Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #305 - Reprints

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

Mark talks about how and when Research and Development decide to use reprints in a design.

I'm pulling over to the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. I meant I had to drop something off at my daughter's school. Okay, so today we're going to talk all about reprints. Why do we print cards we've already printed before? So I'm going to talk about the philosophy behind it, like why we do it, and then talk a little bit about when we're designing, just how it affects your design, how knowing you have reprints, how it affects the design. Okay, so let's start from the basics, which is why do we even reprint cards?

And I think there's three major reasons, so let's walk through those first. is just a game design elegance slash resource issue, which is there is not an infinite amount of designs. I mean, there's a large number. It's a large, finite number. But nice, clean, clear, elegant designs are not something that are easy to come by. And so one of the major reasons you'll do reprints is just you've made the right card. You know, I need a card. Instead of reinventing the card or making

a new card, I just use the one I have. So one of the things, I talk about this all the time, is a lot of our role in doing design is the basic game is the basic game, but each year we're just trying to do different things with it. And so often what'll happen is we will take basic effects and we'll tweak them. You know, okay, this year the giant growth will have the current keyword on it or something. But some years, you know what, instead of doing the variant of giant growth, I should just do giant growth. Instead of doing the variant of naturalize, we should just do naturalize. You know, that there are just basic effects that you should be doing. And so the first reason we do reprints is we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Like one of the things that's really hard when you're doing design is remembering that the larger goal is serving the set.

It's not proving you can do something. For example, imagine we never reprinted things. What would start to happen is we would start getting, we would just slowly make things more complex because we'd run out of the simplest versions of things and then we'd have to do slightly different versions that are slightly more complex. And so a lot of the reason to do reprints is, look, we just have nice basic effects and that when we need them, we should have the access to do them. That doesn't mean that if I need to have a variant of a giant growth, that I have to have giant growth. Giant growth isn't something I should always reprint, but it should be something that I can reprint.

You know, your basic effects should be things that if you need them, you can reprint them. And so one of the things is when we're designing things, a real common thing that will happen sometimes is if I'm in a file and I need something and I don't know, I don't have a tweak in mind, a lot of times I'll just put the original in. And that doesn't mean maybe later, maybe it won't change. I mean, when you put in an effect, what you're saying is this is the slot doing this kind of thing. You know, I just talk about green common, so we'll continue with the green common. Green common, for example, normally has a giant growth effect. It's not always giant growth

and sometimes it can vary and often involve whatever one of the keywords is of the set or something, but sometimes you just can do the simple basic effect. And so whenever I need something that's very common in design, when I'm like, oh, I need a naturalized-like

effect, I will often put naturalized in first and just see if, can I get by with what I need? Can I get by with the simple thing? Now, you want to find places where you can take the basic effects you always do and bend it toward the set that you're doing so that sometimes you don't want to do a reprint. You want to make a new card that's specifically taking advantage of what the set is doing. But, so number one, the most important, or one of the big three reasons we do reprints is you don't always need to improve upon things that work. I know there's a lot of pressure in general in game design to sort of like, oh, we've done that. I have to prove we can do it differently. And the answer is, if you did it and did it

well, and it serves what you're doing, you know, it is not that every card of every set needs to be new and daring. The overall set has to present something new, and there has to be components of it that are new, but that doesn't mean you can't use old components to get the job done. And one of the things,

like I said, I've talked about this a lot in my podcast about how early on in Magic, we definitely had a different sort of attitude about how we thought of things as more disposable and that we would use things up and then not want to come back to them. And we realized with time that no, mechanics and worlds and things

that we thought of as being more disposable actually had a lot of value to them. Now, we were willing early on to reprint cards. That's one of the things that early, like, something like, ironically, Stone Rain, which we now consider to be a little bit too good. But, you know, Stone Rain showed up in a lot of early sets because we're like, you know what? Destroy target land.

