Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #190 - Card Being Made

Episode Date: January 9, 2015

Mark talks about the process of how a card is made, from the blank page to holding it in your hand.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work. Okay, so today's topic, about a month or maybe two months ago, I had asked the audience for topics they'd like to see on Drive to Work. And today's was one of those. So the topic suggested was a card from beginning to finish. the topic suggested was a card from beginning to finish. But instead of talking about a specific card, I want to walk you through what a... We want to make a card made. I don't think the average player understands all the different things that go into getting a card made.

So I was going to talk today about taking a card and just walking you through all the processes the card has to go through in order, you know, from it being a blank page to being in your hand. What does that entail? So today, I'm going to kind of walk you through the process of how it gets made. Hopefully, I will remember everything. It's funny because I deal and I talk about one aspect of the process, which is way at one end. But there's actually a lot of people come after me. After me and my team are done designing a card, there's a lot that has to get done. So I'm going to try to walk through that today.

Like I said, hopefully I'll hit it all. Okay. So we start. There's a set. Set has needs. It wants things. So the design team will make a card. Sometimes the card is made to fill a void.

Sometimes it's top-down. Sometimes it's just mechanically something that's interesting. Sometimes it's just a neat idea you had for a card that you think maybe will fit. Sometimes it's something that synergistically had to be made. But anyway, all cards start because the design team, or those cards that actually created after design hands off, but we're going to walk you through cards that start from the beginning all the way to the end. Okay, so the design team decides to make a card to fill some void.

How does that get happened? There's a bunch of different ways. Usually the way it'll work is either the lead designer will give homework, and then everybody will have to do the homework assigned and bring it in. Or sometimes we do cards in meetings where we design them sort of all together. I do both when I lead my teams, although I really, really enjoy making cards in meetings. It's a very organic process. Some of my favorite cards from a lot of my sets come from there. You know, like one of my favorite cards from, um, uh, from, well, from Theros was

Journey to the Underworld. That came from, and Chain of the Rocks. My two favorite cards both came from in meetings. Um, and in Innistrad, one of my favorite cards was Evil Twin. That came from a meeting. Army of the Damned came from a meeting. There's something fun about sort of figuring out how to make it. Now, when we make it in meetings, there's two different ways we tend to do it. One is we're trying to fit a

specific goal, like we're making a certain cycle or we're filling out a certain mechanic. Other times we'll do more top-downish stuff where, like, both Innish, Run, and Theros, I had the creative team liaison bring in a list of names that would make sense in the set. And we would design to the names. Like, Evil Twin started as, there should be a card called Evil Twin. Well, what would an Evil Twin do?

And then we just designed the card to match what we think was a good top-down to fit the name. So anyway, design will make a card and put it in a file. And we will playtest. And what happens is, I've talked about this before, a lot of design, or most design, is iteration. Which means you spend some time making cards, you playtest those cards, you learn about it, usually you talk about it, then you make changes, and then you play the changes, and that keeps happening.

So what will happen is you'll make a card. Most cards do not make it through the process. For example, if you ask how many cards get introduced early in design that get printed, it's a tiny, tiny number. We actually make way, way, way more cards than actually get produced. And on top of that, things just get tweaked a lot. I'm not saying we've never not had... There's been cards that come in the file early and they last the distance and they never get changed. That does happen.

But more often than not, things either get replaced or get tweaked, but there's a lot of changes that happen in a card. And that'll happen for one of two reasons. Number one is the card just isn't working. That's the most common reason for a card to leave the file. Maybe we got rid of the mechanic that has it. Maybe we changed something about the set where that thing is no longer needed. Maybe the card itself isn't fun or isn't playing well. The other reason that we'll change cards is we need to make changes and then changes will result in other changes. A real common thing is, let's say we need to change a card from 2R32 to 1R21. Oh, well, elsewhere in the file,

we had a 1R21, but that 1R21 is not as important as the one we just changed, so we'll change the other 1R21. We want to make sure that there's not too many cards that are too close to each other, and then you fill out your curve. So sometimes cards change,

not because that card is a problem, but there's another card that is too close to it, and it's harder to change the other card. For example, vanillas are a good example, where the vanilla, we want to have a certain number of vanillas, But there's another card that is too close to it, and it's harder to change the other card. For example, vanillas are a good example, where the vanilla, we want to have a certain number of vanillas, but no one vanilla, usually, barring exceptions, is crucial. And so, oh, if this gets too close to vanilla, the vanillas can easily change. In general, the vanillas, the French vanillas, the simpler cards are much easier to change. They're in there more to be simple than necessarily a specific combination of numbers and abilities.

