Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #338 - The Gathering

Episode Date: June 10, 2016

Mark talks about the Homelands Prerelease event of 1995.

I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's topic is something that when I say what it is, most of you are going to go, huh? So today's topic is the gathering. Okay, now most of you might think, oh, like magic the gathering? What am I referring to? I'm talking about an event today. Today is me talking all about an event that Magic did that I believe most of you have never, ever heard of. Even though it was one of the most expensive events Magic ever ran,

especially in the early days. It was the most expensive event by far we'd ever ran in the early days. So what is The Gathering? Today I will explain to you what The Gathering is. I will tell you stories about it, and I will give you some feedback. I'll give you some info to sort of set up what it is. Okay, so what was the gathering? So the gathering happened back in October of 1995 before I came to work for Wizards, but just shortly. So I did a podcast once before where I talked about the trips that Wizards had sent me on. That Wizards had sent me to 95 Nationals.

And Wizards had sent me to the pre-release of Ice Age in Toronto, Canada. And they had sent me to the World Championships in Seattle. The World 95 Championships. But there was one other event actually I got sent to before I came to work for Wizards. It was right before I came to work for Wizards. It was the same month, I believe, I came to work for Wizards. Or it might have been, either it was end of September, early October. I couldn't actually find

the date. For all this event, I couldn't. I went online to try to find exactly when this event happened, and I couldn't because this, I think this is an event lost to history. But not now. Now, on this show, I will tell you, so it will be found from history. But anyway, so the gathering was an event which was meant to hype the release of the upcoming set, Homelands.

Okay, so let me give a little context to understand how this all came together and what this was. Okay, so for Ice Age, somebody had come up with the idea of doing a pre-release tournament. It was held at Toronto and actually at a comic convention. It was upstairs, downstairs, like over the balcony, you could see people selling comics. We were upstairs. And I talked in my podcast, I talked about this. This was the first ever pre-release. It was in Toronto. Dave Humphreys won. But anyway, it was a success. We had run this event.

And so we decided that, okay, that was successful. We should do something else for Homeland. Homeland was coming out. A little background on Homeland. I'm going to do a lot of sort of setting things up before I get to the event itself. So Homeland, I did a podcast. There's a lot of, you could listen to me do other podcasts on this, but I did a podcast on Homeland. I'll sum it up here. So, a guy named Kyle Namvar, who worked for customer service. I think he ran customer service for a while.

At this point, maybe he just was in customer service. And a guy named Scott Hungenford, Scooter was his nickname, who worked for what was known as Continuity, which is kind of not what we call the creative team, although Continuity was more story-related. They were doing names and flavor text and story-related things. They weren't, the art was connected to Continuity, but Scott was more on the story side of things, name-slaver story side of things. Anyway, they had come up with an idea for a set. Because magic had happened, they both worked at the company, and magic was exploding and they needed more sets.

So they went to Peter, Peter Atkinson, the original CEO of Magic, of Wizard of the Coast, one of the people that founded Wizards, and said to him, we'd like to do a set. And their idea was, they said, look, look at Alpha. There's a lot of things that people like in Alpha, like the Sarah Angel and the Singer Vampire. We want to sort of take those components and build a whole new world out of them. For example, like people like Singer Vampire, like, well, let's meet the Singer family.

Not just, you know, not just an individual vampire, but who are the leaders. We'll meet Baron Sengur and Grandma Sengur and we'll meet the aristocratic elite of the Sengurs. And Sarah Angel, who was Sarah that made the Sarah Angel? We'll have a story. She'll be involved in the story. So they took a lot of components of things

they thought players really enjoyed, like people like the Hurloon Minotaur. Let's have Minotaurs. We'll have a whole bunch of Minotaurs that are set. So they really a lot of components of things they thought players really enjoyed, like people like the Herlu Minotaur. Let's have Minotaurs! We'll have a whole bunch of Minotaurs that are set. So they really took the things from Alpha that they thought people responded to, and they decided to build a world around that. That's what the concept for Homelands was. And Peter said,

okay, sounds good. We need sets. So Peter gave them the thumbs up. So what happened is, at some point, they turned the set in, and R&D looks at it and, I mean, I've talked about Homelands. Homelands is what I consider the worst design magic set

of all time. Prophecy is close. Prophecy is a close second. But Homelands really has a lot, I mean, as I said in my podcast on Homelands, I'm not saying everything

about it was bad. I'm just saying the design was, it was a weak design. It was a little low in innovation and it didn't, from a design standpoint it wasn't as, it had room for improvement. We'll say that. Anyway, so the set gets turned into R&D and R&D says to Peter, oh no, no, this is a bad set. We shouldn't do this. And Peter says to Peter, oh, no, no, this is a bad set.