It's a nice, simple card. Don't need to reinvent it. Okay, we'll just reprint it. And so it's one of the things early on we were willing to reprint, but I think we've been more aggressive on that. And definitely, as time has gone on, there are certain cards that will show up again and again

just because they serve the set so well. Okay, number one. Number two is sort of a nostalgia thing, which is people play Magic. So right now, I think our average player plays nine and a half years. Which, by the way,

is an amazing statistic. And here's the reason why. The average game doesn't last nine and a half years. Meaning the average of our players is longer than the length of an average game. That's very impressive. And the other thing we know

is a lot of people who play will play Magic, will play, and then their life changes or whatever. Like, something else just, they shift away from the game. Usually not to throw a dislike of the game, of just the people they play with for some reason things change

and they're not there to play with. And they stop playing for a while. And then they later meet other people who play and they pick it back up. So one of the things about magic is there's a lot of starting and stopping that goes on. That most people who have played magic, not all of them have played continuously since they first started playing. It is very, very common to have started playing and then stopped and started back up and even have that happen multiple times. When we do our research, what we learn is most people who play Magic at some point or another stop playing for a while.

I'm actually, I mean, also I've been working Voices forever, but I'm in this weird case where I've never not played Magic. Like I learned how to play Magic back in Alpha, and I've been actively playing ever since then. But I'm actually the exception. That most people who play Magic, even the real old timers, a lot of them are not playing consecutively. There are periods where they stopped. So one other thing reprints do for us

is there's a nostalgia value to them. There's a, oh, I remember that card. Like one of the things we want to do is we want to make sure when people come back to Magic that the game is not completely foreign to them. It's one of the things that we definitely were doing in the Core Set, when the Core Set was around,

and even more so now that we don't have the Core Set, is I want to make sure if you played Magic and you went away and you came back after a certain amount of time, that when you open up Butcher Packs, you'll remember something. Oh, that card. I remember that card. And so another reason that reprints are very important is that they really do a good job of tying to the past. And one of the things that we try to do

when figuring out reprints is figure out, oh, are there interesting reprints we can bring back? Are there iconic things? Are there memorable things? And we will definitely go out of our way to try to figure out how we can bring back things that especially haven't been back for a while. The first category, those are the kind of effects we bring back all the time. So like, okay, hey, look, naturalized.

Well, maybe two years ago we used naturalized, maybe four years ago, but it wasn't a long time ago. The second category, we're more likely to go, ooh, we've now been printing this card for ten years. Let's bring this card back. And one of the things we've learned, early on the reason that I think we had more of a disposal attitude toward just game components in general was that, oh, players have seen that.

And what we've learned is that people are excited to see things they know return. Which, by the way, is normal. It's very normal human behavior, which is, I have familiarity with something. When you bring me something that I have previous familiarity with, I instantly emotionally bond with that thing. Oh, this card. I remember this card.

Oh, I was 12 when I first saw it. Whatever. Whatever. It just takes you back. And so a second reason that reprints are very valuable is they definitely tie to the past of the game. And that's something that we want to do. It's fun. Players enjoy it. And it allows us to just, you know, like it is fun for us sometimes to say, what could we bring back that would make perfect sense that people wouldn't think we'd bring back? That would be a surprise for people. One of the things that we definitely do with our reprints is we like to have a little bit of surprise value.

There's a certain reprints that we can preview. Previewing, naturalized, nothing particularly exciting. Hey, there's a fact we often do what we're doing. Not too exciting. But hey, let's say when we brought Lightning Bolt back. Wow, that was a pretty powerful car

that we sort of had indicated that, you know, we're never, we're never going to do this again. And then we brought it back, and it was really exciting. And you'll notice that one of the things we're always looking for, and in every set, especially because of the, once the core set left, one of the things we said is we have to be even more conscious about reprints, because we want a lot of what the core set did for us is guaranteed there are always some staples in the game and always some returning favorites in the game. And so we've been more conscious in,

and I'll get there, I'll talk about when we design, how we make sure to get reprints, but that is something that we're much more conscious of. Okay, third category. The third category is that one of the things that we love about Magic is that we are constantly reinventing the wheel.

