Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #210 - Back in the Day

Episode Date: March 20, 2015

Mark looks back at a number of things Magic used to do that it stopped doing.

I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm doing a show that I've dubbed Back in the Day. So what I want to talk about now is things that magic has done but no longer does. And so just a collection of talking about different things. I know a lot of people listening to this podcast might not have been playing magic for as long as I have. So I'm going to go through and just talk about things that Magic did once upon a time, just to be a source of, like, here are things that Magic at one point did. If this is popular, maybe I'll do more, maybe I'll make a series out of it, but at least we'll start today.

It's just kind of talking about, hey, Magic once upon a time did this. And there's a long list of things. I'm not going to get through the whole list today but I'll start and if there's good responses maybe I'll do again okay we'll start with Ante I've talked about this a little bit okay so when Magic first started

back in 1993 you drew 8 cards you took your 8th card and you played it I think it was face up I think you knew the whole time, that was called ante. And ante, if you won the game, you got to keep your opponent's ante card permanently. Kept it.

It's yours. And so, and let me stress, when Magic started, that was the rule. Now, almost immediately, players were like, you would sit down and play with somebody back in the day, and they're like, okay, no anti-rule, right? Because nobody, I mean, very, very few people liked the anti-rule. It was not particularly popular. Richard was trying to model, I mean, Richard,

there was a method to Richard's madness and why anti was in the game. So let me explain a little bit what Richard was thinking. So basically what happened was, Richard, he assumed that people would spend the amount of money on magic that they spend on a normal game. Meaning when he thought about how many cards people would have, he shot low. He just assumed people would have a lot less cards.

And so because of that, he knew that there was less flux going on in the game. Just what you could build with, you had less cards. But he knew if there was some means by which to change what cards you had, that that would create flux in the system. So he put Antion to allow people to play with fewer cards, but yet still have a dynamic system where things kept changing. You know, that you didn't necessarily have to buy new packs for things to change. Oh, I could play my friend.

And, oh, all of a sudden, I win something on ante. And now maybe I could build a deck I couldn't build before. Maybe I have to change the deck I have because I lost ante. And so the idea of ante early on was really to create flow in the game. The problem was twofold. One was the game was way more successful than... I mean, it's not that Richard didn't hope it was super successful, but he didn't plan. He planned for it to be a normal game

and said, well, if we're super successful, we'll have some problems, but hey, if we're super successful, we'll deal with them. And Anti was one of those. So Anti, very, very quickly, it started as the Z rule, it quickly became an optional rule, and eventually it was just purged from the rules altogether. There are a couple anti-cards from early sets, cards that only interact

with the anti. Those cards are all banned now in vintage because there is no anti. One of my favorite stories is, I used to play way back in the day when I lived in Los Angeles, I used to have a playgroup I would play with, and one of the people I played with owned a store,

and so from time to time, I think like on Wednesdays or something, Wednesdays was the Magic Night in the store, and we would go play. And once a month was Auntie Night, where you had to play for Auntie. And so I had a special deck I made just for Auntie,

so that I wouldn't get too stressed if I lost any card in it. It was a mono black deck. It had the demonic attorneys and it had draw seven cards, the crazy broken card.

There's the anti card where you have to anti another card but you get to draw seven cards which is probably the most broken card in the game. And of course,

I'm forgetting the name right now. It'll come to me. But anyway, I played... Black has a bunch of very good anti-cards. And because anti wasn't played, it was very easy for me to get my hands on them. And mostly, it was a deck made up of common

and uncommon black cards, like Black Knight, and maybe there were Pump Knights. Pump Knights existed at that point. But anyway, I had this little weenie..., and maybe there were Pump Knights, and Pump Knights existed at that point. But anyway, I had this little weenie, actually, maybe they're Pump Knights, I had this little weenie black deck that just took advantage of the ante, with the black ante cards.

