Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #346 - History of Limited

Episode Date: July 8, 2016

Mark looks back at the early days of Limited and how it evolved.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. Okay, so today, recently Brian David Marshall, recently for me that is, Brian David Marshall wrote an article where he interviewed a lot of old pros about the beginning of limited. And I thought that was a fascinating topic and so I'm stealing it from my podcast. So this is sort of a companion piece if you've read that article. I'm going to give you sort of

limited from the perspective of wizards, of R&D, of people behind the scenes and sort of talk about a lot of the events that that article covered but from my perspective and R&D's perspective. Okay, so first we go the way back machine to 19, I don't know, 91, 92. So the question is, when did Limited first start?

And the answer is, it started before the game was released. So it turns out that the playtester, among the playtesters, was Bill Rose, who is our current VP of R&D. Bill and I have worked together for 20 years. He and I were hired the same month, back in October of 1995. And we worked a long time together. In our name, we still work together. And so Bill and I had some interesting chats about, I was trying to figure out the origin to drafts. Where did drafting begin?

And it turns out that I think Bill is responsible. So if you go back to the playtesting, once again, this is before the set came out. What Richard had done, Richard Garfield, the creator of the game, is he had given people sort of booster packs of cards. So people didn't have access to all the cards. They had access to booster packs. And he wanted to match the environment where people had

limited access to cards and had to build decks from what they had and had to trade and stuff. But anyway, obviously the playtesters were gamers, clearly. So they were interested in figuring out other ways to make it matter. So one of the things that they did was, Bill was a big fan of Stratomatic Baseball. So

for those that don't know, Stratomatic Baseball is a thing where you take actual baseball statistics, and you play a game of baseball, but what you do is you plug in real baseball stats, real people. So my team will be actual baseball players, current baseball players, or historical baseball players, whatever, but I'm using real stats in order to play the game. So how well a player can do is dependent upon how well that player did, statistically speaking. And one of the ways they used to play

stratospheric baseball is they would do a draft in which they'd take all the players, and I don't know whether it was always all current players or maybe historical players, but they'd have a pool of people that you could, you know,

baseball players that you could draft from, and they would draft them. So when they were trying to figure out fun things to do with Magic cards, they came up with the idea one day of doing a draft. And so what they did is they took whatever cards they had available to them, and they laid them out. And then what they did is they then drafted them. They just sort of took turns taking them. And that was the very first draft. So imagine if you guys know what Rochester Draft is. So when we first started the Pro Tour, well, back then they came up with what they call Rochester Draft. I'll get to the Pro Tour in a

sec. So what Rochester Draft is, is you have a pack, you open it up. There are 15 cards in the pack, although back in the day you weren't always guaranteed to have a basic land. Now one of them is always a basic land. And what happens is you lay the cards out, and then the first player takes one of the cards. And then the second player takes one. And then you go all the way to the eighth player. But then the eighth player takes another card. And then the seventh player, then the sixth, and the fifth, and the fourth, the third.

So the idea essentially is when you do a Rochester draft, sort of you are doing what they call a snake, you know, you go one through eight, then back down, eight getting a double take. And then the idea is that the next person, you know, the next pack is opened by the next person, so you, the next pack is opened by the next person. So you keep rotating who begins. And you do this until everybody's drafted three packs. I'm sorry, until everybody has opened up three packs. So there's 45 packs open total.

So you either draft one or two cards depending on where you're sitting for each, whenever a particular booster pack is opened up. So Rochester was the very first drafting that happened. But in general, R&D really liked drafting and limited stuff. In fact, when I first got there, so I got there in 95, and even actually before, even when I was freelancing, I used to go up to Wizards when I was freelancing Richard in particular loved coming up with draft formats Richard just loved

making draft formats and you know all the time he's like oh try this format try this format and Richard would just invent draft formats and so

one of the things is R&D really enjoyed doing drafts I mean limited play was always a thing sealed play we just opened up packs

and people like when Magic first came out mostly play was always a thing. Sealed play, we just opened up packs. Like, when Magic first came out, mostly Magic was a constructed thing. That's what people did. But people would play sealed. You know, that was the one way people would play, is they'd open up packs and play with what they got.

