Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #302 - Head-to-Head

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

Mark discusses his why and how he runs his Top 16 bracket activity on Twitter.

I'm pulling away from the curb. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. And I had to drop my daughter off at the bus stop today. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about something I started recently doing, but it has an interesting history because it actually, as you will see, goes way, way back. Something I had wanted to do a long time ago, and I finally am doing it. So the thing I'm talking about is called Head to Head. So for those that do not follow me on Twitter, it's something I do on Twitter. And what happens is

every three weeks I have a round of 16 in which I take 16 related things. The first one we did was creature types. The second one we did was, or as I'm recording this, we're currently doing, which is evergreen keywords. And I believe the third one that's scheduled right now is going to be planes. By the time you guys hear this, maybe we're in the fourth one. Anyway, the idea is, so let's take evergreen keywords, which is the one right now. So like day one, you have a choice between flying or Defender. Flying smacked around Defender, by the way, beating it 89-11. And then each day, the vote continues until there's only one winner at the end.

And I call this head-to-head. And the idea is it's just a fun, light thing. The interesting thing about head-to-head is it actually has a history that goes way, way back. In fact, I tried to get it when the website first started, very early when the website first started. So let's talk a little bit about that. So I did a podcast on the website. So a little of this is recapping that, but for those that haven't heard it, what happened was Wizards decided they wanted a website. I mean, we had a website.

I mean, if you went to wizards.com, there was something. But it wasn't a destination. It wasn't something people were checking in regularly. And they said, you know, we're big game. We should have a website. So they decided that they assigned the task to Bill in R&D. And then Bill assigned the task for me because I was the one with the communications background. And I was a writer.

And I was the most logical sense to do it. So he gave me this assignment and this is back in, I don't know, 2000, 2001. The website started in beginning of 2002. So I must've been working on this for sure in 2001, maybe as far back as 2000. Anyway, one of the things I knew I wanted was daily features. One of the things about, just from my communication theory training, is you want people to make your site a destination. And part of doing that is giving them things to regularly visit. Some of this technology I'm talking about is a little older. How people consume the web is very different now than it was back in 2000. But at the time, you wanted people to come visit your site every day.

That was how the internet worked back then. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to have juicy content. Some of it was weekly, like columns, but I wanted daily content that was bite-sizeable. And Magic Arcana came from that. We had Ask Wizards, which is a thing we used to do where people would write in questions and every day a different person would answer. We had card of the day. We just had a bunch of things that were daily things that were digestible and quick and fast. One of the things I wanted to do was essentially what's head to head is I wanted to have these things where people would come and

vote and every day, hey, there's just a choice. And my thought process was, you know what, we just have our list of 16, we type them in something, and then it can automate it. Turned out that automating it was a lot more complicated than I thought it was, and so it wasn't something that was doable at the time. So it got put on the back burner. But I really love the idea of people voting for things. So it actually led to us doing a couple different things. My desire to, interesting, my desire to do head-to-head has led to us doing a couple different things uh my desire to interesting my desire to do head-to-head has led to some other stuff so we're going to talk about some of that other stuff that led up to the head-to-head um the first thing was one of the things we started

the website was it was very important to me that i wanted the players to feel like this website gave them access to magic and a way to influence the game. That one of the things that when you make a website, you're like, well, what can we do that no one else can do? Well, we were the official source. You know, we told you something you knew was true. We had inside information. You could learn about things you couldn't learn about anywhere else. But one of the other things was you had access to us.

There was what we call a two-way addressability that we could speak to you and you could speak to us. And it was really important to me to try to do some things where the players had some actual interaction with the game. So the first thing we did is we did a thing called You Make the Card. Now, some of you might be familiar with this because we recently just redid it again. So there's been four of them, three of them done back in the day

and one done not too long ago, a year ago. So the idea was, what we would do is, I was trying to think of how to have the audience design a card. And the idea at first was, oh, people just send card ideas in. And then I was like, well, then one person designs a card and that one person's real proud, but that doesn't get the whole, I wanted the whole audience to feel invested. So I said, what if we have everybody design the car, everybody who reads the website design it? And so my idea was pretty simple.

I said, what we'll do is every way along the way, we'll let the audience make choices. And then, you know, so the way it worked was, first, we would always start with some decision that would guide us. It changed. I think the first time we did it, it was like, what card type do you want to be? That's the first question we asked.