That the game is the game, and that when you come and you sit down and you play Magic, we want it to be the game you love. I think the first category of reprints is more about making sure that there's expectations that the game of Magic feels like the game of Magic. You expect a giant growth,

and sometimes just having giant growth makes that feel more concrete, like this is the game I know. But at the same time, the goal is not to make every game feel identical. We want to have... We want the game to feel changes. So another reason we do rim prints sometimes is because they show the contrast of differences.

So the classy example of this, I've used this before, but it's just such the perfect example of this, is in the original Mirrodin, I did something very much on purpose, which is, so in Alpha, there were two cards that were in Alpha. One was named Terror.

So Terror costs one generic and one black. And it's a destroy target, non-artifact, non-black creature. And I think it can't regenerate. It's also on there. But anyway, it kills a non-black, non-artifact creature. And Terror, it was the first real black, iconic black kill spell. We've made a lot of changes over the years. The Artifact Rider, the non-black Rider. We've definitely sort of shifted a little bit over time.

But it was a nice, clean, alpha staple card. And it was the kind of card we did reprint. Okay, another card that was an alpha was Shatter. Shatter is one generic and one red. Destroy target artifacts. In general, Terror is a much better card than Shatter. Because there's just more creatures. In a game of Limited, for example,

you know, in a 40-card deck, you're going to have about 17 creatures. And normally, in a normal set, there's not a lot of artifacts. You know, there's a few common artifacts that maybe help fix mana. Maybe there's an equipment or an artifact creature. But there's not tons of artifacts.

Artifacts don't tend to show up at a low as fan in general, because there's something special. But, in Mirrodin, Mirrodin was us doing an artifact block, which meant that we were changing the rules about how artifacts were working for that block. So one of the things we did, first off, Aspen was high. There were a lot of artifacts, like half the commons were artifacts, which is nothing close to normal.

So one of the reasons I brought back tear and shatter was I was trying to make a point about the environment. shatter was, I was trying to make a point about the environment. So normally, if you were in a draft and you had to choose to pack one, pick one, between tear and shatter, it's a no-brainer. Tear is good, you know. Tear, in almost any deck, you're running tear. And shatter, really situational. It's more of a sideboard card. You know, the reason you might bring in tear is, not tear, you might bring in Shatter is, oh, well, my opponent has some bomb-y artifact rare or something that I can't deal with.

Okay, I better board in my Shatter as a way to deal with this, you know, really devastating artifact rare or something that they have. But in Mirrodin, all of a sudden, the Aspen changed. About half the cards were artifacts, and a lot of the creatures were artifacts.

So before, when I was saying, you know, terror, well, terror can hit black creatures, can hit artifact creatures, but in a normal game of Limited, people play more than one color, so there are going to be targets that you have for terror. And unless they're playing black, you can hit most of their creatures.

But in Mirrodin, all of a sudden, well, half the creatures were artifacts, so shatter went from being this doesn't destroy much to destroys a lot, you know, half the cards. And terror, mind the way, has this rider that it can't destroy artifact creatures. So all of a sudden, terror,

which is normally super powerful, it's still good. I'm not saying you shouldn't play terror in Mirrored Interact. You should. But it's not as powerful. So all of a sudden, in your first draft, your first pick, first pack, if you have a Terror and a Shatter,

it goes from being, oh, clear. I take the Terror every time, to going, oh, I think I take the Shatter over the Terror. Shatter has more targets. And because it was an artifact set, a lot of the bigger bombs and stuff were artifacts. We leaned into the theme. So that was a good example where we brought things back

and we said, okay, these reprints aren't just here. They're not just the simplest version of things. They're not just something to be nostalgic. They were something to set context for the set. And reprints can do a real good job of things. They're not just something to be nostalgic. They were something to set context for the set. And reprints can do a real good job of that. One of the things that's really fun is to bring back a card in which the card functions in value in a way that

it did very differently. Another card I was real happy with is there's a card Harrow, which was originally in Tempest. So Harrow says okay, when I cast the card, it's an instant, I believe. Yeah, it's an instant.

I sacrifice a land, and then I get two basic lands from my deck and put them into play. In Tempest, it was really more about color fixing than anything. I mean, you were mana ramping, you were going up one mana, but you also got a color fix.

