Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #348 - Two-Block Model

Episode Date: July 15, 2016

Mark talks about how the two-block model came to be.

I'm playing on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today I'm going to talk about the history of the two-block model. So, as far as you guys are concerned, relatively recently, we changed over to a new system where instead of having three sets in a block, we have two sets. having three sets in a block, we have two sets. You know, for a long, long time, for many, many years, we had a large set in the fall, and then a small set in the winter, and a small set in the spring. Every once in a while, we would change to a large set in the spring. But starting with Battle for Zendikar, we have one large set in the fall, a small set in the winter, then a large set in the spring, which is a brand new, you know, brand new block, and then a small set in the winter, then a large set in the spring, which is a brand new, you know, brand new block, and then a small set in the summer.

So anyway, I'm going to talk about sort of kind of how we got there and what led us to the current two block model. So that is today's topic, all about the history of one of the biggest decisions we've ever made about the game. Okay, so where do we start? This story actually starts all the way back in Ravnica. we've ever made about the game. Okay, so where do we start? This story actually starts all the way back in Ravnica. So what happens was we had made Ravnica.

We had made the three sets, made Ravnica and Guild Pack and Descension. And then we originally weren't going to do anything for that summer. At the time, every other summer we made a core set. But this was a summer where we didn't have a core set. And so there was big discussions about whether or not we should have another set. And the decision came down, actually kind of late, that yeah, we were going to.

And we had a lot of discussion about what it should be. It ended up being Cold Snap, which was the, in quotes, lost set. We had never had a third set for Ice Age. And all the other blocks had three sets. And so we had this gimmicky, we found this lost set in a file cabinet, which too many people believed was true. Because we had Randy do it, who, if only I had done it, people might have get,

I was messing around. But anyway, we made cold snap. The important part of this is cold snap did very poorly. It didn't really do what we needed it to do. So I said to Bill, I said, Bill, if ever you want a fourth set, let me know. I can make it work. If I know ahead of time, I could make it organic to a block. And rather than just have a random thing in the middle of the summer,

let me know, I will find a way to make it organic. So a couple years later, for the Lorwyn block, Bill comes to me and says, okay, you promised me that if we wanted a four-set block, you could make that happen. I mean, I could. And so I was given the chance to make Lorwyn, or not a chance,

I needed to make Lorwyn a four-set block. And I was trying to figure out how to do that. And finally what I came up with was the idea of doing two mini blocks, of having Lorwyn be large and small, and then Shadowmoor, which was the dark version of Lorwyn, be another mini block that was large and small, and then Shadowmoor, which was the dark version of Lorwyn, be another mini block that was large, small. And the idea was that I felt like if you wanted to make the fourth set matter, you had to

make it an organic part of the whole process. And the reason I went for two mini blocks rather than try to do one giant four-set block was we already knew we had problems with the third set, which I'll get into in a little bit. The idea of getting a four-set and maintaining it all the way through, plus we weren't sure how to draft it when there was four sets. So I came up with the idea of two mini blocks. And rather than having one big block,

have two smaller blocks that were tied to each other. So the idea was we'd go to a world, it was bright and airy, and then something would happen to that world and it would turn dark and twisted. And the idea is the first set would be the bright world, which ended up being a lower wind and airy, and then something would happen to that world and it would turn dark and twisted. And the idea is the first set would be the bright world, which ended up being Lorwyn and Morningtide, and the second set would be the dark and twisted version, which would be Shadowmoor and Eventide.

And the idea was that they were going to be thematically linked together, like it was the same world, but the mechanics would be completely different. That Lorwyn would have one strategy and that Shadowmoor would have a different strategy. So this was a pretty radical idea at the time. I believe we had never done a large set outside of the fall before.

So I was A, proposing that we did a large set at a different time. And B, we were doing two set blocks. We had never done two set blocks before. So it was a pretty radical idea. But, you know, the powers that be understood that, like, if we wanted to do a four-set block, we needed to do something different. The large, small, large, small structure allowed us to, you know, make draft work, allowed us to sort of have a reset middle of the year.