Okay, so a card gets made, goes into design, design iterates, it somehow survives the design process, which is quite impressive. Okay, so next, it goes to development. Now, be aware, in design, the name in design is made up by design. It's a made-up name. We usually put them in brackets, which says that it's not a real name. The creature type or the card type is defined, and any creature type, the way it works is creature types are normally the domain of the creative team, but if mechanically we need a particular creature type, oh no, this card has to be a goblin, we put an exclamation point after it,

and that means to the creative people, no, we mean this, it needs to be this. Creature types are this weird hybrid between concerns of design development and concerns of creative. And so, the default is it's a creative decision, but unless there is mechanical

ramifications, and then if the creative has an issue with the mechanical stuff, like, you want to have a 4-4 goblin, and they go, oh, 4-4 goblin? That's not really a goblin. They'll come and talk to you. But the exclamation point says, mechanically we need this.

Don't change it without discussing it with us. Okay, so it gets to development. Now, while cards are in design, we do what we call a flat power level, which means the goal in design is not about determining the environment, meaning cards aren't balanced yet. They haven't got to development. So we're not worrying about what's the top level card cards aren't balanced yet. They haven't got to development. So we're not worrying about what's the top-level card

and second-level card. Everything is priced by the development representative on a design team so that it's playable. When you are playing a design playtest, the goal is not to play the best cards. In development,

you're trying to figure out, oh, what's the best thing I can play because you're stress-testing the system. In design, we're not doing that yet. We're just trying to see what are the fun cards, what's interesting. And if we had made, normally in Magic, you know, they have what we call A, B, and C's in development. A's are more powerful, B's are less, C's are weaker. And you always play, or most always play your A's. You usually play B's. Sometimes you fill out with C's. If the cards were A, B, C, that just means some number of the cards

wouldn't get playtested or would get playtested at much less frequency. So we even all the power levels out so we can play with them all. That doesn't actually lead to good magic, but it leads to a good testing environment so we can figure out what is working and what is not. Okay.

Once it gets to development, development then has to start giving realistic numbers to things. So they have to figure out, I mean, they'll play with our file, a design file for a while, but then at some point they're like, okay, do we like this card?

Do we not like this card? Should this be strong? Should it be weak? Is this a constructed card? Is it just a limited card? So they start balancing the cards and trying to make them fit what they need to fit. So that's when creature stats and creature mana costs

and activation costs, all that gets a series looked at and it gets adjusted to figure out where development wants to fit it. Now, development also goes through an iterative process, which is their playtesting with the cards. And the early part of development is mostly about figuring out the stat. Usually they tackle limited first because limited has more, just more cards are affected and more affects the commons and uncommons. It just, it's the, as I've talked about before, whenever you're trying to fix something, you always want to put your attention to the thing that's hardest to do first. Because any fix will limit what other cards can do do so you want to work on your hardest problem first limited in draft is pretty complex and requires a lot of the common cards so usually the early part of development is spent sometimes figuring out that now at the same time they want

to figure out construction they're thinking about it and they're definitely pushing cards and what will happen is at some point during development they start doing playtesting early playtesting is either limited playtesting or it's where you build decks within just the set you're playing with you're just kind of testing those cards out at some point they then bring them into what we call the future future league so real quickly for those who have never heard of the future future league development needs to test cards ahead of time

to get a sense of what standard is going to be like. So originally, development made what they called the Future League, which was six months ahead. The problem was it was enough time to figure out there were problems, but not enough time to change anything to stop the problems. So it was kind of in the absolute worst place. So they then decided to move it forward by six months, so it would be a year ahead. And so they changed it from the Future League to the Future Future League.