If you remember, or I don't know if you do or don't remember, when Magic first came out, there were boosters, which were 15-card boosters, and there's something called a starter deck that had 60 cards, I think 22 land, I want to say, maybe 24, but somewhere between 22 and 24 land, and it had two rares, and it had, I don't know, 13 in common, something like that. The idea was it had all five colors, and you could just play it out of the box. I mean, it was a five color deck, so it was slow. It wasn't very concentrated, but you could

just play, you could open up and play with it. And the idea of a starter is it's a product that you could just begin with right away. And so what happened was early Magic, that was common to have like, you would just come and get a starter, and you would play with your starter. Then in L.A., we started doing something we called, what do we call it, Grandmasters,

where you would open up a starter, so 60 cards, you would play against somebody, and then the winner of the match would get the loser's cards. And then you would take the cards, and would build a new 60-card deck. First, the 60-card deck was the cards you owned. But then you build the 60-card deck between the two cards you had.

So you had 120 cards, half of which you had to use. And what happened, and then each time you won, you'd get the loser's cards. And so usually we would play with 16 or 32 people. Every once in a while, 64 if there were enough people and the idea was the deck started getting really good as you started getting more cards but in early Magic, so when I first came to

Wizard, so I got involved obviously during Alpha and I played with Magic and there was Sealed and there was Grandmasters and there were a bunch of different ways to play where essentially you just opened up stuff and played. But drafting was not something I had experienced until I got to Wizards.

And drafting was something that Wizards, the R&D was really into. And so one of the things they wanted to do was they were trying to figure out how to introduce drafting to more people. They really thought if more players were aware of it, that they would enjoy it. And so one of the interesting stories from our side, from the R&D side of it, is

trying to figure out how to get people to draft. Now the interesting thing is, I mean, drafting now is really, really popular, but at the beginning, limited was not super popular. Mostly people associated limited with sealed, and sealed, there's a lot of randomness in sealed. So people saw limited play as being really random. But what we decided was, okay, well, we needed to use some high-profile tournaments to get people to play. So the first time that I remember people playing limited at all in a tournament setting is in 95 Nationals. So that was the Nationals in Philadelphia. It's the one that Mark Justice defeated Henry Stern in the finals. It was, I've had podcasts talking about that.

But, and one of the things I remember, real quickly, for those that might not have heard of that podcast, what happened was the players got together, and in the player meeting, they were walking through the formats they were going to play and one of the formats was sealed and the players really did not want to play sealed because they saw it as too much luck they saw it as you know the constructor was skilled and sealed was just luck um and the meeting uh this is a the meeting went on for three hours there was a player meeting that went on for three hours which shouldn't happen but anyway in the end the decision was well we'll Seal, but we'll give you a lot more cards.

And so I forget how many cards they opened, but the idea was they'd just give you more cards. Interestingly, I'm not sure if that really helped Varian's or not, but at least it made sure that nobody got a horrible deck. I think it meant that certain players got a crazy good deck, but at least no one had an unplayable deck. I think it meant that certain players got a crazy good deck, but at least everybody had, no one had an unplayable deck. Then at 95 Worlds, which was in Seattle that year, we again

did a sealed portion, and what we did is we gave away a huge amount of cards. You just had a lot of cards. In fact, I joked it was almost a casual constructed. Like, we gave you enough cards that the average Magic player playing at home, this is the kind of access to cards they had. And there was a lot of

really strong decks. I mean, I think when I did my podcast on 95 Worlds, I talked about Ivan Karina's deck, where he had a Closet of Society and Still Energy and Channel. So basically, on turn two, he was able to play a 9-9

and then use another card to both allow it to attack immediately and override the, you know, it was a 9-9 that you had to pay like, I don't know, 9 life or something to untap it. And then still energy lets you untap it for free. So it's sort of like he was able to get out this giant creature really quick and then override any negative to it with for free. So it's sort of like he was able to get out this giant creature really quick

and then overwrite any negative to it with three cards. So it was pretty cool. But it was symptomatic of they were really powerful decks because we gave them so much cards. Okay, but we didn't do draft. That's still just doing seal play. That's not draft. So let's talk about the very first draft.

