Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #28 - Planar Chaos

Episode Date: April 5, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about the set Planar Chaos.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. We know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I realize, as I look back at the different sets I've talked about, that I tend to mostly talk about the first set, only because I think there's, I guess as I'm telling stories, I want to start from the beginning. But I thought today I'd do a middle set, although I've done the first set already. So the set I'm going to talk about today is Planar Chaos. I've already done a podcast on Time Spiral, so go listen to that if you haven't listened to it yet. So Planar Chaos was a very intriguing set. For starters, let me explain.

So what happened at the time was, it's the second block that I was head designer for, and one of my big goals when I took over as head designer was, I wanted to institute what I call block design, which was to make us much more conscious of the whole block, thinking as a unit. We kind of stumbled into it for Invasion. We came up with the idea that we'd hold back the enemy stuff, so that Apocalypse would be delivering on something that we hadn't given you. And that went over really well.

I really liked the idea that, because what we used to do was we would just make a set and then make more and then make more. And we'd get ourselves in a corner a lot of times. And I felt like if we planned it ahead of time and we knew what we were doing, then we could set ourselves up. And we wouldn't have these problems where oftentimes we'd be in the third step,

like, oh, well, it'd be awesome if, you know, I remember like when I did Mirrodin, when we got to Fifth Dawn, we figured out we wanted to do a five-color thing, but we hadn't set it up, and so we were able to stick a few things in Darksteel, but it was too late to do anything in Mirrodin itself, And I'm like, oh, if we'd just known that, we could have front-loaded some stuff to help us, and we didn't. And back then, you didn't draft backwards, you drafted forward. So, anyway. So, I took over as head designer, and I said, okay, we're going to do block design.

So, Ravnica was first. It very cleanly fell in what I call pie method, which is, I kind of had the whole thing and then just chop it into pieces. You know, the guild structure, you know, it's kind of a whole entity and then I'm just chopping it up. But I was also interested in trying other things. And so when I got to Time Spiral, I did not lead the design of Time Spiral, the set. Brian Tinsman did. I was on the team. But as head designer,

my goal was to sort of figure out what the block was going to be about. Now, back then, we would figure that out while we were making the first large set. And so it became very clear, we started Time Spiral being a time set that was going to be about time mechanics. You know, that was going to basically suspend what we had saved.

I thought it would be neat to have this mechanic about suspend, and at the time, originally, it was going to be about hybrid. You can listen to my podcast on Time Spiral. But anyway, it pretty crystallized pretty fast that part of time seemed to be, it was fun to pull things from the past. And I think what happened was, I knew I had to break time into three parts. And so the pretty logical conclusion when you want to break time into three parts is, oh, there is three parts to time, past, present, and future.

And so past was very clear. You know, you've got to do nostalgia, you've got to bring things back, you've got to show things people haven't seen in a long time. We brought back old cards, the whole idea of the timestamp sheet. All that, very simple. And the future set, which was going to be weird, but I knew what I wanted to do, which was I'm going to show you things you've never seen. I'm going to give you glimpses of the future, you know.

So I understood what the past set wanted. I understood what the future set wanted. Both were very clear. I mean, not to say either would be easy to make, but both what the past set wanted. I understood what the future set wanted. Both were very clear. I mean, not to say either would be easy to make, but both was clear what they wanted. But what do you do with the present set? That was the hard one. I'm like, well, it can't just be set in the present because every set is set in the present. It can't be like, here's this neat set, here's this neat set.

Eh, just a normal set like you see every day. It had to have something about it. And that's when I stumbled upon the idea of an alternate reality present set. Now, for those who don't know, I'm a huge fan of science fiction. In fact, probably my favorite genre. And one of the things that, one of the types of science fiction is what they call alternate realities. The show Sliders was all about that. I don't want to get too much away,

but a fringe dips its toe there as well. So the idea is that in some of the time travel stories, there's a world that's like your world, but different in some way. And time travel stories love delving into that. Usually the way it'll work in time travel is

some fundamental thing shifted, like the South won the Civil War, or somehow Kennedy wasn't assassinated, or just something in which one thing is different, and then, boom, everything changes from that one thing. And sometimes, when you do parallel

worlds, the differences are subtle. One of the things that I've always been fascinated by, and I'm a color pie guru, I love the color pie, did a podcast on that as well. It's easier to make comment when I have to, I just hyperlink and you can click and go read it. But as I mentioned, I'll mention stuff I've done before, so I like people sort of who are new and haven't listened to everything to know stuff that's in the past that I've done. But I love the color pie.