So anyway, I remember, I have fond memories of of my little ante deck for Ante Knight. But anyway, it was one of those things like magic did a lot of amazing things. And part of today,

the goal of today is that, look, not everything worked out. Not everything stuck around. One of the cool things about studying the history of magic is, you know, we tried a lot of things. There's a lot of trial and error. And a lot of things worked out, and there are a lot of things that are very popular, but not everything did.

Okay, next. How many card types are there in magic? So right now, there are seven card types. There is creatures, and land, and enchantments, and artifacts, and planeswalkers, and instants, and sorceries. One could argue there's tribal. I guess they still exist and supported, but we don't make any more tribal.

But back in the day, there were two other card types. So one of which started the game. So when the game started, there was no planeswalkers, but the game started, there was creatures and land and artifacts and instants and sorceries

and interrupts. So when the game first began, the stack as we know it, the last and first out, the way that the spells resolved did not exist when Magic first came out. The stack got introduced in the 6th edition rule change, which happened when 6th edition came out. Before that, there was a much more complicated, in fact, there was a, to try to explain the rules, Tom Wiley made this maze in One of the Duelists, it looked like a rat maze, and it was just the most complicated, I think Tom was trying to show off how complicated

it was by making it a rat maze, but it was just a very complex system. I purged most of it from my brain because, like, the weird thing, for example, like, if you giant growth and then bolted a creature, if I'm doing it correctly, right now, for example, it's last and first out. So if I giant growth that creature and you response, you bolt it, it dies. And if you bolt my creature and response response, you bolt it, it dies. And if you bolt my creature response, I giant growth it, it lives. But back in the day, the way it worked was damage weighted to the end to resolve. So no matter what order you bolted it in, if a giant growth was involved, it would always live. That was just, you know,

in the order of things didn't quite matter in the same way. But anyway, so interrupts, what interrupts said is, normally when somebody did something, you could do something. But an interrupt functions in such a way that when you did it, it happened right away. It didn't wait for other spells. And so counterspells, for example, were interrupts. That was the biggest interrupt.

And usually things that produce mana were interrupts at the time. And with the 6th edition rules, it was discovered that they could handle those kind of spells. So they had a system where they could handle counter spells and stuff. So they went away. Interrupts went away. And all the cards got eroded. All the interrupts got eroded to instance. So one of the great pieces of trivia is Red Elemental Blast, which was a card in Alpha, mistakenly got printed as an instant, when it was supposed to be an interrupt, because it could counter spells. Red Elemental Blast could counter

target a blue spell, or destroy a target blue permanent. Way out of color pie, but early Magic did some of that from time to time. Richard had this belief, by the way, that it was okay if enemies used their opponent's powers when fighting them. So, like, red was allowed to counter blue spells.

Anyway, we've since discontinued that idea. But that is something Richard was playing around with. Speaking of things that no longer exist. Anyway, so interrupts. Oh, the red elemental blast was falsely printed as an instant. Got errated to be an interrupt because got eroded to be an interrupt, because it was supposed to be an interrupt, so the card would work.

But after an instance got changed, it got eroded back to an instant. So Red Elemental Blast is a quirky card that mistakenly got printed in a way that would later be true, but not at the time. So it's one of the few cards ever to be eroded back to its original wording,

even though its original wording was a mistake at the time. Anyway, a little trivia for you. Also, later in Magic's life, although not too much later, maybe in year two or three, there was a card type called Mana Sources. I think Mana Sources, maybe when 6th edition rules came around, maybe Mana Sources got added then. Mana Sources were put onto any card that produced mana,

and just there were a bunch of rules about how mana worked. And so in order to not have spells do wonky things, they made them into mana sources. It turned out that having them be mana sources was wonkier than just, you know, allowing the mana. Like, right now, if I have a spell that produces mana, I can't necessarily cast my spell with it. I mean, I have to let it resolve in order to cast a spell.

But anyway, if you ever see a Mana Source, that's just an old card, something like a Dark Ritual. You might see a Dark Ritual that was a Mana Source. Okay, here's a weird one. This is one of my favorite rules things, just quirky things in the rules. So protection, when protection first... Alpha had protection in it.

