Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #357 - Hybrid Mana

Episode Date: August 12, 2016

Mark explores the history of hybrid mana and talks about how it came to be and how we design with it.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. I've got to take my son to camp yet again. Okay, so today I'm going to be talking all about the history of hybrid mana. We're going to talk about where it came from and there's lots of stories along the way. Okay, so for those who don't know what hybrid mana is, I guess let me explain real quickly. So hybrid mana is a mana symbol made up of two different mana symbols.

So it's a round circle that kind of half of it is one symbol and half is another. And the idea for hybrid mana is you can pay either color. So if a hybrid mana symbol, for example, is black, white, you can either pay black or pay white. It requires one or the other. So that's what Hybrid Mana is. Now let's get into the story of how Hybrid Mana came to be. Okay, so once upon a time, I was designing Ravnica. So what had happened was we had made Invasion, and Invasion, it was really popular um and we decided that we wanted to go back and do another gold set um so one of the things that i was trying to figure out was okay i wanted to be a gold block but i wanted to not be invasion and so invasion

and had this play all the colors you know invasion sick was, we will enable you to play as many colors as you can. And it had Domain, and it had a bunch of mechanics that really encouraged you to want to play a lot of colors. So when I was trying to do Ravnica, I said, okay, well, what can I do that's the opposite of that? What is the opposite end of the spectrum? Like, well, if Invasion is play all the colors,

well, what if Ravnica was play as few as you could, but two, since obviously playing one color wouldn't be multicolor. So what if it was all about two-color play? I figured that was as far away from invasion as I could get. Instead of five colors, it was two colors was the idea. And from that, obviously, I mean, you guys listen to my Ravnica podcast, Brady Daubermuth was the creative director at the time and, and Brady came up with the idea of the guilds and I love the guilds.

And then anyway, so during that time, I was very focused on figuring out what we can do with two player play. Um, and so I was focused on trying to think of how we could be different from Invasion and so obviously the two was part of it two opposite from five but another thing was I realized that Invasion was all about this and that and I got the idea of what about this or that

what if instead of a cost requiring both colors what if it required either color? And so hybrid mana came about because I was just trying to think about multicolor differently. It was just me going, okay, how could I be different? And so I remember I actually came up with it, and I was like, oh, okay, it's a red mana symbol or a blue mana symbol.

I remember, and I was all excited. So here's what happens. I'm in the office. I actually think I came up with it in the office, my memory. And I remember coming up with it and I was really, really excited. So I went around to show other people

because I just wanted to share my excitement. And nobody I showed it to, like, yeah, so, like, no one was excited. And I was like, no, no, no, no. It's, you know, it's not red and blue. It's red or blue. And they're like, yeah, okay. You know, and I could not get anybody really excited on it.

Because no one, I think the problem is people understood sort of functionally what it did. But no one really got the larger context of what does that mean? Why would you want to use hybrid mana? one really got the larger context of what does that mean? Why would you want to use hybrid mana? And so what I often realized is the key is a lot of times it is hard to see something in a vacuum and understand what it means sort of large picture. It's a lot easier to actually make cards. I've learned this time and again working in R&D of that a lot of times I'll pitch ideas and people are like, ah, I don't know. But when you actually make cards out of it

and then people play with cards, it is a lot more accessible. So the idea that I really liked with Hybrid was that it played in a different space. And so the interesting thing was, so what Hybrid Man meant was, if you say something is, you know, blue and green,

what that means is it has some amount of blue in it and some amount of green in it, and probably you're doing something that blue couldn't do, you're doing something that green couldn't do, but only that blue and green together could do. Well, hybrid mana is very different. Hybrid mana says, well, I have to be able to do this with just blue or with just green. So it has to be something that both can do.

So it has to be in the overlap. So what Hybrid Mana did is it really said, okay, what are the overlaps between the colors? And so one of the things

about gold cards, when you talk about how we design gold cards, is there are a bunch of different ways you can make gold cards, a bunch of kinds of designs you can do. One of the designs is the overlap. Like, sometimes what we do

is like, well, you know, white can do this, and green can do this, but together, you know, they're even more powerful. So one of the things we do when making gold cards sometimes is we make cards that did what each one could individually do, but when you

combined them, you get more bang for your mana, if you will. That you, you know, if I do something that might cost two mana in white or two mana in green, or I have two mana, three mana in white or three mana in green, I can do it for two mana in white-green.

