Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #332 - Card Elements

Episode Date: May 20, 2016

Mark walks through a Magic card and talks about each element on it.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the magic card. Okay, you'd say I always talk about magic cards, but today, specifically, I'm going to go through all the different elements of a magic card and talk about them and hit some things that maybe you've never known. Okay, we're going to start. So, in order to listen to this podcast, go get a magic card. Any magic card, probably not a land. Creature is best, but any magic card will mostly do for this. Okay, so take the card, look at it. Okay, upper left-hand corner, we're going to start there.

It's the title bar. Okay, so a couple things for people not realize. First off is Magic prints in, I think, 11 languages now. Kind of rattle them all off. I know we are in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German. We are in Russian. We are in Japanese. We are in Chinese and simplified Chinese. I think we're still in Korean. But anyway, the title of each card is unique in the sense that each local language will name the card.

With proper names, we tend to try to keep them the same so that people will refer to the characters by the same name. But other than that, we have different translators, and they will translate. The way it works is the title... So this is true for all of Magic, but especially true for the title, which is when referring to the official rules, it looks at the English version of the card. So one thing I'm going to do today is I'm going to ask for each section of the card, can we care about it mechanically? So the answer to the title is we can, but only very specifically.

What we're allowed to do mechanically is reference a specific title. For example, you could say, if such and such is on the battlefield or go get such and such out of your library or your graveyard, you can refer to a specific card. What you can't do is refer to qualities of the name. For example, I mean, Silver Border does this, but you can't in Black Border. For example, Silver Border has a card called Double Header, and when it enters the battlefield, you may return any creature with two words in its title to its owner's hand. Well, you can't do that in Black Border. Why? Because not all cards.

The way it works is we treat all cards for tournament reasons as if they're the English version of the card. And what we don't want you to do, if you're not playing with the English version, is have to figure something out that's not true of the card you're looking at. So, for example, let's say you had a double header in Blackboard. There might be a card in English, which is two titles, but in French is three. And we don't want you to go, oh, you have to know that the English title is two. So we don't reference that.

We'll reference names specifically. We can say, go look for a specific card, but we never talk about the kinds of names. That's something that, like I said, Unsett will mess around with, but Blackboarder never messes around with. We can't care about what letter things start with, how many words or whether a certain letter shows up or whether double letters show up. We can't care about any of that in the title.

Okay, next, upper right-hand corner is the mana cost. So the mana cost is consistent across all languages. It has, it's probably the part of the card that's changed the least. I mean, little things have changed over time. The mana symbols have actually been pretty consistent. The white mana symbol

is the only mana symbol I think we have significantly changed. And even then, during Ice Age, we made a change to it. We definitely have changed a little bit about the shadows around it and stuff. For those that don't remember, back when we, so the current card frame is kind of the third iteration of the card frame.

Um, although we've done a lot of little tiny iterations, but as far as bigger changes, uh, original magic did its title bar differently. Um, it was sort of, uh, they tended to be darker and they tended to be more thematic, but they were harder to read because it was white writing on a darker thing. And what we found was by going to a lighter title bar with a darker letter, you just could read it a lot easier and from farther distance. Also, the font that the title is in is called Balerion.

It is a font we made, a font we own and made and own, named after Jace Balerion, who is one of the main characters of the game. Okay, mana cost, we can care about in any way we want, and we do. Stuff like devotion can care about it in any way we want, and we do. Stuff like devotion can care about how many mana symbols there are.

You can care about the converted mana cost. You can care about anything you want. It's an area that's fully... And one of the reasons that the Black Border can care about it is it's consistent across all cards. That no matter what language the card is in, the mana symbols are the mana symbols, so they carry across. So that is something you can definitely care about wherever. I think I'll tell you about the mana cost. So converted mana cost is the term we use. Mana cost means the actual cost. So if your card costs four and a green, the mana cost is four and a green. The converted mana cost

is a term that refers to what's the total number of mana in your spell. So if you is four and a green. The converted mana cost is a term that refers to what's the total number of mana in your spell. So if you have four and a green as your mana cost, the converted mana cost is five, because you have four plus one. We've actually looked for other names for converted mana cost. In fact, it is such an ugly term that we tend not to use it at Common where we can help it.