We shouldn't do this. And Peter says, no, no, no, no. I promised him we're going to do it. We're going to do it. And R&D was like, Peter, really, this is a bad set. We shouldn't be doing this. And Peter put his foot down and said, look, I'm the CEO. I said we're going to do this.

We're going to do this. And R&D was quite upset at the time because they felt like it was their job to make sure the sets were good and they were being given something they thought was nowhere near good. And so they said to him, okay, Peter, if you think this is good, we don't want to, you know, change it too much because

we, you know, like, they were in a bind. They're like, to actually make the set good, they have to radically change the set. And they felt if they radically changed the set, then it wouldn't, you know, like, they couldn't really win. And so they decided, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to take the set that was given to us. We're going to clean it up, but we're not going to make any major innovations or anything with it. We'll just take what's there.

And I think in some ways it was R&D also sort of making a protest saying, hey, you need to listen to us. And so they made a set that they were not, I mean, they didn't make it. They took a set that they weren't particularly proud of and they didn't change much about it. Because A, they were making a protest and B, I felt like to make the changes they felt they needed to make, it would be such a change to it.

They felt that like it would just upset Peter anyway because they would have radically changed the set. So anyway, they made it. Not one of magic shining moments. So anyway, because they have radically changed the set. So anyway, they made it. Not one of Magic's shining moments. So anyway, Homelands is being made. Another thing that happened, by the way, for those who don't know, the calendar of Magic is Homelands came out in October of 1995.

The next set that came out came out, I believe, in April of 1996, which was Alliances. There was an eight-month gap. That is the longest gap Magic has ever had in its history, probably ever will have, between expansions. And so the company kind of knew they needed the set to do well. They really needed it to be something that was going to be successful. Meanwhile, by the way, just little parameters of sort of Magic history, when Magic first got made,

they printed as much as they could, and demand always exceeded their ability to print product. So early Magic was all about Magic just selling out. And what happened was the people who would order never got what they wanted because of allocations, because there wasn't enough to give everybody what they ordered. So what everybody learned was to order way more than they needed. So if you actually needed two cases, you would order ten cases, hoping that you got two cases.

Fallen Empires came around, and finally they were able to print to demand. So they told everybody, okay, we're going to print what we say we're going to print, to print to demand. So they told everybody, okay, we're going to print what we say we're going to print. And people actually, once again, overestimated their orders,

printed more than they needed. And then Fawn Empires was massively overprinted because they printed to demand, but demand was a lie. People were not giving realistic numbers, not expecting to actually

get what they ordered. Anyway, Ice Age came out, and Ice Age, there was a similar problem of which people still didn't believe that they were going to get what they, so they still overordered. Now, Ice Age, because it was a large set, it was actually a pretty decent set,

it got reprinted over time. Like, that problem wasn't too bad because, you know, they printed the initial orders, but then, okay, the set had enough legs to it that eventually that stuff sold. Okay, so we come to Homelands, and the problem with Homelands is that once again they're overordering, but it was a set that was kind of a dud set, meaning that people overordered and it wasn't a strong enough set to eventually sell the material that needed to get sold. It just didn't have the legs that Ice Age did.

Ice Age had some very powerful cards in it. It took players a while to figure out what powerful cards, but Necropotence was in Ice Age. There were actually really good tournament cards, so people still wanted Ice Age. Homeland, not so much. In fact, for those that I did a different podcast on their very first Pro Tour ever, in which they talked about

how we made a special format that players have since nicknamed the Home Decapped format, where you played with five cards from every available format at the time. Because we needed people to it was a marketing event, the latest set that had come out was Homelands.