And that was one of the things that we sometimes would do. But I realized that this space, if I wanted to do hybrid mana, that's the space I had to live in. I had to live in the space that is in between, you know, the middle of the Venn diagram where things overlap. And, oh, I'm getting ahead of myself. So, anyway, I was working on Ravnica, and I realized that there wasn't tons of space in this, but there was enough that I could do some cards. And so what happened was in

the first playtest I did, we hadn't yet figured out, we hadn't got to the guilds yet. I knew I was doing 10 two-color pairs, but Brady hadn't yet quite got to the guild thing. So what I did was we had a playtest in which I had all 10 color pairs, both in normal traditional gold cards and in hybrid. And so it was mind-melting. R&D, we're talking like former pro players. This is like the best of the best.

These are good players. And they were just like, help me! You know, it was mind-meltingly complex. Just the number of piles you were making. Because if you have ten pairs, like, okay, well, I have mono-color cards, so those are ten. And often people will split the spells

from the non-spells, from the creatures. And then I have multi-color, so I have all the gold cards. And then I have the hybrid cards, which aren't really, need to be in different piles from the gold cards because, you know, mono blue could play the blue-green hybrid where it couldn't play the blue-green gold card if I didn't play green. So anyway, yeah, we put it in and it was really complex and there was a lot going on.

So what happened was I ended up pulling it from Ravnica. I actually didn't do it in Ravnica. We had tried it early on and just there was so much going on that I pulled it out. And the original plan was I was going to use it in Time Spiral, which was the next block. I was like, okay, well, there's all this, you know, temporal madness. It's messing with mana. And I thought, oh, maybe I'll use the hybrid mana to show that the universe is unstable, that mana is blending together. I thought, okay, I could use it in time spiral. So the plan was,

okay, we'll take it out of Ravnica, we'll put it in time spiral. But then Brian Schneider, who was the lead developer of Ravnica, he was working on, and he realized the set was a little light in sort of splash. And he had seen the hybrid cards because he had participated in some of the early play tasks.

And so he came back to me and goes, can we have hybrid back? And I'm like, do you guys need it? He goes, yeah, I think we do. So we decided that we would do a vertical cycle, a common, uncommon, and rare. So a little splash, not so much that it was causing piling problems and building it, but it was something new and different you hadn't seen before. And so I said, okay, let's do that. Let's put hybrid into,

back into Ravnica. And so the next step was we had to figure out how to do the mana symbol and how the cards would look. So the symbol that I really wanted is just, could we just take the two, could we put the two symbols together? You know, one of the things that's really important

is you want your iconography to be self-explanatory, right? That you want, the idea of any sort of visual is you want people to look at it and their assumption of what it is is correct. So I really like the idea of having both mana symbols

in the larger mana symbol. And there was some debate, there was some worry that it would look too busy or it would look muddy. But I asked, can we at least try that? And so they did

and it ended up, and they spent a lot of time tweaking it. I mean, there was a lot of energy spent. One of the things that people, it's very funny because I talk about sort of my job, so you hear a lot about the design, a little bit about the development, but for example, like icon design, you know, something that you might not hear much about, which is, okay, if we want a new icon, someone's got to make that icon.

We now have a person in R&D dedicated to help do the preliminary work, but back in the day that wasn't true. And so we were working with other departments to sort of say, okay, what would this look like? And I know we had a lot of back and forth on the hybrid mana symbol, trying to get the right mix, because there was a lot of debate. I think that

early on we really said, can we try the mana symbol first? And so I think they experimented a little bit with non-mana symbols of just like color swirls. But the iconography of the mana symbols is so strong. Like when you see a little flame in a red ball, you're like, that's red mana.