So anyway, people signed on. And it was successful. I mean, it wasn't, I guess it could have been more successful, but it did work. And it did show that we were capable of making a large set at a time other than the fall set. So the lesson that we originally took out of that was, oh, the third set could be large at times, which is interesting. We didn't get, oh, blocks should be two. We didn't get that yet. We got third sets could be large,

is what we got out of that. So if you notice for a while, if you look at stuff like Rise of the Odrazi, Avacyn Restored, that we started saying, okay, every other year we started making a large third set. And originally the idea was to have that large set in its own world.

But we kept making it part of the same world with a twist to the world just because there wasn't the resources on the creative team to make two worlds a year. So anyway, let's flash forward. I think it was around

Theros that we were examining and we started realizing there were some inherent problems in the system. Now, be aware, Magic has done three set blocks since Mirage. Okay, since, like, pretty much since I began at the company. I mean, Mirage came out in 1996. And before that, we had Ice Age, which, for those who don't know, Ice Age and Alliances wasn't really made to be a block. The team that made Ice Age also made Alliances.

But Alliances was really meant to be its own set. It was only after the fact that we kind of thematically tied it together to say, oh, Alliances takes place in the same place that Ice Age takes place. Oh, it's Ice Age expansion. We did that after the fact. That was not the designer's intent that it was the same world. If you'll notice,

there really is very little mechanical overlap and the little that there is was put in by development. So Ice Age was only a block in the sense that we kind of forced the matter, but it wasn't organically a block.

It wasn't really until Mirage, and even with Mirage, interestingly, the people who designed Mirage, so Bill Rose, Charlie Cattino, Joel Mick, Don Felice, Elliot Siegel, Howard Kallenberg, they actually made a large set and a small set.

They made Mirage and Visions. Weatherlight kind of got done after the fact. Once again, it was set in the same world, but really Weatherlight started telling another whole story. It was the preamble to the Weatherlight saga. A story for another podcast. But anyway, and so we kind of got in this rhythm of, okay, every year

we had our own block. So the next year, we had Tempest. And Tempest was designed to be a full block, to go for large, small, small. And then we had done that for many, many years. You know, the fall would have a large set, winter small set, and summer small set. So one of the things that happened, so it's interesting to know as you look at the design involves in Magic, that I like to say that the scope keeps getting bigger. Then you go back to Alpha,

Richard was very, very focused on individual cards, just making every card sort of shine itself. Alpha's awesome, obviously. He made the whole game. But one of the weaknesses of Alpha was other than cycles and some pairings, there wasn't

a lot of relationships between the cards in the sense that there would be decisions made on one card and a different decision made on another card. There wasn't necessarily a larger sense of consistency. Now, to be fair, we were doing something we had never done before. I mean, Richard was biting off a lot to begin with, you know, and it's unfair. It's kind of unfair to look at modern cars and go, oh, that Model T. Like, look, it was amazing for the day.

It led the way to cars. But yes, there was room for improvement. And as we've worked on Magic, essentially what happens is as Magic has evolved, we've had a bigger and bigger scope. So my example is when Alpha first came out, it was very card-centric. It's very about make each card shine. And then by the time we got to Mirage, we started thinking about the block as a whole. You know, well, actually, originally, in between Alpha and Mirage,

they started thinking more about the set. You know, started thinking more of, we're going to have, like, Antiquities, for example, said, this set is about this theme. It's about artifacts. You know, Antiquities introduced the idea of there's a thematic tie to a set. Even Legends very much had this Dungeons & Dragons adventure party-ish sort of feel to it.

The Dark had a mood and tone to it. So we started seeing us design things that holistically held a set. Mirage had us start going, okay, we're going beyond sets now. We're going to start doing blocks. And our early block design was, okay, we're going to have two mechanics usually.