There was White Knight and Black Knight, for example, were in. So one of the questions early on is, I have a Black Knight. In Alpha, if I had a Black Knight and you cast Wrath of God, it survived. Because protection originally said, can't be affected by things of that color. So it's like, oh, okay, well, Wrath of God, that's white, well, can't be affected by wrath of God. Now later we got more clear on targeting and protection got defined by its four roles of what it can do.

So real quickly, protection can't be targeted by spells or sources of that color. It cannot be blocked by creatures of that color. It cannot be enchanted by things of that color, or things attached in any way. Equipment normally is not colored, but it can be. And it cannot be all damage dealt to that by

sources of that color are reduced to zero. But anyway, there was a period in time where they had something called semi-protection, which I thought was hilarious. So there's a card called Balance for those that way, way back in the day. So what Balance said is

you counted up the number of creatures and whoever had the smaller number of creatures, the other player had to sacrifice creatures until they equaled that number. And you did that for creatures, for land, and for cards in hand. It's very powerful

because two mana, one colorless, one white, one generic, one white. And it was uber, uber powerful. Somehow it got reprinted in 4th edition. It got reprinted in 3rd edition, but there was some broken stuff in 3rd edition. I'm sorry. It got printed in 3rd, not 4th edition.

It got printed in 3rd edition. And it was like, what is going on? This is a broken card. Why is it 3rd edition? It might have actually been printed in 4th edition too. It lasted a long time for a card as powerful as it was to keep getting reprinted in the core set. Anyway, what Semi-Protection was, there was this weird rule that existed for a blip in time that they made a ruling that Black Knight, because it had protection, couldn't be killed

by balance, but got to be counted by balance. So the idea was, when you were counting how many creatures you had, you had to count Black Knight. That balance was aware that it existed, but it wasn't aware enough of it to be able to kill it. And they dubbed it semi-protection, which I always thought was a very bizarre thing. Okay, let's talk about some creature keywords. Okay, so this first appeared in Alpha on Sea Serpent

and one or two other cards. It wasn't named at the time, so what it was was an ability that later got to be called Land Home. And what Land Home was is if you didn't have any islands in play, you had to sacrifice the creature, and you couldn't attack with the creature unless your opponent had islands. And the flavor was, oh, I'm a creature of the sea. I'm a creature of water. Well, unless you have water, I can't be there. Unless my opponent has water, I can't attack.

The reason it kind of worked in the early days was one of Blue's abilities, it had a card in Alpha called Fantismal Terrain, which could change land types into other basic land types. And so the idea was, if I wanted to attack you with my Sea Serpent, I could turn your whatever land into an island so that I could attack you. It was kind of narrow,

and so it didn't really, it didn't quite, I don't know, it was too much of a negative. I mean, it was flavorful. It was wordy. What I had going for it was it was flavorful, but it was really, really wordy.

We finally said, you know what? We can't define all water creatures as having this negative or else it would be super, super hard to ever do water creatures. As is, we sort of are careful how many water creatures we do. Most of our battles are kind of on land, so it's a little bit quirky to have a creature that swims in the water. But we decided, you know what? Suck it up and just let people play with them

rather than put this negative on every single water creature. Okay, other creature keywords that don't exist. So banding, I did a whole podcast on banding. So banding was an ability that allowed you to attack or block in a band, and then you essentially got to choose how damage was assigned. Very complicated mechanic, like I said, I did a whole podcast on it. Most people did not understand how it worked, and we eventually decided it just wasn't worth the confusion it caused, that it wasn't a good evergreen keyword.

Okay, other evergreen keywords that no longer exist. Okay, fear. that no longer exist. Okay. Fear. So intimidate, basically what a fear was, is the very first, in Alpha, there was a card called Fear,

and Fear was an aura that said, enchant a creature that can't be blocked by black or artifact creatures. And so, we later made that into a creature ability that went on black creatures. The black creatures are, oh, I'm scary. And, you know, well, black creatures, they're not scared by me. And artifact creatures, they don't really have much fear.

