Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #254 - Khans of Tarkir, Part 1

Episode Date: August 21, 2015

Mark begins a seven-part series on the design of Khans of Tarkir.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. It also means I dropped my daughter off at camp today. Anyway, we're going to have a full podcast. So today is the start of another design podcast. I'm going to talk all about the design of Khans of Tarkir. So the way I've been doing it now is I've been doing my design things in order, not in order, but as a block. So what will happen is today and the next bunch of ones, I'll be doing Cons of Tarkir, then I'll be doing some other stuff, and the next time I do a design podcast, it'll be on Fate Reforged, and the one after that will be on Dragons of Tarkir. So it's time to talk Tarkir block. So the reason I waited was I wanted to get the whole block out there

before I started telling you the story, because one of the things that happens in my column is I have to start talking about design before everything is known. And it becomes problematic because a lot of what we're doing is setting things up. And so when I'm writing about the design of Khans of Tarkir, I can't talk about things that were going to affect like dragons of Tarkir. But there were a lot of decisions that were integral. And so in my my design articles I kind of was a bit restrained so for the podcast I wanted to know I wanted to talk about it all and to do that I had to let it finish so I let the Tarkir block come out and now it's time in all its glory to talk about the Tarkir block and talk about all the interconnectivity design, because it was a very complicated and interconnected design. And I want to talk about all that.

So this is me without any restraints, and I'm going to explain kinds of Tarkir, and later on, Fate Reforged, and Dragons of Tarkir. Okay, in the beginning, how did this all begin? Okay, so first off, remember, when I was working on this set, we had not yet moved to the two-block paradigm. We were still making sets that were three blocks long. We had no idea it was coming. We didn't figure it out until in the middle of Battle for the Ender-Card block, which one day I'll talk about that. But at the time, we didn't know that.

So the entire block, it was a three-set block. So one of the problems that we eventually solved with the two-block paradigm, which is getting rid of the third set, I was trying to solve so walking in i knew the following to be true i knew we had a large set then a small set then a large set because the way we've been doing it is every other year we've been having a large set as a spring set um the way that the card mix worked was we had a we we have a restriction of how many cards we can print in a standard environment and so it turned out that we could have a large spring set every other year um so one of the things i was interested in walking into this design was okay i know we have a large set a small set in a large set how are we going to make this different how are we going to make this third

set something cool and there's an idea that i had for a long time that I really liked, which the idea was, what if your middle set was drafted not just with your first large set, but also with your second? What if it pivoted in the middle of the draft? I thought that was a very cool concept. The idea of having a draft format where you take the large set, large set plays with the middle small set, and then when the next large set comes out, you stop drafting the first large set and exchange it for the second large set. But the middle set pivots and drafts with both sets.

One of the things that came about is, we've talked before when we had large, small, large, and large as a complete change, that that small set in the middle, like the Worldwakes of the world, get very short shifted. They, you know, like he plays Indy car, you're not drafting Worldwakes, not out yet. Worldwake comes out, okay, you're drafting Worldwake, but, you know, one back of Worldwake, and then when Rise of Eldraza comes out, you're not even doing Worldwake anymore. So they had very little time in the sun. So part of this idea was also to give the middle set a little more time in the sun, and just to change things up. So one of the things I firmly believe in design is I like to start every design from a place that is different than I've started other designs.

That if I just have a different starting point, I've talked about this a lot in my podcast, of the way the brain works is it will find pathways it knows first. If you're trying to solve a problem, what your brain has learned is first look at all the things you've already done. And so when you're trying to solve a problem, what your brain has learned is first look at all the things you've already done. And so when you're trying to solve a problem, if you approach it the same way, you keep coming up with the same solutions. So in a design, I like just saying, okay, here's a challenge I've never had before and letting that sort of dictate decisions. Like one of the things you want early in design is you want to create a bullseye for your team and aim at something.

And part of doing that is just saying, okay, I'm going to start with a different parameter than I've ever started before. And I know that in answering that parameter, I just will get to places I haven't been before. So the idea of large, small, large rotating around the small set was just different. We'd never done that. I didn't know what the ramifications were going to be. But I knew that if I started with that, I'd never done that before. I'd never been in that place before. So I knew that we'd get something cool.