We wanted people to play with Homelands. So we made a formula that kind of forced them to play with Homelands. Ironically, Eric Lauer, the head developer right now, has pointed out to me that Homelands was not the hardest set to actually fit in. The current, I guess it was fourth edition at the time, the core set at the time actually was a harder set to fit in, Eric was saying. Oh, no, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Not the Core set. Chronicles was the hardest set to fit in. Chronicles really didn't have a lot of tournament cards in it. One of these

days, I'll do a podcast on Chronicles. It's one of the podcasts I haven't done yet. Chronicles, they were trying to reprint cards people wanted, but them understanding what the good cards were was at the time low. I think the stuff that got picked for Chronicles was not picked by R&D. It was picked by the R&D before R&D was filled with players that were in R&D. Anyway,

back to the story. There's a lot of pressure on Homelands. They really needed to do well. And so they looked at the previous event, which had been the Ice Age pre-release, and that had gone pretty well. That had actually been a pretty big event. But that event had been built around the pre-release,

and really what it was was just the idea of a pre-release, never done before. There wasn't anything else going on there. So somebody, okay, so let me talk a little about Magic History. So let me introduce you to Ronnie Noise. So Ronnie Noise was the marketing director of Magic back when I first started at Wizards. Ronnie was, I don't know Ronnie's background. I know a couple things about her. One, she was very enthusiastic.

Ronnie definitely had a, she was just, she was always smiling and very gung-ho and very happy and had a very positive attitude, at least my interactions with her. The other thing I know about Ronnie is, I don't know where she came from, but she knew nothing about magic. She didn't play magic. She didn't understand magic, didn't understand magic players. A few quick stories about Ronnie. Some of these I might have told, but they're a good illuminative story about Ronnie.

So one is that when alliances were coming out, I get pulled into a room by Ronnie. Because Ronnie liked to show R&D ads and stuff that were coming up. And the reason she did it, I think, is to get us to go, hey, Ronnie, that's awesome. But we had a bad habit of making comments about how we could be better that tended to frustrate her. So this one we got brought in, and it was an ad for Alliances. And it was actually a pretty ad. And remember, my comment was, okay, Ronnie, I only took a little bit of advertising in college,

but don't you want the name of the product in the ad? So she had done an Alliances ad and had forgotten to put Alliances in it. Like it was selling Alliances, but it didn't reference Alliances. The other big Rodney story is we get called in for, I think it's 5th edition. So in 5th edition, R&D decided for some reason, I thought it was silly, but we took out Sarah Angel because it was too powerful. So she had done an ad in which the ad was, I don't think this ad

ever actually saw the light of day. It was a letter from the Sarah Angel to the Hurloon Minotaur. And the Sarah Angel was like, hey Hurly, I had to leave. I had to go elsewhere but I hope you're holding down the fort

with all those nasty creatures, so do the best you can to make sure they don't overrun the place. And they're like, oh, get it? See, it's two iconic magic creatures, the Sarah Angel and the Hurloon Minotaur, and they're having this letter of banter about how rough it is and how, you know.

And I'm like, okay, that's not how... Okay, Ronnie, let me explain the message that the players are going to read. Okay, remember Sarah Angel, that popular, powerful card you liked? Yeah, that's gone. Remember Herlu Minotaur, that not really good card

that for some reason wizards like, but players don't like? yeah, that's staying. So the thing you like that's popular and strong is gone. The thing you don't like that's weak and not something you particularly want is staying. That's not really a selling point for the new set. Real quick on the Herlu Minotaur, just as a lot of asides, as I tell. A lot of sides, as I tell. Herlu Minotaur was a 1-red-red-2-3 Minotaur, creature Minotaur, or summon Minotaur in Alpha.

And it had an illustration by Anson Maddox. It was a really, really nice illustration. One of the nicest illustrations in Alpha. People at Wizards really attached to that. They really liked the art. And so whenever they were doing Wizards things, like, for example, when I first came to Wizards, or when Magic first made T-shirts, they made three T-shirts.

Well, they made one T-shirt, I think, for another game, for Jahai, which would later become Vampire the Eternal Struggle. But three Magic shirts, one of which was of a stupid doppelganger, one of which was a nightmare, and one of which was an Armageddon clock. I talk about this in my t-shirt podcast. But they had made one just for

the staff that was Herlun Minotaur. Plus when I got there, there was like a jean jacket I got that had a Herlun Minotaur on the back. He kind of became the mascot for Wizards of the Coast. So Wizards really liked using him. But there was a big confusion where people confused Wizards of the Coast. So Wizards really liked using him. But there was a big confusion where people confused Wizards' sort of adoption of the Hurdle and Minotaur as a mascot

