes and then put them through different filters. Where Lorwyn was all about this dichotomy between the two worlds. And Shards was building towards something. So each one of those designs, so I talk about this all the time, which is one of the reasons I like to have radically different block plans is that A, I just want things to be different, but B,

it enables me as a designer or whoever else is designing to be able to approach it from a situation that's different than every other set. That's why I always like to start my set with some challenge that I've not done before. Because if I revisit a challenge I've done before, I just will tend to solve it in similar ways. Okay, so the next set is Zendikar. Okay, so Zendikar

is interesting. Zendikar started with the following premise, which was, Bill, we had been concerned about third sets forever, rightfully so, and so Bill was very concerned about how we would make it work. So what Bill did was he said, okay, what if this year we did a block in which it was two sets than a block that was one set that was all by itself? So as you can see, by the way, it's funny, as I walk through the block plans, you can see what we did with Shadowmore, you can see what we do with Zendikar. the block plans. You can see what we did with Shadowmore. You can see what we do with Zendikar.

The big change, the two block paradigm that we're moving toward, it should be clear that it didn't come out of nowhere. Almost if you watch what we've been messing around with and how we've been working with block plans, we've been trying to solve the third set problem by shifting how blocks function. And the model that we moved to, like I said, we literally did it in Lorwyn. I mean, the two blocks were connected more so than future blocks will be connected. And even something like Zendikar, the original idea

was that the third set was going to be its own world. You know? Now, so the block plan was originally was we were going to do two different worlds with two different themes. And I think what happened was I pitched an idea of a land block. I thought there was a lot of extra mechanics involving land that we could do. Well, that's actually a little unfair.

I knew there was a deep design vein of place to explore, and I felt like that's... That's actually a little unfair. I knew there was a deep design vein of place to explore, and I felt like that's... I like the idea that sometimes our blocks are about top-down, sometimes our blocks are about exploring different things, sometimes they're exploring themes. This was during the period where we were more into doing themes. But I liked the idea, here was an untapped theme that we hadn't done that I thought had a lot of potential.

And so I had convinced, at the time time Randy Buehler was my boss that we should experiment, that we needed exploratory blocks. Here's a block doing something we'd never done before, but we needed blocks like that. And Bill was a little skeptical on my land matters. So what happened originally was what we did was

he said, okay, you can have two sets and then we'll do something different in the third set. What ended up happening was the creative team came up with a, built a world, and then trapped the Eldrazi inside of it. And they're like, oh, we came to this pretty awesome world where these alien creatures are trapped inside the world. You know what might be cool? What if they got out? And then they said, you know what?

We think we could build a third set that would feel different and would have different mechanics and be a creative that justifies different mechanics but would have a different feel to it. And so Rise of the Odrazi ended up staying in Zendikar but we're like, oh, well the Rise of the Odrazi is a different enough thing that we could, with a straight face,

change the mechanics. And so what happened was, in that set the block really much was us building up the world kind of going crazy and then a payoff with the that set the block really much was us building up the world kind of going crazy and then a payoff with the rise of Drazi in which it shifts gears completely

you know what goes on in Rise of Drazi is like forget everything you know the first two sets is the people surviving their world and the second set is our world that's not the problem

survive that and so the block plan it's interesting because if you look at how the block plan actually worked for all intents and purposes mechanically we really did separate the third set from the first two and in retrospect I think the problem was that we

sort of connected them as a block but didn't and I think that was a problem I regret for example not having we should regret, for example, not having... We should have had some allies. Maybe not with the ally mechanic, but just creature-type ally. Just having more allies. Here's all these people fighting the Eldrazi. Maybe they're allies with each other.

And so one of the flaws there was I did not connect the block as much as I should. And the lesson there was it has to do with how people perceive what you're doing. If you stay in the same place, that gets perceived as there's a connectivity to it. You're in the same place with the same people

and the same things. There needs to be more continuity. And one of the reasons we moved to the two-block paradigm is the idea that if we want the third and fourth set to feel different, well, don't stick around. Go somewhere else. Really, if you want it to feel like two different blocks, well, then act like they're different blocks.

And for us, blocks have always been defined by, or mostly been defined by locale. Not always, I guess. And so the idea now is we go someplace, we go there for two times, and then, okay, for the next second half of the year, we go to two other sets in some other place. And that really is a way to feel like we're doing two unique different blocks. Okay, so it's funny.

As we're driving, I'm realizing that I have enough content for two podcasts and not just one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue talking about the first five and wrap it up. And then next time, I will talk about the second five, and talk about sort of where the Black Planet came from then. So one of the things that's very interesting, and I go back and look at this, the historian in me

can't not sort of look at the history. If you notice, what's going on here is, and in some ways, it's a neat divider, because the first five sets were very theme-based. Ravnica started by going, we're doing multicolor. Time Spiral was, we're doing time-theme-based mechanics.