Okay, so what happened was the Great Designer Search 2 had happened. Ethan Fleischer had won. Sean Main had come in second. Scott Finesse had come in third. So we ended up, Ethan, as part of winning, got a design internship, and Sean ended up getting a digital R&D internship. So the two of them were both given a six-month internship, and I was sort of said, okay, watch over these people. Do they have what it takes? So one of the things that happened when I was putting together the second grade designer search

was I had a chat with Bill, who's Bill Rhodes, the VP of R&D, and we were talking about what design needs. And one of the things we were looking for is more people that were sort of visionary, more people that were able to sort of craft worlds, if you will, craft sort of designs from the top end. That was something we were a little light in, so I made the great designer search, too, have this bent.

And what we did is I made each person design their own world and then with one with one exception all the challenges were building in their own world so what happened was they would do stuff we'd give notes and they kept evolving their own world now the new challenges would make them do different things but still there's a consistency of the world they were building in and so I specifically both Sean and Ethan had demonstrated this skill. So I wanted to sort of test that skill. I wanted to make sure during the six months that we had to sort of observe them, that I could figure out how much potential they had. So I had this idea.

What if I stuck them on a set that wasn't even in design yet and sort of, you know, so the idea was at the time we were working on Theros, I believe. So, Cons was the one after Theros. It was called Huey. It was Huey, Dewey, and Louie were the name of the three sets. So, the idea was, what if I had Sean and Ethan work on Huey way, a year before it was due? We had started, at the same time we started Theros, we started this little project. it was due. We had started, at the same time we started Theros, we started this little project. Now, interestingly, this went so well that it would evolve into what we now call exploratory design, which is something we do all the time now. But anyway, in the beginning, it was just, I wanted to sort of test Ethan and Sean in a place that could test their world building and their

sort of block design, but in a way that there was no danger. And the idea was, since we were a year ahead, look, design hadn't started yet. All they could do is give me ideas. Worst case scenario, if the ideas were horrible, well, we'd start design like we all started design. It wouldn't be any worse off. But, hey, maybe they'd come up with something. So the first assignment I gave them is I said to them, okay, guys, here's all we know.

I want to do the following block structure, which is large, small, large, with the middle set pivoting and drafting with both the large sets. But the large sets never get drafted together. So my challenge to them was, okay, let's figure out why. Why would we do that? So, and the way this project worked was, I would give them assignments, they would go off and work with them, and then once a week we'd check back, and they'd show me where they were at, and I would give notes. And then based on my notes, that would sort of set what the next thing they needed to do.

And so they would work on stuff, I would see it, give feedback, and we would do this iterative loop. So essentially what happened was, they went off and they came up with all sorts of ideas of why large, small, large. I think I've talked a little bit before, right? But a real recap for some people that have heard all my podcasts. So one of the ideas they came up with is that the middle set represented some vehicle that you were traveling from the first set to the second set.

So let's say the middle set, like you're on some ark or something. And the first set is you're on one continent, and you get in the arc and you go across the seas. In the second set, you're in the second one. And the idea was, the reason you draft the middle set with both is, well, the ship or the arc or whatever is at the first place, so you can draft them together.

And then it moves, and now it's in the second place, and you can draft them together. We had the idea of a war where two sides were fighting each other, and the middle set represented the battleground. So in each case, you've got to see them fighting each other, and you've got the battleground overlap with both of them. And one idea was, we had this idea of a battleground

where the things fighting each other were on different planes, but there was some way where they interconnected on the battlefield, and that that center set would be that interconnectivity. But the cool idea was that you couldn't really make out the other people, that when you were fighting, your enemies were sort of shadowy, and you couldn't quite make them out. And so you would see both sides of that conflict. We talked about that. We went through a whole bunch of different ideas. Ethan and Sean would come back and pitching things.

So finally one day Ethan came and Ethan pitched the idea of a time travel set. So Ethan said, okay, we go to a world and then we go back in time, change something, and when we return, the second set is the same as the first set but changed because of the change in time. Now, for those that don't know, I love time travel.

Love, love, love time. I'm a huge time travel buff. So when Ethan said that, magic has dipped its toe in time travel. For those that know a little bit about the Urza story during the Weatherlight Saga, Urza messed around with time travel. In fact, the reason Karn is a silver golem

is in the means by which Urza figured out how time travel. In fact, the reason Karn is a silver golem is in the means by which Urza figured out how to travel through time, the only device that could get through time was silver. So that's why he made a silver golem, so that he could do his experiments. Those experiments didn't go all that well. And then during time spiral, when the entire collapse of the multiverse, there was time displacement.