to that the players liked the Hurdle and Minotaur. And it took us years to explain to them that it was a bad card, that players tended to fall in love with good cards, and that, yes, it was a pretty picture, and yes, wizards liked it, but the Herlin Miniature was never really beloved by the players, because it just was a kind of sucky card. Yeah, it had nice art, but it was a kind of sucky card. Where Serra Angel, like, was a powerful card. People liked it. It was a powerful card. Anyway, that, that, there's this

long-going belief for a while, and once again, a good sign that there was a lot of people at Wizards that really didn't understand Magic or Magic players is they're just like, oh, well, people here seem to like it. I guess this is popular. And I'm like, well, not with players. Like, you're making the assumption that, like, one of the things that happened early in Magic is Wizards, Wizards was a small company.

Started in, I think, 91 by Peter and four of his friends started as a role playing game company I did a podcast all about Wizards of the Coast and what happened was they stumbled upon magic I mean Richard had come I did a podcast on this is like me advertising all the podcasts I've done

talking about the history of magic and how it started and Richard and a guy named Mike Davis had come to pitch RoboRally to them, and they couldn't make RoboRally because the pieces were too expensive, it's too hard a game to make, they're too small a company. And so Peter said what they wanted was something that could be made out

of cards that was portable and quick time so you could play and roll playing games. And Richard said, oh, I have an idea for something like that, and he went away and came back with magic. So what happened in the early days was magic sort of was lightning in a bottle. It was just an instant hit. And for the early parts of magic was they were just struggling to print magic as fast as they could to get it out to as many places as they could.

And so Wizards, the company, was exploding. And so they were just hiring anybody they could hire. I mean, they were literally like, say to employees, do you have friends? Do you know anybody who needs a job? And they would just hire, you know, friends of employees or, you know, anybody they could find out they would hire. Getting hired early on was this just crazy thing. Oh, by the way, I got to tell a great story. This is just an early wizard story.

I just, it's a fun, fun story. a great story. This is just an early wizard story. I just, it's a fun, fun story. So, every other Friday or something, they used to come out and they would be, they would do, they'd hand out paychecks on

every other Friday. This is back in the old, old, old building. Like, the building we first worked at, when I first got there. So, like, right now, we work in a building. We've been there for 10 years. We were across the street for 10 years before that. Before that, it was called Powell's. It was on Powell.

And we actually have a list at work for people who worked at Powell, the Powell's List, which I am on since I started there. And it's down to a handful of people. It's like maybe 10 people. So, but the Powell's List are the real old-timers that used to work

at the Powell building back in 1995. Anyway, so they're, at one point, so anyway, every Friday they would come and they'd hand out paychecks. And so, and the person

who would do the paychecks was actually the mother of Peter Atkinson. Um, she used to do the paychecks and it was so new and growing so fast that a lot of times payroll would mess up what was going on. And so, uh, these, everyone calls her mom, uh, you know, mom would write down, um, like she'd go, Oh, they messed this up. Okay. Bring that up. Cause anyway, flash forward, forward, I don't know, a year later or something, and these two managers are talking, and they bring up this guy, I'll call him Bob, I don't

remember his actual name, and one manager says something about how you better talk to Bob, and the other manager goes, no, no, no, Bob's not my report, Bob's your report. And the two of them are like, no, no, no, no, Bob is your report, he reports to Bob. And the other manager goes, no, no, no. Bob's not my report. Bob's your report. And the two of them are like, no, no, no, no. Bob is your report. He reports to you. And the second manager's like, no, no, no. Bob is your report. And so they look into this and what they discover was Bob was just a friend of somebody's who showed up on one of these Friday paycheck days and mom had assumed that there had been a mistake and so had just written his name down. And so he got on the payroll because he just was in the right place at the right time.

And then he had figured out that. So he just came to work and didn't do anything. He just like pushed papers around and took a year for them to realize that he didn't actually work there even though they had paid him. Anyway, a little early chaotic wizard story. I always thought that story was funny. Okay, so back. Okay, so early wizards, they would hire whatever they need.

The reason this is important is wizards had a lot of people that weren't particularly magic people. Rani was one of those people. She got hired. I don't know how she got hired. Like I said, she was enthusiastic, but it was clear to me that I don't believe that Ronnie came from a background in marketing. Maybe she did. I don't know that definitively, yes or no. But there's a lot of things. You can tell that there's a lot of learning on the job that went on. Anyway, Ronnie got put in charge of making an event for Homelands.

