Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #203 - 2007

Episode Date: February 20, 2015

Mark continues his 20 years in 20 podcasts with the year 2007.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is another of my series, 20 years in 20 podcasts, where I'm going through all of Magic's history year by year. So we're up to 2007. Man, we're zooming along here. We're going to catch up to modern day pretty soon. Okay, so we start in January. January 20th was the pre-release. February 3rd was the release of Planar Chaos, aka Crackle. The block that year was Snap, Crackle, and Pop, the Rice Krispies mascots, for those who might not know. So the set had 165 cards, 60 commons, 55 uncommons, 50 rares. The set had 165 cards, 60 commons, 55 uncommons, 50 rares. So Planar Chaos was part of the Time Spiral block.

So I talked about Time Spiral during 2006. So the whole block had a time theme. It also had a strong nostalgia theme. So the idea was the first set was the past, and the last set was the future. The middle set had to be the present, which was tricky, because how isn't every set the present?

So I came up with the idea of doing an alternate reality present. So when we got to the present, so what was going on in Time Spiral, for those that might not know the story, is all temporal chaos was breaking loose. The multiverse itself was breaking down. It had taken enough abuse. And so it was starting to collapse.

And time was merging together and all sorts of problems were happening. This would lead to the mending, which is where the planeswalkers had to come together. And a lot of them gave up their sparks to stop the multiverse from falling apart. And in doing it, the nature of the sparks changed. And we went from having our uber godlike planeswalkers to ones that could still planeswalk, but they were not nearly as powerful. So we could tell stories about more average characters

and not people that could dream up worlds. So the tricky thing about this set was, like I said, is we needed a twist to make present make sense. And so we ended up doing alternate reality. The tricky thing about this set was, like I said, is we needed a twist to make present make sense. And so we ended up doing alternate reality. So what we did is we reimagined magic as if the color wheel had been done a little bit differently. Now the idea was the philosophy stayed the same.

Colors still believed in the same things they believed in. We didn't change the philosophies, but we changed the execution. Turned out to be a little more... It's one of those things where you try to do something and go, this is the exception to show what we normally do, and people just log on to, hey, red can do this and blue can do that.

This is the set where people write in and go, hey, there's this card. Isn't that precedent you can do something? I'm like, Planar Chaos is precedent of nothing. It was just us showing kind of where the color pie could have been had we just gone down a slightly different path.

Just like Time Spiral, there was a time-shifted cheat, which meant in every pack, you got one card that had a different frame. It had the alternate reality frame. It's kind of what the modern frame could be if we'd gone slightly differently.

I actually liked the alternate reality frame quite It's kind of what the modern frame could be if we'd gone slightly differently. I actually liked the alternate reality frame quite a bit. Anyway, so the lead designer of this set was Bill Rose and the lead developer was Devin Lowe. Bill Rose, he and I have worked together a long time. He's now our VP of

R&D. The set, the whole block had just like a billion returning mechanics. I think the one new mechanic in the set, which new

in quotes, was Vanishing, which was, we took the fading mechanic that we'd introduced, when did we introduce fading?

Fading was back in, when was fading? Urza's saga, I think, block did it? I think Urza's legacy, I think, blocked it. I think Urza's legacy, I think. Anyway, Fading was a mechanic where things ticked off.

It came with so many counters. And then after you couldn't remove a counter, it went away. But it was non-intuitive to players. They kept assuming when you took off the last counter, it went away. And so all Vanishing really was was a cleaned-up version of Fading that acted the way that everybody thought it worked. There's a lot of controversy about whether we should just bring back Fading or not. My argument at the time

was we were doing time things, we were correcting our time themes. It's something that I thought if we wanted to bring it back let's do it correctly, let's not bring it back wrong again. That only makes it that much harder to correct it. And it's the alternate reality. What if Fading it back wrong again. That only makes it that much harder to correct it. And it's the alternate reality. What if fading had worked this way?