And so let me talk a little bit about the color pie because there's a facet to the color pie that is very interesting that basically the whole idea of Planar Chaos came out of. Sorry, I'm putting some water to keep my voice nice and, I don't know, well lubricated. Okay, so when you look at the color pie, there is what I call the philosophies, meaning that each color has a core philosophy. I've typed about this in articles. You know, each color does something specific.

Okay. Now, the mechanics come out of the color pie, meaning all the mechanics fit the justification of what the color can do philosophically. But, and here's the rub, the color pie philosophies are broader than mechanics, meaning we had to make decisions on mechanics. We had to choose where to put things. Now, some things are just super clear, like who gets direct damage? How about the color about destruction? That seems pretty clear. You know, who gets counter spells? How about the introspective, sneaky, you know, mental color, right? Some things go really clear, But some things aren't as clear. Some things, like

discard makes a lot of sense in black because black is all about it goes after the mind and it's willing to do whatever to win. But hey, blue is also very much about mental facilities. We show that up as milling in our thing.

But I can mess with you mentally. I could take spells out of your hand. I mean, flavor-wise, that could work. And so what I realized was that the color pie has two kind of functions to it. There is kind of the philosophical color pie and there's the functional color pie. By functional, what I mean is it's actually what we do.

You know, it's how mechanics work. So I divvied that up into a three-ring system, which I called the core, the mantle, and the crust. So the core, the idea of the core is that is how we've chosen to do magic. That's the mechanical identity we have. Discard is black. You know, life gain is white and a little bit have. Discard is black. Life gain is white and a little bit green. Direct damage is red.

Counter spells are blue. It locks in where things are. But, so the core is where we are. So we go out of the ring. The ring is the mantle. The mantle is, so one of the things about magic is every year we go and we do new things, we have new themes. And in order to make themes work, sometimes we have to shift a little bit. So for example, if we have a graveyard set, a graveyard themed set, well, black does stuff in the graveyard, white does stuff in the graveyard, green does stuff in the graveyard, blue and red,

not really, a little bit. But what we did is when we got to the graveyard set, we started sort of defining some stuff so that red and blue would have some graveyard stuff. And that's true every year. Every year we kind of push in different directions because we need to make sure that when we get in certain areas that all the colors have access to something. And so what happens is we stretch the color pie a little bit.

Every year we'll push on the color pie in different directions. Now, usually we're not pushing too hard. It's not in the core, but it's adjacent to the core. It's stuff that doesn't really feel that bad. It generally feels like it's pretty close. You know? An example of that, like I said,

like in the graveyard set, you know, we'll push to like do a cycle where everybody regrows a certain card type. And we let blues get in and reds get sorceries. That's not normal. Red doesn't normally get to regrow sorceries. It's not a normal red thing. But, you know, we bleed it a little bit when we need to.

And the reality is, you know, it's okay. We've made a room for it so it fits. So the mantle is kind of where we go when we need to go to stretch. So the crust, the crust is where we can go. Philosophically, it makes sense, but we tend not to go because it just feels a little weird. And so the idea with Planet of Chaos I had was, okay, well, we'll play in the mantle and we'll dip our toe into the

crust, you know, so we'll get as much mantle as we can and we'll get just enough crust to give the set a little bit of, you know, oohs and aahs. Okay, so now, the set was led by Bill Rose, who is currently the VP of R&D. Real quickly on Bill Rose, I've talked about him a little bit, but so Bill was one of the original play tefters. I think he met Richard because they played bridge together. Bill, by the way, is an amazing card player, especially trick-taking games.

I mean, he's one of those people who are like, the game ends and it's like, oh, you had the three of clubs. How did you know that? Well, on turn seven, you played this card instead of that card on this. So that implied that you had three clubs. I'm like, how do you know that?