So Ronnie came up with the idea for The Gathering. And I think it might have even technically been The Gathering 1, since the idea that there'd be many The Gatherings, and this was the first one. So she decided to go all out. She rented the space in this nice building in New York, like downtown New York, which was not cheap. Like I said, I believe at the time this event cost in New York, like downtown New York, which was not cheap. Like I said, I believe the, at the time,

this event cost, I believe, a million dollars, which now we will do a million dollar events, but they're giant events with, you know, huge numbers of people. And, you know, we do giant events. This was way above the scale of anything we'd ever done back in the day. And so what she did is she got this building, and she made a big press event. She called the press.

And then there was a pre-release, but the pre-release was done on a different floor. And on the main floor, there was like a cocktail area, sort of, like they had food and stuff. And then R&D had been brought in to do gunslinging. So I have a time, I think what happened was I was going to work for R&D had been brought in to do gunslinging. So I have a time, I think what happened was I was going to work for R&D, I hadn't officially started yet but they brought me to this event and I was one of the gunslingers. And the fun thing about the gunslinging was

we had to build decks out of homelands, we had to feature homelands and like I said, R&D was not particularly fine with homelands so I decided to build my deck around my favorite card from Homeland, which was Memory Lapse. So Memory Lapse costs one and a blue. You counter a spell, and it goes back into the player's hand. So it's like, nope, you can't. And they can cast it again, but it keeps them from casting it once.

And anyway, I really liked this card. I would later find out that the card wasn't even actually originally from Homelands. What happened was, Bill Rose, when he came out to do his final interview, or probably only interview, they pulled him into a meeting, and they were doing the final stuff on Homelands, and they had a hole to fill, a common blue hole. And Bill was like, oh, we need a counterspell. Oh, I have a counterspell on the set I'm working

on, Menagerie, which made it become Mirage. You guys can use that card. So it's funny. My favorite card from Homelands wasn't even from Homelands. It's actually from Mirage. So anyway, I built a whole deck around. I did a permission deck with

Memory Lapse was my key card I was using. I made a deck that made advantage of Memory Lapse. So, anyway, what was I going to say? Oh, okay. So, I, we did gunslinging, so we, people could come play us and you could win a pack of Homeland. Okay, that hasn't come out yet, so that's sort of a fun thing. There was, like I said, there was a pre-release tournament, although the interesting thing was, because,

one of the other things, not only was there not, were not a lot of people who understood Magic Players, early on, there actually was a stealing by some of the employees that like,

like the Magic Players were an embarrassment. Like they literally ran the tournament on a different floor because they didn't want the press to see the players. Which is crazy!

Like, oh my god, we have a new thing, we have all these players showing up because they're so excited. Don't let the reporters see excited players playing your game. Anyway. I don't remember who showed up. My memory of this was

they did all this to try to get, you know, press and stuff, and not a lot of press showed up just because it just was sort of this. Remember back in the day, by the way, magic early on back in 1995. Like, I started the company in October of 1995, same month. When I went to, in November, I went to my 20th, not 20th, my 10th high school reunion. I graduated in 85, it was 95, and I had just started a new job. And people were like, what do you do? Well, I work on Magic the Gathering for Wizards of the Coast.

And people would go, what? What is Magic the Gathering? What is Wizards of the Coast? They had no idea. And then every, I don't know, 20th person would be, Magic the Gathering? My husband plays Magic the Gathering. You work on Magic the Gathering. So it was like, the people that knew

it, knew it because they played it, but it was a very tiny percentage of people. Everybody was like, what is this you're talking about? They had no idea. And so, I think what happened was, people had no idea what Magic was, and you know, and so we didn't draw much of a crowd. Okay, but

one of my favorite parts I didn't even get to, probably the quirkiest part of this whole event, was at the time, there was a restaurant in Seattle. I don't remember the name. I'm going to call it Enigmas because that seems like a good name.

It was that kind of name. And the shtick of it was that it was a restaurant that had puzzles. And that they had different puzzles and you could solve different puzzles. And then every, I don't know, every once in a while they'd change what the puzzles were.

But there was a whole series of puzzles you could do. And you'd come and they had sort of, I don't know, more fancy than it should be food that was a little over-costed. But there was fun activities that you could do with these puzzles. So we hired the people that ran this place to make an event, to make something tangible for this event. In fact, by the way, Tyler Beelman.