That was my argument. Okay. Next, in February 9th through the 11th, was Pro Tour Geneva in Switzerland. It was a time spiral booster draft. And in it, Mike Krohn of the United States defeated Takuya Osawa of Japan. Mike Kron is one of those people that have been on the Pro Tour for a long time and this happens a lot on the Pro Tour where

there's somebody who's really good and has been around for a long time and has, you know, had a couple good performances but never quite got the brass ring and this was Mike Kron's time to finally win a Pro Tour. Okay, April 20th to the 22nd was the next Pro Tour. Pro Tour Yokohama, which was

time spiral block constructed. And in it, Guillaume Wafatapa from France defeated Kazuya Mitomura from Japan. So, Wafatapa just got inducted in the Hall of Fame this last year. A very, very good player. One of the best, we'd say,

obviously, in the Hall of Fame. This was his first win. He had come in second before, and I believe he had a number of top eights before, but this was his first win. That's another exciting thing when you watch people who come and they just do well and they keep top eighting and having great finishes, but they

never quite win it. When they finally win it, there's just a great sweetness. I mean, one of the themes of this year, I guess, is a lot of long-time players coming back and manning to finally take the win. Once again, a reminder, the reason that I get into the detail a little less on the Pro Tours in the later years is I was not at the Pro Tours. I go to Worlds. I can talk a little more about Worlds. But I stopped attending Pro Tours when my twins were born back in 2004. So I have the basic deals on the ProTours.

I can't give you as much detail as I did in the early years. Okay, next. April 21st was the pre-release. May 4th was the release. For Future Sight, a.k.a. Pop, it was 180 cards, 60 uncommon, 60 rare.

I was the lead designer. Mike Turian was the lead developer. And it introduced a lot of mechanics. So the stat I use is, I believe before Future Sight came out, there's something like low 50s, 52 to 56. There were some number of mechanics. Let's to 56. There are some number of mechanics. Let's say 56. There were 56 mechanics in Magic.

In all of Magic, counting everything, evergreen, everything, there were 56 mechanics. Future Sight itself had in it 48 mechanics. So what happened was there was a time-shifted sheet, much like the Planar Chaos time-shifted sheet, or the Time-Furl time-shift Sheet, but it was from the future, with a futuristic frame. In fact, the last podcast, I just talked about how I like that futuristic frame, and there's some elements of magic I might have done

if we were starting things all over. The one big difference about the way we did the Time Shifted and Future Sight is, in both Time Spiral and Planar Chaos, every pack had one card from the time-shifted sheet. In Future Sight, it was mixed in. So you usually got one, but you weren't guaranteed one. And sometimes you got more than one.

It was mixed in the sheet. So you got, in fact, you got a number of them. The future sheets, I think you could get as many as three or four maybe in a pack. But anyway, the future-shift shifted cards are really hard to do. In fact, what happened was normally during development, when development creates holes, there's a hole filling team that'll fill them in. But Mike Turian, who was the head developer, came to me,

and the problem he was having was it was really, really hard to design future shifted cards because they had to be cards that didn't do something we've already done, because they're from the future, but it's the kind of thing we might do. It was a very delicate space that was hard to design. So he actually came to me, and I filled in a lot of the holes. One of the famous stories is he had two holes to finish right before he had turned the final in. And in one hour, I made both Bridge from Below and Narcomiba.

They were made at the same time, same session, me sitting down making cards. Anyway, the set has all sorts of hints at the future. Delve, which just showed up in Kanzatarkir, was originally there. We just had

Devotion last year in Theros. The original version of Devotion, Chroma, I think it was unnamed, but showed up in Future Sight. There's a lot of individual cards that are shown in Future Sight. It's one of those things people are always asking when they're going to see more Future Sight cards show up. And as we get farther and farther away from it, you're more getting elements of them than straight direct reprints

just because it's getting harder and harder to get reprints, but every once in a while, I know there's some future sets that we're looking at maybe adding a Future Sight card. Okay. Oh, one other thing about Future Sight is I often talk about how Future Sight

is my, how do I word it? It's the, my art house, my art house set. The problem we had for the Time Spiral block was it was complex. I believe Time Spiral had like 14 mechanics and Planar Chaos had those and introduced a few more and Future Sight introduced a whole bunch more. I mean, there were mechanics in Future Sight that were on one card or two cards from the future. And so, there just was a lot

going on. On top of that, just the theme of time is a complex theme. You know, suspend cards, you know, you're paying for

instead of money, you're paying for time and things can vanish and, you know, there's a lot of things. I mean, Future Sight even went further. And Future Sight,

if you love magic, if you love the potential of magic, Time Spiral Block in general is a love letter to longtime magic players. And the hardcore players loved Time Spiral. The problem was, if you didn't understand what was going on, it was really, really confusing. And Future Sight was like, if Time Spiral was confusing, and Planar Chaos was really confusing then Future Sight was

