Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #257 - Keeping an Eye Out

Episode Date: August 21, 2015

Mark talks about the things that a game designer must be on the lookout for.

I'm pulling out of the parking space. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, drop my son off to camp again. Let's go. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about responsibility of a designer, especially of a lead designer or head designer. So what I'm going to do is talk about how at different phases in the life of a set, how I'm in charge of doing different things. And it's interesting to sort of point out how, like, the neat thing about it is, as you move along, pretty much I'm involved from the earliest, earliest stages

of coming up with an idea to the end result of it coming out and dealing with all of you guys with it coming out. So I'm going to sort of walk through all the different responsibilities and just give the idea that, like, one of the interesting things about my job is that I've been doing it a long time, that there's a lot of different components to it. There's a lot of different, that when I deal with any one set, the lifespan of a set, so for example, we'll start from the beginning and go to the end. So what is the very first thing I do? Well, the very first thing I do is what we call the seven-year plan. Originally it was, so way, way back when, when Randy Bueller

was my boss, he said, you know what, we need to plan more ahead because we had done something, I forget what it was, but we, we got ourselves in trouble because we really hadn plan more ahead. Because we had done something, I forget what it was, but we got ourselves in trouble because we really hadn't thought ahead of where we were going. And maybe it was Onslaught. It's like Onslaught had this problem where we decided we were going to do a tribal set, but we didn't know that until we got there. And so Odyssey had done this thing where we

messed around and didn't use all our normal tribes. So we didn't have goblins, and we didn't have merfolk, and we didn't have elves. And when you get to Onslaught and it starts caring about goblins and elves and stuff, it wasn't in the previous set, and that was a problem. And had we just understood ahead of time, oh, we're going to be doing tribal, and these are the tribes we cared about, we could have planned that out. And so one of the things that Randy said is, okay, we need to start planning where we're going to go. So why don't you tell me the next five years, where you see magic going for the next five years?

And the idea was, well, we're going to create a five-year plan. And what happened was, I think I had six ideas, so I turned in a six-year plan. And then I did the, later on when Aaron was my boss, Aaron Forsyth, he again asked for the same thing, but he asked for a six-year plan, I gave him a seven-year plan, apparently I always give one more year than I asked for, so we now kind of tend to refer to it as a seven-year plan, when we moved to the two-block paradigm, we kind of crunched things, so the seven-year plan got crunched, we had to add some other stuff to it, but anyway, first, anyway first okay as head designer one of my jobs is to work with the rest of the group

way way back in the day i used to be the one saying okay i think we're gonna do thing x it was very mechanical now we're much more involved with story and flavor and so what happens is we'll have an off-site and we'll all all the top people will go off, and we'll talk about all the different options we have and where the story is going and what are different worlds we think we can make fun worlds out of and what worlds reinforce the story we're trying to tell and sort of craft a larger picture thing. So the seven-year plan now is much more about understanding the big picture of how all the pieces will fit together.

It's not just mechanical. But mechanical is part of it. So early, early on, you know, in these early meetings, I have to say, okay, well, if we did such and such, I would assume we'd do this, you know. I have to sort of understand what mechanical places we're going to go. You know, if, you know, if we're going to go to Innistrad, I'll just, we'll go back, I'll talk about sets that we've already done, just because I can't talk about sets we haven't done yet.

You know, for example, we did Zendikar, then Scars of Mirrodin, then Innistrad, then Return to Ravnica and Theros. So let's say those, that's my, I'm plotting things out. Well, Innistrad would be like a top-down thing. We're going to do a flavor-based thing. Oh, we're doing gothic horror. We can

design from that. Where Scars of Mirrodin might have been, okay, we're in readership of the Phyrexians. We're going to sort of mechanically find an identity for them. And we have this neat idea for a war that can play out over the course of the block. Something like Return of Ravnica would be, okay, we're going back to

Ravnica. What did people like before? They liked the guilds. We'll probably revisit the guilds. You know, we'll probably have a new mechanic for each one. So, like, when I was looking at stuff, I was sort of, I get a general sense of where I think we're going. Now, this is the early, early. This is me spitballing. This is like, well, if we're going to do that, you know, if we're going to go to Theros, that's Greek mythology. Probably it's going to have a top-down component.

I probably will have to figure out maybe I know enchantments ahead of time. Maybe at that point I don't know it yet. But the idea is early on, I just want to make sure that we have enough rough idea of mechanics that we can plot things out so we can, as a group, commit to it. Okay.