So one of the things that... The very first protour obviously one of the things that, the very first Pro Tour obviously was constructed. I've talked about that. But the second Pro Tour, which was in Los Angeles, on the boat, once again,

I've hit a lot upon these in different podcasts. I talked about, I think it's called Tales from the Boats, one of my podcasts. I do talk about this first one, but I'm going to talk

a little bit more about our take on how to get people to play Limited. Okay, so, at the very first Pro Tour of Los Angeles, it was our first ever limited Pro Tour. So the way Pro Tours used to work back in the day was we would alternate between having constructed Pro Tours and limited Pro Tours.

And then the limited Pro Tours, we would alternate between two formats, mostly is Rochester Draft, which is what I explained, and Booster Draft, which I assume most of you know, where you open up a booster ticket card and pass the booster. It's interesting, by the way, Booster Draft got created because we considered Rochester Draft to be the better draft. It just, you know, it was more skill testing, we felt, and just, you know, led to better gameplay. And we ended up making Booster Draft more as a sort of another way to play. One of the things we found was Rochester Draft just took a while to do.

And so we wanted a draft format that if people didn't have, you know, the time or space to do Rochester, it was kind of a more, you know, a more, I don't know, a more easily manageable format. And at the time, we really thought that Rochester was going to be the thing. We thought Booster Draft was just kind of like, well, something that the stores would do more often just because it was a little easier to do. What we ended up finding was that Rochester really didn't take off. And it's funny. I mean, Booster Draft, yes, was easier to do and quicker, but it actually had a few other bonuses that we didn't at the time realize. So one of the biggest was in Rochester, you lay out your cards. So if you make a mistake, if you take the wrong

card, it's on public display. Everybody's watching what you're doing. So the first problem was it just, it was really hard for someone who was a beginner to play. Or not even just a beginner, just not an expert to play. Because it just made you very self-conscious. Because if you made a bad choice, if there was a correct thing to do, and you didn't do it, everybody saw it. You know, in booster draft, if you have a really good card, and you don't realize it's a really good card and take a less good card, you know, maybe the guy next to you realizes you didn't take the good card. Who knows? Maybe you took another good card. take a less good card, you know, maybe the guy next to you realizes you didn't take the good card, although who knows, maybe you took another good card, you know, they don't know.

But in Rochester Draft, they're rarely aware. So Rochester Draft is a little too open, and it just, one of the things we have to think a lot about, and this is one of the reasons why I think computer versions of the game teach really well, is there is, there's an ego factor when you're learning to play a game or learning a format or whatever which is you don't want to feel dumb people don't like to feel dumb and when you have to do something and other people are watching you it just makes you feel self-conscious but the nice thing about like boosher draft is i'm doing it and nobody's watching me or when you're playing you know magic duels or online,

like if I'm playing against the AI, like the computer's not going to judge me. If I make a mistake, whatever, you know, I can take my time. And what we've learned is people do get very self-conscious when they're learning things. And that you have to be aware of that. That you have to be aware of that. You don't want your player to sort of feel judged. Because whenever you're starting

to play something... Hold on a second. I'm going to take a sip of water here. Whenever you start playing something, most people understand that they don't know things. You know what I'm saying? Most people don't walk in and go, I know exactly what I'm doing. You know you don't know. You're self-conscious about it. especially when you're playing with better people. The last thing you want to do, and here's a tip,

by the way, if you're ever playing with less experienced players. If they make a poor choice, a lot of times there's a tendency to want to go, what were you doing? And what you might not realize is there are decisions that are clear as you get better that aren't clear before. And that, you know, the attitude is sort of, you know, you're a dummy because you didn't do the right thing. No, the point is they might not know that, you know, that you have to be careful not to, like, if you're trying to encourage newer players, or just players that are newer to whatever format you're trying to play, you have to be careful how you're critical.