That really, we didn't want to give up on that. So, we ended up doing sort of the cross. Now, a lot of people have asked about hybrid, you know, three color, four color, five color hybrid. Now, a lot of people have asked about hybrid, you know, three-color, four-color, five-color hybrid. Like, are we going to go beyond, you know, just two-color hybrid? And the answer there is, like, for example,

five-color hybrid is basically just generic mana, right? It's like, I mean, technically, I guess it's not completely generic mana because you can't use colorless mana, but it's really close. And it just gets muddier and muddier. First off, let's take three-color hybrid. In order to do a three-color hybrid card, I would have to find an effect that's in all three colors.

Do those exist? A couple, maybe. I'm not even sure. Every three-color combination. I mean, everybody has something. Only, you know, I mean, white, blue, and black could have a flyer. I mean, there's things that we could do. I mean, if you take things that are primary, secondary, tertiary, okay, maybe you could find a few.

But it'd be really, really hard. Like, even doing normal hybrid with two-color hybrid, it's tricky. I mean, there's overlaps in all the colors. But, you know, anyway, three-color just is much less necessary. It's messier. It's harder to explain what it is. It's harder to find design space. So, will we ever do three-color hybrid? I never say never, but I'm not a, if you were a gambling man. So, I'll get, at the end of this, I'll talk about some of the different executions of hybrid. We'll get there. Okay. So, so we had the mana symbol. So the next question was

what the card frame needed to look like. So, interestingly, a couple years earlier, I remember exactly when this happened, I made a push to try to change the multicolor card frames. What happened was,

when the game first started, when Legends happened, so Legends was the third expansion, first expansion of Magic to have gold cards. And so what it did is, it said, okay, we're going to do multicolor cards. What kind of treatment do we do? It was decided to make them gold. So back in the day, if you've ever seen the original Legends, they were literally just gold.

They were color of gold. There was no pin lines or anything. There was no hinting, other than the mana symbols, there was no hinting that this card was multiple colors. You just had to know, oh, gold means multiple colors. Look at the mana symbols. Oh, it's both those colors. And one of the things I found that was just non-intuitive is

most of Magic, when you look at the frame, the frame communicates color, which is really important to understand. And gold cards just did a really bad job of communicating color. Like, you had to, like, the whole card didn't tell you, and then you had to go look

at the little tiny section up at the corner. So what happened was, I wanted us to explore the idea of what if we made cards that were half one color and half the other? So the idea being, if I was a black-red card, I would be, you know, half will be a black frame,

half will be a red frame. And the idea, when you look at the card, you go, I get it, it's black and red. Half of it's black, half's red. I get that, it's a black and red card. So we made them, and there was a lot of debate in R&D. There were people who sided with me because they liked the practicality of it. They thought it did a good job of communicating information. But the problem

was the other side really felt like we had equity in gold. The gold was exciting to players. They really liked it and that it really, when you opened up multi-color cards, it really made them stand out because they were kind of their own color. And so the decision was made, well, okay, we're not going to, let's keep the gold frame, but that's when we added in the pin lines. So if you notice, the pin lines are the little bits of color that go around the card. And so what we started doing was we started, if a card was red and green, for example, the left side of the pin line could be red and the right side would be green. That the card would be gold,

but there'd be enough elements of red and elements of green in the pin line to communicate a little clearer that it's a red and green card. That was the compromise we made. So anyway, now we have to make hybrid cards. And so one of the big questions was, what do these look like? So I remembered the frames that we'd used for the multicolor.

By the way, we had gone pretty far. We had done testing on them. We had built them. We had printed them. It was something we really seriously looked at. So I'm like, okay, well, we did all this research on it. I think they looked really cool. What if we used the half and half frames for hybrid?

Fit hybrid pretty well. Hybrid's like, I'm a red spell or a green spell what if half was red and half was green and so we got them out and we tried them and they looked good I think they looked good from when we tried them for gold and everybody was on board pretty quickly we'd already made the frames so and

but I mean that's how we got the hybrid frames is we took the rejected gold frames and we used those so anyway we put it into Ravnica

and it was a big hit people really liked it it scored really well it was one of the when we do god book studies we sort of ask about all the mechanics so we asked about hybrid mana

people really liked hybrid mana so much so that I I was emboldened to go to the next step, which is, what if we did... In Ravnica, I'd use something I call Splash, which was just, it's new, it's different, it's cool, it's in very small doses. But I wanted to see if I could make it what I call environmental, which is, could you build a design around it?