As there were things from different time were popping up in Dominaria. Which is why there were a lot of legendary creatures of things from the past that, you know, look, it's Safi Ered's daughter. Look, it's Norn the Wary. You know, the people that were coming from the past. That was the rationale for that. So we'd mess a little bit with time. But this was a very distinctive story, which is, go to a world.

World is not a great place. I mean, this is an archetypal time travel story. You go to a world. The world's not a nice place. The main character decides that they're going to go back in the past and try to improve something. They go back in the past.

They make a change because the world is flawed to them. And they come back and then, oh no, they made things worse. That's the archetypal time travel story. Okay. So the idea was in order for us to do this, oh, so once we knew the time travel story, the next thing that I was interested in was trying to figure out, I wanted to have a mechanic that stretched across the block. I wanted to show you what was going on through one constant. And the idea was we'd have a mechanic. And the mechanic that I was very interested in was messing around with Morph. Morph, for those who don't know, first got created during Onslaught Block.

The rules team at the time was trying to figure out how to solve a card called Illusionary Mask and another card called Camouflage that come out in Alpha where you turn cards face down and you didn't know what they were.

And so in order to solve the problem, they came up with the idea of defining what a face down card was. At the time, they defined it as a 1-1 creature,

a 1-1 colorless creature. And then they realized they had this cool idea for a mechanic where you have cards that could purposely put themselves down, and then you can make them turn face up, what they called the morph mechanic. They were really excited. They pitched

it to Bill. Bill wasn't excited. They pitched it to Mike Elliott. He wasn't excited. They pitched it to me. I was excited. My one recommendation is instead of a 1-1, to make it a 2-2. And then what I did is I mocked up decks and played it around and slowly built sort of consensus in R&D and then eventually got it into OnSlot.

Anyway, the mechanic was in OnSlot, went over very well, people liked it. We kind of knew we wanted to bring Morph back at some point. It's just a very cool mechanic. It's a little complex, but it's very cool. So anyway, I was interested in seeing if we could use Morph as the through line. And so Ethan and Sean,

once we had the time travel thing worked out, the next thing they worked out was trying to figure out, okay, well, we have a mechanic. If you go to the past, well, you need a proto version of that mechanic. You need a mechanic that's like that mechanic, but in the past. And then in the future, oh, things are different, so they have to be altered in some way. That's the idea.

So they did a bunch of work. So the idea was the first set would just be morph, normal morph as you know it. The second set would be some sort of proto-morph, and the third set would be an alternate version of morph. So they played around quite a bit, but what we ended up coming up with was what we called recruit, but you guys know it's manifest, which ended up being in Fate Reformed. And then the third set we had we called Aura Morph, which were morphs that instead of being creatures were auras. And when you turned face up, they would go to the creature.

They were very interesting when we first played with them because just the dynamic was very different. Normally, for example, if I have a face-up creature and a face-down morph creature and I attack, and you choose what to block, well, let's say you block the morph creature. Well, okay, now you're fighting the morph creature, and my other creature gets through. With aura morph, the morph creature would hop onto the other creature.

So there was this weird, like, in morph world, you tended to block the morph, because if you were scared of the morph, you didn't know what it was. But in aura morph world, you tended to block the not morph, because if you blocked the morph and it was an aura, it could hop onto the other creature and they would get through. Anyway, it was different. We kind of liked it. So we signed

off for, that was our tentative idea for the three stats. There'd be morph, what we called recruit, then it'd be manifest, and aura morph. Meanwhile, we went to the creative team. And what we said the creative team is at the time this was Brady Donovan still running the creative team. So I went and talked to Brady.

I said, okay, Brady, here's our constraints. We go to a world. The world is a rough world. Things aren't great about it. Then we go back in the past. We alter something and we come back. And now the new, the third set is this alter world in some way.

So it was Brady that came to me with the idea of doing Tarkir, which was Sarkinval's home world. We didn't know much about Sarkinval's home world. All we know was that there were warlords, and that the warlords had killed off the dragons. Because a big part of Sarkin's background was he revered dragons. But he came from a world where the dragons had been killed off.