Because if you really sort of are too condescending, it just drives them away from wanting to play. And that's a very careful thing with new players is don't assume they know things. There's things that you didn't know when you started players is don't assume they know things. There's things that you didn't know when you started that they don't know. And the attitude sometimes of what are you doing, you know, it's really off-putting. So you have to be careful that if you're trying to nurture new people playing, don't assume they know things and don't somehow

like belittle them for not knowing them when they might not know them just because, look, you probably didn't know them at one point either. It's much better, for example, if you see them do something, say to them, hey, I noticed you did such. Here's something that you might not know but it can help you. It's not as in you're a dummy.

It's more like, I understand you don't understand. Let me help you learn. Be a positive teaching moment and not a negative sort of shaming moment. So just in general. I mean, don't shame people in general. But as a thing when you're teaching people, be careful to be constructive and not shaming when you're trying to teach people and they're doing something wrong. All right.

Good life lesson, basically. Okay. lesson, basically. Okay, so the other thing that really made Booster Draft take off I think was that, I mean, it takes less time. It just takes less space. But also

there was a lot of... One of the fun things was in Project Draft, there's so much information and you feel obligated to learn all the information. This is another important thing in design, which is you have to be careful how much open information you give your players, because the players feel obligated to know the open information, even though a lot of times they're not going to be able to.

And Rochester Draft, like, you knew what every single person took, you know, and you knew who you were going to draft first. So, like, you know, really good Rochester drafters are like, okay, I'm playing against the person opposite me. They're starting to go down this path. Well, I better shift what I'm drafting to adapt to what they're playing. And that's great if you're a really good player, but you know, a less experienced player like can barely remember what they took, let alone what seven other people took. And what happened was with Rochester draft, you felt obligated to learn that information because some people would, and then you just felt bad about yourself when you couldn't

absorb that much information. And in general, the nice thing about Booster Draft is there's actually a lot of information you could learn, but a lot of it's more hidden. For example, it takes a while when Booster Drafting to understand what we call reading signals. That, you know, when you first start drafting, it's just like, what's the best thing in this pack? You're not worried about what, you're not thinking beyond the pack. But as you get better, you start going, oh, I know the person to my right or left,

depending on which way, you know, which pack it is, passed it to me. I know they took something. Oh, well, let me look and see what's missing. For example, you can start telling what colors got drafted before you because those colors appear less in the pack. And if you see cards that are very strong, that sort of says, oh, they're not in that card. They would have taken this card.

For example, if you get past the pack and there's a really strong blue card, if it's the second, if someone just passed you, it means the guy to your right didn't take blue. But if it's like the fourth pass, the three guys to your right might not be taking blue if there's a really good blue card. So one of the things is you learn to read signals, but that's not something that's apparent right away. And that one of the things is you, I talk about lenticular design, about how you want to make cards that the deepness of the strategy is kind of hidden from less experienced players.

That is true, not just in card design, but in format design. And what ended up happening with Booster Draft is it has a lot of lenticular qualities in that there's a lot of depth to it, but the depth is not so apparent at first. When you first start Booster Drafting, you can just focus on what is the best card in this pack and not worry about anything beyond that. But as you get better, there's a lot more information from that pack that you can glean, that you can share, you can learn. And so Booster Draft has a much better curve of learning in that

as you're ready to learn more, more stuff become available to you. But it's a little bit hidden, which is important. It's why lenticular design is important is you don't want players having to face things they're not ready to face. It just makes things easier for them. And Booster Draft is a format that's just much more lenticular than Rochester Draft. You know, Rochester Draft, I mean, there are things you don't realize in Rochester Draft. It's not like there's not some lenticularness to Rochester Draft, but it's less. That there's more information you feel you have to track in Rochester. You know, there's more, it's just, there's more, it's more daunting to you.