And the audience picked creature. So then we said, okay, would you want to be colored? Do you want to be, you know, white, blue, black, red, green? Or do you want to be artifact? I think we gave them artifact as a choice. We might not have given them artifact as a choice. But anyway, they chose green. So we made a green creature.

And then we let them choose everything about it. How big the creature should be. What kind of creature type. And when it came time to design it, we let them design it. They turned in designs. And there was like thousands of designs. And I had to go through them all. And we picked the best ones we thought were best.

And the audience got to vote on which of the, I think, top ten you wanted to be the mechanic. And then the audience got to vote on who the artist was and looked at three different sketches. And anyway, they got very involved and got to make a lot of different decisions and choices about you make the card. So the first one ended up with a card called Forgotten Ancient. The second one was a card, an artifact called Crucible of Worlds. The third was, I think, a white-blue, I think it's instant, called Vanish into Memory.

And the last one, the one we just read recently, was a black enchantment called Waste Not. So anyway, that was me dipping my toe into trying to let people vote. And we definitely had some issues. One of the things I've learned in general

about the website was there are things that seem really easy that aren't necessarily as easy as they seem. And voting was one of the things that, like, I see voting everywhere. Voting's really easy. And it turns out that there's a lot that can break in the system

where voting happens. And so anyway, we did I think we did, you make the card. I remember it's successful. How about we do head-to-head? Nope, still can't do head-to-head. So we did another voting thing called Selecting Nth Edition.

So what Selecting Nth Edition meant and when I say Nth, this meant I think we did it for like, I don't know, 8th edition and 9th edition. I'm not sure I have 100% right the meant, I think we did it for like, I don't know, 8th edition and 9th edition. I'm not sure I have 100% right the ones we did. We did it for two or three. So what happened is, these were core sets. In the core sets, you have a lot of reprints.

So we said, okay, well, what if we picked two different reprints that we were happy with? Instead of the audience, you get to pick. And so do you want Llanowar Elves or do you want Birds of Paradise? Do you want Crusade or Glorious Anthem? You know, we would give them choices. And so the idea was that whatever the audience wanted. Now, obviously, we only gave them a choice that we were willing to do. You know, the reason we were able to do this was we didn't give them choices that were not necessary. In the end, though, we had a couple problems. One was that the votes that the audience liked most were the ones that were the hardest for us to do.

Because a lot of times what we would do is we're like, okay, we're doing a counterspell. Which of these two counterspells do you want? But the players were happier when there was big wild swings, like here's a powerful card and another powerful card. Which powerful card would you like? But the problem is the more stuff we did like that, the more we cemented in, the harder it was to create. And so when we started, we thought, oh, pretty easy to do,

and it ended up making a lot of extra work for us. And there were some choices made. Like one of the famous ones is we had a choice between Crusade and Glorious Anthem. So Crusade costs white and white, so two white mana, and it says all white creatures get plus one, plus one. Glorious Anthem costs one white, white, so three mana, two of which are white, and it says all your creatures get plus one plus one. So Crusade is a stronger card from a pure power level standpoint.

But the audience voted for Glorious Anthem because they, what we discovered, and this is one of the things we started learning this is, they just prefer things not affect their opponent. They don't want their positive things to positively affect the opponent. And they're willing to pay more for it to just guarantee it to themselves. And we really, we had planned for Crusade to be one of the exciting things to bring back. And when we put it up against Gloria's Anthem, our thought was, okay, here's this exciting card in Crusade.

You know, Crusade hadn't been in the course of a long time. You could bring it back. And they didn't. The audience didn't do that. So we also, it was hard to, like, it made it hard to develop the set. We also, because, I mean, it was interesting to learn what the audience wanted, but it also warped some things in ways that were hard. The other tricky thing was that

if we put exciting things and you vote on them, that happens way before the set comes out because we have to do it in time to put it in the set. But that means by the time the set comes out, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, we talked about this a year ago. Oh yeah, we know that card. It's not exciting. And so we were trying to get people exciting things to vote for, but then it made the actual set release less exciting because a lot of the bigger things you already knew about. And so it caused us trouble. There were some voting issues in general, and it made it, in the end, it didn't do a

job of, I mean, it made people feel invested. That's good. But it sort of made people less excited about the thing, which is one of the ideas is getting people involved so they'd be more excited. People were a lot more excited for You Make the Card because that had much more personal, like I actually helped make the card, where selecting Nth Edition was, you know, I just picked a card

but people felt, I don't know, they didn't feel as connected as they did with You Make the Card. We also don't do core sets anymore. And the whole gimmick is showing people reprinted cards. So it makes it a lot harder to do it. I mean, we don't have enough reprinted cards in the set, nor do we have the flexibility to pick and choose which ones go in like we did in the core set.