So it's like, if I needed a color, not only could I go up in color, but I could get the colors I needed. It helped me sort of fix what I was doing. It boosted your mana and it fixed your mana. Okay, now we bring it back into Zendikar. Now, those are both still true, but Zendikar had Landfall. And Landfall's mechanic says, okay, every time a land enters the battlefield, you trigger Landfall. Well, Harrow, at instant speed,

got two lands in play. So all of a sudden, it became this really neat trick with Landfall. And it did everything that it did in Tempest. It fixed your mana color-wise. It boosted you. It did all those things. But now, it did this whole extra thing,

which has allowed you to help manipulate landfall and in a way that could provide some really blowout moments. You know, having double landfall at instant speed in the middle of combat or whatever can really do some pretty crazy powerful things. And so here was another good example where we brought it back and contextually it meant something. And one of the things that's like, I think all three things have value and each set we work on, we want to make sure we do it. We want to make sure we're just getting nice,

clean versions of things. We want to make sure we're having the nostalgia and bring back some exciting things from the past. And we want to set context. We want to, one of the fun ways of showing how the set has changed is by having tent poles, or I don't know the right word, but having things that you know and understand and then getting to see that they're not as you know them, that in context that they're a little bit different. That does a really good job of helping understand what the set is doing and how it functions.

Okay, so that leads to the next big question. Okay. So now we know why we want reprints. The question is, how do we get reprints in the set? Okay. So the key to this is, when you are designing sets, people always ask when the reprints happen. And the answer is reprints happen at every stage. Um, that design tries to make sure there are reprints and development makes sure there are reprints. Um, so design is more responsible for number one and number three. Um, the surprise one, I mean, sometimes we'll work with development,

but usually the, oh, my God, I can't believe you brought it back, is more of a power level developmental thing. It's more like, oh, they didn't think we could bring this back, but surprise, we did. I take that back. It's sometimes that. So let me walk through. I guess design actually does all three. There's a whole area that I remember that I should that back. It's sometimes that. So let me walk through. I guess design actually does all three. There's a whole area that I remember that I should bring up.

So, okay. So first off, when you're designing a set, the way you bring reprints in is minding each of the three things. So number one is just being conscious of saying, look, some of the time I don't need to do a tweak. Some of the basic effects should just be simple vanilla effects, should be simple effects that we do all the time. And that one of the things when you're designing a set

is kind of being conscious of your base effects, how many, you know, you want to make sure, like I talk about, for example, when we do creatures, we want to make sure there's some vanilla creatures, which is creatures that have, you know, nothing but power toughness, nothing in the rules box. And we want some French vanilla creatures, which are creatures that only have evergreen keywords. We want to have some simple creatures. Same is true for spells, is you want to make sure that some of your spells are nice, clean, simple. Now, some of the time we can come up with new, clean,

and simple, but it's hard. And sometimes it's just like, okay, we want to make sure we have it. So first off is just making sure, for an elegant standpoint, that you have a number of reprint spells. And a lot of the ways, the way that works is when we know we need something, a lot of times if we don't have

a clean, easy answer for it, we'll just bring back the old card. Now, that is a marker. When I put Giant Growth in a set, what that means is I need a Giant growth-like effect. If I put giant growth, I'm not sure what it's going to be. Maybe it'll be giant growth, but maybe it won't.

And so that will often serve as a marker. So early in design, we'll often put more reprints in than necessarily we mean because what will happen is the act of doing design will force us to make changes. what will happen is the act of doing design will force us to make changes. And a real common thing that will happen is we'll go, oh, we need to make a change for something. Okay, what can we change? And the things that are the easiest to change a lot of times are things that are like, oh, look, we have simple effects. Okay, maybe we could adapt that simple effect to get the second need into it. that simple effect to get the second need into it. The good example might be, I'm doing a giant growth effect, but the set cares about sorceries,

let's say, in some way. So I might go, oh, okay, because the set cares about sorceries, I'm going to make my giant growth in this set have a sorcery speed. You know, it'll be, you know, plus four, plus four, whatever. I'll change it around a little bit because it thematically plays into what I'm doing. But we tend to start high. Usually in the early design, we'll have a lot more nice, simple, elegant reprint cards in the file because we'll want to see what makes sense. Okay. The second category, a lot of times, like I said, they fall in two groups. One is more design-y, one is more development-y. The more development one is we're bringing back something that's a surprise because it is powerful.