So anyway, Booster Draft took off, but anyway, let's get back to the Pro Tour. Okay, so we're at PT2 in Los Angeles. So the plan is we want to get more, we want drafting to start happening. So we said, okay, so day one was going to be sealed. Day two was draft, and then the finals was draft. I forget why we didn't do... Do we do drafting on day one? Maybe we did do drafting on day one.

I know we cut to 64. I don't remember whether it was sealed or drafted on day one. My memory says it was sealed on day one and drafted on day two. But I'm not 100%. Maybe we drafted on day one. I do know... Maybe we did draft on day one and drafted on day two, but I'm not 100%. Maybe we drafted on day one. I do know, maybe we did draft on day one. Anyway, the important part of the story is that we had started to encourage people to run limited events. And we had a lot of control in America because we ran most of those events. And so, you know, we were starting to run more limited events. But other parts, especially Europe, was very hesitant to run.

In fact, Europe did not like to run limited events. They really associated limited with being luck, and they're like, we want to do skilled things, we're going to construct it, and they really weren't at the time playing limited formats. And the way we sort of realized that is when PT2 happened, PTLA, the first one, we watched the limited play happen.

And on the first day, we cut to 64. I don't know how many people were there, a couple hundred, 200, something, maybe. The pro tours were a little smaller back then. So what happened was, my memory is, my numbers might be slightly off, but it was something like 61 Americans, two Japanese, and one European, something like that. Like a tiny, tiny percentage was European. And what we found was the Americans were much more used to playing limited, just because we've been pushing it, and the Europeans were not.

And the very first Pro Tour, the Europeans did not do really well, but the Americans did much, much better. Now, part of it was, I think, the early days of the Pro Tour, the Americans was particularly strong just because they'd been playing Magic longer, and at that point, you know, longer actually meant something. Because, you know,

Magic had only been playing for a couple years. But anyway, I think what happened is that the first Pro Tour really sort of cemented in people's minds, oh, maybe there's more skill here than I realized. And that first pro tour went a long way of making people realize. One of the interesting things about that first pro tour, by the way, was R&D liked to draft. So we actually were much more familiar with drafting. And it was probably one of the few points in time where the average skill level

of R&D at drafting was higher than the average level of the pro tour drafter. And so I remember watching drafts in this pretty sure it was Rochester, watching people draft and saying, wow, they are, what are they doing? Right now, if I go to a Pro Tour and I watch people draft, it's, like, way over my head. I'm like, I have some idea what's going on. I'm not going to draft.

But, I mean, I'm not, you know, they're drafting to a level beyond me. But that first Pro Tour, you know, it's like, it's very funny. There's not a lot of times where I actually know a topic better than the pros as far as, you know, play skill. But I remember watching a lot of the drafting, and it was just, as I talked about in the article that BDM did, of early drafting, it just really took them a time to understand what drafting meant, how to draft. Like, one of the early strategies when they first started drafting was, just take the cards you recognize as good, because in constructed magic, you know they're good cards.

And they were taking, like, big things, and magic you know they're good cards um and they were taking like big things and you know they they weren't they weren't they didn't understand at the time that what might be good and constructed might not overlap what's good and limited and so they're like okay i'll take the shivan dragon i'll take the the things that i know are you know can be daunting once i get them in play and what happened was the strategy um b Hacker talked about this, Brian Hacker and John Yoo and Tarek Bouy, they're out of California, and they really were the ones that started thinking about, okay, how do you maximize the draft? And they really went down the path of the idea of beatdown, of a curve, of I'm just going to draft one and two and three drops.