So it is called the FFL for short. That name is just stuck. So, I mean, no one really calls it the Future Future League. It's just called the FFL. But that is what it's referred to. And there are teams dedicated to different seasons of the FFL so the people that are specifically

working on making sure they understand that environment now be aware that if we are able to completely understand the environment with the small pool of people we have the millions of Magic players would crack it in a day so what development is trying to do is create something that's bigger than what they can solve,

but they try to get a handle on places they think players will go. Now the hard part is they don't want it to be a solvable format, so they're taking their best stab at where they think things will be. It is very, very hard to predict the future in a way where it's not prescriptive. I mean, obviously you can make it so it can only go one way, but that's not how development wants to make sense, because the players will just figure it out too easily. So development makes a dynamic

system that can go multiple ways. They play it just to get a sense of where they think it's going, but there is room for error built into the system. Okay. So, meanwhile, a little bit into development, not that far into development, the creative team has to start getting the art ready for the cards. So in order to do that, they have to make what's called a card concept. And what a card concept is, is they

have to tell the artists what they're drawing. What is this card? What is it? Let's say, for example, it's a card that does 4 damage to a creature or a player. Okay, it's a direct damage card, but what is it? Is it lightning? Is it fire? Is it earth? Are you throwing rocks at them? Is it some sonic attack? What is it? Are you throwing lava at them? What are you doing? There's a lot of different ways. Someone on the creative team has to make what's called a creative concept,

which is what is the card? What does it represent? And then they write an art description for the artists. So what will happen is a member of the creative team, now the creative team is broken up into two different sections. There is the story team and there is the art team. The story team does the words, the art team does the pictures. Normally the story team is the one that will do card concepting and the reason is the story ones are the ones that make all the background and figuring out, like, let's say we're building a new world. Oh, well, who's on this world and what kind of people and what are the cities and what are the different, you know,

and they figure out the world. So the reason, who's on this world? And what kind of people? And what are the cities? And they figure out the world. So the reason they do the card concepts is they're the ones that understand all the different things that represent the world. And then once the card concept is done, he then shows it to the

art director. Now we have a bunch of art directors right now, so different sets will have different art directors, but whoever the art director is for that project, they are shown the art descriptions. They might tweak them some. Usually when they tweak them, it's to try to make sure they get a stronger visual image. Because what happens sometimes is the card conceptor has a neat idea for what the card represents, but maybe isn't presenting in a way that ends up with the best picture. Now, the goal of card concepting is not to tie the hands of the illustrator. In fact, it's just the opposite.

What the card concepter wants to do is say to the artist, here's the thing, here's what you need to know. Now, there is a thing made called a world guide. Whenever we do a new block, the creative team has some freelance people come in from outside, artists and they spend three to four weeks figuring out what everything looks like they then make what's called a world guide which is a sample of what do the different inhabitants look like and the clothing and the weapons

and the locations and maybe artifacts if artifacts matter so that when you go to artists they send the artist this world guide and they might say oh well he's holding a spear. Look at page 72, one of those spears. And so what the card conceptor wants to do is wants to present for the artist

everything the artist needs to know without giving them any more than they have to to give artists freedom to try to make the coolest image they can. So what happens is, in order for development to make sure that the card concept can be done, we tend to do art in two waves. So about, I'm not sure the percentage, it might not quite be a half, but the lead developer on the set

has to, early on, figure out the first half of their set that they can start having card concepted. So what they need to do is figure out what are the stuff that we are pretty sure is going to stay and or things that we know we're going to have a card representing, even if the card changes some. For example, basic lands tend to get done in the first wave. Legendary creatures tend to get done in the first wave.

Things in which we just know we're going to have that thing. Usually story-related things that we know we're going to do. Sometimes even there's a little bit of work done where we're not quite sure where the picture's going to end up, but we know we're going to have a card with that picture on it. For example, let's say in Kandatar Kyr, we knew that the bones of Ugin were going to be important and that we're going to make a card to represent that. What exactly we did mechanically was still being worked out, but we knew that image was going to be there, so they did that early. Okay, so the card constantly gets handed over to the art director. Art director sends out. So the way art works is

we have freelance artists, and so in order to have something done, the art director will get freelance artists, assign them some number of paintings, and then send them the art descriptions, and the artist will draw them. So the way it works for the artists is they have roughly seven weeks, something around there, and what happens is at some point, I don't know the time, not doing art, I don't know the timetables, but at some point they turn in a sketch, turn in a sketch. And the sketch is a check-in to make sure that everybody's happy

on the creative team, everybody's happy with what's going on. So normally what happens is both the art director and the card conceptor will take a look at the sketch to make sure that the sketch is A, looking like it'll lead to a good picture, and B, representing the things

it's supposed to represent. And this is the point where we'll get notes. So people ask all the time, does the artist see the card mechanic? The answer is no. Mostly because most artists don't even play the game of magic, but also because the mechanic itself could change. So there are some key things that matter. For example, one of the rules we have is if you are a flying creature, you must look like you fly in the art. And so we will always say to the artist whether or not the thing is supposed to be flying. And there also will be some instructions based on, there's some general instructions for