But as much searching as we've done to try to find an alternative, we have a lot of problems doing so. The biggest problem we have is that to convey converted mana cost versus mana cost is just complicated, and most of our terms that seem to convey converted mana cost just as much convey mana cost. It's something we keep looking at. Maybe one day we'll find the right term. But thus far we have not.

Okay, next we have the art. The art actually takes up the most space on the card, I believe. This was when we changed from during 8th edition to the original card frames to the 8th edition frames,

we enlarged the 8th edition frames. We enlarge the art box a bit. The art box is also, we can't reference the art box in Black Border. Silver Border does. In fact, Silver Border both references who the artist is, and it references things in the art.

But that's somewhat subjective. Like there's the elemental. That is a really long name. He cares about how many creatures are in the art. Okay, well now that's subjective. Like does that count? Are those eyes of creatures? Like, you know.

Now for Silver Border, it's fun trying to figure out who's in the card. And I've had people take cards and try to figure out what card shows the most people in it. There's a card with locusts. It shows a lot of locusts. But anyway, the art is another constant, although we're not allowed to reference it mechanically. It is another constant across cards. In fact, it's one of the things that helps people identify the card.

In fact, interesting little statistic for you, is we spent a little time and energy trying to figure out how people identify magic cards. Meaning, you can do some tasks where you sort of look and see where people look at things. And the art is the thing that grabs your eye the quickest. And it's the thing that you most use as a memory tool to remember what a card is. So, in fact, in 7th edition, we tried this promotion in the core set where we changed all the art. All those iconic cards got new art

and it caused all sorts of problems because people identify the cards with the art. It's a very common way. When you have a lot of cards on the battlefield one of the easiest ways to mentally process it is using spatial skills and a lot of that is looking at the art

and recognizing the art to tell you what the card is. So when we changed everything, it caused problems. Also, we tried this experiment in Fallen Empires, where the commons each had four different pictures. And once again, it caused all sorts of problems because people couldn't

identify the card. Because, you know, they might identify one version of it, but then someone played a different version and they had no idea what it is. So we are very careful about how much art we do in any one particular card and make sure that people can recognize the art. Okay, next we get the card type and the subtype. That's the line right below the art. Okay, so the card type, there are, what, eight card types? So there is Artifacts, Creatures, Enchantments, Lands, Instants, Sorceries, and Planeswalkers.

And then technically there is Tribal, which, while it seems like a super type, is actually a card type. It just has to do for rule reasons. We no longer use Tribal on cards. We support it, meaning all cards that have Tribal still have Tribal on them. But we don't make it anymore. I think I did a podcast on this. But essentially, it wasn't carrying its weight.

It was making us put a lot of extra words on cards that almost seldom mattered. And so we stopped using Tribal. Excluding Tribal, the other seven card types are the basic card types of Magic. Obviously, Planeswalker was added in Lorwyn, so that didn't start with the game. Magic actually started with seven because for a while, Interrupt was a creature type. Instant was broken into

two parts, Instant and Interrupt. And the timing in Alpha worked a little differently and so Interrupts, in order to make counterspells work the way they needed to work, we had to invent Interrupts. But once the six edition rules happened and added the stack and how things the batch and stuff,

anyway, it helped us figure out how to not have to have an interrupt. There was one other card type at one point, Mana Source, which was used for a while because there were some rules about things that tap for mana worked a little different than things that didn't.