We're going to have flanking and phasing. And then all the set, all three sets are going to have flanking and phasing. We're going to have buyback and shadow. We're going to have echo and cycling. And those early sets would just take those two mechanics and run them all the way through. We'd evolve them. We would find ways to sort of, two mechanics and run them all the way through. We'd evolve them,

we would find ways to sort of, you know, tweak them as the block went along, but there definitely would be a feel, and usually we'd be in a singular world. Like Mirage took place on Jamora. Tempest took place on Wrath. Ice Age sort of jumped around.

And what happened was that eventually we got to Ravnica, where we started sort of pulling even farther, saying, okay, we're not just going to make three sets in the same place. We're going to think about how they all interconnect to each other. And Ravnica really was us saying, okay, we're going to do a guild structure. There's four, then three, then three.

And when you see the first set, it's telling you something about the second two sets. Although, actually, the first set, it's telling you something about the second two sets. Although, actually, the first set to ever do that, really, we sort of stumbled into it, I think, was Invasion, where we realized while we were doing Invasion that we could save the enemy color stuff, and so we did the ally color stuff in the first two sets

and saved the enemy color for the third set. Kind of backed into that, but that led the way to the idea of what Ravnica was, where we were doing true block model plans, where we were sort of designing the whole thing together. But one of the problems we kept running into was the third set. The third set was a problem child. It's a funny thing, because Apocalypse was the one time where it really worked, where

we had saved some special theme, and we did it, and really it had its own identity, and people liked it. But one of the problems we ran along the way was that we kept running to this problem where we'd get to the third set and like, oh, either we'd run out of what we were doing and we had to sort of come up with new twists for it or we had made some mistake along, for example, Fifth Dawn is a good example of a set where we made Mirrodin, we made Darksteel. We made some huge mistakes developmentally, and we figured that out by the time we got to Fifth Dawn. So Fifth Dawn design was like, okay, don't do A, B, or C because those are broken.

If you give any more cards A, B, or C, it'll be a problem. And you're like, but that was the theme. And we had to come up with this five-color theme that didn't really have support because we hadn't ahead of time. We didn't know we were going there. And so it was something in which it was a surprise to us because we didn't know we would back ourselves in that corner. And we did enough sets like that where we had this wild turn in the third set

that that kind of led to me trying to do more block planning but what i found was some of the times like ravnica we found some elegant solutions but it was always hard um and we normally found that the third set like we would try to save things for the third set so the third set had some identity of its own um but what would happen sometimes is either we would run out of the thing or the change would be enough of a change that it just felt really forced. Like, for example, Champions of Kamigawa, Saints of Kamigawa just does this really hard turn on mechanics. Like, it's about hand size all of a sudden. And, like, it's just a disconnect.

Or, you know, or you get to Scourge, and Scourge was about dragons, sort of, in a set that was about morph and tribal, you know. There definitely was a sort of, like, disconnected feeling of the third sets, and we tried for a long time to try to figure out how to make the third sets better. And a lot of what I was trying to do was do block planning so the third set had an identity. So anyway, we now get to Theros. Okay, so Theros, the idea was, okay, I wanted to save something for the third set. So what we did is I said, okay, we know the players are going to want some sort of enchantment matters thing. It's not something we can use for the whole block, but it's something I could save for the third set. And so, you know, Come the third set, we could

really make enchantments matter a little bit more. But in order to do that, we sort of pulled stuff off, and then we stranded stuff in the second set. Sometimes it's funny, we run out of stuff and the third set is dry, but then as we started trying to save stuff for the third set, we made the second set a little lighter than we meant.

And Born of the Gods had some issues. So we were trying to figure out how to solve this. Like, it really was a long, ongoing problem. And if you actually read my columns or my blog, it's a problem I was talking about for years. It was something that I was always trying to solve. Okay, meanwhile, we had

a completely different problem, another problem. So this problem was the core set. So when Magic first came out, we had, you know, Alpha, you know, it was, originally there was Limited Edition, and then Unlimited Edition, then Revised Edition, and then 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th. And we put the set out, and we sort of, it essentially kind of ran out of steam.