So Shadowmoor was my design trying to do that, saying, okay, well, what happens if we up the amount of hybrid? What happens if an environment is a lot of hybrid? So the idea was we decided to go with half hybrid. So we'd open up your booster pack roughly, slightly under, I think it was like 49%, 48%, but very, very close to 50%. And then what if half your pack was hybrid?

So it did a bunch of things. First off, it allowed us to do something that I've always wanted to do that's really hard, is allow people to draft mono color consistently. So one of the problems in general when you make a set is, let's take a normal set. A normal set will have five colors, so 20%, I mean, there's lands, let's take a normal set. A normal set will have five colors, so 20%. I mean, there's

lands, there's artifacts. These numbers, I'm rounding, so just bear with me. So in a normal set, there's five colors, that's 20%. So every color has 20% of the cards. So let's say I want to play a mono black deck. Well, I have access to 20% of the cards. That's a lot limiting. Now, if I play a two-color deck, I have access to 40% of the cards. I have twice as many options. So, in drafting, you know, the reason you don't go too many colors is the mana system punishes you

for being in too many colors. But you can be in two colors without too much of a punishment from the mana system. So, when you play limited, you're usually in two colors. Now, in draft, you know, sometimes you have a little, I mean, it's really, really hard in limited and sealed to play one color. Sometimes in draft, if you're, if you've really focused and are willing to take cards and, you

know, sort of starve off the person to your left so like that you communicate real quickly that you're in this color. I mean, there are some ways to draft MonoColor. It's not easy, but it's doable. But the nice thing about a hybrid set, about Shadowmore, was because half the cards were hybrid, we just upped the percentages completely. In a perfect hybrid where everything was hybrid, obviously 40% of the cards, it would be identical to drafting one color versus two colors identical.

So one of the things we had done in Shadowmoor, we decided to focus on the five ally colors. So it wasn't all 10 hybrid colors, just because we thought that would be too much. And so we ended up dividing them to ally and enemy. Even Tide, the small set, ended up being an enemy. In retrospect, I think maybe we made a mistake there. Maybe it should have just been ally all the way through.

Changing over hats, anyway, hatsatch and Draft, or whatever. I mean, if we had drafted the way we do now, it would have been fine. But the way we drafted back then, where you only got one pack of it and it was the last pack, was very problematic. Okay, so what happened was we said, okay, well, what happens if you just up the amount? What if it becomes an environmental thing? And because you just have more access to a certain color, let's say you're drafting black,

you have access to black-red hybrid, you have access to black, mono-black, you have access to black-red hybrid, you have access to blue-black hybrid. So you just have more cards available to you. So it enables you to do mono-color drafting much easier. It's not that you had to do monocolor. You could draft multicolor and shadow more. But you could consistently draft monocolor if you wanted to draft

monocolor. And that was one of my goals of it. One of the things that I found is that in general, I'm big on the idea of trying different extremes. So, have I told the Warren Wyman story? I'm going to tell the of trying different extremes. So, have I told the Warren Wyman story? I'm going to tell the Warren Wyman story.

So, Warren Wyman was a person who used to work at Wizards. If I tell the story, I apologize. It is a good story. So, he used to do our security. And he used to talk about how when he was in the military, he used to fire off shells for mortars. And one of the things they taught him when they were shooting is, if you shoot and you miss the target, if you're to the right of the target, make sure next time you shoot it, if you learn to miss, better

be to the left of the target, because you learn a lot more information by being on the other side of the target. You can triangulate much better. And what I found with mechanics in general is that philosophy is really true. That what you kind of want to do is try one extreme

and try the other and from it you learn. So it's like, okay, in Ravnica we've done as little as we could. We really said, well, what's the least

amount we can do to make an impact but the least amount we can do? We'd come up with three hybrid per combination. Shadowmore, with the absence of red, said, okay, what's the most we think we can do? And I think when the dust settled, what I realized is we kind of overshot a little bit.