And a lot of people were laughing because the cards they were drafting from a constructive standpoint were junky cards. But they were like, no, no, you don't get it. You know, look, you have a six drop. Well, if I beat you before you get to six land, I don't care about your six drop. And they really, it was the early days of sort of understanding how to draft an aggressive draft. And it's funny as you look back,

I've just, you know, there were very good players that understood constructed magic, but limited was such an oddball thing that it took a while for them to understand. Okay, so the next event was, okay, so there was New York that was constructed, then there was LA that was limited, then there was Columbus that was constructed, then there was Worlds, and Worlds had a limited part. I think we did a draft at Worlds that year. But it was just a component of larger stuff going on. The next real limited

event was in Atlanta. So Atlanta, we did something pretty cool. Something we don't really do anymore, which was we had a pre-release Pro Tour. So what happened was Mirage was coming out. Now this is back in the, it's before the website really. This is where there weren't really previews in the sense, like now, before you go to a pre-release, you know all the cards. You know, when you go to a pre-release

you are, you're familiar usually, if you care to be familiar with what all the cards are. But what happened was the Pro sat down, they opened up Mirage Booster Packs, and they had what all the cards are. But what happened was the pros sat down, they opened up Mirage Booster Packs, and they had never seen the cards before. So what we did was, it was limited,

it wasn't draft. I guess we felt drafting would be too hard if you've never seen any of the cards. So it turned out this Pro Tour was day one. Well, this was an interesting Pro Tour also. One of the days was a team event. It was a five-person team event in which the Pacific Coast legends, I think it was Henry Stern, Mark Justice, Scott Johns, Mario Rubina, and I think Frank

Gilson was the fifth? Mark, oh no, Mark Chalice, it wasn't Frank, it was Mark. Well, it was Mark Chalice and it was either Mario Mark Chalice. It wasn't Frank. It was Mark. Well, it was Mark Chalice and it was either Mario or Frank. I forget which was the fifth. For sure it was Mark Chalice because that story will come up in a sec.

But anyway, they ended up playing. It was a Canadian team. It was like Terry Boer, Paul McCabe, Gary Wise, Gary Krakauer, and Matt Viano, I think.

Those are all guys from Toronto, so the Toronto team. But anyway, the Pro Tour event, the not-team event, was nine rounds in one day, sealed, limited, sealed,

and then cut to top eight and they got a new pool of cards. And so what happened was, the players, it was very interesting, because the players had never played the format before. So one of my favorite memories was, so the format before Mirage was Ice Age. And for those that have never played Ice Age, Limited, Ice Age was not designed with Limited in mind. Mirage was the first time that we developed a set

really thinking about limited. And that we spent a lot of time actually, you know, making sure that, I mean, once again, Mirage is the Model T, if you will, of limited formats in the sense that when you look back at it, it seems kind of old and quaint and, you know. But in the time, it was the first one. It really was designed

for limited play. Because Ice Age, like, one of the Ice Age's problems was there weren't a lot of creatures, so you could open up packs and, like, you could open up your packs and get, like, five creatures in four different colors, you know. You could really get distributions that were weird. And

the East Coast playtesters, the people that made Ice Age and Alliances and Antiquities and Fallen Empires, really were not fans of flying. In fact, Fallen Empires, the stuff that they made, had two cards in it

that even referenced flying. There was Enchantment that could grant you flying temporarily and kill the creature. And there was a blue card that could activate to get, you know, flying to the end of turn. And there was a blue card that could activate to get flying until end of turn. And that was it.

So anyway, there was more flying in the United States, but not a lot. So when people opened up Mirage, there were just a lot more creatures. We actually balanced it because we wanted to make sure you could play in Limited, so there were a lot more creatures. And there were a lot of flying creatures. Flying was very common.