And so for Magic 2010, Aaron really thought about how to redo them. We embraced resonance. We started adding new cards. But what we found was the same thing was kind of happening. Like Aaron had breathed new life in the product, but as we evolved that system, it slowly had the same problem that the audience wasn't particularly interested in buying a core set. And we could do some stuff to sort of make them want to buy the core set, but really what they wanted was expansions,

not a core set. And we looked back and said, well, why do we have a core set? We said, well, the reason we kept giving it to ourselves was we wanted to have an entry level into the game. But what we found was the core set came out once a year and people joined the game all year long.

And so it became problematic for us to, like, kind of the rationale for the core set didn't make a lot of sense. You know, that it was meant to kind of be this entry-level thing, but everything we had done to watch how people entered the game said that, you know, if people happened to be at the right window, fine. Some people would enter through the core set. But if they weren't at that one window, they just didn't do it. That's not how it was done.

And so he said, you know what? Maybe we could figure out a way to make better use of this. There's a certain number of new cars we were making in the large set. Could we use those resources better? Okay, then we had a third problem. This was the story problem. So one of the things that we were very interested in is we want to tell a story in magic

I mean something we've done for a long time but we really wanted to up it we wanted to make it something that was more of a focal point but the problem we had is when you were telling a story in a block it was the pacing was really slow like we're going to tell you a story

for a year then we're going to tell you another story next year and we realized we needed to tell you another story next year. And we realized we needed to find some way to pick up the pace of the story. That if we wanted to tell a more involved story, that it needed to go a little bit faster. Okay, so you notice we had three different problems we were trying to solve. One was the third set problem, that the third set sort of ran out of steam. The way I described it was,

so whenever I, one of my game design truisms is make your game end before your audience wants it to. That you want the game to end with your audience still wanting more. You know, because if the game ends and the audience is like, ooh, I'm not quite done yet, then they're eager to play again. But if you end the game after they're already tired and want to quit, then it's like, eh, whatever, maybe I won't play that game again. That you want to end the game before your audience is done.

Like, you want to end before they want it to end. You want to leave them sort of a little hungry at the end of the game. The game was fun, but ooh, they want to play again. And I felt like what we were doing in the blocks was we weren't giving ourselves, we were overstaying our welcome. By the time we ended the block, people were tired of the block. And like, what if we ended the block before they got tired of the block?

What if we ended the block and went, ooh, I want a little bit more? And so we explored the idea, like, okay, well, maybe the idea of a three-set block is antiquated. But the problem was, how exactly do idea of a three-set block is antiquated. But the problem was how exactly do you make a two-set block? What do we do with that extra set? That was the problem. And we said, okay, well what if we did a large small, and then

we did just isolated large sets? Is that satisfying? Because one of the things we noticed is there always was this feeling in September, October of there's a new block, there's a new block, there's exciting, a new thing is coming. There's a really fun time of magic.

And we're like, can we recreate that? And once we started thinking about it, we're like, you know what? The core set isn't doing what we want and it's making new cards. We already have allocations of new cards. What if instead of that being a core set, it was a small set that was tied to,

so what if we made two blocks a year?, it was a small set that was tied to, so what if we made two blocks a year? And then also, by the way, which solves the third problem. So A, it meant no third block problem. There's no third block. You know, we would sort of get in, get out, and that we could do what we needed to do in the second set, and by the time the second set is done, hey, we're out of there, you know, and that players, we felt like, kind of wanted two and a half blocks, you know, the two and a half sets in their block. That they didn't, usually by the end of the second set they wanted a little bit more,

but they weren't quite done when we got, you know, third set wasn't enough, or it was too much. So the idea now is we go large to small set, and we end with a little bit of desire for more, which is good for what we want, and for the audience wants you to end it. And then if we got rid of the core set, we could have two blocks a year, and that would allow us to, you know, make the excitement of blocks and just up it. Now, there are a bunch of problems, but I'll get to that in a second. The other thing it did was, it just doubled the rate of our storytelling. If we had two blocks a year instead of one block a year, we were telling two stories

a year instead of one story a year. It just picked up the pace of what we were doing. And when you think about it, let's say we want to tell a story that takes place over even two years. If you want it over two blocks, let's say we want to tell a story that took place over two blocks. That would be two years under the old system, one year under the new system.