So I did a podcast on Mirrodin. He was one of the designers on Mirrodin. So the story of Tyler is Tyler had a partner named Mark, Mark Jessa. And the two of them originally, the first time I met them was they came to pitch ads for the Duelists. Wendy Noritaki was the publisher. And so she pulled me in because we were trying to get some ads. And so they had come in pitching ads.

And so they pitched them to me and I shot down everyone. That was my first meeting with Tyler. Anyway, both Tyler and Mark would go on to work for Wizards. They both were on the brand team for a while. Mark eventually would become a big player in marketing, and Tyler ended up working in R&D.

He ran the creative team for a while. Like I said, he was on the design team for Mirrodin. He made Isochron Scepter. That's a Tyler Bielman design. And he and I had done a lot of work in making the world that we mirrored in. I mean, the creative team then took our idea and did a lot with it. But we were the ones that started the metal world idea. I don't know if I've ever talked about it.

He and I had this whole trilogy. And originally the idea was there was a metal world, and then there was a prison world. And then you found out that each of the worlds was designed by a wizard who was trying to create people so they can have a combat between the two. And then the final world was like Arena World where they were fighting. Anyway, that never happened. Metal World happened.

And it's why, by the way, if you've noticed in Metal World, he pulled things in from the outside. Anyway, the germ of that going back to our story. Anyway, the people from this restaurant, Tyler among them, made this experience. And the idea was they wanted you to experience magic the gathering. And so I ended up calling this, I refer to this as the Dominarian haunted house.

So what they did is they walked you through the five colors of magic. And just imagine kind of, like it had a lot of, like, haunted house technology. Like, there was smoke machines in a dark room, and you walked on foam, and you put your hands in buckets of things. And it was cheesy, to say the least. And, you know, they were trying to, like, what does red feel like? What does blue feel like?

I'm sure blue sprayed water on your face or something. I don't remember exactly. I just remember it was really cheesy. So we had that. We had the Dominarian Haunted House. And I think if you came to the main event, there was the gunslinging area, there was the Dominarian Haunted

House. I think we might have had a little area which we had a little bit of historical stuff, maybe a little bit of what's magic together. I think we had a little bit of a few things hung up. Although once again there wasn't a lot of history yet. It was 95. The game came out in 93. So actually instead of history, maybe it was more of like just what is Magic the Gathering sort of stuff. There's a little bit of that. Although one of the things about early Magic that's mind-boggling to me is they were very afraid in early Magic to show cards.

They're really afraid that if people saw cards, they wouldn't like it. This is part of the Magic isn't cool problem we had early on, where a lot of people that worked for Wizards didn't have enough respect for our players or the game, which is crazy. For a while, there was a point where we wouldn't have ads where we put cards in them because we didn't want to show cards. And we're like, what? You do understand the game is made of cards. Like, if someone comes to the game to play the game, to the whole point of advertising, they're going to see cards. Like, if they're somehow turned off by cards, perhaps we're the wrong product for them. Maybe they don't

want to come to us. And we're like, why aren't you showing cards? That is absolute crazy. Anyway, it's the same sense where they would try to show off magic without actually showing you magic. Which, anyway, crazy. So anyway, we had... So there was... We were on the upstairs. So basically on the top floor was this event. And then there was a pre-release that had run on a completely different floor that I was not at, that I heard was a bit chaotic.

But at least they were excited to play what they're playing. I mean, even though Homelands did not turn out to be the most amazing set, obviously, in the world, it was still a brand new set. People love brand new cards. I mean, it takes a while to even understand power level stuff. So people are excited. And when you play things in Limited, you know, I mean, remember, by the way, that Magic in the early days

wasn't designed to be played in Limited. remember, by the way, that Magic in the early days wasn't designed to be played in Limited. That the first set that really even took Limited into account during design development was Mirage. Like, when I got there. That was the first set we really started thinking about

Limited. And, like, I mean, we made a lot of mistakes, but we were actually thinking about Limited. For example, if you ever played Ice Age, Ice Age is painful in that you could, for example, if you ever played Ice Age, Ice Age is painful in that you could for example, open up your cards and get four creatures. That's what you got, you know, and like

I guess I'm playing the colors that those four creatures are in. And Ice Age was significantly better than Legends, which was the large set the year before, which, I mean, I've talked about this before, like Arborea. There's a chant world you could play where as long as you didn't play spells, it didn't go away,

and nobody could attack you. So it allowed you to put out Arborea, and then you just waited until you had a good enough hand to do something. And there was no common way to get rid of Arborea. There's literally no card in common. There's Boomerang. You could Boomerang it,

but they could just play it the next turn. There is no destroy target enchantment card in common. There's Boomerang. You could Boomerang it, but they could just play it the next turn. There is no Destroy Target Enchantment card in common. There were other Enchant Worlds. I don't think there was anything in common in Enchant Worlds. And the only card that actually, I think, destroyed Enchantments was at Rare. So, like, it just... I put out Arborea.