I don't know. And so anyway, Bill and I started two weeks apart. Bill started two weeks before I did. Bill took my desk. I had a desk I wanted, but Joel Mech, who was in R&D at the time, who was lead designer at the time, head designer at the time, he and Joel

and Bill were friends. They both had played together. Joel was also a playtester. Bill and Joel had worked together on Mirage. They were the two leads of Mirage. Anyway, Joel was saving the desk for Bill. When I got to work,

when I first got to work, Wizards was originally in a building. Shortly after I got there, they moved to a new building. And then many years ago, we moved to a third building. So this was the original building. I mean, the original, original, I guess, was Peter's basement. But once Wizards had a building. And so the first three weeks I was at Wizards, I had no desk.

Because we were moving very soon. And it didn't make sense to sort of scrounge me up a desk when we were just moving so soon. And they thought we were moving faster than we did. So I ended up being there a little more than three weeks, I think. I think they thought it was going to be three weeks. It ended up being five or six weeks. But anyway, for the first month and a half, I had no desk. And what they basically said is, well, just, you know, grab someone else's desk because

I could log into my account. So just whenever you can, someone else's desk, use their desk. So for the first month and a half, I'm just using other people's desks when they're not there. I was like a desk nomad. But anyway, Joel took my desk for Bill,

so I didn't get a desk. So Bill started two weeks before I did. And Bill, I mean, Bill, I think Bill right now is either number three or number four for sets led. Either he's tied with three with Brian Tinsman or he's in fourth. I mean, Mike Elliott is the number two slot and I'm the number one slot. But anyway, Bill's designed a lot of stuff. What happened, though, is Bill was very interested in management.

And so Bill was actually the, for a while, Bill was the head designer slash developer back when that was one role. And then Bill moved up, and now Bill is the director, and now he's the VP of R&D. I mean, I was always interested in doing design. I mean, I think Bill liked design, but that's not where his heart led. For me, design was the thing I wanted to do. And so Bill and I had very different paths. I mean, Bill wanted to manage. I mean, I have managed, but I'm very happy.

Like, I'm not managing right now. It's not my forte. And I like the creative stuff. I would rather make sets and build blocks and do that. And so Bill and I sort of had our different tracks. Bill jokes with me

because he says he and I are the two that will be there forever. Because of our group when we started, which was Mike Elliott, William Jockish, Henry Stern,

that whole group, Bill and I are it. We're the ones that are left. In fact, I think right now at Wizards, I'm number nine for have been at Wizards the longest and Bill's number seven. So actually somebody started the week after Bill and before me and they're number eight. Anyway, so I had to go to Bill and I was trying to convince Bill because Bill was going to lead the set. And the problem was, alternate reality is definitely a weird concept, right? It is not the easiest sell.

But Bill is pretty open-minded. Like I said, the story about the split cards, like Bill is the one guy who got the split cards, you know, that said, oh, that's awesome, we should do that. When everybody else was like, what? So Bill is pretty good at seeing potential. So anyway, I went to him and I said, okay, Bill, imagine a set with, and my example was a white memory lapse. And the idea is white is all about delaying things. It's defensive. Now, there is a world in which memory lapse

could just be white. Well, and eventually it was, although we costed it one more. But what I said to him is, look, you know, memory labs can clearly just be a white card. You can see a world where that is so. I think the other one at the time I pitched him was Black Wrath of God. Well, the white memory labs didn't make him the set. Black Wrath of God did.

And Bill, those two, Bill said, oh, I see where you're going. I got it. I got it. You know, and the idea was we would sort of start over and say, let's take the color pie and let's not assume anything and start again. Before I get there, let me quickly introduce the team. There's four people on the team. Bill Rose was the lead. The other two, I was on the team.

The other two was Matt Place, who I've talked about before, one of my favorite developers of all time. He was the dev rep, the development rep. We always have a developer on the design team to help give a developer sensibility. So he was that. And the last person was a guy named Paul Sotosani. So Paul was actually brought into Wizards to work on,

we had a project called Gleamax, where we were going to, it was trying to be a social network, but geared at gamers. It was a big swing we took. A miss, obviously. But we hired a whole bunch of people. He was one of the people we hired. And one of the things we like to do

is we always like to bring in other talents into our design teams to get some fresh blood. And so we brought Paul in. He did really well. Paul would actually later go on to lead his own set, which was Morning Tide. But anyway, we brought Paul on. Paul was awesome.

And so what happened was we said, okay, first meeting, Bill's like, okay, here's what we're going to do. The color pie is not decided yet. We have five colors. We have the five philosophies, but let's start afresh. And the idea was, let's go down and look at avenues we could go. So essentially what we did is we took all the mechanics and said, what if this wasn't what the color is now, what could it be?