That's a very different animal. It allows us to have a much quicker story. Okay, so we found a solution that solved three of our big problems. Okay, third block's a problem, stop having a third set. Core set's a problem, stop having a core set. Story's too slow, speed up the pace, put out more blocks. Okay, but what did that mean? And the interesting thing, I think I talked about this in my article, is this wasn't something that all of us together came to.

It's something all of us independently came to. Like, I had an interesting chat with Aaron, where Aaron was sort of pitching ideas, and I jumped in like, oh, yeah, yeah, I've been thinking about this. And meanwhile, Eric Lauer and other people were having very similar thoughts, that every time someone new got looped in a situation, they're like, yes, I've already been thinking about this. Here's some ideas.

Like it wasn't, every time someone new got brought in, it wasn't like, let's get you up to speed. They're like, no, no, no. I've already been thinking about this. Here's my idea. And a lot of things came out of that.

So, but first, let me talk about the problems. Okay, so it's a neat idea. It said, okay, let's do large, small, large, small, two blocks a year, pick up the pace of the story. Sounds awesome. But problem number one,

our creative team already was making a world every year. That's a lot to make, a world every year. Like, for example, when the movie Avatar came out, one of the things that's interesting, Zendikar had come out, I don't know, six months prior to the movie Avatar coming out, and there were some similarities in how Pandora and Zendikar looked. I mean, a lot of differences too, but there were some similarities.

And one thing that was interesting is that, like, I went and read about how long they worked on Pandora, and the answer was five years. They worked on building that world for five years. You know, Zendikar was done in a year. That we were doing what other people were spending, you know, five times the amount of energy to do.

And we were asking those people to double their thing, double the productivity. Instead of having one world a year, let's have two worlds a year. So what that meant was, we needed to add resources. The reason that Avacyn Restored and Rise of the Drasi didn't actually take place in a brand new world was they didn't have the resources to build the second world.

So we said, okay, you want to do that? Let's up our resources. We need more people if we want to build that many worlds. So that was done. Okay, we'll build that up. Another thing that it said is, okay, what does it mean, you know, the next problem was if you, if standard instead of being, because standard was two years long, if standard was eight blocks,

or four blocks instead of two blocks, what that meant was, you know, core sets, for example, had new cards, but it didn't really have new mechanics. We tended to bring back one old mechanic. But a small set would have new mechanics. And what we realized is by having two blocks a year,

we were just upping the number of mechanics that we were going to make per year. There just was going to be more that got made. And so what that meant was standard was going to have more things in it. So standard was going to get more complicated. So at first blush, the answer was, okay, if we want Standard to stay the same complexity, that meant we had to lower the complexity in each set.

So one of the goals I had was, okay, can I find a way to do what we need to do, but lower complexity a little bit. But meanwhile, there was a separate problem that Eric had brought up, which was the audience was breaking sets too quickly. That they were, as the world had sort of learned how magic functioned, as the world got better and better at understanding magic and figuring out how to click, they were just solving magic environments faster. And so one thing Eric said is we needed to figure out a way to solve that problem. And so when I said, oh, well, my plan was to sort of, to solve my problem of complexity, I was going to lower the amount of complexity per set on average. And Eric's like, no, that's not going to solve our problem. In fact, that might make our

problem worse. And I'm like, okay, is there a different way for me not to have to lower the complexity per set? And he's like, yes. What if we change standard? He says, standard used to have two blocks in it. Right now we have four. Let's cut the difference. Let's go to three. Let's make it 18 months long with three blocks in it. So it'll have three blocks worth of mechanics, which is more mechanics than before,