But I can't be black by anything but those. And eventually what we realized was we needed, because the evergreen keywords are so important, we needed to spread them out a little bit. So we ended up changing fear into intimidate. Intimidate is mostly just the keyword that adapts. So whatever color you are, those colors can block you. And so it allowed us to take it and put it on other colors other than black. Because it's really weird to put fear on a red creature and say,

well, this red creature cannot be blocked except by black creatures or artifact creatures. And so Intimidate was our fix for that. And Intimidate's caused some of its own problems. The other problem with fear was that it kind of had the name backwards. Fear didn't mean the creature who had it was fearful. It meant the creature who had it was scary. And so fear was kind of weird.

It's like, I didn't, you know, when I gave my creature fear, I didn't make it scared, I made it scary, and that also was confusing. Another keyword that we had, we, all these ones I'm naming are supported in the sense that if you play vintage and the creatures have the keyword, they have the keyword. We just don't make new cards with these keywords. So another one was Shroud. So Shroud is a lot like Hexproof, except nobody can target it, not just you. And we originally made untargetability, we made Shroud. And the idea was can't be targeted. The reason we did that was obviously there's some problems if you can't be targeted, but you can target and make the thing bigger.

But a lot of people were playing Shroud as if it were hexproof, and we finally changed it to hexproof just because that's how so many people were playing it. We're like, okay, people just seem to think, why can't I target my own creature? So we changed it. Obviously, hexproof has also had some issues. There are some ways to take advantage of it that are real hard to compete against, especially if the thing is hexproof and some kind of evasion. So,

anyway, Shroud, another oldie. Oldie but a goodie. Okay, so now let's talk about some rules that used to exist that no longer exist. Some rules that just were part of the game. So one of them was, if a blocker was tapped, it did no damage.

So it used to be, I attack with my creature, you block with your creature. I then tap your creature with a twiddle or some effect that can tap your creature. Or Icy Manipulator was a very popular one. Your creature, your blocker, would not deal damage to me. You sort of shut off their damage. You're still blocked, but it was a way for you to keep them from damaging you. I'm not sure where the rule came from. I think it

was this little quirky thing where you know, just a quirky thing where oh, well, if I somehow mess with you, then maybe I can keep you from damaging me. But it just became this extra rule you had to learn

that wasn't necessarily intuitive. And we're like, does the game need it? No, the game doesn't need it. Blocking already has a lot of disadvantages anyway. So we're like, okay, we just took that away. Another rule, another famous rule we took away is mana burn. So it used to be, when the game started, that if you had mana in your pool and you ended any... Well, the current phase of the steps were a little different.

But if you ended the phase and you had mana in your pool, if you went from your main phase to your combat phase and you still had mana in your pool, for each mana in your pool, you would take a damage, or you'd lose a life, life loss, you would lose a life. And it was a flavorful rule, the problem was, in order for that to happen, you either had to be very absent-minded, or you had to use a few cards, something like Mana Flare. Mana Flare was a red card back in the day that you tapped your land and produced an extra mana. We later turned it into a green card. But anyway, it was very, very hard to make a mana burn happen.

The story I tell when we got rid of it was we tested it for a while without it, and then we had a meeting to say, okay, how does it feel not to have mana burn? And the entire design team, nobody had had a game with mana burn in the month we had been playtesting in design. You know, and so, once again, it was one of those things that was flavorful, but just extra rules to learn. It didn't

come up much. I know there's people, still to this day, like, oh, you were wrong to get rid of mana burn, but yeah, I mean, one of the things about magic is we add things in, and so we occasionally have to take things out, and rules have to carry their own weight, and just if things are kind of narrow, and you have to learn them, but they don't come up much, you know, let card by card to do that, not standing rules. Another rule, this one caused R&D all sorts of headaches, standing rules. Another rule, this one caused R&D all sorts of headaches. Tapped artifacts