wow, over the top confusing. The number of things going on it just overwhelmed a lot of our players I know the diehards loved it but it overwhelmed a lot of our players and that well in the future we might do supplemental sets Modern Masters does some of this where

we've sort of, Times Fargo Block made us realize it was one of the two things that led to New World Order. Um, in fact, in Lorwyn, we'll get to Lorwyn in a second, um, we adopt, ah, we'll get, I'll talk about when we get to Lorwyn. We, we adapted some stuff from, we had some lessons from Times Fargo, and then we learned some lessons from, uh, from Lorwyn. Well, I'll get to that in a second. Um, yeah, the thing, but, oh, the reason it's my archives picture, I'll get to that in a second. Yeah, the thing...

Oh, the reason it's my archives picture, I'm very proud of Future Sight. There's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of cool ideas. There's all sorts of hints about the future. In fact, now that we're, you know, well into the future, we're, you know, eight years in the future,

a lot of the stuff we were teasing, not necessarily the whole cards came, but the creative elements that then came out. There were mechanical elements. There's a lot of what the next eight years of magic would be. In fact, there's hints of even beyond that come from there. There was a lot of us sort of doing some soul searching of where we thought we were going. And there were a lot of interesting hints of where we were going, both mechanically and creatively. Okay. So now we get to PT San Diego. So June 29th through July 1st,

it was a two-headed giant booster draft. Time is viral. Two-headed giant booster draft. And Chris Lachman and Jacob Van Loonen of the United States defeated Kentaro Yamamoto and Masami Kaneko of Japan. Probably they were known as the sliver kids.

So they came with this strategy. So one of the things that went on in Time Spiral Block is we had slivers in it. So all three sets had slivers, and they were doing different things. There were slivers in the final set in Future Sight that were poisonous. That were slivers that had, we finally had keyworded the poison mechanic because we were hinting that we were going to bring poison back. Now, it turns out we did bring poison back. We ended up doing infect rather than poisonous.

In fact, the funny thing is I started doing Scars of Mirrored InDesign with poisonous and then realized there was a better way to do it. We got to infect. So anyway, there was these slivers that were poisonous. So they had this strategy where they would draft slivers. They would just prioritize slivers over everything else. It turns out in Two-Headed Giant, slivers are very... At the time, because we were doing slivers,

and the first one was All My Nostalgia, we ended up... Even though we had changed the way lords had worked, so they only affected your creatures, we had decided for that block to let slivers affect, to work like they had in the past, which is they affect all slivers. And so Intuitive Giant had worked extra well, because if I had slivers and you had slivers, they helped each other.

So they drafted these two sliver decks. And usually they're killed kill involved using the... I forgot the name of the Poison Sliver, but the Poison Sliver. And in fact, they won the Pro Tour with a Poison kill, which I was quite excited by. Slivers originally come from Tempest, which was my first set. They were a creation of Mike Elliott, who was trying

to get the coolness of Plague Rats and bring it to a whole race of creatures. And anyway, they won. So that was definitely... So one of the funny stories about that, I wasn't at the Pro Tour,

but anyway, so these two kids win with slivers and poison. So a poison kill in the finals of the Pro Tour, which is something obviously everyone knew, everyone at work knew that I was a you know, a huge Poison fan, and I'd been trying to get Poison back forever. So everybody, for some reason, everybody assumed that somehow I wasn't aware of what had happened in the Pro Tour,

and so everybody who saw me for, like, three days would go, did you see the Pro Tour? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw the Pro Tour, and it became this running joke that everybody was so excited to tell me that Poison run the Pro Tour that every single person I knew mentioned it. At least it felt that way. Okay, next.

July 13th, 10th edition. So 10th edition had 383 cards in it. It had 121 commons, 121 uncommons, 121 rares, and 20 lands. So for those that aren't aware, when you print magic cards that are printed on a sheet, the most common size for sheets

is 121, which is 11 by 11. There's 11 wide, 11 long. And so when you see 121, that means we are printing to the max that we can in any one sheet. And so it's a 121, that means we are printing to the max that we can in one sheet.