Part of limited was you needed to have evasion, so we made sure there was plenty of flying. So people opened up their packs, and they were walking around before the first round, and people were like, my deck is so good. My deck is great. I have so many creatures and so many flyers. And everyone was bragging about how awesome their deck was. And the people weren't like, okay, guys, you're used to the Ice Age environment. This is Mirage. Yeah, it's not the same.

People weren't really used to the idea yet. Ice Age is probably the first Limited most of them had ever, ever played. And so it's sort of like, oh, wow, this is just so different. But the idea that Limited would just radically change, that what you have to do in each limited environment would change from limited environment to limited environment

that was kind of a new concept at the time but anyway a lot of people, the funny the guy who won PT Atlanta a guy named Frank Adler, who's German and probably of people who've won pro tours over the years Frank's on the lower end of the spectrum, not that he

wasn't a good player, but, you know, he was one of the Pro Tour champions in the early days that people felt was, you know, like he never top-aided another Pro Tour, for example. That most people who won a Pro Tour would go on to top-aid at least another Pro Tour.

And so a lot of people thought of that format as being, once again, kind of random. And I will admit, you know, like, there's a lot of good red in that format. So opening good red was important. But if you actually look at the top eight, the top eight is like Darwin Castle, Mike Long, Terry Boer, Chris Pakula, Matt Vienu. People who were, like, good, you know, were actually strong Magic players. It was not a list of random people. Anyway, real quick story, just because we're at PT Atlanta. So, for those that don't know, I've never talked about the greatest mistake ever made in a Pro Tour,

as far as I'm concerned. Although, there's a lot to compete with this. made in a pro tour as far as I'm concerned. Although there's a lot to compete with this. So Terry Boer was playing Mark Chalice in the team event on the first day. And Mark Chalice did a trick at the time. The judges will not allow this trick anymore. This was in the early days where there was stuff that we later said, hey, unsupportive conduct. There was a trick you used to do where you would ask your opponent if they had any fast effects.

What you were doing was you were trying to make them give up their window of priority. And so the idea was you would ask them that. If they said no, then, you know, it allowed— basically, if you were doing it correctly, if you asked them and they said no, you could just, no one could do anything if you priority didn't initiate anything. But the key was you had to do it at the right time. You had to understand, you know,

who had priority and such. So anyway, Mark Chalice uses this trick on Terry Boer. I don't know how effectively, effectively enough that it stuck in Terry's brain. And this happened during, I don't know if it was in the finals of the team event, but it might have been during the Swiss when the two teams met, but it was when Mark Chalice played Terry Boer, who were on the two teams that made it to the finals.

Might have even happened in the finals, I don't remember. Okay, so what happens is Terry Boer is playing Darwin Castle. I don't remember whether it's the quarters or the semis, but he's playing Darwin Castle. And Terry is attacking. In his hand, he has the winning card. I don't know my exact specifics, but I have a creature that my opponent can't block, that if I enhance it, I can win the game. But he was trying to be smart.

I think Terry was trying to trick Darwin on not being able to do something. But anyway, he tries this trick that Chalice had played on him, saying, do you have any fast effects? Except Terry didn't understand priority. So what had happened was, he says to Darwin, do you have any fast effects?

Darwin goes, no, I don't. Terry then goes to play the spell on his creature in order to enhance it to win the game. And Tom Wiley, the head judge, goes, no, I don't. Terry then goes to play the spell on his creature in order to enhance it to win the game, and Tom Wiley, the head judge, goes no, no, no. Because you asked and he gave up, you've ceded priority. Since Darwin didn't do anything, we now move

on. You've missed your window. And so because of that, Terry wasn't able to play the spell. He wasn't able to win that turn. Darwin was able to come back. Darwin won the game that Terry would have won and ended up winning the match. Now, what I say is one of the greatest mistakes ever is Terry Boer had won a pro tour earlier in the year. If he had won this match, I don't remember whether he would have gone to the semis or the finals. But anyway, he would have advanced.