So the first thing we do is the early, early sketching stage, which is roughly where do we think we're going and what we're doing. Okay, the next thing I have to do is we eventually get to what we call exploratory design. So exploratory design is the earliest design that we do. And the way I handle podcasts on it, and the way I talk about it is that it's not so much about solving the problems as much as it's about figuring out what the problems will be.

What problems will the design have to face and solve? The design team is going to eventually solve most of those problems. It's not that the exploratory team is solving problems. What the exploratory design team does is they sort of map out the space, figure out the problems, and then start to come up with possible solutions. Usually what comes out of exploratory design is a whole bunch of mechanics and a whole bunch of ideas to give to the design team

so the design team starts with an understanding of what the larger issues are at hand. Old school, before we had exploratory design, you would just start designing like, okay, let's figure this out. And now it's sort of like you have time to sort of think through things and you walk into design having a better understanding. And as I explained in the Exploratory Design

podcast, it's a rotating group. So we get a lot of people in and a lot of ideas. And like I said, it's more about generating ideas and understanding the problems the design team is going to face. Okay. So that, the Exploratory Design takes five, six months and then we hand going to face. Okay, so that, the exploratory design takes five, six months, and then we hand off to design. Okay, so in design, like I had a podcast about this. Design's broken into three parts, although I think I slightly misremembered.

So the way it works is there's vision, integration, and refinement. Three phases. I think I said before they were split evenly. They're actually not. A lot of this was... The terms were not done by me. The terms were done by Mark Gottlieb,

my co... The person who works with me on... Running the design team. And they were trying to codify things. So I kept explaining how I did design and Mark would write it down. So vision actually is the first half of... It's six months of the 12 months of design.

And then integration is three months, refinement is three months. I think before I said four, four, four. But we actually spend a little bit more time on vision. So what happens is we figure out what we're trying to do. We get our mechanics. I mean, I taught the design part that I've talked so much about. But essentially the design part is we're designing the set. We're starting with ideas and knowing where we're going.

We have some suggestions from exploratory design. We talk with story. A big part now of design that wasn't always true is we are now doing a much more cohesive story. That our story is much more tied together. We have a group of characters. We have an ongoing story we're trying to tell. And so I need to work with the creative team to make sure that I'm matching the flavor of the world, I'm matching the needs of the story. You know, we're working to get all those components come together so that we're

doing something very compelling. And then another big part of what's going on in design is we involve not just creative earlier, but development. That we're doing a lot more work to make sure that what we do can be developed. Because one of the problems sometimes is I might come up with a cool mechanic that's kind of neat, but when you actually have to develop it, it doesn't quite work. There's things that are not developable. It's like a neat idea, but there's no way to actually cost it in a way that's doable. I know some people go, how does it cost more or cost less? But there's a point at which either it's too complicated, it's too wordy, it doesn't fit in the text box,

it doesn't fit in the text box, it doesn't fit within the rules, there's no way to cost it in which it looks attractive. Like, if I have to do a mechanic and every card in the mechanic costs eight mana, well, this is not going to be an attractive mechanic. And, you know, one of the things you have to figure out is how to make things that people want to play with. Okay, so anyway, the design part, like I said, you guys have heard about this part. I and my team, or whoever the lead designer is, have to work with creative, work with development, get all the pieces come together, figure out what the mechanics are, figure out the tone of the set, the mood of the set, the general emotional response we're trying to get.

I mean, we make an entire set. Now, note that one of the things design does is we are coming up with mechanics and concept and tone, and we're making cards to sort of represent what we want. But development, so the next stage is development. And development comes along, and they're trying to take our vision and make it

work, make it match. Because sometimes we'll come up with ideas, and the actual execution doesn't quite work, and they have to tweak it. Okay, but the point of today is, what do I do during each of these things? So I've spent time before talking about the processes. Okay, so while something's in development, as head designer, I need to keep an eye on it. As lead designer of a set, I'll keep an extra eye on it.

It's just kind of what are they doing? Are they staying true to the vision of the set? You know, so one of my jobs is I have to just keep poking my head in. Part of it is the lead developer will be proactive and will come to me. Often it's Eric. I do big sets and Eric does big sets, so we overlap a lot. So what'll happen is I'm available. If Eric has any questions or the lead developer has any questions, they can come to me and talk to me. I will explain philosophy. When you hand over design development, you make a document and you have an official handoff that helps sort of show what the vision is.

