Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #360 - Tweaking

Episode Date: August 26, 2016

Mark talks about how they tweak old cards in design to make new cards that fill a similar function.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work. I dropped my daughter off at camp. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about tweaking. And what I mean by that is, sometimes in magic, what you want to do is make brand new things. And sometimes you want to reprint old things. But sometimes you kind of want in the middle. What you want to do is do something you've done before, but not exactly as you've done it before.

You want to tweak it a little bit. So today I'm going to talk all about, in design, the fine art of tweaking. Because it's important. like i said i've done i did a podcast all about reprints and when you do reprints and why reprinting is good um obviously i talk about making new cards all the time so this is this is the sort of middle ground um so let's talk a little bit about why why we tweak uh and then we'll talk about how we tweak um so essentially one of the things that...

I talk about this a lot. That our goal, essentially, is to make a game that you are familiar with, that you are comfortable with, but that is different. I want comfort, but I also want surprise. You know, I want... And so part of what we want to do is

every magic set has certain components it just needs to have. There are certain things we need to do. For example, in common green, you're going to have a giant growth. But it would be boring if every single set, giant growth is always giant growth. Some of the time it can be giant growth. It's a cool fact. It's clean. It's simple. You know, it's not that you should never reprint it. Sometimes you should reprint it. And it's the kind of spell that, in the right place and time, yeah, you should use giant growth.

But you can't always use giant growth. So the first reason we tweak things is we just want a little bit of variety. We want things, like one of the tricks of doing magic design is we want things to feel the same but different. One of the things in Hollywood, a lot of times when they sort of try to sell something, they do what they call the three beat, which is, you know, this meets that. You know, it's Lord of the Rings meets the Avengers, you know, and you sort of have this idea of, oh, well, it has the component of the Rings meets the Avengers, you know. And you sort of have this idea of, oh, well, it has the component of the first thing

and the component of the second thing, but the combination is new and different. And I feel like magic, what you're trying to do is figure out how to be new and different. You're figuring out how to say, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, we have the giant growth that you expect. You know, when you play green, there's this certain combat you expect.

Okay, we're delivering that. You know, whenever I'm attacking or my opponent is attacking and they're playing green, I have to assume they have something akin to a giant growth. They might have it, they might not, but I know the environment will have something like it. Okay, so number one tweaking is to look at the new things and say, okay, what are the new things in the set? Keyword mechanics being the loudest, but sometimes there's themes and other things. So the first thing you can do is you can say, okay, is there a way to tweak this that plays into some new thing we're doing? So for example, we will always take a look at our keywords and a lot of times, one of the things you want to do when you make a keyword is you

want your effects to be as simple as you can make them. Because the keyword itself, usually it's new and different. And so what you want to do when you're working with new keywords is find simple effects. Now, as you get higher rarities, you can have less simple effects. But a common, for example, you want a nice, clean, simple effect. So that is a really good place to look for tweaks. For example, giant growth, very, very often, if we have a spell effect, you know, a mechanic that goes on spells,

okay, can it go on giant growth? That's one of our staples. And we don't always want to do giant growth. So a nice, easy way to tweak it is to just take the base new mechanic. So it's like, oh, we're doing buyback. Okay. Well, you could have a giant growth buyback. Okay. We're doing kicker. Well, you can have a kicker, a giant growth kicker. You know, we're doing, name your mechanic. If it's a stall mechanic, you can at least think about it. Now, once again, when you tweak it, so first and foremost, we can look at that. We can look at the mechanics.

And oftentimes, one of the things we want to do with the mechanics is find the basic effects. So that tends to be a nice, clean, easy way to do it. And in general, by the way, one of the things that usually is a sign that your mechanic is a good mechanic is it works well with nice, clean, simple effects. If you can't put your giant growth and your direct damage and your discard, you know, if you can't put the kind of effects every set wants on your keyboard mechanics, usually that's a sign that's a product of the keyboard mechanic. Okay, so you can use your keyboard mechanic. The second thing you can do is you can just say,