That 50% was too much hybrid. Why was it too much hybrid? Well, first and foremost, the biggest problem was the hybrid space. We had to go to overlap. We had to say, okay, well, where does red and green overlap? Where does green and white overlap? Where does white and blue overlap? Where do they overlap? And some colors like green and white or black and red, there's a decent amount of overlap. But some colors like black and blue or red and blue, it's harder. You know, like red and blue at common is really, really difficult. There's not a lot of things.

Like, we now have prowess, but at the time, we didn't even have a keyword that overlapped. You know, it was just tricky. It's like, okay, well, what does red and blue do? You know, you had to work at it. And that, one of the things that happened in Shadowmoor is I feel like some of the cards we made weren't really hybrid cards. They were gold cards. Meaning, you shouldn't have been able to do what some of the cards did in mono color. And we, I was okay to stretch a little bit because, you know, okay, you've stretched it sort of,

I mean, you color bend a little bit to match your theme from time to time. But I feel that we kind of force it a little more. There's cards that, like, really, really, really one of the colors wasn't supposed to be doing something that it did. And I feel like one of Shadowmore's problems was, I think we got there because we pushed it a little too hard. I'm not upset we did it. I'm glad we did Shadowmore. One of the things as somebody

who's in charge of sort of pushing boundaries is, I'm never upset that we try new and different things. You know, that it's okay for us to try things and things not work out exactly as we plan that part of taking risks is trying things and that a lot of times

if everything always works out for you you are not taking enough risks because if everything always works out for you that means you're not really pushing boundaries and so one of the things that I like about Shadowmore is it tried something. It committed to it. It did it. Okay, we learned from it. I don't think we quite do the same thing again. And I'm a big believer of it's okay to make mistakes. Just try not to repeat the same mistakes.

Try to learn from them and make new mistakes. But Shadowmore was very interesting and it definitely sort of made me realize some of the limits of what a hybrid could do. That said, I really do like hybrids. So the other thing we did in Shadowmoor, we evolved hybrid a little bit. We tried the next evolution of hybrid, which was what we call two-brid. So there was a series of cards where you could spend a black mana

or you could spend two mana. So the idea was if you're willing to spend more mana you didn't need the color to it. And the idea there was we kind of priced things that if you didn't pay the colored mana it was kind of like casting an artifact

or a colorless card. So for example, I think the way we did them is we did them, I think, what we call H-H-H., I think we'll call HHH. H is what we use for hybrid mana. So we're writing out a cost. Let's say, for example, I want to do a cycle

and all the cycle is going to cost two generic mana and then a hybrid mana. We would put two H. H means we'll fill it in later with a hybrid mana, but it's a representation of all hybrid mana.

C used to be that for colored mana. We've switched to M since C has now become a colorless mana as opposed of all hybrid mana. C used to be that for colored mana. We've switched to M since C has now become a colorless mana as opposed to a generic mana. Behind the scenes. Okay, so we tried the two-bird mana. I liked it. So I think they were mostly HHH. So the idea was they're a lot cheaper if you have the color.

You know, they cost three mana in the color. They cost six mana outside the color. And the neat thing about them was that sometimes it's like, oh, I don't have three colored mana. I'm going to spend a little more just to let them have all the colored mana, but I don't have none of the colored mana. So there's a gradients for how much it can cost.

It can cost three, it can cost four, it can cost five, it can cost six. And the gradients is kind of a cool thing about the card. I really did contemplate using Two-Bred in new Phyrexia. I like the idea of having the Phyrexians mess with mana. We ended up doing Phyrexian mana, which is sort of an offshoot. I consider Phyrexian mana to be sort of the next evolution of 2-Bred. Which Phyrexian mana said, you can pay colored mana or pay 2 life.