doing magic when you first learn to be a magic artist. And then there's some world instructions for doing magic when you first learn to be a magic artist and then there's some world instructions depending on that world. But anyway, the sketch will come in. If they like the sketch, then they'll go ahead and they'll make the painting. If there's a problem, they give them notes. Then the artist might correct the notes

and send another sketch in to show the correction. And then once that gets signed off on, then the artist goes to get finished with their painting. So a lot of people ask these days, once upon a time, almost all art was done on, you know, on canvas or on, you know, some physical medium where you would literally mail in the picture. And we used to have a wall where all the pictures would be up, you know, or they'd rotate through. So once the art comes in, by the way, the art has to get scanned in. So we have a whole team that has to get art and that once you scan it in, there is different art processing you have to do to it.

Oftentimes you have to figure out the crop because the dimensions that is drawn by the artist is not always 100% the dimensions of the card. So sometimes there's cropping that goes on. Every once in a while, there's some color correcting that happens. But anyway, there's a whole imaging team that has to take the art in. So art used to be done in physical form. It has changed a lot over time. A lot of art now is done digitally, which means,

I mean, digital art, by the way, for people who think that someone somehow sits at a computer, the way that a lot of digital art works is you have the same tools that you would have to paint a picture, except it's being tracked digitally rather than being tracked using actual paint. They're using brushes and things on a, usually it's a big board that can feel that can represent the stuff. So you can paint and it can feel the brush strokes and things.

So, digital stuff is a lot closer than you think to original as far as how it's done. Anyway, a lot of, not all of it, there's a few that still get sent in, but a lot more these days are digital. That means our wall doesn't have as many things sitting up on it. Sometimes if they really want us to

see something, they'll print it out so that we can see some stuff. There's a set coming up, I can't tell you which set or what's going on, but a very important part of an upcoming set. And so they put all the pictures, all the key elements up so we could see them. And it was really breathtaking.

And you guys, I can't even tell you what it's for, but at some point in the future you'll be really excited about something that's visually stunning. So anyway. Okay. So meanwhile,

the development team is still plugging along, figuring out what they need to do. So lots of change happens during development. Whole cards come out. Sometimes mechanics come out. Things will change.

So development is plugging away at that. They start doing their FFL testing. So at some point, once the cards get closer to their finalized form, then it's time for names and flavor texts to start getting involved. And names and flavor texts aren't just in charge of doing names and flavor texts. They're in charge of all wording in general, which means, or sorry, all naming in general, which also means they have to name the keywords as well. The keywords are named by the same people that do naming and flavor text.

So what will happen is they have a team of freelance writers that do names and flavor texts. They will send out cards. Those writers actually see the cards, because when you're trying to name cards and do flavor and flavor texts. They will send out cards. Those writers actually see the cards, because when you're trying to name cards and do flavor texts, it's important to understand the mechanics. So they will break people into groups.

Not every group sees every card. And then multiple people see every card, although different people see a different mix. So any one writer is seeing a unique mix of cards, although every card is seen by more than one writer. And then people turn in a whole bunch of suggestions. So here's a card, and you go, oh, here's five possible names for that card. Here's three possible flavor texts for that card. And then the person in charge of naming the flavor text, and just as the card concept will rotate, so will the name and flavor text person rotate. And that person will look through and figure

out what's working, and have name conventions, and you have to make sure that cycles get connected, and there's lots of work that has to get done. That gets done pretty late in the process. By the way, as development starts doing its thing and art starts coming in, development gets its hands tied more because it has to do with...

For example, once an art is commissioned, that's the art. So if they want to change the card, now they're married to a certain artist that they have to not contradict. That might dictate the size. It'll dictate things about it. Now, sometimes we can swap art around. Sometimes like, oh, well, how about we put art on this card? That'll make sense.

And then we haven't commissioned this yet, and you can do that. So there's a bunch of different things they'll do. But development gets their hands tied more and more as the set goes along because more exterior things are happening. Okay, meanwhile, while development is going on, usually during design, we have a check-in with the rules manager to make sure that we are doing things that will work. Then during development, templating starts to happen.