The other thing that we did with voting, and each one of these times we would do this, and I remember I would come back and I'd go, okay, can now we do head-to-head? Um, and each time the answer would be, no, no we cannot. Um, the next thing I think we did voting for is, um, so there was the Magic Invitational. I've done a bunch of podcasts on this, which was the equivalent of the Magic All-Star Game. Uh, we invite 16 of the top players in the world. But one of the things I always liked to do was, because it was an All-Star Game. We invite 16 of the top players in the world. But one of the things I always liked to do was,

because it was an All-Star Game, I wanted to give the audience a chance to sort of vote some of their favorites in. So the idea is, the players that did the best got invited, but of the people that passed a certain bar, I forgot what it was, you had to do well enough to be able to qualify for the ballot. So not just everybody got on the ballot,

but you had to do well enough to get on the ballot. And then we let the audience choose some number of players each time. So there was an audience choice to try to make it more all-star-y, I guess. The all-star games a lot of times will let fans do voting. And so we did that online. That, by the way, when I talk about systems, that was one of the stress test things where, um, so many people voted that it was causing problems in the software, uh, in a way we were doing the voting. So that's one of the things where I tried to do some voting, like we needed to do it. So they let me do the voting and then there was, ended up being, um, a lot of technical

problems. So when I said, okay, let's do head to head, they're like, no. Um, but I eventually did, I eventually convinced head-to-head, they're like, no. But I eventually convinced them to do a one-time head-for-head, which I think we called You Decide. And so what we did is we got 64 legendary creatures. We were planning to do Time Spiral, which was a returning set.

And so we really wanted to gauge the popularity of older creatures. So what we didn't tell the audience was, we said to them, we're going to do a vote-off. The winner gets something. We didn't tell them what the winner got. So there were 64 legendary creatures. We did head-to-head.

And so it took 63 days. The way, by the way, for those that don't, the easy way to remember how many matches it takes to do a single elimination tournament is take the number of people in the tournament and subtract one. So if 64 people compete, what's going to happen is there's going to be a match where each person loses except the winner. And so if there's 64 players, well, there'll be 63 matches because every player has to lose once in order for there to be a winner. The reason, for example, head-to-head right now I do 60 16 is 16 is 15 matches which is exactly

three weeks so it's a nice neat round number for content purposes oh for those that don't know um let me quickly I didn't really explain that the dynamics all the head-to-head so what happens is I pick 16 names I seed them uh people ask about this so what seeding means is I pick 16 names. I seed them. People ask about this. So what seeding means is I put them in the rough order. I think they're going to, how they're going to do. It's not an exacting order. It's not exacting science. A lot of these categories, no one's ever voted on.

So I'm just sort of making a rough guess. The trick is what you want to do is you want to have the things you think are the best chance of winning top seeds so they don't run into each other. So the way it works is when you do a bracket, so let's say top 16, number one fights number 16 in the first round. So the way you remember it is the two seeds add up to 17 in the first round of a 16. And in the second round, basically you want to have the one seed and the eight seed, if they win, meet each other in the quarterfinal rounds. So the quarterfinal rounds, if the top seeds win, the two numbers will add up to nine. And then the semis, you want one to meet four, and then two meets three, assuming the seeds always win. And in the finals, one meets two. So the idea, if you pick your top two things,

the top two things, in fact, number one can't meet number two or number three until the finals. One can meet number four in the semifinals. So what happens is I will put them all in. They are seeded. And then the audience will start voting. Day one is always seed one versus seed 16. So usually it's a blah.

That's like Flying versus Defender. Day two, though, is 8 versus 9. So that's usually a real close one. So the second one's always close. So like in every green keywords, first one was Flying versus Defender. Not particularly close. The second one was Lifelink versus Death Touch.

Much closer. Lifelink won 53-47. So, oh, to give you guys some kind of idea how in advance I taped this. or lifelink 15347. So, oh, to give you guys some kind of idea how in advance I taped this. Yesterday was lifelink versus death touch for me. I do many weeks ahead of time. So a lot of people are like, how early did you do this?