So for a while, we later just changed the rules for how mana works. But Mana Source was also a card type for a little bit of time. People ask all the time, will we make another card type? The answer is maybe. Being that I think Magic is going to last a long, long time,

there's a good chance it'll happen. We are careful about card types. We don't want to have too much complexity in the game. And so I'm not saying we'll never make another card type, but there's a good chance we will. But if we do, we've got to be careful just because we want to make sure that we're not having too many card types. Okay, subtype. So subtypes have a whole bunch of rules that a lot of people aren't aware of. So creature subtypes are like vampire,

goblin, merfolk, that kind of thing. You can have a subtype in a card that is not a creature. Lands have had subtypes. Spells, so lands have had like basic subtype in land. Urza's was back for the

Urzatron. There are different land subtypes. We've done subtypes for enchantments. For example, Curses was a subtype. We've done subtypes for Instants and Sorceries. Arcane from Champions of Kamigawa, for example, was a subtype. We've done subtypes for artifacts, like Equipment is a very famous subtype for artifacts. So all different card types have subtypes.

So the rule about subtypes is two cards are not allowed to share a subtype, unless the tribal card type allows you to put a creature subtype on a non-creature card. That's why tribal, this is a card type. But instance of sorcery can share subtypes and then no other card type can share a subtype. If a subtype is a creature subtype, it is not allowed to be a subtype for a non-creature card.

Mechanically, we are allowed to care about both the type and the subtype. In fact, we care about them quite a bit. Those are, once again, are consistent between languages. The subtype, one of the things to keep in mind in this line that a lot of people don't think about is the line can only be so long. So the other end of the line is the expansion symbol, which I'll get to in a second. But one of the restrictions that come up from time to time

is people will say, why didn't you do X? A famous question was, the gods each had magical items in Theros. Why weren't they equipment? And the answer was, we couldn't. We couldn't fit enchantment, artifact, you know, god equipment. I didn't say god on it, but we couldn't fit equipment in. There wasn't enough space for it.

That's one of the things that, I mean, that also can be true on the title line. Sometimes if the title's long enough, it bumps into the mana cost and we have to care about a combination of

how much lengthened mana cost and how much lengthened title. It's one of the reasons I talk about sometimes we have to change the title or change the mana cost. Same is true in the card type line. Is that, and usually it's the subtype, not the

card type itself. Enchantment is the longest card type. I guess you can have Artifact Enchantment. That's probably the longest card type. I mean, we combine Artifact with Creature, but Enchantment's a longer word. I've also mentioned this before, but

when we care about length of words, it's not about how many letters's a longer word. I've also mentioned this before, but when we care about length of words, it's not about how many letters are in the word. It's about what letters they are and how wide those letters are. For example, you can get a lot more L's on something than you can an M. M's pretty wide, L's pretty narrow. So, you know, an M is worth, I don't know,

four L's or something, in case you're ever wondering. Okay, next, the expansion symbol. So the expansion symbol is something we put on every set to designate what set it comes from. The very first set, Alpha didn't have expansion symbol. The very first expansion symbol appeared on Arabian Nights, and it had a little scimitar. And the idea of expansion symbols is it's a little picture that represents something about the world.

In the early days, we were able to do very iconic, clean, simple, recognizable things. What's happened over time is those have gone away. There's not a lot of nice, simple, clean images that we can do. So you'll notice these days that our expansion symbols are a little more stylistic, they're a little more in-world, you know, it's an emphasis symbol or whatever, because it is something that, it is a resource. In fact, of all the things we have to care about, of limited resources, expansion symbols are actually one of the ones with the shortest amount of space to, because just visually visually to look

distinct and not like other things they're just a limitation of what you can do um i mean we haven't run out of them yet or anything um but expansion symbol also expansion symbols come in one of four colors um they're either black they're silver they're gold or they're orangey orangey red or they're orangey, orangey-red. So black means it's common, silver means it's uncommon, gold means it's rare, and orangey means it's mythic rare. We have had purple symbols used on the bonus sheet of Time Spiral. So purple means not normal. So the expansion symbols were not always colored.

So the expansion symbols were not always colored. They actually didn't start getting colored until... Blinking on... I think it was Urza's Legacy? Sometime around there. Joel Mick, when he took over as the brand manager, one of the first things he did was he made sure to put rarity on the card so you could tell rarity. Because once upon a time, there was no way to tell rarity on the card.