but, or more blocks than before, which, I mean, obviously the third set would have a mechanic or something. But in the new system, when you change over blocks, you want to have more, each block has its own identity. So we're going to have three different blocks. But in the new system, when you change over blocks, you want to have more, each block has its own identity. So we're going to have three different blocks. But what Eric said is,

if you cut down the amount of cards total and standard, it allows each set to sort of up its complexity a little bit. So the two would offset each other. That we would have a little more complexity in the system of having three blocks versus two blocks, but by going from two years to 18 months, we would sort of gain back some of that. So that meant

that not only didn't I have to lower my complexity, I actually could raise it a little bit. Not a lot, but a little bit. And so we changed over from two years to 18 months. And the reason for that was, without that, the only way to solve the complexity problem was for me to lower

complexity. Now be aware for those, one of the turmoil of anyone who's listening to me talk about it, I have a lot of issues with Battle for Zendikar. It did not turn out quite what I wanted. And one of the reasons for that was, this was a set that sort of

everything changed in the middle of. That we, it started off as a three block set, changed to a two block set, started off a standard being two years. By the time it was over standard was 18 months, but it happened real late in the design process. And I was trying to make things simpler because I thought like, basically this is the set I had is I started designing my set.

It had one large set, two small sets. Then early on, I'm like, Nope, one large set, one small set, two small sets. Then early on, I'm like, nope, one large set, one small set. Okay.

And then I realized I'm trying to adapt to the two-year standard under that. Then partway through, actually near the end, it's like, no, no, no, now it's 18 months. So like things kept changing and it made it a little harder to deal with. But anyway, so, okay, we got the resources so we could do the world building.

We figured out how to make sure the complexity problem wasn't there. The next issue was how do we handle doing twice as many blocks a year? And that was a tricky one because one of the ways that we used to function is I used to do the full set every year. So basically we had one large set every year. I would work on that. I would sort of set the vision and do the basic design. And then I would hand off the set and it's time to start the next large set. But now we had a world in which we had two large sets a year. So when we first started off, I did

Battle for Zendikar and then, uh, Gottlieb did, um, Shadows, Mark Gottlieb did Shadows of Innistrad. That was kind of set up the, um, those, those process was set up before, like once we realized we're moving to two block system, that was our first move to try to do that. But I realized that I wanted to make sure we set things up so that, I mean, luckily, I was on Shadows for Innistrad, and Mark did a really good job of figuring out that block. But for those, I mean, I haven't really gotten Shadows for Innistrad yet. It had some complexity issues, and I think we really, really did a great job of capturing

the world and being very evocative. And the flavor team, you know, the creative team hit it out of the park. From a design standpoint, there's some complexity issues and stuff that I wanted to address. And so one of the things I had to figure out was, okay, I really wanted Kaladesh and Beryl, the set after that, is what I did was I would do the first six months of the design. I would sort of do the vision portion of the design. And then I would hand over the set, or I would co-lead with somebody else. And then what happened was I would lead the first half with the other person there.

Like, for example, Sean Main was my co-lead for Kaladesh. So what happened was he and I worked together. We were both there for exploratory design. In fact, he led exploratory design with me guiding. And then we got to Kaladesh. The first six months, I led vision. And the second six months, he led integration and refinement. And he was there for the first six months.

I was there for the second six months. We were both there the whole time. But we sort of, it passed hands. And then for Barrel, after Barrel's ham, you know, the idea was, moving forward, was I was going to sort of do some handoff stuff where I was going to do the first half of it and then hand off the second half. I was going to be in do some handoff stuff where I was going to do the first half of it and then hand off the second half.

I was going to be in charge of the vision part. And so, as you'll see, we started doing this and we're still evolving. We're still sort of figuring it out. I mean, one of the things about changing over to the new system is there are a lot of things that are very different. And so we are still up to now adapting. We are still figuring out how to make that work.

And so it is interesting. As far as you're concerned, I mean, you guys, you've just begun it, right? Shadows of the Indestructible is your second ever new, you know, in the two-black model, where I am years ahead of you. So I have learned a lot. There's a lot of changes that are coming in the trying to adapt to the new system requires some changes. And so, we'll get to we actually get to sets where I'm doing that.