And a few things it was hard to move, but most things it's like, okay, well what if it could be a different color? And it wasn't just a matter of changing things. We had to make an entire new color pie to fit. Now, one of the ideas that came up, I'm not sure. Somehow I think it was Paul's idea. But the idea of a sixth color came up. And we've talked about a sixth color on and off.

Usually there's an article in a magazine called Inquest that no longer exists. And they had dubbed the Sixth Color purple and so we always, somehow whenever we talk about the Sixth Color it's always purple so we talked about doing purple and we actually came up with an interesting way to do it I don't want to give away how we were going to do it because we might one day do it but it was an interesting way, we had an interesting take on the Sixth Color

and how we do it and the idea was, well, if there's a six color, we'll just give some abilities to the six color. And the beauty of having a six color was we could define the flavor of the color however we wanted. So it made it a lot easier for us to stick things in if we needed to. And so we started down the path of saying, what could we do? And then one of the things that I was very gung-ho on is time spiral. I'd come up with the idea of the time-shifted sheet, of the idea that in your pack, old cards would just show up.

And I really, I thought that was very awesome. And I wanted to have each set have its own time-shifted cheat. And I knew what the future set was going to do. I knew you were going to have cards from the future. That was clear. So the idea of the alternate reality set was, okay, what are the time-shifted cards? Were magic cards you knew, but in a different color?

And concepted differently. Like, you know, if Sarah Angel was a blue thing, because in this world, Vigilance was blue. And so Sarah Angel was a blue card, except it wasn't an angel, because it's in blue. It was a blue thing, because in this world, Vigilance was blue, and so Ser Angel was a blue card, except it wasn't an angel, because it's in blue. It was a Sphinx, you know? And I'm like, well, how would you flavor that card? And so we tried on the path,

and so the idea was all the time-shifter cards were existing magic cards, just shifted in color. And we had a lot of fun coming up with those. They were tricky. They were hard. We were trying to come up with stuff that made sense. A few of them, like Prodigal Pyromancer, which was us redoing Tin,

the Prodigal Sorcerer, we kind of actually knew maybe we'd really do it because we needed to make a few cards that we could shift into real sets because at the time, the core sets,

you had to rotate cards in. You couldn't make new cards. So we made a few things that we had, Magic had wanted in shifting. So like, okay, this is a good place to introduce that anyway. And we came up with the idea of a six-color. We made it. We put it in the color wheel. We actually made

cards. I remember that one of the purple time-shifter cards was Mana Drain. And the idea was, if purple was dedicated, and you had to sort of commit to purple to be there, we could raise the power level a little bit, because

it didn't fit in, it wasn't like purple was rampant in Magic. If we gave you purple, this is the only, if you're playing a purple deck, that's all you got. We're giving it to you. So we were able to push purple a little bit. But anyway, we played with it, it was interesting, it was a great exercise, I'm glad we did it. In the end, we decided that we had enough stuff going on

that we didn't need purple. We kind of felt that purple was a little bit of overkill. And we also sort of knew that purple is a potent, the sixth color, is a potent thing. Like one day, maybe we really need it. And to use it in a set that had plenty else going on, it just

didn't seem necessary. So we didn't use it. And to use it in a set that had plenty else going on, it just didn't seem necessary, so we didn't use it. But one of the things we did do was, I had a lot of fun sort of exploring the mantle and the crust. And one of the things I realized was that magic philosophy is much more flexible than the locked, fixed magic mechanics. And they have to be. Mechanics have to be, you know, in order to make the system work, you have to kind of commit to things.

You have to make choices. But when you explore, like one of the things that we came across was the idea of we took bounce, unsummoning things, and we split it into two colors, that white could bounce its own things, and red could bounce the opponent things.

And the idea was, you know, that, oh, we'll give red, you know, red is a tempo color, and, you know, and, like, it can't do tricks with itself, it can't save itself, because white got it because it could save itself, we made it protective, but red used it as this tempo thing, and it was very interesting. I mean, it was different.