Lightning bolts. No one expected us to bring back lightning bolts. Now, that's more of a developmental thing. Now, sometimes we'll work with development and it'll get put in during design. That is possible. But it's also the kind of thing that sometimes during development gets put in. What design is more likely to do is to say, are there cards that are thematic to what we're doing

that are narrow and are from the past, and the reason we don't do them all the time is it isn't the effect you normally want, but in this world, with this theme, we might want to do that. A good example is, we'll do a set like Theros where there is enchantment. Like it's an enchantment matters block. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, there's all these cards that care about enchantments that maybe we could bring back.

Sometimes, by the way, it's fun to bring it back because of the flavor. So for example, what was the card? In Innistrad, we brought back a card. It was an equipment. What was the equipment? The story about it is we brought it back, and Brady asked us if we could, it had a rider on it about vampires, and Brady asked if we could remove the vampire rider. vampires, and Brady asked if we could remove the vampire rider. And I was like, oh, no, Brady, this is not, it's a reprint. You know, it's so, I'm blinking on the card. It's in Innistrad, it was originally in Zendikar, and it has a rider on it for vampires. So sometimes you find something like that in design, where it's like, oh, this card just feels like it came from the set, even though it predated the set.

Those are awesome finds. We didn't find a card that just currently exists in Magic, but just maybe it's mechanics, maybe it's flavor, a combination. There's something about it. Like, sometimes we'll bring back cards because the name and flavor is just perfect. It's perfect for this world.

Mechanically, it fits. Sometimes, by the way, one of the things is we did a site called FutureSite. So FutureSite had future shifted cards, which were cards from the future. That one day, you know, these are all from alternate reality futures. Or I'm sorry, alternate futures that some of them might come to pass. And so we're always going to look out if we can, you know, reprint a FutureSite card. Or preprint, whatever, a future site card.

So something that Deafling Design is looking at is trying to figure out where there are opportunities to make something that really feels organic at home. And so one of the things we do early in design is we'll just say to people, look, if you have any reprints that you think are just super flavorful, that fit here and are just a nice clean fit. Especially cards we don't normally do. I mean,

once again, it's not that we can't do staple effects, we'll reprint those. But one of the coolest things is to go, here's a card that's hard to put

in a set. It just doesn't go in a normal set. But, hey, we're back in a world where this thing acts that we don't care about

most of the time, we're caring about, oh, maybe we can do that again. And there's a lot of fun of trying to bring back sort of fun cards that just have this nice, neat fit in a set. So the third category is in which you're doing contextual stuff. And that is a matter of saying, what are your themes?

What are you mechanically doing? Okay, are there things of the past that play into those themes? So, for example, if I am caring about enchantments, then I want to go back to the past and go, okay, are there past cards that care about enchantments? Like, I remember, like, one of the things, like, sometimes these combine. So two and three can combine.

Sometimes what happens is we go back and we find a card that exists and flavorfully is a perfect fit. And because the new set is doing something different with whatever that thing is caring about, it has a new context to the set. So sometimes you can combine two and three. normally by the way when you put them in three is you want to make sure in the dev notes

you dictate why you're sticking things in so people like one is usually when people see reprints I mean like I said R&D understands the principles of why we do reprints

so you see a reprint you kind of go oh what is this what functions is serving here? But sometimes when you reprint, the designers will be up to something, and sometimes that's not super obvious necessarily from looking at the file. So usually when you put things in, what we always do is we tag reprints. So in our database, we have a field where we can tag things. So we'll tag it as a reprint.