You go back to Alpha in the early days. You just had to have a list or something. The card did not tell you it's rarity. And there was no collector number, which I'll get to eventually here. That's two things that Joel's brand team did to make magic cards easier to understand, that you could look at the card, it would tell you more information about itself.

Okay. Okay, anything else about expansion symbols? What else can I tell you? The, um... Oh, can you care about it mechanically? What else can I tell you? The... Oh, can you care about it mechanically? In early Magic, you could. And then you couldn't.

So what happened was, Arabian Nights had a card called... What was it called? It was a card that destroyed all... I'm blanking on the name. It destroyed all cards in play that had an Arabian Nights expansion symbol on it. And we did something, again, in Antiquities and in Homelands. And eventually what happened was...

I'm trying to think why. Oh, I know what it is. The reason that expansion symbol, we can't care about expansion symbols is we can't care about anything on a card. Like if a card is a card, let's say you have grizzly bears, right? We have done grizzly bears in more than one set. So that means that grizzly bears exist with different expansion symbols on it. Well, a Magic card can only have one quality if we want to care about it, because we don't want to care about which version you have. So let's say Grizzly Bears appeared in both the Core set and, you know, 5th edition. Well, those have different expansion symbols, and if we care about the expansion symbol, then we're differentiating between those two cards, and we don't do that.

So because of that, the expansion symbol became a thing no longer that the Black Border cards can care about. And in fact, we had a problem because there's three cards in Black Border that care about them. So what we ended up having to do is we eroded the cards, and the way it works now is those three cards, in a very long bit of text, actually spell out every card that it destroys. So one of the effects now for Arabian Nights is the card that destroys all the cards actually doesn't destroy a mountain with an Arabian Knight symbol on it, because mountain wasn't listed. It was the only card in that set that was not unique to that set. So it wasn't listed as a card that got destroyed. So now, with this errata, the one difference from before is

before, if you had an Arabian Night Mountain, it would destroy your Arabian Night Mountain. And that's no longer true. Your Arabian Night Mountain is now safe. Remember, I can't remember the name of the card. I always think of all you guys yelling at the screen, telling me the name of the card. Golthic and Silex was the card for

Antiquities. Okay, I'm blanking on the card. Golgothian Silex was the card for Antiquities. Okay, I'm blanking on the card. You guys are yelling at me. Okay, let's move on. Okay, next we have the rules text. So the rules text, next is the text box. So there's the title bar, the art box, the card type bar. Now we get to the text box. So the text box has text in it. There's two types of text in it, basically. There is the rules text and there is the flavor text. The flavor text is italicized at the bottom. It gives you flavor of the world and card. We'll get there in a second. The rules text, it can be italicized for the following, which is ability words are italicized and reminder text, anything that's in parentheses, is italicized. And the idea is the italicized text is supposed to tell you, like, this is less important, although for reminder text and stuff, it can be important.

So the rules text, obviously, the game very much can care about. The rules text is... One of the things that we do with time is we have a thing called Oracle where we update things, and the rules text, the actual technical rules text is in Oracle. I guess Oracle updates everything.

Like, every once in a while, we'll mess up on a car type or something, I guess. Oracle will update other aspects, but really what Oracle updates mostly is the rules text. And the rules text is, it's funny when we do this little survey where we look at where people's eyes go on the card, the first thing they tend to look at is the art, but the second thing they tend to look at is the rules text. Those are the two most important parts of the card for people. Rules text tells you what the card does. So one of the things we have to be careful about rules text is there's only so much text space in the text box.