And so it's a sheet of rarity. Every slot on the sheet is filled up with a card. So 10th edition is interesting. So Magic started with Alpha and Beta, what we called limited edition, then unlimited edition, then revised edition, which was technically third edition, and then fourth edition, fifth edition, six, seven, eight, nine. So this was 10. So what would happen, this was the last named, um, the last named edition, if you will.

Um, after this, uh, we would go to Magic 2010. We'd start naming them after the years. Um, uh, and the reason was that we we finally started getting daunting like when you hear 10th edition you're like I've missed a lot there's been 9 previous ones of these and it made the game we like the fact the game has a history and there's some breath to it

but it is it can be daunting I think if you're a newer player so 10th edition not a lot I mean it can be daunting, I think, if you're a newer player. So 10th edition, not a lot, I mean, I don't remember if there's any gimmick to 10th edition.

Like 8th edition had a big gimmick. Like 7th edition had new art, and 8th edition, it was our anniversary, so I had one card from every set,

every Blackboard set, so I'd never been in the core set before. 10th edition was more of the same. I'm not sure if 10th edition is anything particularly different. Okay.

So, oh, by the way, for those that are wondering, I'm sitting here in traffic. I do not know why, other than it's really foggy. It's not raining today. So one of the ways I can tell how I'm doing is I have a... I drive two highways when I hit the middle, my halfway point is when I change highway, so I'm not even to the second highway yet, although what happens is, usually when this one's busy, the next one won't be busy, so I am sitting in traffic today, I have no idea why, which means you guys will get an extra long podcast, unless I run out of content,

that's the secret by the way, I don't know if you guys have known this, is sometimes, and this has happened before, I'll get into traffic secret, by the way. I don't know if you guys have known this. Sometimes, and this has happened before, I'll get into traffic and it goes so long that I don't have enough on the topic of the day to talk for as long as my drive takes me. Like, I did a drive once where there was crazy traffic. It took me over an hour to get in. And I just had a topic that I maybe had half an hour on.

I think I was doing, like, card stories or something. And I only had so many cards I'd prepared. And anyway, so today's interesting. We'll see if... The good news today is when I talk about years, I have a lot of things I can talk about if I want to go back. I mean, usually I try to make sure I hit each thing until I get through the whole year.

Today's a little different, so if I start going off a little more in some of the sets, that is why, because I'm sitting in traffic. Just for a little update for those wondering. sets, that is why, because I'm sitting in traffic. Just for a little update for those wondering. Although, see, you guys, I guess when you start, know how long it's going to be, which I don't know when I start. Okay, so next, September 10th was the release of the Master's Edition on Magic Online. So one of the things is when Magic Online first started, it was 100%— if it was in paper, it was online. If it was online, it was in paper.

It was one to 100%. If it was in paper, it was online. If it was online, it was in paper. And then as time went on, they mostly overlap. All the major sets overlap. But we started occasionally making sets that would play offline and online, like Conspiracy as an example. And we started making sets that were online that weren't offline. that weren't offline.

So Masters Online was, I'm sorry, Masters Edition was us just trying to create a fun experience. It used all existing cards, but I think what it did, I mean, it used all existing Magic cards, but it used a whole bunch of cards that I believe weren't on Magic Online yet.

I think the idea was we wanted to get some cards that hadn't got onto Magic Online. So what happened was when Magic Online started, it started in Invasion. Or when it first came out, the first set to come out was Invasion. I think Magic Online might have come out slightly after Invasion, but we sold Invasion. So for the sets pre-Invasion, we, starting with Mirage, which is the first block, we released all the blocks online. But there were some sets that were pre-blocks.

Basically, Arabian Nights through Alliances. And so what we did is we started... We made the Masters Edition so we could take the cards we thought players really wanted and didn't have access to, and then we built a fun, limited environment out of it. One of the things about Magic Online is there's a lot more limited play than there's constructed play, just the nature of sort of how Magic Online works. And so we made a fun format and also allowed us to get some of the cards into the format that weren't there yet.

Because one of the things we wanted is we wanted people to be able to play older formats online. Okay, next. September 29th was the pre-release. October 12th was the release of Lorwyn, a.k.a. Peanut. So this is a funny story real quick.