I don't remember whether he would have gone to the semis or the finals. But anyway, he would have advanced. That would have given him enough pro points that instead of Paul McCabe being the second ever pro player of the year, Terry Boer would have been the pro player of the year. So pro player of the year, not something we currently do, but for a long time, you could... Do we still do player of the year? No, I guess we do. We do. We do.

We do still do Player of the Year? No, I guess we do. We do. We do still do Player of the Year. Anyway, whoever had the most pro points at the end of the season was the Pro Player of the Year. And anyway, this is the second ever. The first ever was Ularade. So Terry Moore could have been the second ever Pro Player of the Year. And he might have gone on to win the event. You know, I mean, he made a mistake of his own doing. And to me, a particularly egregious mistake

because, like, it was completely, he could have just done nothing and been fine. That he was trying to mess with his opponent. He was trying to do something he had learned, misunderstood how it was applied, did it wrong, and it cost him, cost him big time. So anyway, it wrong, and it cost him.

It cost him big time. So anyway, Pro Tour Atlanta was a... It was very interesting. I think players were a little grumbly because it was... There was some randomness to Sealed. But it definitely set the tone. So the next one was, I think, in Pro Tour Mites was

the next one, where we did Raw Shifter. Am I skipping a booster? Oh, I might be skipping a booster draft. Anyway, maybe next LA was the booster draft. Dallas was standard. And then I guess next LA, I guess LA a year later. No, LA a year later was Dave Price, right? Anyway, I guess the real story here is we started introducing Limited at Pro Tours, and it really caught on. The funny thing is, when the early days of the Pro Tours,

after the Pro Tour was done, the players would then play more Magic for fun. And they used to play constructed decks. But once we introduced Limited, that just became the things players did. The funny thing now is, after hours, Limited is what the pros tend did. Like, the funny thing now is, after hours, like,

Limited is what the pros tend to play. And I think what happened is, it's funny, early on, the perception of Limited was it was the luck-based format.

The Constructed, that's where the skill was, and that Limited was just luck-based. And what has happened, especially with drafting, is players have realized that how much skill

there is in drafting. That understanding, and one of the neat things about drafting also is there's just huge variety. You know, when you play Constructed, you know, you're just playing the same deck again and again, and you're playing against a lot of the same deck.

So there's a lot of repetition of the play, and there's a lot of nuance, and it's not that there's not a lot of fun in Constructed. But I think Limited Play, you know, has just more variance to it in the sense of more different things will happen. And it's very skill testing. Drafting and drafting well is very complex. There's a lot to learn.

You know, drafting is very lenticular in the sense that, you know, just when you think you've learned everything there is to learn about drafting, there's more things to learn about drafting. And not even the draft itself, but also the limited play. And so it's become a huge thing. But it's funny because when I look back, in the early days we were pushing so hard to get people to play. And I think at Heart of Hearts R&D knew it was awesome. We knew it was fun. And it was just sort of getting people past the prejudice of what they thought about it

and get them to actually experience it. If you actually look at the history of what they thought about it and get them to actually experience it. If you actually look at the history of magic, there's a lot of, whenever we introduce something new, there's always resistance, just because you're used to the things you're used to, and you're not used to that new thing. And when we introduce standard or introduce new rules, I'm sorry, 16 rules,

whenever we introduce something new, that later goes on to be generally accepted new rules, M60, I'm sorry, 6th edition rules. Whenever we introduce something new that later goes on to be sort of generally accepted as being a really good thing, it takes a while for people to sort of adapt to it. We understand that. And Limited went through the same thing.

There really was resistance early on. I mean, Limited now is hugely popular and there's a lot of people it's their favorite way to play Magic, but that wasn't always the case. And so sort of today, talking about the history of limited magic is once upon a time

there wasn't much limited played and when it was introduced, it took a while for people to warm up to it. They really did and now like I said it's super popular. It's a very fun way to play, but that wasn't always the case. So anyway, I am now

at my daughter's school, so we all know what that means. We mean 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.