There were so few answers you had to it. I mean, maybe you had an Enchant World. Once again, not in common, but maybe you had an Enchant World. Once again, not a common, but maybe you had another Enchant World. But anyway, so Ice Age was better than Legends, and Legends was horrible. Ice Age was merely really, really bad.

Homelands was not particularly designed for Limited, and because it was a small set, I think they just played Homelands. They might have mixed it in with the Core set. Anyway, it was a brand new set. Players were excited, nonetheless. But probably what I consider to be the thing that would most excite reporters,

we kept far away from reporters. And then upstairs, we had this kind of, I don't know, cocktail-y area where people could mull around and talk as if it was like a cocktail party. And then we had an area where we were gunslinging and it was kind of off to the side, because heaven forbid you see us playing magic. And then there was the haunted house, which was its own separate, you know,

dark area. Like, why the press would want to walk... Anyway. So it turns out we spent a lot of money on it and it was a giant, giant failure. We barely got any press. It didn't do the job. I mean, we really, I think we mucked up the pre-release.

Like, it wasn't even as clean as we wanted, and because we sort of stuck it off somewhere, it didn't have the room it needed. Like, it's kind of crazy that we literally, on the top floor, had all the space for people to mull around, and nobody was there, and then down below, where we had players playing, there wasn't enough stuff for the players to play with

because we crammed them in a separate area. So anyway, like I said, it was called the Gathering 1 because, or I mean, it was just called the Gathering because there was a 1 on it. Like, and then we had the other, the next The Gathering. I actually have a t-shirt.

In fact, it is funny because when I wear the t-shirt, people are like, what is that from? Is that from a set? No, it is not. What is that from? It's from an event. And whenever I say it's The Gathering, people always go, I have no idea what you're talking about. So now, faithful listeners, you guys know what The Gathering is. It was the pre-release for Homelands.

you guys know what the gathering is. It was the pre-release for Homelands. And like I said, one of the offshoots of this is, I think a lot of the mistakes I'm talking about, a lot of the sort of disrespect for players and the unwillingness to sort of show the game and not understanding the importance of the players in the pre-release. Like, it's funny how, like, we got there. Wizards took a while.

And I think what happened was, early on, one of the things that R&D really pushed as a philosophy is we need to have more people that understand magic, that it's good for the company to have magic players. And early on, that was considered a... Like, they understood that R&D had to be magic players because we had to make the game.

So at least they were willing to put Magic players in R&D because they figured, well, people who made the game at least had to know how to play it. But I think with time, really Wizards has slowly adopted the idea that it's important to have people that understand Magic. Like you go to the brand team now, and the brand team is made up of people that are Magic players. You know, like Elaine Chase, for example, who A A, was once an R&D, and B, like, played at the first Pro Tour. Elaine's a long-time magic player, you know, and she's in charge of the brand, and she knows magic. She's played magic.

You know, and we go to our marketing people, and we go to other people in the company, like, they're magic players. I mean, not every single person, but even the people that didn't come to the company playing magic, at least, are encouraged to play magic, encouraged to learn Magic. Like, our pre-releases, we keep breaking records for how many employees show up at our

pre-releases. Because people, like, there really is this idea that, hey, you want to make Magic awesome? You should play Magic. Which is just light years different than early Magic, early Wizards, for example. So, but anyway, so next time someone says to you, what is The Gathering? You can say, oh,

do you mean the October 1995 event featuring the pre-release for Homelands? Yes, I know that. Okay, guys, I'm now driving up to my daughter's school. So we all know what that means. It means this is the end of my drive

to work. Or actually, the end of my recording. At some point, by the way, during the summer, I'll be back to just driving to work. But anyway, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I will see you guys next time. And I hope you enjoyed the peek into the minutiae of magic history. Talk to you guys next time.