And then you stay in touch and sort of watch and see what they're doing. You'll occasionally do play tests. So the role while it's in development is design wants to make sure that whatever is special about the set. And one of the things I always tell my designers is, you can't fight for everything. If you fight for everything, in the end you fight for nothing, because no one will listen to you. So what you have to do is pick and choose what are, I call the

bearing walls of your set design. If you rip out, it's going to cause all sorts of problems. The things are supported on. You have to figure out what's important about your design. So, for example, during Innistrad, Eric Lauer was

the lead developer for Innistrad, there were a lot of different things they did. They revamped how the vampires worked and gave them the slith mechanic

and they did a bunch of different things. I didn't step in during any of that because I'm like, okay, they follow my vision, they're changing things, but it's to make my vision,

to realize my vision. I wanted aggressive vampires. My vampires weren't aggressive enough. They made the vampires more aggressive. But at one point, they got a lot, there's a lot of flack on the double-faced cards. And so they're like, oh, do we really want to do the double-faced cards? And then I'm stepping in because I'm like, no, no, no, no. That's really important. You want to change how the vampires work to make them aggressive. Awesome. I want them to be aggressive. It's fine that you change them. What you did is move them toward the vision. But the double-faced cards are a very important part of the vision. We're doing dark transformation. We're trying to bring werewolves to life.

It does its job really well, better than anything else we could come up with. That's important. That's a key part of the set. Do not lose the double-faced cards. In fact, there's some talk of changing the werewolf mechanic, and I also stepped in and said, look, if you want to experiment, please spend some time experimenting. But we spent a lot of time, and I'm very, very happy with how the werewolf mechanic worked. And so what I did is I stepped in where I needed to, where I thought it was important. My job as lead designer slash head designer is not to fight every fight,

but fight the good fights, I like to say. Figure out where it matters. And one of the things that happens with the developers is they want to hear your opinion. They want to know what's going on. They want to know what you're trying to do because their goal is to bring to life the vision that you have created.

Okay, so after development, a set then goes to editing. Design doesn't have too much to do with editing other than from time to time they'll come to us to say, what did you mean for it to do? Sometimes they want to understand our original intent. Because in templating sometimes, and templating happens during editing, sometimes you have to make choices,

and so you have to do something. And so often they'll come back to the designers and go, okay, we want to understand the original intent. We have to change things, but we want to be the closest we can to what you meant. Usually templating is handed by development. The only time they come to design is when there's some bigger questions

that development might not know the answer to. And usually it has to do on intent. The other thing is one of the things you want to do is you want to peek in and just have a general sense of looking at templating, looking at word choice

for mechanics. So if you have any templating things you want to run to the editor, whoever your lead editor is, and express if you have any templating things you want to run to the editor, whoever your lead editor is, and express if you have any templating issues. Flavor issues, usually you don't, flavor text is flavor text,

it usually isn't a too big issue, but names and creature type can matter quite a bit. And so usually what you do, and also names of keywords can matter quite a bit. And so usually what you do, and also names of keywords can matter quite a bit. So if you have issues, you can go talk to whoever the person is in charge of the creative and talk to, oh, you know, this name of this mechanic implies something that's kind of different than what mechanically it's delivering,

and you can talk about that. That's something development is also doing, but design wants to keep your eye in. I'm a word person, so I often want to make sure that the words are reflecting what the mechanics are doing, but design wants to keep your eye in. I'm a word person, so I often want to make sure that the words are reflecting what the mechanics are doing. Okay, so once it's out of editing, then the set goes off to caps. Caps are the people who do all the layout, who actually make them into cards. And there's a bunch of different things going on there. make them into cards.

And there's a bunch of different things going on there. There's not a lot of interaction design has with caps. There is some early, whenever you are building frames that are unique, there's some early work that has to do with caps. Part of that's also done internal to R&D. But the one time the design gets involved with caps in layout is when you're trying to do a new frame or a new component that has a mechanical element to it. It's like, oh, it's important. Now, once again, normally development does the brunt of that work.

But design will poke its head in and just make sure that its voice is heard on decisions like frame and things like that. Sometimes, as with split cards, I had a vision and it was very important. That's what I wanted, and I spent a lot of time making sure that we visually had what I thought to be the best. I spent a lot of time. Same with the frames for both unglued and unhinged lands. I really had a very distinctive feel of what I wanted, and so I worked closely with caps on both those to make sure that it looked the way I wanted.

closely with caps in both those to make sure that it looked the way I wanted. Meanwhile, concurrently to all of this, brand is doing marketing. And so one of the things that you need to be involved in is making sure that how they want to market the set is reflecting on what the set is. Because if they want to say, hey, it's AAA, and really it's BBB, you got to go to them and go, you can't tell people it's A, that's not really what it is. The set's not going to reinforce that.