So you want to go look it up. That's my day. Yesterday was lifelink versus death touch. So today is December 9th, for those that care. Okay, so, and the way it works is if 9th for those that care. Okay. So, and the way it works is if you win your round, then you advance.

If not, you're knocked out. So, elimination. And then, we go to the end. And so, the first week will be

round of 16, one through five. The second week will be round of 16, six through eight. And the first two quarterfinals. And then week three,

the first two days will be the second two quarterfinals. Then the two sem, the first two days will be the second two quarterfinals, then the two semifinals, then the finals on the final Friday. So it neatly works out to 16, very convenient. Or to five, three weeks, so it's very convenient. Okay, so I was talking about Invitational. Oh, no, I was talking about You Decide. So we decided that we were going to do a big 64 thing.

It took 63 days. And every day you would come to the site and we would show you two legendary creatures. And we had a big playoff. And in the end, I think it came down to a Chroma, I think, versus Phage, which if you know the story, it's actually pretty funny

because a Chroma fights Phage in the story. And they merge together with another person to make Corona the false god. But anyway. In this thing, there was a winner. Akroma beat Phage. And so Akroma actually got two prizes. We didn't tell you what the prizes were

ahead of time. So prize number one was we did a Akroma theme week on the website. So I actually wrote... So one of the funny stories about Aachroma, real quickly, is I... So Aachroma, for those who don't know, has

like six abilities. It's like flying and haste on a white creature, which is super weird. And vigilance, although it wasn't spelled out. It's spelled out. It wasn't vigilance yet. And protection from different colors and things. And so it was very

what I call a kitchen sink design, which is just a lot of things on it. It was impressive, just because it had so many. It had like six keywords on it. But because I knew the story, I was like, oh, well, but a chroma's a lot more than just all these things, and I wanted to change a chroma because I

thought a chroma, this didn't match the story, you know. And the argument that was made against me was, look, she's just impressive. We want people to care about Ackroma. She's just really impressive, and she's strong and impressive. And at the time, that didn't weigh enough. And I now realize the value of, look, we wanted Ackroma to matter in the story, we wanted her to be a badass, and she was.

Did we quite get the nuance of the story? No, but we got the overall badassness, to invent a word, of a Chroma. And the fact that a Chroma later would win this, anyway, I wrote a whole article about how I liked the design, I didn't like it for a Chroma, I tried to actually take it off a Chroma, and it was an article going, hey, I was wrong.

A Chroma was good as is. So, anyway, if you like to read articles where I admit to being wrong, I have a few of them, but not tons, you can read that. I don't know what it's called, but search for my name in a Chroma. I assume you'll find a Chroma Week. Okay, the bigger prize, which is what we actually intended, although I guess we knew we could always... I guess we had planned to do the theme week no matter what.

But I also... What we wanted to do was weave it into Time Spiral. So we actually ended up coming up with a pretty cool way to weave a chroma into Time Spiral. So first off, she was on the time-shifted sheet for Time Spiral. So you could open her in a pack. You could just get... I mean, she had a little purple

expansion symbol. She was time shifted. You could open up and get a Chroma in a pack of Time Spiral. And then Planar Chaos, which was the alternate reality present set, we did an alternate reality version of a Chroma. So instead of being white, she's red. Because one thing we always talked about how

a Chroma had a temper and a lot of things on the first one. She had a lot of a red feel on the first one and her personality was kind of red. So we said, well, what if we push her more toward the red side? We made her red a Chroma. And then for Future Sight, the third set,

we looked at the future and Chroma was dead in the future, but we had her memorial. And so we got a Chroma and then we got red a Chroma and then we got redachroma, and then we got a chroma memorial. So the little prize for winning that thing was a horizontal cycle across three sets during a block.

So that went well enough that the website liked the idea of doing occasional votes. So they started doing this thing called You Decide. And what You Decide meant was that they would ask the audience something and then not tell them why they were asking what they were asking. So the one that jumps to mind is

one day they had the people vote for a letter. Vote for a letter. Vote for a letter. And they would vote. I don't remember what letter one, S or T or something. And then we had a spoiler upcoming.

I'm not sure what it said. And we showed all the text in which every letter in the text was, I don't know, they were all X's or something. And then the only thing we showed you was the letter you had chosen. So here's the set, except the only thing you can see is the letter you've chosen. And that was us sort of doing a little teaser to tease the set.