So Lorwyn originally was Peanut, butter, and jelly. The problem we ran into was we later decided Bill wanted to do a fourth set, kind of like Cold Snap, but a little better. And I told him if he'd give me some preparation, I could make the fourth set more, because at the time, remember, the extra expansions, the corsets were every

other year, and so we had an open year, and I said to him, because the coltsnep hadn't gone that well, let me incorporate into the year, so rather than just being this extra thing, it's part of what we're doing for the year. And I came up with a model for Lorwood and Chathamore of large, small, one block, one mini block, large, small, another mini block. Obviously, for those who know the two block paradigm, kind of the precursor of things to come. But what happened was the audience wasn't supposed to know we were doing that. And we had already told them the codenames of peanut, butter, and jelly.

So what we did is we ended up naming, what's it said, Eventide Donut. So the sets were peanut butter and separately were Jelly Donut. But if you didn't know any better, when you heard Peanut Butter and Jelly, it sounded like a traditional three-set block. So that allowed us to have code names and not give away information. That's actually one of the biggest, you guys aren't even aware of this, but we try very hard with our code names and how we do things to make sure that we're not giving away things. And our audience is quite smart, so even the tiniest little clue...

It's why our code names, we work really hard with our code names not to mean anything, because we don't want people figuring things out for our code names. As is, people still think they figure things out from our code names. Usually the code names exist before the sets exist, so any happenstance... Like, I know that Pharaoh's Block was Friends, Romans, and Countrymen. Like, oh, a Roman reference in a set that's more Greek than Roman, but, you know.

Ooh, sorry, guys. Somebody cut in front of me. You almost got an accident. Oh, live! On my podcast. Luckily, I'm alert while I'm paying attention to, while I'm talking to you, I'm actually paying attention to the cars around me. Man, he just cut me off.

So, anyway, I'm lucky I did not swear there, because he really was not paying attention. Okay, so, Lorwyn was 301 cards, 121 commons, 80 uncommons, 80 rares, and 20 lands. It had five new mechanics. So, the lead designer of the set was Aaron Forsythe. The lead developer was Devin Lowe. Introduced five mechanics, Champion, Evoke, Clash, Changeling, and Hideaway. So what happened was, back in the day, Aaron Forsythe was my protege. I was training him to be the next big designer.

And he reported me for a while. And I had him on a whole bunch of sets. He worked on all the Ravnick sets. The last Ravnick set, Descension, he led. And then finally, he's like, okay, it's time to put him on a big set. And Lorden was his first big set. And it proved, it was very daunting. Designing magic is tough.

Designing a small magic is tough. Designing a small set is hard. Designing a large set, especially back in the day, now I do a lot more prep work with exploratory design, meaning we walk into the set with a lot more idea of what we're doing. But back in the day, it's kind of like, Aaron Middleley was like, okay, Aaron, here's what you know. It's a large set. It's got a tribal theme. Go.

And the way we worked this is we first sat down with Creative and figured out what the tribes were. There ended up being eight supported tribes. And then we built around that. And from that, the Creative team ended up going using a lot of Celtic mythology. So it had a little bit of a fairytale vibe,

a lot of Celtic mythology in it. And what we were trying to do is make Lorwyn kind of the softer, happier set, and Shadowmore the darker set, because we were doing, they were parallels to each other, and we knew we wanted light and dark. So we took a tone with Lorwyn that was a lot lighter. It's sort of like, you know, instead of someone killing you, they're like tossing fish at you, you know. And it was more like the evil things were mischievous, but not so deadly as they were.

And then we got to Shadowmoor, it turned super deadly. One of the funny stories is we originally had minus one, minus one counters in Lorwyn because we thought, what's kinder than death? Well, instead of killing you, what if they just injure you? What we found was, minus one, minus one encounters felt meaner than normal magic, not kinder. So we ended up moving them off to Shadowmoor.

And then we made an interesting call, putting plus one, plus one encounters here, so that the plus one encounters and minus one encounters would contrast each other. They wouldn't be in the same limited environment, although they did show up in the constructed. So, Champion, by the way, was our attempt at doing evolutions of creatures evolving to other creatures. That's very popular in other training card games. And so we thought we'd do our version of having a creature turn into another creature.

We made ours a little more open-ended. So when you had a champion, it based on a creature type, and we were doing a tribal set. So any elf could turn into this elfin champion. Evoke was a mechanic where you could play it, and it was a creature that if you didn't pay extra... Oh, I'm sorry. It was a creature that had an enter the battlefield effect. You could pay less to not have the creature... The creature would be sacked at the end of turn. And so essentially what happened was you either would get a creature with a sorcery attached, essentially, or just a sorcery.