And so one of the things with marketing is you want to make sure that the campaigns they set up for how they're selling the set is reinforcing what the set is. And so you need to sort of keep your hand in marketing to make sure that you have the messaging. Okay, now marketing is a little bit different from what I'll say is revealing the set to the public, sort of the preview. So that's a different group. That's online media. That's a different group of people that handle that. And that's like, okay, we're going to start revealing the set.

How do we want to reveal the set? Is there something cool, some neat, you know, like in Shadowmoor we opened up a booster pack and they were all cards without text, but you could see that half the pack was hybrid, or during Planet of Chaos you came to the site and you saw Wrath of God, it turned into Damnation. Is there

some exciting sort of cool element we want to do to introduce it? And then what are the cards you want to show off? And so it's very important that a designer sits down with online media and says, okay, these are the, and once again, development's very involved. Most of the stuff I talk about when design's involved, development's very involved. In fact, development's more involved than design in most of the stuff because they're downstream.

But design is always involved. And so one of the things we want to make sure is that we pick the cards that will represent what the set is. And the same set is, you could have a card in the set that's a cool card, but if that card is not representative of what the set is, it's a bad preview card. Because when people see things, not only do they assume that card's in the set, obviously they know that card's in the set, they assume cards like it are in the set. And so one of the things you've got to be really careful about when previewing

is making sure that you are showing off things that are representative of what you'll see. You know, you show off a new mechanic, okay, there's more cards with that new mechanic. You know, if you show off a component or a theme, okay, there's more cards with that theme. But if you show a one-off rare that isn't really,

I mean, maybe it's thematically tied in flavorably, but it's not really closely mechanically tied in, You mislead people. And one of the things we've learned over time is you want to be really careful in matching that up. And that's something that design and development understand really well. So one of the reasons we're very involved. The other thing I personally get involved in is I have my column.

So not only am I involved in the previews, and I'm also, as a columnist, involved in picking my previews, but I also have to introduce every set. Every design, I've got to introduce it. I've got to introduce you to the design team. I've got to explain what we were thinking, how it came about. I usually talk about how the mechanics came to be. I have to sort of introduce the set to the world.

Part of the reason I have a column is we want to make sure the audience who, at least the part who wants to have it behind the scenes, can. And there's a lot of things we do in design and also in creative and development. There's a lot of things that we want people to recognize it's there because what we've learned is if you educate people, if you tell them what you've done, then they have a better appreciation for the work that went into it. And so a lot of the reason I spend the time and energy explaining the design is I want people to see what we did, why we made the decisions we did. I want to walk through how we made the set.

We're very transparent on purpose that part of the experience of magic, it's a very shared group experience. And I want the audience to feel connected to the whole process, not just the end result, but the whole process into itself. I want people to sort of be able to talk about reasons we did things or recognize cool things we did that might not be obvious at first blush and that a lot of writing the article is about that. Okay, but my work's not done yet. Except it's not even out yet.

Then the set comes out. Okay. Once the set comes out. Okay. Once the set comes out, obviously, then I get to write more articles talking about things about the set that you couldn't really understand until you could see the whole set. So there's more articles to do.

Then comes social media, my blog, my Twitter. The audience starts to have questions about the thing you've made. And one of my jobs as spokesperson for the company is to make sure that people questions get answered. Sometimes, for example, there's things that

it seems like we're doing something when we're not. And I say, oh no, we're not doing that. Or people get confused about how something works and I go in and explain. And a lot of my time right after set comes out or right after previews really, is just explaining to people sort of what is and isn't. Sometimes people misunderstand how certain things work. Normally rule stuff I push off to take back, but if they're simple

rules I'll answer them. Or if they're things of like just, how does it work? You know, oh, they're double-faced planeswalkers in Magic Origins. Well, how do they work? Is it like Innistrad? Is there a slot for double-faced cards? Or do they just show up in the mythic rare slot? How does it work? And so one of my jobs is to answer questions. Another big part of my job, then, is to figure out how you all feel.