turned off. So when the game began, if you had an artifact and you could somehow tap it, either you tapped it yourself or you tapped your opponents, it would turn off. Now, a lot of times this is used beneficially. Usually it's used where I have something either

that helped everybody or just helped myself. Or it's like it helped everybody or hurt everybody. If it helped everybody, I turned it off on my opponent's turn. If it hurt everybody, I turned it off on my turn. So for example, you have Howling Mine. And so you put a Howling Mine out. And then you would tap Howling Mine on your opponent's turn, or you know, end of your turn, and then they wouldn't draw the extra card, then in your turn it untapped and now you gotta draw the extra card.

So, you know, with the Icy Manipulator and howling mine, I gotta draw an extra card every turn and you didn't. This caused all sorts of headaches. The biggest thing is when designing cards, we kept kind of forgetting the cards could turn off, and we made cards that would, like, a lot of times you make artifacts that want to do something. But if you can just let people easily turn them off, they become too easy to build around. So there's a card called Sands of Time that was in Visions. And I actually, the very first Invitational, Thomas Anderson from Sweden,

just made this crazy powerful deck just because you could turn off Sands of Time, which was this thing that, like, affected how things tapped and untapped. They didn't untap and tap as normal. And it's this neat kind of card that weird things happen, but, like, oh, no, I'll just shut it off on my turn. And so my opponent, bad things happen on my opponent's turn,

but it never affected me, and there wasn't really the intent of the card, but we, anyway, it was another one of those rules that, like, oh, it was causing us us headaches and so what we decided was um on the few cards that mattered we would just errata them to say when this is untapped so in hauling mine or winter orb for example um if you tapped them back in the day just we had a rather said well if tapped so it comboed with a few cards we cared about, and the rest we didn't. We made this change in 6th edition.

So there's some cards after 6th edition that got errata'd, say, when untapped. So here's the quirky thing. Howling Mine, because it was in the core set for quite a number of years, had the when untapped text on it. Winter Ore, because it never got reprinted in the core set, never got printed with the words win-un-tap. We had just eroded it. So when we decided to go to the policy of not having eroded that changes functionality, we took it off winter ore because it didn't match what the printed card said. But Hollingmine, we had made enough

Hollingmines that more Hollingminesines existed with attacks than without. So we left that there. So Howling Mine has a Win Untapped clause, but Winter Orb does not. A lot of fans of Winter Orb, and that was a pretty powerful part of Winter Orb, were not so happy when that happened. But that's the reasons behind it happening. Oh, another thing about artifacts. I think I mentioned this once before, but just as I'm talking about things. Oh, another thing about artifacts.

I think I mentioned this once before, but just as I'm talking about things. When magic first started, a lot of the card types were not written as they currently are. So artifacts either said mono artifact, poly artifact, continuous artifact, or artifact creature. So mono meant that inherently it had a tap. There was no tap symbol on it. In fact, when magic started, the tap symbol did not start when magic started. Cards just said tap 2.

They would spell out the word tap. And then eventually, we went through various versions of a tap symbol. For a while, it was a T, and then it became the little card that you see now. Or no, then it was a card, then it was the arrow that you see now. Went through a couple of incarnations.

The T, by the way, went away because we started printing in other languages, and tap isn't always starting with a T in other languages. That's why the T changed. But anyway, so if it said mono artifact, it just implied that it had a tap, even though it didn't say it. So like ice manipulator was a mono artifact, it just meant, oh, we had a tap to use it. But it wasn't an activation. It just showed you you had a tap to use it. So, like, Ice Manipulator was a model artifact that just meant, oh, we had to tap to use it. But it wasn't an activation. It just showed you you had to tap to use it.