I felt like I could see the world where it was justified, but, you know, it was very different. Now, one of the big problems in Planar Chaos that I did not think of, in fact, I mean, I don't regret doing it, but it's caused some problems. Let me talk about that for a second. So there are two ways to play Magic. One way to play is where Magic is an ever-evolving game, where, you know, like you play Standard, for example, and Magic keeps changing. What Magic can do keeps changing. And then there's the static way to play. It's just additive. Whatever Magic can do, new stuff come out, now Magic can do that. And the problem is, um, R&D cannot design to the additive.

It's just a broken system. You know, it's just like, if things never leave, it's just going to fundamentally break under the weight of itself. I mean, you can ban cars and do things for larger formats, but, you know, it's a lot more, uh, Magic really is about the ever-evolving system more than the static system.

I mean, the static system exists. Hey, you know, if you want to play that way, hey, more fun for you. But R&D kind of more looks at it as an ever-changing game. And so for us, it's like, hey, we're going to do this thing. It'll change magic for a little bit. It'll be quirky. But then, you know, then it'll go away and the magic will get back to normal. But the problem is it fundamentally changed static magic.

All of a sudden, green can now draw cards. Green normally doesn't draw cards as simply as blue did. And all of a sudden, now it does. Or all of a sudden, red's bouncing things, or blue's discarding, or all the things that were a little more crusty things. And we can never take that away. It's added to magic. And so it's hard when we explore an experiment where we want to push boundaries.

In a world that's ever-changing, it's okay because the boundaries keep coming back. And that was kind of a problem. The other big problem is what I call the precedent problem, which is whenever we do something, the audience considers it a precedent. Now, it's not always a precedent. And one of the things I stress up and down is planar chaos is not a precedent. Now, that's not always a precedent, and one of the things I stress up and down is

Planar Chaos is not a precedent. Now, that doesn't mean we can never borrow from it. We can, because there's some ideas in there that are interesting. But just because we did do it doesn't mean inherently we will do it again. And, I mean, players all the time, and it's very common, like on my blog, where people are like,

why can't you do Thing X? Right, I can do Thing X. It did it in Planet of Chaos and I'm like that's Planet of Chaos guys that's not that's not the

go-to defense of what I mean Time Spiral Block in general is not the go-to defense of what we can and can't do you know

Time Spiral brought back old things that we no longer do you know the alternate reality did things that we could do but don't do so

you know future stuff stuff that maybe we'll do but we don't do. So, you know, maybe we'll do, but we don't do. But anyway, I mean, the thing I enjoy about the set, the thing I most enjoy about Planet of Chaos is

I do like the experimentation that went into it. I do like the thought process. Like, I... In some ways, I joke that Time Spiral Block is more of an arthouse movie. It's not necessarily for the masses.

Because each one of them is really about making you think. Not everybody gets what we're doing. Planet of Chaos, to me, is a fascinating set if you really understand the color pie. Because it really says to you, hey, here's all these choices that were made, but you know, they could have been different choices. Much like time travel.

The North won the war, but what if the South had won? Or what if Kennedy wasn't shot? Or whatever. Each one of those is like, oh, well the world works a certain way, but just change a few things and all of a sudden, the world's a bit different than what you know. And I liked showing that you could make a magic that's true to the philosophy of the colors, but radically different from where magic is today.

I think that was very eye-opening, and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that aspect a bit. On the downside, A, we changed static magic forever, which, like I said, not really our concern, but I recognize that it's a cost that came with it. Also, we caused some confusion. I think we were messing around with something that was a little above a lot of people's heads. And so, you know... And plus, the other thing is, you know,

hey, it's a magic card. Green doesn't do it. Yeah, it does. Here you go, you know. And it's hard to argue that green doesn't do it. Yeah, it does! Here you go! You know, and it's hard to argue that green doesn't do something when we made a card that does it. Even though what we were saying is we're shifting magic in certain directions for a short period of time,

it still did it, you know, and um, the other big downside was that if you didn't, a lot of what made this set work, a lot of the novelty of the set, was this knowledge of magic. The reason I think the Time Spiral block did poorly

among less, you know, lesser experienced players was Time Spiral made all these references to cards you've never played, and loaded up the set with a gabillion mechanics, more than you can track. Because you don't know them, they're new to you. Then comes Planar Chaos.