Like, when we get to Kaladesh in the fall, I'll start talking about sort of the handoff process, the co-lead process and how that worked. And there's a lot of things we had to figure out with the two-block system. It really, I think, is doing cool things. I really like it. Obviously, the audience has been very positive about it. And I think it's a great move on our part.

But there's a lot of work on our end. We are changing how we are doing things. Like one of the things people might not understand is the scope of the change in that, you know, we've been doing something for 20 plus years. And when you change something that you've been doing for so long, it's a pretty radical change. It's a very different change. And so a lot of, like, we are, even now, I mean, I'm three, four years into the two-block model, and I'm still learning things.

We're still making changes. We're still adapting to it. That we still are, we haven't completely understood the ramifications of what it means, and we've made, you know, many, many, many blocks at this point under this model. That it is a very complex and different system. But the thing I think is

awesome is that one of the things I love about Magic is I love the change of Magic. I love that it's an ever-evolving game, and I feel like the way I used to joke is we've upped the conveyor belt. There's a conveyor belt that brings you your Magic set, we just double the speed,

and now you just get twice as much. I truly, truly have always loved that sense right before a large set of just the world of possibilities and what's this new thing and people getting excited and the idea that it's now twice a year, that we've taken one of the most special parts of magic

and doubled it. I think it's pretty cool. The other thing that's really nice from a design standpoint is not having to stretch to three sets of saying, you know what, I got two sets. I can do what I need to do. I don't need to save things for the third set. I can just put it in the second set, you know, that I can, there's a lot, I mean, I spent years and years and years trying to solve this problem. And in some ways it had a very Gordian knot solution, you know, which was, how do we make the second and third set work?

And the answer was, don't have them both. It's a very interesting answer. And it's interesting. Like, one of the things that people... Magic turns 23 this year. And one of the things that's very interesting about it

is people always say, you know, you've been doing this a long time. Aren't you getting bored? And I'm like, no, no, no. Because one of the things is, not only does the game keep changing, how we make the game keeps changing. And the fact that like 20 plus years in that we're willing to make this change was a pretty radical change. And be aware, Magic's been doing great. We've been having record year after record year, you know, the fact that we're willing to make such a major change when things

are going well, not when like, clearly when things are going bad, you're more than happy to make changes because you want to somehow fix things. We're trying to fix things when things are going well, when things are going right. We're trying to figure out how to make the game even better. And I really it's something I'm very proud of is that we don't rest on our laurels. We don't say, oh, good enough. Magic's doing well.

Good enough. We don't need to do anything. We are constantly saying, how can we make this game better? And the two-block model is pretty radical, but I think pretty key, in that we have a lot of cool worlds to visit. Oh, that's another thing I did real quickly before we, I'm almost at my daughter's school, is one of the other problems we ran into is we were making really cool worlds that players wanted to go back to.

But the problem was that one world a year, it's like, wow, it's going to take a long time to get back to worlds or just not have as many new worlds and we're like well one of the nice things about going to two blocks a year is we can have both returning worlds and new worlds at the same pace in fact faster you know we do about 50-50 so like now every

year gets a return world and every year gets a new world on average where before every other year it was roughly new and every other year it was roughly new and every other year it was roughly a return. And so just doing that, I mean, there's so many things that this change did that's really positive for us.

But one of the things I'll be talking about is it was a big shakeup. There's a lot of stuff on our end and it really is causing R&D to rethink a whole bunch of things. But I think that's a good thing. I think part of the way you get better at things is constantly challenging yourself and pushing yourself.

And I feel like once things become easy and rote, you know, you're not doing your best work. And so the fact that I'm even today, you know, 20 plus years into it, trying to figure out how to make design work, you know, I've designed many, many, many sets. The fact that I'm still figuring it out because we're constantly evolving, changing, and improving.

It's actually quite exciting. But anyway, I'm here to drop my daughter off, so we all know what that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. See you guys next time.