So instead of paying 2 mana, you pay 2 life. The reason that's a bit different is in 2-Bread, we cost the things like they were artifacts because, whoa, well, you know, there's a cost if you're not paying colored mana for it. It's more expensive. The thing about Phyrexian mana is you could save mana, like you might even have the mana,

but you don't want to spend it because you want to spend it on something else or whatever, and you can spend life instead. So that was a little bit different. I mean, hybrid mana, I I'm sorry, Phyrexian mana was an offshoot of two-bred, so when I'm talking about hybrid and all its evolutions, I do think that

Phyrexian Madness is an evolution. Another thing that we did with hybrid mana, we did in Alara Reborn. So we tried making gold cards where you had a singular color and then you had a one of two other colors. So the idea is, it's a normal mana symbol and

then a hybrid mana symbol that usually does not overlap with the one symbol. Although did we try, I think we also tried some of that in Lair of Reborn, where like it's a green symbol and then a red or green hybrid symbol. So it's a mono green card or a red green card. And then we also experimented with it's green and then it's white or red hybrid. So the idea is it's a white green card or a red-green card. And then we also experimented with, it's green, and then it's white or red hybrid. So the idea is it's a white-green card or a white-red card. We pushed

things a little bit with Alara Reborn. What Alara Reborn taught us is that when you start mixing up mana symbols, I think in fact, did we have that Alara Reborn do two different mana symbols together, two different hybrid mana symbols? I think it did, because that confused people. The idea there is imagine you have a green-white mana symbol next to a red-green mana symbol.

And the idea is you can cast this for mono-green, it could be white-green, it could be green-red. That confused people. One of the things about hybrid mana in general is people always come and say, hey, here's all these neat things you can do with it and there's a point where it just starts getting complex enough that it gets beyond a lot of players so what we call HI

so H is for a cost I being a hybrid mana cost but a different hybrid mana cost we've been shying away from that the one thing we did do where it really actually turned out to be beneficial was when we were Fate Reforged

we had the following problem the set before it it was a small set that played with the set before it and played with the set after it but the two large sets didn't play together well the problem was Fate Reforged wanted to be three color when it played with Khans of Tarkir

but needed to be two color when it played with cons of dark here but needed to be two color when it played with um dragons of dark here okay how exactly can you make a card that enables three color in one deck and two in another and the answer was hybrid mana what we did is we would take the color and then make the hybrid of the two other colors in it. So, for example, let's say we take Mardu. You could take red and then the hybrid mana symbol could be white or black. So the idea is, okay, it's base

red, Mardu is base red, but okay, for red-white or for red-black, you can get this card. What that allowed us to do is, when you're playing in three-color Kanzo Tarkira world, okay, these cards are just fine. It gives you flexibility how you want to cast it. For purposes of, like, on legendary

creatures, the color identity, it's still three-color. And it still has a feel. The card still feels like it's a three-color card. I mean, technically, it is a three-color card, but it doesn't require three-color mana to play. But, when those same cards got drafted with Dragon's Attar here,

for all intents and purposes, they really were ally color cards. You know, you didn't... They were just as useful as an ally color card as they were a three color card. And so the idea was, okay, I have my Mardu card. It's red and either white or black. Okay, well, it's red... For all intents and purposes, when I'm drafting with Dragon's Attar here, it's a, and either white or black. Okay, well, it's red- For all intents and purposes, when I'm drafting a concept with Dragon Stark here, it's a red-black

card. And that hybrid has proven to be a very interesting and valuable tool. Sometimes I refer to it as a mechanic. It's not really a mechanic. It's much more a tool than a mechanic. It's something that you can do, you can use as a means to help express things.

And like I said, we've used Hybrid Man in a couple of different places, in Lara Reborn, Fate Reforged, where we kind of want to do something and we need some subtlety or some tool to help you. And that's where Hybrid Man really does a good job. Also because it's so popular, when we went back to Ravnica, we brought it back because it was very popular. Hybrid Man also did something interesting, by the way, which is one of the reasons I was originally fascinated by it

when I made it for original Ravnica, was one of the problems of traditional multicolor cards is that there's no way to do a one-drop. Because the problem is, if I have to have white and I have to have blue, I can't make a one drop white and blue creature. But Hybrid finally fixed that problem. So Hybrid allows us

to make multicolor one drops. Because the card, like, the other neat thing about the card, and Shadowmoor played around with this a bit, is Hybrid cards, not only is it an ore, which means, okay, I can spend white mana or blue mana,