And Planar Chaos is like, get it, get it, get it. And if you don't understand that it's going get it, you're like, what? Huh? What? If you don't know any better, all of a sudden, things are not in colors they're supposed to be, but you don't know they're not supposed to be, so you're learning the game

wrong. I think Planar Chaos Forever kind of just took some beginners and scrambled their brains because it's just, you know, and the other thing about it was, I mean, the one mechanic we added in was, what did we add in? The first set had

flashback. What I wanted is I wanted each set to have a mechanic that played into the time theme. So the first set had flashback because the idea of, oh, flashback, the past. The second set we had vanishing. It used to be called fading.

Real quickly. So what happened was, fading made a lot of sense. I liked the idea of you got it now, but it goes away. Like the idea that it's about the present because it's not going to be here for long, so enjoy it now.

I thought that made sense in that present set. Scribe, by the way, was one we used for the future set. I'll get there when I do my future site podcast. But the problem was, fading had this problem where when we had set it up originally, it didn't go away until the turn after. Like, if you couldn't remove a counter from it,

it went away. What we found was it was completely non-intuitive. Why does it stick around for a turn after the last counter's removed? And that just threw everybody. So we're like, okay, if we're going to do it, let's just update it. We'll call it Vanishing.

We'll change the name. It'll be the exact same mechanic, but we have to get it so people play it correctly. And I believe that Vanishing had a potential future, so let's fix it. As it turns out, mechanics are all downside. They're not super popular,

so I'm not sure if vanishing will come back. It might one day. It's actually a pretty awesome mechanic. I think if we find a good place to use it, I'll bet you it comes back one day. But anyway, we put vanishing in. I mean, we renamed fading, called it vanishing. That was the one kind of new thing.

Might have been a couple other random new mechanics that showed up, but that was the one that represented the present. But anyway, other than that, I mean, the set... The set's identity was so much about understanding the context that I think a lot of people didn't get it. That a lot of people were like, it's just a random set with

random cards. I don't understand. And the time shift... Oh, the interesting thing about the time shift sheet, by the way, was I actually... If I could close my eyes and blink, I really like the card treatments in the alt frame. It was kind

of a cross between the old card frames and the new card frames, and I liked it. I like where it came from. I mean, Future Sight would go a little crazy, and we'll talk about that, but I actually like the Planet of Chaos frames a lot. I thought they were really cool. If I could, like, blink and change magic, magic might have those frames. I really liked those frames quite a bit.

They just have a nice texture. I don't know. I liked them. I was a big fan. I was one of the persons that worked hard to make them. In fact, all three frames, I had to go back and forth with the people who do the layouts to try to get the frames, and I really like the Planet of Chaos frames. So,

like I said, it's a little arthouse film. I think the people that appreciate what we were trying to do really do love the set. If you like messing with the color pie and all that experimentation, we've never done a set like it, and we probably never will again, so

it is the one set that does this thing. But, like I said, if you didn't appreciate that, it's a hard set to sort of wrap your brain around. I'm proud of it. I think we did a lot of fun things. I like the thought experiment we did,

and it was fascinating as a color pie person to be able to go in and redo the color pie I learned a lot about the color pie kind of taking it apart and rebuilding it which I think helped me a lot as a designer and just as a color pie guru

but anyway I've just parked so I need to wrap this up like I said I'm not unhappy we did Planar Chaos. I think it was a neat idea. I think it was a neat experiment. I do like a lot of what it did. I do believe that it caused lots of problems, and that if I had to rank sets that have kind of, to the day, caused us problems, it's up there.

It really changed expectations. It really made people believe things that wasn't where we were planning to go. I mean, to this day, it becomes a set for prescience of things that it's not supposed to be. But anyway, it was fun. It was the closest we ever came to doing purple.

And it was exciting. Oh, one last story. Real quick. Real quick. Because I didn't write the story. So I love the idea of doing Black Wrath of God. Very excited about Black Wrath of God. And I got sign-off from development. Because black should kill things.

So I felt like it made a lot of sense in black. Demnation, obviously. And I was very gung-ho with the idea of leading with... That's the card we lead with. And we came up with the idea of what we call the Day Zero preview, where you came to the site, and I think it showed you the art for Wrath of God,

and then it turned into Damnation, and then it became the card. That might be my favorite Day Zero preview we've ever done. And then just the visceral impact. One of the reasons I was so excited to get Damnation in the set was I had that image in my mind,

and like I said, it really started off things pretty cool. So anyway, a little extra little story there. So thanks for joining me today and it's time to go make the magic.