And the idea was, since you picked the letter, hey, what we figured out, you know, like, you influenced our teaser, but you didn't know what you were doing when you asked. Because obviously if we let you pick, you might have picked differently and it was kind of fun to go, okay, what are you going to do? We did a couple you decides and the audience in general liked them

and once again, every time we would do voting the voting would always do well a lot of people would vote, in fact usually too many people would vote, it would break the system and I would say, hey, people like voting we should do well. A lot of people would vote. In fact, usually too many people would vote. It would break the system. And I would say, hey, people like voting. We should do voting more often. And note, by the way,

this happened over many, many years over many, many different people running the website. So it wasn't just like, like the first person to run the website was Aaron Forsythe, believe it or not, for those who don't know that. And I would bug Aaron to do it and Aaron's like, we can't do it.

And then Scott Johns ran the website. I'd say, Scott, come on, Scott bug Aaron to do it, and Aaron's like, we can't do it. And then Scott Johns ran the website. I say, Scott, come on, Scott, we need to do this. And Scott goes, we can't do this. And then Kelly Diggs ran the website. And so I said to Kelly Diggs, come on, Kelly, we need to do this. And Kelly's like, yeah, we can't do this. Then Trick Jarrett ran the website. Trick, we have to do this.

And Trick would go, yeah, we can't do this. Now Blake runs the website. Blake, Blake. And anyway, actually, I don't know if I ever asked Blake. In Blake's defense, I'm not sure I ever asked Blake. But what happened was Twitter started doing this new software where you could set up votes on Twitter. Oh, actually, so the other lead-in to this is I, when I did Gatecrash, I realized it was my 16th set that I had led or co-led.

I co-led Gatecrash. But I had led 16 sets. And so I said, you know what? Let's have a little vote off. I go, let's do it head-to-head. Now, there wasn't the software yet. So what I did is I went on Twitter every day. I gave the choices.

And then with help from some fans, we would count up how many votes they got. And somebody would win. By the way, the current system with the automated Twitter thing is much easier. But what we did is we did, I called it the Rosewater Rumble, where I put all my favorite sets. And so in the end, it came down to, I think, Ravnica versus Innistrad. And Innistrad defeated Ravnica as the favorite set of mine that I had led design of people.

The surprise one had been Future Sight, which I had seeded on the lower half and ended up making it to the final four. It got taken out by either Ravnica or Innistrad, obviously. But it was interesting and it was illuminating. I definitely realized some things.

I'm like, oh, you know, I sort of guessed. I thought people some things. I'm like, oh, I sort of guessed. I thought people would respond. And I was mostly right but not completely right. And I really missed on FutureSight. And so that was very interesting to see. So then what happened was Twitter introduced the software. And I'd seen it happen and I didn't know what to do with it. I wasn't really thinking head-to-head, interestingly enough. And then I needed to do a topical blend.

Oh, for those who don't know, so real quickly, when something I do, maybe one of these days I'll do a podcast on my topical blends. The real short version of it is that I used to do improv when I was in school, and I decided decided to be fun to do a writing exercise that was kind of improv inspired. So what I did is I said to the audience, okay, I want you to give me a magic topic and give me a non-magic topic. And then I will make an article intertwining the magic topic with the non-magic topic. And so the first time I did it, we voted. So actually, now that I think about this, talking about votes online, topical blend were votes online. I didn't, I hadn't thought about

that. And we, I would have people, people would write in suggestions in email and then I collected them and then we did, we did a voting online. Oh, by the way, something else I forgot about real quickly was something that I started in Randy's column. So Randy did the developer column when we started. And something that I did for quite a while, they don't do it currently, but we did for quite a while in the development column, is we would have a poll. And so after every column, Randy would ask a question that had to do with the poll. And the results were more, they didn't mean anything. So we had less people voted

and we didn't have to worry about security issues. But randomly, we always do it and we always would have a poll. And it was interesting how many people would vote on a vote that really,

it was just for information. There wasn't anything beyond that and people loved to vote in it. So anyway, back to Topical Blend. So we did this vote. The first one, they picked top 10 design mistakes and girls.

Then the second time, they picked Mark is bleep and bleep bleep crazy and a sixth color. and the third time was top ten favorite top ten favorite creature or best top ten best designed creatures and D&D the fourth one was what was the magic topic

the non-magic topic was magic as in you know poof you know abracadabra magic and I don't remember what the magic topic? The non-magic topic was magic as in, you know, poof. You know, abracadabra magic. And I don't remember what the magic topic was. But anyway, this was the fifth one.