So when he ended up going to, I want to say Jund, somewhere in Alara, and saw dragons for the first time, he was amazed because he revered dragons. So we knew that he had a home world, obviously had an Asian sort of theme to it, an Asian character, and we knew that there was warlords and we knew that there

once had been dragons there. So Brady said, okay, what if we make this Sarkin's Homeworld, we go there, it's a warlord-strewn world, the reason he goes back in the past is to save the dragons, and the third set is a dragon set. And I'm like, okay, warlord world sounds cool,

dragon set sounds cool, I'm in. And so we started working off that idea. So meanwhile, I'm in and so we started working off that idea so meanwhile I had a conversation with Aaron and I pitched Aaron one of the things Aaron's my boss

obviously the director of Magic R&D so one of the things I do from time to time is I have a one-on-one every week where Aaron and I sit down

and we talk about things that are relevant going on and so Aaron's always sort of checking out stuff. So we were talking about the set. Once again, remember, this hadn't begun design yet. We were still in exploratory design.

And I explained to him my idea, the time travel thing, and it was a Warlord world, and it went to become a Dragon world. And Aaron said, okay, I get Dragon world. That's exciting. Players like dragons. But what exactly makes Warlord World exciting? He's like, it feels like the exciting thing, you're not getting to the third set. But, you know, we know that the way blocks work is a lot of how well blocks do are contingent on how well the first set does. The more excited people are on the fall, the more the block, you know, just has legs for the rest of it.

And he's like, I feel like you're taking the most exciting thing, a dragon set, and you're putting it in the last slot. And I said, but we know his world doesn't have dragons. We can't start with a dragon world. We can't start with a dragon world and the dragons go away because that's not Sarkin's world. Sarkin's world has no dragons. We've got to start with no dragons.

But I said, you know what? I will find a way to make the warlords exciting. And Eric goes, okay, we've got to make with no dragons. But I said, you know what? I will find a way to make the warlords exciting. And Eric goes, okay, we've got to make warlord world world exciting. I said, don't worry. I will make warlord world really exciting. So meanwhile, the creative team was working on some ideas for warlords, for the clans of the warlords. And the original idea, when I first talked to them,

was that there would be four clans and I think the way the clans worked out was two of them were two color and two of them were three color so that they were balanced every color is represented the same number of times so one of the things for it's a development thing

but in drafting it doesn't work if your factions don't add up if the colors don't kind of divide evenly among the factions, you tend to get yourself in trouble. Not only the case, obviously, in Ravnica, red and blue, we ended up making extra red and blue cards because there was one less, you know, there was only one faction with red and one faction with blue,

where the other green, white, and black all had two factions in Ravnica. So we can sometimes make it work out, but it's tricky. And so I worked it out in a way that it would have two twos and two threes. And the creative team had come up with four different worlds. They were based, mostly what they did is, they took the idea of an Asian-inspired plane with warlords and looked at different sort of, from Asia, different kind of influences. And so I know they were looking at, like, from Asia, different kind of influences. And so I know they were

looking at like the Turks and they were looking at the Shaolin monks and they were looking at the Cossacks and they were looking at the Mongols. So they're definitely looking at different kind of things. And so we had settled on four. And So one of the things that I decided early on was that I needed to tie... I needed dragons to matter in the first set even though there were no dragons. Because I'm like, one of the things that's important is

when you go to the first set, you have to have the sense of it's a world without dragons. Now obviously, don't put dragons in. That sounds like a world without dragons. But it doesn't convey the feel of the dragons. I wanted the audience to understand that dragons were missing, and in a very tangible way,

so that you would get this feel of he wants to save the dragons. Okay, so I had some clans, and I wanted a dragon feel. So finally I said, okay, what if the clans were influenced by the dragons? And the dragons had this big impact on the world and that there were attributes of the dragons that each of the clans could care about. And so the idea was, okay, so I'm thinking like,

let's say you were once upon a time revered dragons. What qualities of dragons might you be inspired by? And so the team, we said, okay, well, speed, speed of dragons made sense. Strength by? And so the team, we said, okay, well, speed, speed of dragons made sense. Strength, strength of the dragons made sense. Intelligence, intelligence of dragons made sense. And constitution.

So for those D&D fans out there, Dungeon Dragon fans, in Dungeon Dragons there are six attributes. So there is intelligence, dexterity, wisdom, strength, constitution, and charisma. And so we realized, okay, what if we looked at the top of your floor. You have dexterity, you have strength, you have constitution, and you have intelligence. What if those were four dragon attributes? And the idea we liked a lot was, okay, well, let's say you're all about, for dexterity, we were calling it speed.