And so one of the things the editors have to do is make sure that we don't exceed the amount of space. So we have a minimum font. I don't know what that is, but there's a minimum font. And we're not allowed to go below a minimum font I don't know what that is but there's a minimum font and we're not allowed to go below that minimum font note that because we translate

in other languages there are other languages German and looking at you that are longer on average when translated and so we tend to pick our parameters

knowing that we need a little extra room for German to fit things in just because the words are a little bit longer in German. There is no flavor text unless there is room for it,

so we'll get to flavor text in a sec. Rules text obviously has priority. There's been many times where we've had to change cards because the cards didn't fit rules text-wise, where there was too much rules text. Rules text also, by the way, is different cards have domains of different teams so for example um the title that's creative creative has control of the title um the only time that our design

development will poke its head in there is every once in a while we have cards that directly care about it but once again what the name is doesn't really matter as long as it points to it. I guess sometimes we want things linked together through name so people realize their cycles. There's a few things R&D will care mechanically, but usually that's the domain of creative team. The mana cost, that's completely the domain of development. The car type is a design development issue. The creature subtype or the subtype is normally a creative issue unless mechanically we care about it and then design development gets involved. Rule sex is mostly a design development issue.

Where creative gets involved is when we have names of tokens or counters. There's a little bit of room for flavor sometimes. Like, especially counters is a good example. And you get to name the kind of counter it is. And other than not naming it like in other counters, if we don't want the counter to be the same, got to come up with a word with it, creative does that.

Okay, and then we get to flavor text. So flavor text is, and this goes all the way back to alpha, it's a piece of the card that's giving a little flavor into the world. Sometimes it's referencing the story. Sometimes it's referencing the story. Sometimes it's referencing the world. Sometimes it's referencing the card. We've occasionally used flavor text sometimes to make sense of what's going on. Sometimes the components of the card aren't a clean fit.

And so sometimes we use flavor text to sort of tie it all together. So flavor text can have a lot of different functions. I mean, usually it's meant to talk about the world. Sometimes it's used to justify things. We cannot mechanically care about flavor text. Silver border does, obviously, but black border cannot. And the reason for that is

the way flavor text works is it's the one part of the card that when we translate it, we say to the translators, if this doesn't make sense in your language, make something that makes sense. Well, why wouldn't something make sense? Well, for example, a lot of times we'll do puns or we'll do wordplay or something that might not make sense when translated. And so we give carte blanche to the translators to make changes. So there's flavor text on cards in other languages that aren't always the same.

Usually if there's a story beat or something important about the environment, that stays. And the translator usually does a direct translation if it makes sense. But when something about the card

doesn't work, then they'll fix it in the flavor text. There's also, for example, a story I just learned in my blog a few days ago. So when they first named the Weatherlight in, I forget what language, I think it was Portuguese, they gave it a very insubstantial name because they thought, they just thought it was going to show up in a little bit of flavor text and they, so they didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about it. And then when the Weatherlight turned out to be a

major, major player, in fact there was a set named after, and it was a major part of the Weatherlight saga, they decided they wanted to rename it. And so they gave it a new name, and then they took a piece of flavor text and explained in that flavor text that when Gerard took over as captain, he renamed the ship to explain why the ship had a different name than when it was in Mirage, in reference in Mirage. So there's little things like that that go on in the flavor text.

I think that's kind of cool. Once again, other than having fun in Unworld, flavor text really does not have any function for mechanics. Like I said, every once in a while we use it to help explain, to mechanically give some definition to something. Sometimes if the flavor between what the card does and what the concept is is a little loose, we'll use the flavor text to help explain that. By the way, if you ever see a quote on the flavor text and there's no attribution,

that means that somebody in the art is making the quote. So, for example, if you see someone in the art, the idea is if it's a quote, you go, oh, well, we'll assume it's someone in the art unless we attribute it to somebody else. So if you see a quote and there's no attribution, that means the person saying it is in the art. Okay, next. Bottom right, we have power and toughness. Now, this is only on creatures.