Interestingly, originally when I made Evoke, it was an instant or sorcery that you could kick into a creature. That was the original idea. But all the mechanics of making that happen just got complicated, and it was easier making creatures that you could pay less to not keep them. Clash was a mechanic that we did. You each showed the top card of your library, and if you had a higher converted mana cost than your opponent, you would generate some effect.

And then the Clash cards, I believe, went on the bottom of the library. Or did it go to the bottom or did you have a choice? I forget whether you had a choice or they were on the bottom. The thing about Clash was we were trying to add a little more... It helped deck smoothing to make sure that you got your mana and it also had

a little bit of... a little surprise and I mean you could build your deck to win more Clashes but it added a little more of a a little surprise. I mean, you could build your deck to win more clashes, but it would add a little more of a random element to it. Changeling was the glue that glued everything together. Changeling was based on Mistform Ultimis from Onslaught Block. The idea was, if you had Changeling, it meant you had every creature type. And so all the cards that cared about creature types affected Changeling's... Like, you could do these neat things where I had a card that cared about goblins and a card that cared about elves, and my changing was a goblin and an elf, so I got both bonuses.

And it allowed you to sort of click together some stuff that maybe you normally couldn't play together. I call it the glue that kind of glued everything together. normally couldn't play together. I call it the glue that kind of glued everything together. Chainslings also cause all sorts of problems when you're doing trivia, because whenever you talk about creature types, people love to bring in chainslings. Like, what's the first set? This set has the most Asven of dragons. No, it doesn't!

Most Asven of actual dragons, you know, stuff like that. The final mechanic was called Hideaway. Originally that was a mechanic called Treasure that was a common mechanic, a much lower Originally, that was a mechanic called Treasure that was a common mechanic, a much lower mechanic, that was much more wide. The flavor of the set was it was an adventure world.

No, it wasn't an adventure world. We were, sorry, lower world. It was tribal world, but had a fairytale-ish sort of feel. And so there was treasures there that you could dig up and find. And Aaron spent a lot of time trying on it. And in the end, it ended up being five

rare lands. The hideaways were sort of fun. When you got it, you got to put something from top of your deck down, and you could earn it. So the hideaway lands were fun, but it definitely was hinting at a much more complex mechanic. Okay. October 18th through the 21st

was the last tier tier magic invitational thus far thus far it was actually held in Germany at Essen so Essen is a giant in fact it might be the biggest game convention I think it is in the world

I'd always heard about Essen it was one of the things that I really wanted to go but every year Richard Garfield used to always go to Essen and Wizardsards used to send a few people, but never a lot of people, and at the time, I was pretty low on the totem pole, so I never had a chance to go to Essen. So when someone came to me and said, what would you think of having the Magic Invitational at Essen? I was like, yes!

And so, it definitely was an invitational. We did some more experimental things. It definitely was an invitational. We did some more experimental things. We invited some people. Like Evan Irwin got invited. Steven Mandel got invited. Steven Menendian, sorry, got invited.

There's some people that might not normally have been invited. There was some controversy. We were trying to make it a little more fan-friendly, so we brought some people that... Evan might not be the strongest player, but he's a much-beloved Magic personality, and we thought there were so many good players there that it's okay having

some things that might just bring some spectacle to it. You have a chance to watch Evan lose to all the good players. But anyway, in the finals was Tiago Chan of Portugal playing Rich Hohen of Canada. Tiago would win, and he would go on to make a card called Snapcafter Mage. That card would take forever to get made.

Part of it was we had to change things, and we had trouble getting Tiago. And to be honest, my heart wasn't... Somehow I kept feeling like if we didn't print the card, that maybe we could get the Invitational back, and I think I was just in denial. But I knew once I printed it, like, I was kind of done, the Invitational was over, and that saddened me greatly. Okay, November 16th was the release of the first dual decks, Elves versus Goblins. They were two pre-constructed 60 card decks that were meant to play against each other.

It's funny, I actually wrote an article in the Duelist I mean, long, long, long ago. I mean, before I worked for Wizards, so 94, where I talked about making two decks to play against each other and how that's a fun thing to do. And many, many years later, we're like, you know what?