Poly Artifacts meant that it didn't tap to use, and you could use it as many times as you wanted. Continuous meant that it just had an effect, like Howling Mind, just had an effect. And then Artifact Creatures were Artifact Creatures. One of the other problems, by the way,

with the tapping rule by artifacts turning off was we couldn't make something that both tapped for an ability and had a non-tap for an ability because if you tapped it to use the ability then that ability couldn't be activated. In fact, we had a problem for a while. I think we had to make a special rule for regenerators.

If we made an artifact creature that regenerated and you attacked with it, it was tapped when you attacked with it. Well now, could you activate its regeneration ability? We had to make a special clause to let you do that. Other things that were a little bit different, creatures didn't say creature on it. They said summon and whatever the creature type was. So a goblin would say

summon goblin. Also, race class didn't exist back then, so at the time there was only one creature type. And two of the creature types, legend and wall, actually had rules baggage. So legendary back in the day was a creature type, legend, and legend

meant that it was legendary. When the game first started, there was a restriction that all legendary things could only have one of in your deck. And also back in the day, when you played a legendary thing, it would kill the thing in play that was legendary. And then we would later change the rule to say that if you had a legendary creature out, you couldn't play another legendary creature. That changed during Rakiden Mass that had the big legendary theme. Rakiden math that had the big legendary theme.

Walls, by the way, in early Magic, walls just had Defender built in. Defender didn't exist yet. And if you were a wall, just you had Defender. We later decided to, because it was causing problems when we made cards that added creature types. We made cards like, oh, now you're a wall.

But because wall and legends had creature baggage, they were doing weird things. We had to be like, you can turn into anything, but a wall or a legend. And we made legend into a super type and took the baggage away from wall and said, you know what, all walls will have defender. We'll go back.

Every wall from the past, walls can't attack. All walls will have defender, but not all defenders necessarily will be walls. Enchantments did not say enchantment on them. They said enchant blank, whatever creature type they were enchanting. So they were enchant creature, or enchant enchantment. And they also would just say stuff like enchant dead creature,

like it did on Enemy Dead, for example, another card from Alpha. Instants and sorceries did say instant sorcery, and land said land. The idea of basic land didn't exist. I mean, didn't... Basic wasn't a super type when the game began. I think we called them basic lands,

but it wasn't a super type. Okay. Other things. Here's some things that didn't exist. When Magic first came out, there wasn't a rarity and there wasn't a collector number. That when you got cards,

you didn't know what your rare was. There was nothing indicating in the pack. There was an expansion symbol, but there's nothing to indicate what the rarity of the symbol was. There's no rarity on the symbol. So when you opened the pack, you didn't know what was common or uncommon or rare, and you had to talk to people. When Magic first came out,

one of Richard's senses, he wanted the game to be the sense of discovery, and Magic came out in 93, which was just on the cusp, right before the internet really started to happen. I mean, it technically existed, but it was still in an infancy stage, especially in, sort of, in the public. I mean, I guess

there were some colleges and things. But anyway, Richard's thought was, you know, he didn't want to do anything to help people, that he wanted people to have to explore. And that one of the things was, by obfuscating rarity, sort of like, you didn't even know necessarily, you know, what were the special cards, or, you know.

Richard liked the idea that, like, you had to sort of discover everything for yourselves. But two things that Richard didn't realize. One was that the information, you know, the internet was just on the cusp of being there. The information was going to be shared freely, and that it would be very hard to withhold information. And the second thing was, I think he didn't realize how big collecting was going to be,

and that really not having collected numbers, not having rarity, just made it a lot harder to trade. One of the problems in the early days was there were a lot of what I'll call predatory traders, which were people who understood the value of things, and because it was so murky what the value were, a lot of people did not know. And so it was very easy to make trades. At least now you have some hint because you know rarity,

but back in the day, you could get somebody to trade a common for a rare because the kid you're trading with didn't realize that this thing that he had only ever seen one of was actually a common card. With this other thing that maybe he had, you know, that didn't seem so special was a rare thing. Because maybe he opened two of them somehow and then that thing seemed not that rare,

but it was rare. So there were no rarity symbols. There were no collector numbers. What else? The thing that, I mean, I'm almost to wrap up here, is one of the things that I'm trying to stress in sort of

today's thing, and like I said, this is popular, maybe I'll do more of it. I just want people to understand that part of making an ever-ongoing, evolving game is that just as we learn things that work, we learn things that don't work.