No other card type has a power toughness box. Power and toughness are something you can care about for gameplay. They are also the same in all languages because they're numbers, and numbers are universal in the languages. in all languages because they're numbers and numbers are universal in the languages. Every once in a while the only trouble we get into there is sometimes we will replace

a number with a star or with an X and then that gets explained in the rules text what that means. So normally the power toughness can stand by itself and explain the creature but every once in a while if it's dependent upon something, if it's a variable, it'll have

a star in it. The reason the difference between X and a star is X says there's something you're going to pick where a star means it's a variable that you don't pick per se. You might have some control over the variable. The other thing we have to be careful of is every once in a while we'll do plus, like

star plus one, and sometimes we'll have trouble fitting in the rule text box if we, when it's number slash number, we're okay. But when it is something plus something, that's when we get ourselves in trouble. We don't tend to do a lot of that. I'm not a big fan of variables with additive cost in them and power toughness. But anyway, it's definitely something we care about. Okay, now bottom left of the card. Okay, first thing there is it's a number. So it's two numbers. It's a number slash a second number. Well, that is what we call the collector number. That is the first number. The first number is the

collector number and it says of how many cards. So for example, let's say it said 186 out of 274. That meant it's the 186th card in the set out of a set of 274 cards. How do we figure out collector number? We go in color order, so WUBERG as we say, white, blue, black, red, green. Colorless comes before white. Devoid, though, is at the beginning of the color. And then after colors is multicolor, which includes both traditional multicolor and hybrid. And then we have artifacts, and then we have land.

Within each color, they are alphabetized in English, which makes a little bit of wonky collector stuff in other languages. We had tried to find other ways to do it, but there was nothing as clean as alphabetization. And it is based on the English name. That's why it's harder to discern the

order in other languages. We always tell you how many it's out of. We have, on a few occasions, had some fun where we have numbers that are higher than that number. Unhinged, for example, had Super Secret Tech, which was a card at the time we didn't tell you existed. So it was, I forget the number, but let's say there were 165 cards. It was 166 out of 165. We sometimes also go over when we're doing starter-like products

where there's products that are tied to the set that matter, when we're doing starter leg products where there's products that are tied to the set that matter but we don't want to confuse you with cards that aren't

in the set that are in some other product so we tend to number those high so that they can be counted as part of the set for like standard purposes

but not confuse people when they're collecting cards. Okay. Next to that is a little letter. It says either C, U, R, or M mostly.

There might be things with bonus sheets or tokens or something that are other letters, but that is the rarity. C is common, U is uncommon, R is rare, and M is mythic rare. So that tells you the rarity of the card. It's just a repeat from the expansion symbol tells you, it's repeated on there because we need, when we print our cards, it's information we need the printers to know. So some of the reasons

the information's down here, A, it's easy for you guys to be able to see some stuff, but also it helps our printer. Then we have a three-letter code. Every set has a three-letter code. So for example, the card I'm looking at happens to be from Battle for Zendikar.

So BFZ is its code. How do we get the three-letter code? It's tied to what the name is, but we share three-letter codes with all of Hasbro. So if some other product has already had that three-letter code, we might have to pick a different three-letter code. That is why our three letters aren't... Sometimes the obvious thing is not what we do. That's why we don't always do the obvious thing. Okay, next to that is a two-letter code,

which represents the language that the card is in. E-N means English. That is what most people listening to this podcast will probably see. I do not know the card codes for all the different languages. I believe they are within that language, meaning my guess is, for example, that German is not GE for German, but probably DE for Deutsch, is my guess. I don't know. That's off the top of my head.

Next to that is a little symbol, I think a little pen symbol, and then the name of the artist. That's where the artist's name is. So that's the artist credit. So if you're ever curious who drew the card, go look at the bottom. There's a little artist credit, and that's the artist credit. So if you're ever curious who drew the card, go to the bottom. There's a little artist credit and that artist will tell you. The artists have the ability to say how they're attributed. There have been some rare occasions where artists have used pseudonyms or sometimes artists have just changed how they want to

be called. We did a fun thing on Hinge where we let artists pick a nickname for themselves. Everybody had a nickname. If they didn't pick one, we gave them a nickname. But everybody had a nickname. And we let the artists pick their own nickname if they wanted to pick one. But anyway, the artists have control over what name they want to appear on the card. And you cannot... Oh, I didn't explain this.