But we were thinking dexterity is, okay, I'm just faster than anybody else. If my attribute is I'm faster, well, how do I win? Well, I just strike so fast, I can't do anything about it. It doesn't matter if they're better fighters or they're bigger, they're stronger. If I just hit you before you have any time, before you can prepare, if I just beat you so fast, well, then I'm going to win. And then you get, like, the strength, and the strength says, okay, I'm bigger. I'm a better fighter well then I'm going to win and then you get like the strength, and the strength says okay, I'm bigger, I'm a better fighter, how am I going to win? I'm just bigger and badder than you, you know, I'm just

the stronger fighter, you know, and we said okay, how about intelligence? Well, okay, I'm not the fastest, I'm not the strongest but I'm smarter, and I can outthink you and I can make you waste your resources, and I can attack you in such a way that's to my benefit. And then the Constitution sort of stamina is the idea of, well, what if, no matter what you did, I just stood there? I let you hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me and hit me.

At some point, you just grow tired of hitting me, and then I beat you. So we liked those a lot. We liked those a lot. So we ended up changing Constitution to Endurance. We changed it to Speed. But it was speed, strength, intelligence, and endurance. Then Brady came to talk to me. And Brady said, hey Mark,

I know I said four, but we've actually found a fifth space we think is pretty cool. How about five? Could you do five clans? And I was like, oh, Brady. is pretty cool. How about five? Could you do five clans? And I was like, oh, Brady.

One second, will I cough? I go, here's the problem with five. Is five means something in magic. Five, the mana system is tied to five. So if I do five factions,

I'm going to somehow end up getting connected to the color pie. I cannot. Five is too organic to the game. But I said, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Just be aware that if I do that, it's just going to, I don't think I can avoid the color wheel. The second you tell me

there's five factions, I'm just... It's going to interconnect with the color wheel in some way. Because I have to balance the colors. And Brittany's like, oh, okay, well why don't you go explore and come back to me? If it's really a problem, we don't have to do the fifth one, but it would be a big favor

to me if you could figure out how to get the fifth one. And we really like the fifth clan. So I started examining it. Now, one of the things I do on my blog, blogatog, my blog on Tumblr, is I ask questions all the time. So one of the things that I ask is I always ask people about sort of what do they want? What are the things that we haven't done yet they really want? So one of the things that came up a lot was the idea of a wedge set. So Shards of Alara had been a set with a three-color theme,

and the three colors are what we call arcs, or now we call shards, which are three colors. It's a color, and it's two allies. So if it was a white base, Shards of Bant, for example, was white, and it's two allies, green and blue. You know, Esper was blue with its two allies, white and black. And so, we had made, in Shards of Alara,

five Shards, a three-color set that represented those colors. Now, we had toyed with that in Shards of Alara. Maybe we'd do all ten combinations, but the creator team said, no, no, no, there's five Shards, there's nothing representing the enemies, let's just stay with these five.

And so we did. So one of the things we'd never done is done what we call the wedges, which were a color and it's two enemies. And so we'd never done that. And so one of the things on people's list, because people love, the players, they love the box checking. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just like, it's very obvious, you haven't

done this yet. And so they're like, look, you've done three color with allies, with shards, but you haven't done wedges. So one of the common requests is, hey, you guys need to do a wedge set. So I was sitting here, and I'm like, okay. Brady wants to have a fifth clan. I need to somehow make it work.

And Aaron has said, okay, make this exciting. We really want to make sure that people, you know, we have to find a way to make um, okay, make this exciting. We really want to make sure that people, you know, we have to find a way to make Warlord World as exciting as Dragon World, which sounded pretty daunting. So I knew people wanted wedges, and I knew we wanted to do five, and I knew there had to be a connection.

So I'm like, okay, okay, could we make this Wedge World? So I went back and I looked at all the things, and I said, okay, well, could this be this and this be this? And we took the five wedges and started figuring out what could go where. And then we worked with the creative team. And in the end, we figured out a way to sort of make them all fit. A few of them required a little tweaking by creative to sort of add elements that made sense in the third color. But we finally got to the place and said, okay. but we finally got to the place we said okay and then we had to add in

what was the third one about so at the time the fifth one we decided was I think we called it Magistry and the idea was they don't fight they win the war by not fighting they win the war by

bribing the other side or blackmailing or whatever they need to do. They're the opulent one. The idea that Bray had come up with was sort of the opulent, kind of death-inspired golden palaces in the jungle sort of thing. Okay. So, we now had