Now, we do a lot of market research, so I'm far from the only source of information, but one of the jobs of being out there and talking to all of you is learning what you think. What did you like? What did you not like? What were the successes? What were the failures?

And one of the things that I get that it's hard to get sometimes in market research is I can get much more pinpointed answers. Like, we can ask you how you feel in general about things on market research, but I can just say, okay, talk to me. What's the actual thing that bugs you most? And you'll tell me, and I'll ask questions about it. And we can have some back and forth. So if you follow my blog, one of the things we do a lot when the set comes out is people will say what they like or don't like. And I'll go, okay, hey, other people, do you share this? Would you like to see us do this again?

Or was this bad and don't want to see us do it again? Or, you know, give us feedback, positive, negative. That's important. And so I work there collecting information. Oh, another thing that I forgot, by the way, which is important. One of the things I also do, and this is part of social media, is part of my job is not only being reactive, but being a bit proactive in I know what things are coming.

I know what's coming down the pipeline. One of my jobs is to hype what's coming to get you all excited. You know, we do really neat things and then I want to sort of help build them up. And there's a whole, it's not just me, obviously, there's a whole plan to sort of release information. But one of the things I do is I do a lot to sort of very subtly tease things and hint at things. And I think if you pay attention to my blog,

when we announce things, the feeling you should get a lot of time is, okay, I didn't definitively know they were doing that, but I'm not surprised having read Mark's blog that they're doing that, because that is something that we, the public, have really said we wanted to do, and ooh, yay, they're doing it.

So, but anyway, like I said, part of today, to get a sense is, so for example, you know, this summer, we're going to start talking about the 2020s, sets coming out in

you know in the next decade. And in a couple years from now, I'll be doing exploratory design in those. And then, right, I said six months of exploratory design, a year in design. There's like, I don't know, nine or so months of development.

And there's time after that where we're doing all the marketing and we're doing all the hyping for new sets. And then the set comes out and then there's a lot of feedback and talking about the set and answering things. So when you take a particular set, which is like from the beginning of the, I first present the idea of the set or somebody else presents the idea and I'm fleshing out what mechanically we're going to do.

So from the earliest mention of a set to the set till I'm done talking about it in fact I'm almost never done talking about it because people ask questions about sets that have come out long ago but as far as the area where I'm mostly focused on it it is many many many years.

I mean my earliest sort of like okay we're going to do thing X through okay I'm done mostly talking about thing X is probably six years, seven years. I mean, it's a long time. Like, it's funny because I live with these projects for a long, long, long time. Like, one of the things that's weird for me is when I hand it over from design, like, it's 16 months from the public even seeing it, you know, and I've been working on it for a year and a half before I hand it off.

And we've been doing prep work before that, you know. And once I hand it off, there's still all the development and all the work that's gone, and then it comes out, and then once it comes out, I still have many, many months of just interacting with the public,

of talking about this. And so one of the things, like I said, it's very interesting for me, and Two Black Paradigm is going to make this even more challenging, is there is not a set, like anything that's in my radar, from we're going to do it one day, to we've done it, it's out,

okay, I think I've talked about it enough that I can move on. I have to be aware of all those sets. I have to be aware of six or seven years' worth of blocks. And when you take into account that we're starting to do two blocks a year, that means that there are times where I'm going to have to, in my head, be cognizant of, like, 14 blocks. Now, not all of them are actively in design. Some of them are just up and coming.

But like, for example, I will have meetings. I will have meetings where in a single day, I will discuss eight different blocks. And then I'll go home and talk with the public about another block or other two blocks. So it is very interesting that one of the things about my job, which on the plus side, it's never boring. There's a lot going on.

Um, and it's always ever changing, so that's cool. But there's a lot of cognitive load. There's a lot going on. And that, there's so many cool, exciting things we do. And we want to make sure at every level that, you know, from the very first glimpse of it to you guys having in your hands and talking about it, from the very first glimpse of it to you guys having it in your hands and talking about it, I want to make sure that the whole thing

that I'm keeping my eye on as it goes along. And like I said, it's tricky because it's not just one set I'm keeping my eye on. You know, there's one set, there's multiple sets upcoming. There's one set in exploratory design.