You know, and that it's... I often talk about how we build upon our successes and how, like, this worked and this worked and then we did this. And I often talk about how we sort of... how we use our successes to build upon and make things better. But we also use our failures.

You know, I wrote a famous article once called Mistakes I've Made a Few, where I talked about some of my classic mistakes I've made. And in it, I mean, one of the things I'll do, I'll probably do a podcast on mistakes, but mistakes are a valuable thing. They do a really good job teaching you. And a lot of today is trying to show that, you know,

magic went through some growing pains. And even right now, you know, there are things right now in magic that if I continue to do this series, in five or ten years, I'll go, okay, back in the day, we did such and such, you know. And for those of you that, you know, will remember back to today and go,

oh, I remember playing with that. One of the things that's fun to do when you reminisce about old Magic stuff is that it is fun just, I mean, I meet a lot of Magic players who have been playing Magic a long time. You know, it's very, very common for people who have been playing Magic to be playing many, many years. Now, a lot of them played for a while, then stopped playing and came back.

So that's very common. Although I know plenty of people, like, I've been playing for 19 years, 20 years, 21 years, 22 years. And it's fun when you look back. I don't know, a lot of today is just remembering the quaintness of mono-artifact, or remembering that, you know, if I granted something, if I turned something into a wall, then it couldn't attack. Or, you know, turning off artifacts because I tapped the artifacts, or keeping your blocker from damaging me because I tapped it.

You know, there are a lot of quirky rules and, you know, a lot of niche cases of things. And that one of the things that's kind of fun is just kind of acknowledging that and saying, you know what, there were some fun quirky things early in Magic. And that, you know, I know that a lot of these I've mentioned along the way and I just want to collect them in one place. One of the things I've learned is not everybody necessarily listens to all my podcasts,

and so sometimes I will make podcasts where I collect specific things. And so you want to reminisce. This is a reminiscing podcast where if you've been playing a long time, you go, oh, yeah, I remember that. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Oh, I love that rule. What a good rule. That was an awesome rule.

So that's kind of my goal of today. But anyway, I'm hoping. You know, oh, I love that rule. What a good rat rule. That was an awesome rule. So that's kind of my goal of today. But anyway, I'm hoping today, like I said, I'd like to do a lot of different things with the podcast. One of the roles of the podcast to me very much is to be a source of historical

sort of record keeping. That's why I like doing a lot of podcasts talking about back in the day and early magic and early pro tours. I want people to know that we have a long, rich history and that the history isn't always just successes. I know it's very easy to want to talk about all the things you did right,

but part of your history is also things that didn't quite go so right. And I definitely wanted to share that. That's sort of the goal of today's podcast. So anyway, let me end by saying this, which is I don't know whether I'll do more of these podcasts, podcasts. So anyway, let me end by saying this, which is, I don't know whether I'll do more of these podcasts, but I want people to, if you like it, let me know when I do something like that. I want people to know, and that it's important to, that, anyway, when I do podcasts that you guys like, I do listen to feedback. I mean, I'm ahead by a couple months, so, I mean, understand

that you liking something and me getting to do it again, there's a little bit of a gap, because I have to wait until you hear it, and then there's another, you know, there's a multi-month gap before you telling me something and me being able to react to it in a way you can hear about it. But I very, very do much want to hear what you like and don't like, and that

it's very important to me. If you guys like something, let me know, and I can do more stuff. So this is the kind of thing that, I don't know what you guys will think. Do you like hearing about crazy things of the old? I think you do, that's why I did it, but let me know. So anyway, that, my friends, was back in the day. But, you heard my parking

break, so I parked in the parking spot and we all know what that means. That means it's time to end my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you guys next time.