five factions, and we found a way to match to the wedges. So I said, okay. So I went back to Aaron and said, okay, what do you think if the Warlord set was a wedge set? And Aaron goes, awesome. So the plan was

that we wanted to, because we were changing the middle, we wanted the third set to be radically different from the first set. So if the first set was going to be wedges, that meant the third set should not be wedges. Because if the first set was going to be wedges, that meant the third set should not be wedges because if they were wedges, if the first set was wedges

and the third set were wedges, they just wouldn't draft very differently. The whole idea was the middle set meant one thing to the first set but meant a different thing

to the second set. You know, if we're going to change things up, you know, one of the things about changing up the third set was people get bored. Well,

if they've been doing wedges the whole time, you know, they'll get bored. So like, we wanted to change it up. Meanwhile, we were also experimenting with what we could do with wedges the whole time, you know, they'll get bored. So, like, we wanted to change it up. Meanwhile, we were also experimenting with what we could do with wedges,

and we also figured out pretty quickly. So, Shards of Alara, people think of Shards of Alara as being a shard block. But really, really, really, if you look at it, the first set is a shard set. The second set is a lot more of a five-color set. And the third set, which is all gold, was more of a two-color set.

Now, there's a little bit of three-color in the second set, and a little bit of three-color in the third set, although if you notice, we did less three-color in the first set, so if you look at how much we did, there wasn't really enough to make a full block in which that was the focus, so we couldn't really do wedge for the whole block anyway. One of the reasons I was kind of excited to do it here was we had enough wedge to blow out a large set and maybe do a little bit in the second set. We had to figure that out. But we didn't have enough to do two large sets. So the idea was, okay, we'll do one three-color set, a wedge set,

and then we'll make the third set a two-color set. And the idea that I was really excited with was doing an enemy-color second set. The idea of the dragon set were enemy colors because another thing people have been asking for is Apocalypse was the only time we've ever done an enemy-color set. We've done a dragon set were enemy colors, because another thing people have been asking for is, Apocalypse was the only time we've ever done an enemy color set. We've done a bunch of ally color sets, but only one enemy

color set. Okay, awesome. We'll do a wedge set in the beginning. People have been asking for a wedge set. We'll end with an enemy color set, and we'll do that. And so everything was going according to plan. I'd worked with a creative team, and we'd figured out the clans. We also had tweaked it a little bit.

So speed, it says, well, they changed speed at one point to something else and we ended up changing it back to speed. So they changed strength to savagery. They changed intelligence to cunning. They changed majesty to ruthlessness. Endurance stayed in speed. I forgot, at some point speed was changed, but the word they changed it to was like a synonym for speed.

So I'm like, what's wrong with speed? Speed's a fine word. So we pretty much stayed with speed and endurance, and then tweaked the other ones. The idea was they were trying to make it feel a little more dragon-y, you know, that cunning felt a little different than intelligence, and they both were about smarts. And ruthlessness was a little less,

it wasn't just majesty, it was like, we're willing to do whatever it takes, we'll beat you by doing whatever we need to do. And then Savagery, I mean, played in the sense of strength, but the idea of we're bigger and faster and tougher, and it had that sense. So, we figured that out, and so now we knew that we had our wedges to do,

we were going to build into the enemy colors in the third set, and we had all the pieces. We also remember we had Morph as the spine to run through it. And we had talked with the creative team about Morph, and the idea they liked was that it was some kind of draconic magic, and that the draconic magic, the humans had somehow adopted the draconic magic, and maybe even

it was this magic that they had adopted, that was the means by which they killed off the dinosaurs, that they had used this magic to their own ends, and that that was what they had, not the dinosaurs, the dragons, that they killed off the dragons with.

So anyway, we had all the pieces, we had our five things, but now it was just a matter of putting all the things with. So anyway, we had all the pieces. We had our five things. But now it was just a matter of putting all the things together. So be aware that I'm about maybe three months into design now. Like, we knew we had our clans. We knew they had attributes of the

dragons to them. We knew it was Wedge. And it was time to dig in and start to find identities for each of the sets. Okay, but I've finished my first podcast. So, I mean, I'm at the 30-minute mark. I've actually been at work for a little bit, but I whenever I leave

not from my house, I make sure to get my 30 minutes in so you guys get a full podcast. But we leave today. Part one ends with we have the clans and the next step is to figure out how to give each clan identity. And so next time, I will talk about that. So anyway, I'm in my parking space.

We all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you next time.