but the card is still a white and blue card. That even though I only spent white mana or only spent blue mana, it's still both colors. And so one of the things you'll see in Shadowmoor that we did is we messed around a lot with color mattering, because it was kind of fun to say, I'm playing a mono-black deck, yet I could

still have interactions where I care about having blue cards or care about having red cards. Because I have blue-black hybrid and red-black hybrid. And so, one of the neat things about hybrid is it allows us to take multicolor in places that normal multicolor can't do. And that's kind of cool. I mean, it's funny. When people ask me what the favorite sort of mechanics I made, once again, it's not really a mechanic,

but the favorite things I made, usually the two things I list are split cards and hybrid mana. And I think that both of them were just really more outside the box kind of thinking and just kind of coming up with something that was neat and cool

that was just really different. Hybrid mana has been neat in that it's really ended up being a really functional thing. It really, like, multiple times, like, we get ourselves in a corner, like, how do we solve this? Like, oh, Hybrid Mana, that's a tool we could use. Um, and, like I said, there's pitfalls with Hybrid Mana. Uh, we have to be careful not to sort of make traditional gold cards as Hybrid Mana cards.

Um, but other than that one problem, which we've got to be careful about, I think Hybrid Mana has been a roaring success. It's really done a lot of good things in a lot of different stats. Now, we've pushed it a little too hard. I believe that we did too high a percentage, probably in Shadowmourne in retrospect. I believe that mixing hybrid symbols,

like I think we did in Alaroborn, tends to confuse people. I do get a lot of requests. I do get, there are people that are like, when are you going to make the, you know, the white-blue hybrid, blue-black hybrid, black-red hybrid, red-green hybrid, green-white hybrid, five drop, you know.

And it can be played with a combination of colors, you know, and it can be played the combination of colors you know and i'm like well i i don't necessarily know we're going to get down that path um but i i am i'm interested to see where we can go with hybrid hybrid is the kind of thing where i keep seeing us using it in different ways to solve different problems um and so it's a neat tool in our toolbox i feel like it's very funny because my flashback to sort of my first discovery of it, I think I saw a lot of potential, but until I sort of realized the potential, I'm pretty good at seeing things that aren't there. And a lot of people are like, ah, you got to show me, give me an outline, give me a little more better sense of what you're talking about. And so it is neat to watch to where hybrid has come.

What's the future of hybrid? So it's what we call a deciduous mechanic, which means that any set, it's available for any set. Any designer or developer that needs to use hybrid mana, it's free and open to them. Any set's allowed to have it. It can be in back-to-back sets.

It can be in back-to-back sets. It could be in back-to-back blocks. But what deciduous means is, yeah, we don't expect it to be in every block. We don't expect it to be in most blocks. It's just a tool that's available. And so I think we use it where it makes sense. And it's a neat thing. I love know, as Hybrid being my baby, I love seeing what other people do with Hybrid. I love seeing

how it gets used. It definitely had a windy road to get to where it did, but I think in general everybody's a big fan now. I mean, like I said, early on people

were a little skeptical, but I think as people have seen the kind of stuff we can do with it, I think people realize that there's a time and a place and a role for it. You can overdo it. It is possible to make cards that the kind of stuff we can do with it. I think people realize that there's a time and place and a role for it.

You can overdo it. It is possible to make cards that are kind of mind-melting with it. You've got to be careful. But there is a lot of neat and cool things you can do. And plus, there's also things like 2-Brit and Phyrexian Mana, which are sort of extensions of it, where aren't exactly Hybrid Mana, but clearly are sort of offspring of Hybrid Mana.

And so I also think that, I still think there's some of that left. There's space to play around with where you can use hybrid as a means to make other kinds of mana-related mechanics,

if you will, or mechanics, mana-related things. But anyway, guys, that is all I have to say about hybrid mana. All I have to say because I'm now here

in my parking lot. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed my talk about hybrid Well, all I have to say because I'm now here in my parking lot. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed my talk about Hybrid Mana, a little history into where Hybrid Mana came from. But anyway, I'm now in my parking space.

We all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.