So what templating is, is there's a lead editor for every set. There's a whole editing team in R&D. Each set has a lead editor. The lead editor, the rules manager, which sometimes is the lead editor, and the lead developer get together and try to figure out how the cards have to read. Now, some cards use existing templates because they're doing things we already do. Those cards are very have to read. Now, some cards use existing templates because they're doing things we already do. Those cards are very easy to template. But every set, we always have new mechanics,

and we just do new things we've never done before. And so the templating team has to spend a lot of time and energy making sure that the cards read correctly and that players will understand them. That also involves writing reminder text. Reminder text is not as technically tight, so sometimes we've been using reminder text to help people get the gist of what's going on

without having to be sort of super, super specific technically. So development is going along. At some point, art comes in. At some point, names and flavor texts get done. At some point, templating gets done. And then development hands off the file. Actually, development hands off the file before art is done, before names and flavor texts are done, and before templating is done, and then development hands off the file. Actually, development hands off the file before art is done,

before names and play protects is done, and before templating is usually done. So they hand in the file. Now, development has some amount of time after the file is handed in to do play testing where they're allowed to change minor things. But minor things could be numbers,

which for development is very important. Numbers are the easiest thing to change because it doesn't change any of the creative, or you have to make sure it doesn't change creative elements. But assuming you're not changing creative elements, especially mana costs are the easiest thing to change. So the card costs four in a red or five in a red, there's no real difference to the rest of the card. It doesn't make any more space up. If you're trying to change it to more colored mana, that could matter depending on the title. Remember that the title and the mana cost

have to stay on the same line. If the title's really long, the mana cost has to be shorter. If the mana cost is really long, the title might be shorter. Also, the title cares about the rules text, but sometimes if the rules text is really busy, it needs a shorter name to fit in the rules text box.

So anyway, the development gets their hands off, and it goes to editing. Now, it's editing's job to make sure the art comes in, to make sure names and flavor text get done. They might give notes on various things. They might give notes back on templating. They might give a note back to development. But at some point, all the cards have to finally get settled. So once that is done, once all the components are in,

then editing sends the cards off to get laid out by CAPS. Matt and I talked about CAPS not too long ago. Creative and Professional Services, I think. They're the ones that physically lay out the cards. Now, be aware, all the way back in design or early development, if we believe there's going to be a new card frame, that's something that CAPaps has to know about and that the creative team has to know about.

Oftentimes, we'll do something that requires a new frame, or if it requires a watermark or some kind of symbol, all that has to be figured out early so that once we get to this point, those things are done. So editing gets all the component pieces, gives it off to CAPS. CAPS has to physically lay out the card. And then editing checks the card to make sure that all the components are put together correctly, including the frame, which is why CAPS is laying it out.

Because, you know, a card might have the wrong watermark, or have the wrong frame, or, you know, something about it might be wrong. So editing is the final thing that has to make sure that everything is correct. And the editing team, just so you're aware, the editing team is constantly monitoring the file as it goes along. They start editing it usually

at some point during development. And even in design sometimes, they'll take light notes on getting general wording, so we're playing with something that's representative of you want to know how wordy your mechanics are, so sometimes they'll do passes on it early, so we're playing with something that's representative of... You want to know how wordy your mechanics are so sometimes they'll do passes on it early so we get a sense of what it'll realistically look like. Okay, so CAPS lays it out.

Editing does a check. So once CAPS is done with the layout and editing signs off on it, now it has to physically get made into a card. So once they're signed off now be aware as i talked about before caps was doing imaging to get the pictures they have to lay out the card they have to if there's color adjustments uh sometimes there's print tests if we're trying to do something we haven't done before like let's say we're doing a supplemental product that has a new type of

foiling or something they have to do tests to make sure that's all right so but once it all comes together and everything is signed off on the r&d thing now caps has to put it together now there's something called collation which r&d helps with is figuring out what cards go where on the sheet um and so uh there often is once caps um will put together cards after they put together individual cards and that's one by one the editing looks at them like one at a time on a sheet. Then they have to make actual sheets, and the sheets are, okay, there's 121 or 110 or whatever, different printing presses printing different numbers.