Lorwyn started as tribal. Shardin the Lar started as multicolor. Zendikar started as a land block. But each of these sets were very much about trying to play up a theme. And there definitely were elements built in, and I'm not saying there wasn't story built in, but not in the same way.

Next time we see the second five blocks, that's when we're doing a lot more to build stuff in. There's actually a big shift. When I talk about the different stages of design, Scars and Mirrors is I talk about the different stages of design, Scars and Mirrodin is where I start the fifth age of design. And so Raven, A Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Shards, and Zendikar

are the fourth age of design. So it's interesting, as I am talking about this, that my ten years as head designer over three set blocks, over ten years, that actually half of them were the first age and half of them were the second age. And I think, hopefully, that stems from the fact that I learned from doing the first five of how better to do the second five. And that, one of the things that's interesting is, I mean,

I think each one of these blocks taught us something very important. So let me talk about the lessons of the block as I finish up here and go to work. The lesson of Ravnica was that you don't need to give everybody everything. That it's okay to leave the audience wanting more. It was a very big risk at the time, but it paid off huge. And Ravnica's probably our... The setting is our most popular setting, and people just love the Ravnica blocks.

And I think part of it is really the idea of we have identity, we have things mean something, that are relevant to our players, and then we take the space and time to give each the do it needs, and that we don't need to give you everything at once. The lesson of Time Spiral was, I think that the importance, well,

one of the big lessons is be careful with your themes that I think while we found a way to tie them all together and thematically it fits, we went so broad with our theme and... I like the fact that each set had its own identity.

That is cool. But we really, really stretched what was going on. And, I mean, I guess in some level the block plan wasn't at fault as much as we were not keeping complexity in check. But I will say this, that I made a block structure that was so forgiving and so flexible that it allowed us to overstuff it. And in some level it kind of hid how stuffed it was because everything had such a strong

theme to it that when you sort of stood back and looked at it, everything looked okay. And it wasn't until you dug in deep that you realized, holy moly, we just crammed this too full. Now, I understand if you were a diehard experienced player that got it all, it was amazing because normally we never make sets as dense as we made this block. But for the average player, it was a little too dense. Lorwyn Shadowmoor, I mean, obviously the big lesson of Lorwyn Shadowmoor is that we were not tied to large, small, small. That we could break out of that confine.

And really, if you look at Lorwyn, like we talked about the two-step paradigm, Lorwyn just did it. Where we're going, I mean, now I understand, I designed it as a mega block, meaning the two mini blocks were connected. Moving forward, that's not quite the case. That each block will be its own block, much like now blocks are their own blocks. But it did set that set up. It did

change, it did challenge the idea of what could be where. And that, the idea that a large block could be in the spring, you know, or that you could do a block that's just two blocks, or that you could put two blocks in a year. There's a lot of things that we would later, I mean, obviously come

back to that really this was the block plan that sort of opened up that idea. Shards of Alara was us exploring with the idea that if you're going to lead towards something, that you need the payoff to get there. And the idea that if you want to do something cool, you have to do the setup to get there.

And that a lot of times we sort of would back into things and then not quite have all our ducks in a row. And that really the lesson of Shards of Alara is you need to prepare. That if you want to do cool things, if you're going to create payoff, you need to lay the foundation for payoff. That, you know, if you look at a story,

like a movie or something, that when someone does the jaw-dropping moment, it's important that you look back and everything in the movie supported that moment. That it wasn't like, huh? It was like, oh, how did I not see that? Zendikar, the lesson of Zendikar was, in some ways, I think the lesson of Zendikar block was you need to be cohesive in your blocks, and that even if you're going to do crazy things and change things, that, you

know, if something is set in the same world, the expectation is that there is some cohesiveness between it, and that as much as Rise of the Drazi was trying to be its own thing, the lack of cohesion with the rest of Zendikar felt wrong, and I believe it was a mistake. And so the big lesson there is when you're doing a block plan, there's a certain amount of distance you can get within the block plan, but you still need to have, you know, if the audience perceives it as a single block, that you need to make sure that there's some connectors, even if you're going to make some space with the mechanics. I don't think that's necessarily wrong.

I just look back at Rise of the Drys and I'm like, oh, there's more continuity we could have created, but lack of continuity was a problem. Okay. So, as I explained, that was the first five blocks of the block plans

of my time as head developer. Well, not my time. Time's not up. But of the ten three-block... the ten three-step blocks that I did. So next time, next time on Drive to Work, I will talk about the second five ones

and these are the five that introduced the fifth age of design and I'll talk a bit about that but I've just parked my car so that means

it's time for me to be making magic so thanks for joining me guys talk to you next time