So I decided instead of doing it through my column online, that I would just do, that I would use Twitter. So I did this thing. I had people send me suggestions. I got 16 suggestions for both topics. And then I ran a little top 16 suite. I did it in less time. I think I did all of the, around in a day.

So all of the top 16s were one day. All the top eight were the next day. All the top four were the next day. Then top two, then top one. Or not top one, then top two. And I did it for, there were two different brackets because there was the magic topic 16 and there was a non magic top 16. Um, but anyway, I had done that and it was really easy to use, really easy to use.

Hats off to Twitter. And I said, you know what? Cause I remember doing the rope Rosewater rumble and it was, it was a bunch more work and I need to get people help to count things. Um, but I said, get people help to count things. But I said, oh, this is super easy. And so I said, you know what? I'm just doing it. So I realized that I'd done the Rose Bowl Rumble, and I'd done the voting for my You Make the Card.

I'm like, you know what? I can do this, especially when I do You Make the Card. It was so easy to do. And I said, you know what? I can do this. But the interesting thing was, and my plan was, okay, I'll just do this. It requires a minute every morning so what happened was I said oh you know

for a little bit of fun I said let me print this up ahead of time and let me give R&D the roster and I said kind of like a sweet 16 like okay how do you think you'll do

and I didn't know how many people wanted to do it but pretty much everybody did it everybody wanted to vote and so what happened was everybody did it. Everybody wanted to vote. And so what happened was it was fun and everybody would talk about it and so we did it and then I promised that the person who would win would get

bragging rights. I would announce the winner. And so the winner would know, everybody would know they won and they would get bragging rights and I would announce it. Nobody else's score, the only announced score is the winner's score. And this was a tie, I would announce both of them. And

something I, at the time of recording this, I'm in the process of making this, actually by the time you hear this, I'm making a trophy, a bragging rights trophy. So the idea is the winner will get a trophy that they get to keep. Well, not permanently. They get to keep while they're the winner. And then when someone new wins,

the new person gets the bragging trophy. But anyway, the person who won the first time was Bill Rose, who's the VP of R&D. And Bill has gotten much enjoyment out of being the winner of the first one. It has been brought up on numerous occasions that he won, and he was having fun bragging that he won.

So he got $25 out of $32. Oh, the way I grade it, so if you guys ever want to grade your own, for the very first one, I didn't post ahead of time. And then a bunch of people said, oh, can you, once they knew R&D voted on it, they go, can you post it ahead of time for us? So I started posting them ahead of time. So the very first day, I usually post the grids before I post the first vote. And the first vote is always one verse 16. So it's, I don't ever expect, I mean, first vote. And the first vote is always one versus 16.

So it's... I don't ever expect... I mean, in theory, I could misdo my seeding. But normally a 16 shouldn't have a prayer against one. Because one is the one you most likely think is going to win. And 16 is the one you least likely think is going to win. So you get stuff like flying versus defender, where not a particularly fair fight, but that's how

you kind of want to give the high seeds the early wins because you don't want to knock out really strong things because you put strong things against each other in lower brackets. But anyway, the way you do it is there are eight top 16 seeds because every 16 fights, you know, there's

16 fights, 16 fights, but two is eight, there's eight matches. You get one point for each one of those you pick correctly. Then in the quarterfinal round, you get 2 points for every match you pick correctly there. And then in the semifinal round, you get 4 points for every correct match you picked there. And in the finals, if you get that

correct, you get 8 points. So in order to win in R&Ds and so many people enter, you really kind of, you have to win, pick the whole thing. You need the eight points. It's really, really, really hard to win without picking all the points. Not impossible. And I could imagine in one that's really, really hard, and people miss a lot of what the audience says,

but my guess is most of them, the winner will be somebody who did get the finals. The eight points is so valuable. Anyway, Bill had 25 out of 32. The funny thing is, every time he had voted for zombies, zombies lost. He thought zombies were going to do much better. In fact, the big upset of the first head-to-head

was zombies were taking wizards on the first round, and zombies were supposed to beat wizards by the seating. I was a bit surprised. In fact, one of the things that's neat about head-to-head is me learning things, and the big learning lesson of that was underestimating how popular wizards are. Not that zombies

aren't popular, just I think wizards are popular, and that I was not giving wizards enough due. And wizards, not only did they win against zombies, they then had to go up against somebody. They made it to the quarters. I'm sorry, they made it to the semis.