So, yes, you can care about power and toughness mechanically. Everything else I'm talking about, everything at the bottom of the card, none of that you can care about. Yes, yes, Silver Border does, because Silver Border cares, but Black Border can't. But you can't care about collector number. You can't care about rarity. The same reason, by the way, you can't care about rarity is cards can change rarities through printings,

and we want all cards to be treated the same. You can't care about what expansion it's from. You can't care about what language it's in. You can't care about who the artist is. All these things are things that Civil Border cards have cared about. Once again, because we have to care about things that Black Border can't. So anyway, anything about the artist's credit. The artist artist credit is

it's important to us we really the art is a huge part of the game and we want to give credit to the artists people ask about why we don't give

credit to non-artists we did by the way we did give credit to designers when we did a special promotion through Magic 2015

that's the one time we've ever given designers credit the reason we usually've ever given designers credit. The reason we usually don't give designers credit is on a lot of cards, it's not even clean and clear who the designer is. Most cards are actually a combination of a bunch of different people.

And it just, we want everybody working together and don't want sort of people fighting for, no, I don't want to change it because I want my credit on the card. And it just could lead to some poor choices. The artist is nice, clean, and clear. One artist does it. We know who the artist is, so we give them credit.

The final thing on the card is the bottom right-hand corner. That is the legal text, I guess I would call it. So that is, it has the name of our company. It says what year this was produced. It has the trademark and copyright symbol on it. So that is, it has the name of our company. It says what year this was produced, has the trademark and copyright symbol on it. That is just the legal stuff for legal purposes to let people know that what's printed on this card is our property and such. We, once again, cannot care about the legal text. I don't know if I've ever cared about legal text in Silver Border. I'm allowed to, but I don't know if I have.

I think I've tried making cards that did it, but there's not a lot of variance. The one thing is it will always list the date that the card got printed, I believe. So if you're ever curious, if you see a card and you want to know when it was made, if the expansion symbol can't tell you, because it also lists the expansion, it'll give a date when the year the card was first printed. And that date is when the card, I believe, the first version of the card first came out. So one of the things we do not do is we do multiple printings of cards, but we do not change the cards in between printings. We have in the past,

there are times that we did, became a collector issue. Because we're a collector item, we do not change the cards. So once we print something, if we inaccurately print something, we will inaccurately print that for the full print run. We don't change things. If something's spelled wrong or if there's a miscredit, we don't change things because we're trying, because it's a collectible, we try not to make people change cards just because there's some misprint that we forgot about um we will change things but so let's say a card is in um one set and then we print it

in a new set clearly in the new set we can do that um oh the other thing by the way is there's certain characteristics that we when we do a reprint uh well when we do a reprint, well, technically when we do a reprint, everything stays the same with the exception that we allow the art to change. That the art, whether it's a reprint or not, the art is allowed to be different. If it's a reprint, the name needs to be the same, all the mechanical elements, the mana cost, the type, the subtype, the rules text, the power toughness, all that stays the same. Flavor can change. The name can't change because it's how we reference cards. But the art and the flavor text can change. So in a reprint, that's one of the ways we will change things

for reprint purposes to make it different is change the more creative elements of the card. Or the art and the flavor text. The part the creative team is responsible for. I guess they're also responsible for the name. That doesn't change.

But anyway, I'm almost at my daughter's school today. So that is all the different components of the card. Hopefully you learned a little bit more

about magic. Anyway, I guess a different way to look at the game. I know that there's a lot of information hidden on a magic card.

Not hidden, but put on a magic card. And I know people are always aware of all the hidden on a magic card. Not hidden, but put on a magic card. And I know people are always aware of all the information, what it means. So anyway, I am now here to drop off my daughter. So I hope you guys enjoyed hearing all about the magic card. But I'm pulling up to the curb

to drop my daughter off. So you know what that means? It means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.