Now, when you want to do a reprint, there is one other big thing that I've not talked about yet, which is there's another group that really cares that you need to talk with, which is creative. So creative has two parts. There's story and there's art. Now, normally when we bring back a card traditionally we've given cards new art

recently once the corset went away we said you know what there are cards that have really beautiful art that if we go to a world or we go back to a world in which that art still makes sense that we should be open to the idea of being able to use the art again

and we did that a little bit in Battle for Zendikar. It's something we're still playing around with. We're trying to get a sense from the audience. But anyway, if I want to reprint a card, I need to go back and I need to talk to the creative team. Because what I have to ask them is does this make sense? Can I do this card? So like for example, one of the things, I'll use a classic example, where you get in trouble sometimes,

is Ghostfire. So Ghostfire, when we did Battle for Zendikar, we decided we wanted to use Ghostfire technology, it came to Void, and that it really solved a lot of problems for us of having spells with colored mana that themselves were colorless. It's a way to define the Eldrazi, make the Eldrazi all colorless, have a colorless matters theme.

And we really wanted to use Ghostfire because Ghostfire is like the card that inspired us. And like I said, we like to bring back future site preprints when we can. And so this felt like, oh, you know, it inspired the set. It mechanically is what the set's doing, let's get it back. But we then have to go to the creative team, and here was the problem with it. Ghostfire, the name and the flavor text of the original card, clearly spell out that this is not Eldrazi magic,

it is Ugin magic. And now, there is, one of the things about Ugin, the reason that Ugin was able to trap the Eldrazi in the first place is, Ugin has some affinity for colorless mana in a way that has some that there is some overlap

I mean, I think why their colorless is very different between the two of them, but there is some overlap in that his understanding of that style of magic helped him be able to between the two of them. But there is some overlap in that his understanding of that style of magic helped him be able to trap the Eldrazi. And so there is some overlap in the flavor of Ghostfighter and the flavor of Devoid

but they're not identical. And when you looked at Battle for Zendikar, every single Devoid card was an Eldrazi card. And this card clearly wasn't representative of an Eldrazi. And so the creative team were like, yeah, we get why you want to do this.

We get why the audience would love it. You know, it did mechanically fit. It was a great callback. It was something that was nostalgic. You know, there's all these great reasons to do it. But it contradicted everything the story was trying to say. You know, and we said, oh, maybe when Chandra shows up, because she learned how to do Kala's magic, maybe she's using Kala's magic to fight the Eldrazi, and we went down the path, and is there some way to do it,

but in the end, it just didn't work out. It really, it broke what the story was trying to do, so that's another common thing when you're trying to do reprints is you have to make sure that they actually match. Sometimes it's a problem with the world. Sometimes it's a problem with the story. Sometimes a real common thing is the name. Like, for example,

we were thinking of bringing back Inquisition of Kozilek in Oath of the Gatewatch. We're like, okay, it's the Kozilek set. Kozilek in Oath of the Gatewatch. Okay, it's the Kozilek set. Kozilek's in it. And we're like, but it's a non-devoid card that cares about the Eldrazi.

And we really sort of toyed around and said, okay, well, could this be a sympathizer that's not Eldrazi, but sympathizes with Kozilek? And it proved to be very complex because it just didn't quite make a clean fit. And so that's another thing about reprints is that trying to make them fit is partly mechanical, but partly also the flavor, and the flavor has to match.

We will not do reprints if they contradict. Now, one of the tools available to us is we are allowed to redo the creative. And like I said, renew the creative is not great for number two. It's not great for the nostalgia. It's not horrible when you get to redo something. It has a little bit of nostalgia.

But it doesn't, it's not like, oh yeah, I remember that card exactly. It's more like, oh, they redid this card I know. It is fine for number one when you're just trying to get elegance.

It's elegant. If you have to change the name to be able to use the card, it still allows you to use the elegant version. So number one doesn't care about the creative change. Number two cares a lot

because a lot of what number two is trying to do is use the nostalgia as a means to excite players and this lessens it. It doesn't completely lose it and sometimes if what you're doing

is super iconic, you can sometimes do creative that calls to the first thing. So it's clear that you're doing a riff on the first thing, even though it's not exactly the first thing creatively. And the third one is the creative changing sometimes actually can even help you. It's like in world one, it was created with this. In world two, it's this.