Were they... Oh, I think Wizards beat Slivers. Right, because the joke was that in the actual story, that wasn't what happened. Slivers were the number two seed. I actually thought Slivers were going to do a little better.

Maybe a little backlash since the M14 Slivers didn't go... weren't as popular as normal Slivers, and so I'm not sure what went there. Or maybe Wizards is really popular. But wizards managed to take down slivers to go up against angels, but then got lost

to angels, and then angels went up against dragons in the finals. Dragons had gone up against goblins in the semifinals. I can't tell you the outcome yet of the evergreen keywords, because so far, today's the third day of voting. Today is vigilance versus

a double strike. Oh, one of the interesting things, by the way, about the way it works is as of right now, I'm getting 2,500 plus votes every day. It's been going up, so I'm hoping by the time you hear me, I'm getting more than that.

This has proven to be one of the reasons I had wanted to do it is I like having nice light things, and one of the things about social media I've learned is I'm trying to do more fun things that get people involved,

something that's easy to do. Voting is so simple. You just vote, click a thing, and you're done. And then the way Twitter does it, which is clever, is you don't get to see the outcome until you vote. So it encourages you just vote click a thing and you're done and then the way Twitter does it which is clever is you don't get to see the outcome until you vote

so it encourages you to vote and so anyway you get a vote then you get to see the outcome and then people are rooting for the things

they want and are trying to encourage other people to vote for them and then people are reacting to the results and one of the things I can do

is I can look at metrics on Twitter and this has been real sticky, meaning that people really get invested in it and it generates a lot of tweets and a lot of people, like I said, right now I'm having about 2,500 people vote a day, which is awesome, and it's been going up. And so I think as we do more of these, maybe people get more used to it

and it becomes something more people even do. And also I'm hoping by talking about my podcast that maybe if you don't follow me on Twitter, maybe you follow me on Twitter because it's a fun little activity you can do. And like I said, the other thing that's interesting is R&D is, we're recording information on our Wiki page.

I'm actually, every time there's an outcome, I'm recording everything. So not that this is the definitive, this is my Twitter followers voting, but it's a good little swath of magic, and it definitely, oh, so I didn't get into the last part. So, I had people vote. So, then Jenna, Jenna Helen came to me. She's the story manager, and she asked me if she had an idea for a category. What do I think of that category? I said, you know what? You pick them. Pick the 16, and I will put it up.

And it turns out Jenna missed a few days of work for personal reasons, and she was going to be third. The first person who was compiled, not by me, will be Kelly Diggs. He did the third one, which isn't even posted yet, but I'm planning to make it third, which was on the planes. And so by the time you hear this, I'm not sure whether we'll be voting on the planes or planes will be done. I'm not quite, I think I'm about six weeks out.

So probably either planes will be near the end or we'll be on the next thing. But anyway, I started having other people in R&D compile them. So what I said to them is anybody has a topic, run it by me for approval and then make a top 16 and then I will run different people's head-to-heads. And so, oh, and so let me ask the question that everybody asks because everybody thinks this is an awesome idea, which it is, which is why we're doing it. So it turns out it takes three weeks to do a head-to-head. weeks to do a head-to-head. So if you look at a calendar year, in 52 weeks

you can fit in 17 head-to-heads. 17? Interesting number, you say. So my plan is we're going to do 16 head-to-heads on 16 different categories, and then each year the final head-to-head, the 17th head-to-head, will be the ultimate showdown!

Where we will take the 16 winners of that year and have them face off against each other for the final, the ultimate head-to-head champion. And then as Ethan pointed out, in 17 years or 16 years,

we can have the ultimate, ultimate showdown. But anyway, so hopefully, I mean, really my point today was to talk a little bit about head-to-head, but it also got me into a lot of other topics about different voting we've done, so hopefully you guys enjoyed hearing about all the different voting online.

Please, if this sounds fun to you, join me on Twitter. I'm at maro254. 254 is my lucky number, which everybody always asks what the hell that is. But anyway, come join me if you're not already

following me on Twitter. And come vote. This is fun. The head-to-head is a lot of fun to do. So anyway, I'm now in my parking space, though,

so it's time for me to end my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.