We should have more products that people could just buy and just play. That's kind of where dual decks came from. You know, it's great that you can buy cars and boosters and take them and assemble things. But sometimes, in fact, the ad campaign, one of my favorite ad campaigns we ever did, we started doing dual decks. Oh, I take it back. This ad was for pre-constructed decks, but I left the sentiment. It was a pizza guy, and he opened up his pizza delivery guy, and inside were all the ingredients one would use to make pizza. And the ad campaign was,

sometimes you don't want to make it yourself. And it was Preconstructed Decks. But anyway, Duel Decks had the same philosophy of what came with Preconstructed Decks, except there were two of them rather than one, and they were meant to play against each other. My cool idea in the duelist many, many years before finally became

a reality. Okay, so October 12th through the 14th was Pro Tour Valencia, which was extended, and in it Remy Fortier from France defeated Andre Muller from Germany. I think this was the Pro Tour that got flooded out,

that they actually had a delay today because there was flooding and the site got flooded. Also, this was both Steven Menendian and Evan Irwin who got invites to the Invitational, got a free Pro Tour invite out of it, and this is, I'm pretty sure, the Pro Tour they went to. But that's all the stats I know about that. Okay, the final event of the is, I'm pretty sure the Pro Tour they went to. But that's all, that's all the stats I know about that.

Okay, the final event of the day. I'm actually not too far from work. The traffic picked up. So I'm actually, I'm making better time than I thought I would. Okay, so December 6th to the 9th in New York City

was the World Championships. In it, Uri Peleg of Israel defeated Pat Chapin of the United States. And Team Switzerland defeated Team Australia. So the thing I remember about this, A, I've known Pat for a long time. He worked in R&D for a little while as an intern.

Pat and I go way back. In fact, Pat, this last year, once again was in the finals. Pat was one of the first two people ever to be in the finals twice in a world championship. And he's currently the only person to ever come in twice at a world championship. the, so, Pat,

there was a great story that day in the semifinals. Pat was playing against Gabriel Nassif, and they were playing a storm card, I forget the name of the storm card, and they were playing a storm card, I forget the name of the storm card, where your opponent has to reveal cards from their hand and then take damage equal to the amount of cost of the card, and he stormed it,

and I think there were five copies, and there was a combination of things that have to happen for Gabriel and the Seath to survive that game, and the odds of it happening, I forget if someone figured out the odds of it happening, I forget so much about figuring out the odds of it happening. They were astronomical. It had to be the right five cards in the right order, and it exactly happened that way. So the funny thing was,

during this event, I wasn't watching the finals because there was a multiplayer event there, and R&D was doing something cool, which was Worldwake would be the next set. It comes out in 2008. We'll get to that in 2008.

But we were previewing some cards, and the way we were doing it is five of us were playing in the tournament, in the multiplayer tournament, and each one of us had one of the cards in our deck. And our decks were sort of built to show off that card. And the idea was we were supposed to, at some point during it, just play the card. Don't make a big deal about it, but just play it.

And then somebody would sort of go, hmm, what's that card? And they'd realize that we were playing with a card that wasn't public yet. So I had a card called Chameleon Colossus, which I think is 2GG. How big is it? It's 3, 3 or something. But anyway, the thing about it is for, I believe, 2GG, for another 2 green and green activation, you can double its power

until end of... power and toughness, I believe, until end of turn. You double it. So what happened was, I was playing a multiplayer game. There were a whole bunch of Howling Mind type effects out. So, like, I had the ability

to just make lots and lots and lots of mana. And so, I had a turn and I had something... At the time, I had...

I think I had two... What's the equipment? The equipment that... Oh, it's based on Armadillo Cloak. The equipment that's Armadillo Cloak. So it made, like, plus two, plus two, and gave me Lifelink. And at the time, Lifelink stank, stacked. It no longer stacks.

So I had double Lifelink, and I managed to do, if I remember correctly, like 20, 26,000 or 27,000, I think maybe 27,000 in change damage and I gained 55,000 life. That was my, and anyway, obviously,

giant attention, like, you know, hey, I have a card, I sneak in the game and then I did this crazy, grandiose thing. I ended up winning that, or I ended up,

the top two survived, so I survived my first round to go to the second, and then I lost in the second. Two players that had come together, but no one knew it, so they were secretly working together, and we're like,

you have to kill him, or he's going to beat us. And he goes, oh, yes he is. Anyway, during this, I'm hearing the yelling, because this is going on during the finals, and I'm hearing all the yelling, and I don't know quite what's going on.