And you can use that as a means to show the differences between the two places. Like I said, sometimes you bring back mechanics or cards to show how the worlds are different. So changing the creative sometimes can actually help you in that regard. So while it can hurt you in number two,

it can help you sometimes in number three. But anyway, one of the things we tend to do with reprints is we overshoot in design because we want to make sure there are lots of options. And sometimes what we will do is we will make a list of potential reprints. And we are very aggressive. What happens is we start by going, let's first see if this is fun let's see if this reprint is something we want to have and we will include a high number of reprints early on knowing that the process will remove reprints the process tends to and there's a couple reasons why one is i just talked about is creative a lot of times will remove them sometimes um they don't match the

set like oh this would be a great fit and And then you start playing like, oh, really what I want is something slightly different. And so it doesn't match up. Sometimes you need to tweak something. You're like, oh, okay. I can't do the simple version. I need the tweak. I need the tweak to do what I want to do. What's really common sometimes is

you're having a number issue where you have one too many cards. And so you essentially have to lose a card. And so one of the tricks sometimes is you'll take two cards, you'll blend them together. And a real common is you'll take a nice simple card and another nice simple card and then blend them into a singular card. So for example, I might have a sorcery that does a basic effect and a French vanilla creature, and I go, okay, I now will put that effect as an ETB on the French Vanilla creature. I will make my creature a little more complicated

but I now take the two effects and blend them into one card. That's real common for us to do. Sometimes, often development will have to pull a card. A lot of times we'll be really aggressive in our reprints and design and then development starts looking at the file and they're like, yeah, we're never doing that.

That is too good. Like, for example, in Zendikar, I wanted to bring back Doubling Season. Zendikar had a real strong counter theme because it's one of my sets and I love counters. And there's a lot of plus one, plus one counters. And there's a lot of just things that interact with how the set worked that I thought would be pretty cool. And so I was going to bring it back. The problem is, in between original Ravnica, where I had done Doubling Season, and Zendikar, where I was trying to bring it back, we had introduced Planeswalkers.

And it turns out that Doubling Season really, really is good with Planeswalkers, so much so that in Standard, we didn't want them to coexist. So I put it in the set. Development's like, that's awesome. We get what you're trying to do. We see why it fits your set., yeah we can't have that in standard

so sometimes it developmentally gets pulled so like I say, early in design we tend to put a lot of reprints in and then once the set gets to development a big thing they'll do is when they kill cards and try to replace cards, another thing they'll do is

they'll look for opportunities for places to do reprints and when they're trying to fill holes, another thing they'll do is they'll look for opportunities for places to do reprints. And when they're trying to fill holes, reprints are really nice because they're a known quantity. You know, that if I make a brand new card, like, oh, well, we got to test this. But a card that's a reprint, especially later on in the process, is nice because usually they have a much better sense of what it is. Now, sometimes, like I said, for category number three, it can change based on the environment. Sometimes they do have to test it because, oh, it would have been fine in a normal

environment, but in this environment, you know, we have to take into account this thing, you know. But anyway, so development will bring in reprints, just like design will put reprints in. Usually, it's a pretty good mix. I think when the dust settles, design will put a handful in and development will put a handful in. Development also will come to us during design sometimes and go, you know, this would be a great idea for a reprint. A real common thing they might say

is, here's a card you might not think you could have put in, but we think we can put in. Why don't you put it in? And a lot of times we'll get excited. A lot of times we'll have written off cards like, oh, I thought we could never do that. Oh, sure, sure, I'll put that in. And a lot of times we'll get excited. A lot of times we'll have written off cards like, oh, I thought we could never do that. Oh, sure, sure, I'll put that in. But anyway, so, that's basically why do we do reprints. Like I said, to recap,

I'm at work. To recap, the major reason to reprint is sometimes you want the elegant, simple thing and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you want to play nostalgia, you want to bring something back, you want to make people excited to see something they know before. Or, sometimes you want to play in nostalgia, you want to bring something back, you want to make people excited to see something they know before, or sometimes you want to

reset the context for your set, and bringing back old things to sort of use as markers to work against helps really show off how things have changed. But anyway, I'm now at work and in my parking space, so we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me

to be making magic. Well, I'll see you guys next time. Thanks for joining me.