There's three sets usually at a time in design. There's another couple sets in development. then there's a bunch of sets that are in caps and dealing with marketing and I didn't even get on to like digital or organized play or there's other facets that I didn't even talk about that are also important because

you're doing double-faced cards, you've got to talk to organized play about how they're going to handle it or same with Magic Online like they didn't have double-faced cards they've got to figure out how to make that work. And anyway, the point of today is that part of doing design is just keeping track of things over a long period of time and juggling a lot of balls in the air. And so anyway, I'll give you a little insight into my job and what I do every day. But as I can see, oh wow, I feel like I've talked for half an hour and I have not because I, let me do a little wrap up here. One of the things, like I said,

that sort of my idea of today is I think a lot when I talk, I talk about design and I'm very, very focused on design. I'm focused on, sometimes exploratory design, but mostly design. And one of the things is that being a designer is not just doing, not just designing your set. That is part of it. And it's the most important part, obviously. But it's just keeping track of all the other pieces that are

going on, and that even when your set leaves your purview, where it's no longer in design, you still have to pay attention. You know, I still am having meetings. I still am having conversations about things that are way out of design that are upcoming. You know,

like it's very funny that like when I, you know, every day I'll sort of look and I'll go, how many sets, how many blocks did I work on today? And it always amazes me like one of the things that will happen sometimes is I'll come in a meeting and I'll sit down

and I'm like, remind me where we are again. What world is this? Where are we? And one of the things I've learned is trying to get a rhythm and get a sense

of where things are going. Having a connected story is helping a lot. I'm like, okay, it's this ongoing story. I can piece where in the story we are. But it is,

like I said, it's an aspect that I don't think people, because I focus so much of the story we are. But it is, like I said, it's an aspect I don't think people, because I focus so much on the design part, I don't think people think a lot about how much I have to keep track of things that aren't there. Because a lot of times when I'll talk about how something snuck through, like in a corset or something, where there's a card that's off color pie, and they're like, how did you let that slip by? And I'm like, do you have any idea how many things I'm keeping track of? You know, I just, I'm only human.

But anyway, so that, I don't know. The images for today is just an idea of, I like giving you guys different facets of things, of different kinds of things that my job entails and that I have to do, and that keeping track of things I formerly designed that are in other places, and constantly sort of just jumping in and having discussions.

Because I live in the future, pretty much, that one of the neat things about design is you are ahead of everybody. So when you're working on something, I mean, I have to work with the creative some, and I work with the development some. I have to sort of help make sure that what I'm doing will be deliverable for them

and work with what they need but I have a lot less interaction when I'm actually designing but when I'm doing my design team we're in a little bubble and there's a little bit of conversation but we're in a little bubble when we're doing our design once it's out

so many people get their hands in it and I've talked about this before, about how magic is a group. Like, if you love magic, hopefully you do, you listen to my podcast, there are hundreds of people involved. That there are people doing little tiny things that are

super important that you might not be aware of, but make magic what it is. And that I have to make sure, and my team of all those different people, they need to understand what we're up to. They need to understand what the mechanics are. They need to understand what the set is doing. And that part of our job is when you are the designer, especially the lead designer, you are the ambassador of the vision of the set, of the mechanics. You are the person that's sort of there to say, here's what we're trying to do. And you really have, I mean, it's your baby,

and you have to monitor it from the beginning all the way through the process. And like I said, what makes it hard is, I got a lot of babies, so there's a lot to watch. There's a lot going on. And since I'm a head designer, even for stuff I'm not lead designing, I still got to keep a track of

to make sure the larger vision is going on. And the one last thing I haven't got into is one of the other big things that we have to do, this is a big head designer thing, is I have to make sure what each block is doing so that the blocks are connected to each other, they're corresponding, the blocks are setting each other up, they're not stepping on each other's

toes. And so another big thing I do is we'll come up with an idea in a design meeting. I'll go, oh, guys, this other team is doing this. Be aware. And so another big thing is it's just gatekeeping

and making sure all the different components are working together. So when you guys see it, that it's a bunch of different sets that aren't in a vacuum. We're not making sets anymore. Once upon a time,

we made sets. You make a set. You do it. And the next set, who knows? And that's how we get Odyssey and Onslaught Odyssey did not help Onslaught because Odyssey was not about creature types or in fact was anti-creature type

and right next to a creature type block and so we have to not do that anymore and so we spend a lot of time and energy figuring out what concurrent blocks and what blocks two away and all the different components, how they interact with each other but anyway it's now okay. I get my full 30 minutes in.

And I said, this is more than inside of just another aspect of my job. But anyway, hopefully this was interesting for you. But I'm now in my space, my parking space, or a parking space.

Everybody thinks I have my own parking space. I don't. I'm in my parking space. We 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 y'all next time.