And it turns out that because this was going on during the finals, and I'm hearing all the yelling, and I don't know quite what's going on, and it turns out that this match is going on between Pat and Gabe Nassif. And I think Nassif wins that game, but Pat went on to win the match to go to the finals. That also was, I think, oh, no, no,

I'm confusing New York with Memphis. Memphis will be coming up in a future year. In fact, it might be, no, no, it's a few years later. Anyway, I'm trying to think, any other fun world, stories from that world. That was a world, by the way, where, oh, no, no, no, sometimes I keep confusing New York with Memphis. But, oh, another one from that world. That was a world where I believe Mike Turian...

Oh, was that in Memphis? Am I confusing New York and Memphis? Okay, I'm going to tell the story, and maybe it was Memphis, maybe it was New York, but it's a good story, and maybe it was New York, where Mike Turian was being inducted into the Hall of Fame, and we started, and he wasn't there. And we stalled a little bit.

We stalled a little bit in front. Like, okay, we can't hold the tournament any longer. We have to start. And so we started the thing. And it turned out that Mike's, each person gets introduced, and then there's a video segment, and that Mike's segment was last. There was, like, I think four people being inducted,

four or five people inducted. Maybe there were five. And Mike was the fifth person, maybe because his's segment was last. There was, like, I think four people being inducted, four or five people inducted. Maybe there were five. And Mike was the fifth person, maybe because his name started with T. I forget why, but he was the last person. And so we started, and we started doing, the first person gets introduced, and we're doing the thing, and this and that, and then the second. And, like, I think while the second person gets introduced, Mike comes running in, he and his wife come

running in, that they had just gotten there. And, uh, anyway, he made it in time. He made it before he was introduced. But I always remember Mike just barely, barely making his own induction. So that was pretty cool. The one thing that I miss,

it used to be that all the inductions to the Hall of Fame were done at the Worlds, and that's changed a little bit. I miss that. I always liked the induction ceremonies. In fact, Worlds, I think I mentioned this when I talked with Randy online this year, is about how Worlds used to do these big presentations. There'd be a big show, and we'd be in Japan, and there'd be a big drum show, or we'd be in Australia, and there'd like the world's most famous didgeridoo player

playing the didgeridoo. And then there'd be a flag professional, a flag processional, where the world champion of each country would carry their country's flag and then we would play music

and they'd go in one by one. We don't do all that anymore, but that was, back when there was a little more pomp and circumstance. Worlds have changed a bit and it's not quite the world's of old. We'll't do all that anymore, but that was back when there was a little more pomp and circumstance. Worlds has changed a bit, and it's not quite the worlds of old. We'll get to that. So anyway, as I'm

driving into world... I'm driving into work, kind of the recap of this year is this is the cusp. We're just about to get into the world where we start making a lot more stuff. Dual Deck shows up for this year. That's the little precursor that things are changing, and that the idea of having a year

where there's just three or four expansions is going to change. And this is the year that sort of gives a little, little tiny hint of that coming. And I think next year, 2008, is when it's really going to start coming in force. But anyway, it was a good year. Times Fargo block was definitely, oh, I didn't talk, and Lorwyn, I didn't talk too much about what Lorwyn got to New World Order. I said I was going to tell the book. The real short version is we decided things were too complex.

We simplified the cards, and we simplified what we called comprehension complexity, and then Lorwyn taught us that there was a completely different kind of complexity called board complexity. And then during the next set, which would be Shards of Alara, is when New World Order would start up and we would really change how we did things. But anyway, I'll talk about New World Order

when we get there. So that, my friends, in a nutshell, is 2007. So it definitely was a learning time. Technically, Magic was having, we were having acquisition issues at this time. We were realizing that something was going wrong. A lot of this would lead to us realizing New World Order. So this year,

I think if you were a tried and true lover of Magic, there were a lot of cool stuff this year. But if you were a newer player, we were causing some problems. It was real hard to get into Time Spiral. Tribal turned to be very complex on the board

and a little hard to play. So anyway, that, my friends, is 2007. And we did have a little longer than normal podcasts because of the traffic.

So anyway, I am now in my parking space, or a parking space. I always plug like I have all parking space. I'm now in the parking space and we know what that means. It's time to end my drive to work. So it's time for me to stop. It's time for me to stop talking magic and start making magic. See you guys next week.