You have to get them on the sheet, and then you have to make sure that they're organized correctly. So collation, what collation does, and this is often done by a member of R&D, is all the cards are costed, or evaluated for how good they are, and in Collation, you want to make sure there's a good mix so that every booster pack has roughly in this ballpark, I mean, there's a range, but, you know, we don't want cards that are completely, oh my god, amazing bunkers, and cards that are completely worthless, we don't

want them too far apart. Now, obviously, there are packs that are better than other packs. The uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares are disconnected, meaning we don't control which commons are on a sheet. So certain commons have possibilities of being with other commons at some rate. There's different sheets that we cut from different places to mix it up to make it very hard to tell. And so there's a lot of variety in how commons come together. But commons will

clump near other commons more often than higher varieties because how uncommons are dropped to the common sheets are not connected. So certain uncommons don't come with certain commons. Anyway, collation has to be done, and then caps have to physically make the sheet. So once the sheet is

made, then it used to be there were actual files made because it was done with cameras. Now it's all done digitally. So now they have to get the correct digital files and get them off to the printers. Once upon a time, all our cards were printed at Carta Monday in Belgium. But since way back when, we are now,

I don't know how many we're at, four, five, six. We make a lot of cards. So we are a lot of printers all around the world. And different printers have different requirements, and so one of the job of CAPS is making sure that we need to print all Magic cards to a singular standard. That if you open up a Magic card, it doesn't matter where it got printed. It should seem the same. And we have dealt with a number of different places that weren't able to actually meet our standards,

and so we weren't able to use them. We have very high standards when it comes to our printing. And so anyway, so what happened is CAPS will get the file to the printer. The printer will print them. Then we get logistics. Then somebody has to make sure that the finished printed cards get to,

well, the printer will print the cards and then get them into booster wrap. Sometimes, if things are complex, every once in a while, a card has to be made at one printer and shipped to another printer and packaged at that other printer if we're doing something special.

And that's not normal expansions, but supplemental products sometimes have special things we're doing. But anyway, that has to get made into booster packs or into products, whatever we're making. And then logistics has to come in, and logistics has to get them to where they need to go. Meanwhile, we have a sales team, and the sales team is making sure that people want to buy the card. We sell to distributors, and the distributors sell to different stores. So there's a whole sales team that's working with them to make sure that everybody gets the allocation that they need,

and there's all sorts of stuff that goes on with sales. Meanwhile, logistics is making sure that the cards get done, that they get delivered where they need to be at the right time. There's warehouses, and we have to, you know, make sure that we have the product and then the right time ship so that all the distributors get stuff so they can get it to the stores. Meanwhile, I didn't even get into brand. So brand is in charge of overviewing everything.

They're the ones that have to figure out print limits, you know, print sizes, which happens much, much earlier in the process. So they're figuring out how many we're going to make of something. They figure out when we reprint things. They're also in charge of marketing, which is, if a set's going to come out, well, we want people to buy that set, so we have to make sure people know about it.

And there's a lot of different marketing we do. We do marketing through the website. We do marketing through a lot of web marketing. The Pro Tour is considered marketing. It's paid through our marketing budget. And I'm not getting to OP. There's all sorts of things.

When we have a new product, organized play has to take a look at it because they have to make things that tie into it. Magic Online and Duels of the Planetswalkers have to look at it because the products we're doing is affecting stuff they're doing. R&D has an entire digital team to integrate so i didn't even talk about that that like early on in the process digital is going to take a look at because they have to incorporate

it from the digital thing um as you can see uh you know when we're making a card i mean it's not just design and development it's the creative team it's the editing team it is, I mean, it's not just design and development. It's the creative team. It's the editing team. It is the caps team. It's logistics. It's marketing. It's sales. And there's lots of other teams

that support the stuff we're doing. You know, I'm not getting to the HR team, you know, the human resources team or the legal team or even the people who clean the office

every day we come in and it's nice. There's a lot of different people all working together to make that happen. And a magic card or a magic set goes through many, many, many hands and lots and lots of people touch it. I know I talk a lot about design development just because that's where I work.

But I'm hoping what today will make you realize is there are so many different people that go into making a magic card. That it is not like, oh, I designed something, development looks at it and we're done. Design and development are just part of a much, much larger process.

And I didn't even, like, editing, for example, have to worry about collector number and the legal text line and there's all sorts of stuff that go on. I didn't even, like, editing, for example, have to worry about collector number and the legal text line. And, you know, there's all sorts of stuff that go on. I mean, I didn't even get into the nooks and crannies. But hopefully I gave you a slight overview of just the number of things that have to happen in order for a card to go from something to go,

ooh, I have an idea, to you open it up and it's printed in your pack. But I have now just parked my car. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work and it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you guys next time.