okay, is there a way to tweak it slightly different than we've done before? So I'll use giant growth as my sample today. Okay, so giant growth is plus three, plus instant, plus three, plus three. So one of the things you can say is, okay, let's look at different ways we can change this. Okay, I could change the effect. Instead of plus three, plus three, it could be plus four, plus four, or it could be plus two, plus two and grant trample or some other ability

that's in flavor for green. So I can mess with kind of the size of the effect. I can put additive things to it. Besides just growing, I can grant trample to it. I could grant hexproof to it. I could grant death touch to it. I could do something else. That's not the greatest example. But anyway, I can add some ability that green can do. And it's like, okay, well now you get bigger

or you get bigger and some other bonus or you get a little bit bigger but it's cheaper. So first off, the effect can change. The cost can change. So giant growth happens to cost one, but maybe I have a bigger effect that costs more than one. So you can change sort of the cost of the effect. The other thing you can change is the, I would say speed, but the card type. Speed is not technically correct.

Let's say, for example, you're used to giant growth being an instant. Well, you can make it a sorcery. It's a different card. Now, one of the things when you're tweaking, you have to be careful, is understanding what and how you're using the card. Changing giant growth from an instant to a sorcery really fundamentally changes a lot of things about giant growth. Now, that doesn't mean you can't ever do that, but you need to be aware. For example,

if I'm going to change my giant growth to a sorcery, I'll probably make sure there's some other combat tricks to help me win in combat at instant speed. Because one of the things you have to understand when you're tweaking things is understand the role that that original thing plays in how the cards work.

One of the things you want to do is you want to make sure that your tweak fulfills the same role as the original card. If Giant Growth is supposed to sort of help interact with combat, okay, be aware of that. It's not that you can't make a Sorcerer Giant Growth, but then elsewhere in your set,

you want to make sure that you're... One of the things in general is, and this is something that when I talk about doing a design skeleton, like you write the things you need, I've internalized that, so I don't actually physically make a skeleton, but for all intents and purposes, in my head, I have a skeleton.

And the idea is, there's certain things you need, there's certain sort of staple abilities of the colors. Giant growth being one for green. Like, you just, you know, if I, let's say I'm playing a new environment, I've not looked at all the cards ahead of time, and I'm just playing against somebody playing green.

I just know that a giant growth-like effect exists. That I should keep in mind, you know, if you attack me with open mana, and especially if you're attacking me with what looks like a bad trade for you, what you are usually saying is okay do i have this giant growth like thing and even if i don't know the environment exactly i know that's there that's an important part of why you want staple

effects and why you want things is you want magic to have a certain feel that not that you can't change from set to set not that you can't have some variance, but you want the familiarity. You want the comfort. And it's funny because people spend so much time and energy about new, new, new, what's the new thing? But the reason that is so is because we spend a lot of time making sure that it's comfortable and familiar. One of the things that's funny is I can make a new set that's so foreign that people would bounce off it. And I'm sure a lot of people realize

they would bounce off it because you take a lot for granted. Like we work really hard to make sure that magic's magic and that certain things you've grown to expect most of the time function. I mean, one of the cool things from set to set is in any one set, you can take one aspect and change it. We could have a set in which

okay, the giant growth is a sorcery, and there's not as much changing size and instant speed, which makes that environment play a little different. But you want to be careful. I mean, you want to make sure the green has some combat tricks and stuff. But we can tweak things a little bit. We can tweak the environment to hell. I'm not talking about tweaking

cards right now, but you can tweak the environment, obviously. The other thing that you can do sometimes is sometimes you can take your effects and you can marry them with other effects. For example, let's say I have a giant growth. What if with giant growth I put life gain with it? Or I, instead of, for the turn, I I make an instant I can make it an aura with flash which gives permanence to it. I could sort of take the basic idea

and mix it up some. So another way that we'll tweak things is a good example is sometimes you'll match not your mechanics but your theme. So for example one of the things we did in Theros is we took a lot of auras and said, can we use auras to replace normal effects? For example, we made an aura that was, I don't remember the stats,

but it boosts your power and toughness and it was flash. So it was an aura, it permanently increased your creature's power toughness, but it filled the role of a giant growth because at instant speed, because it had Flash, you could use it.

So yeah, it was a little bit different. It stuck around. So it was tweaked, but it was tweaked in a way that sort of filled the role that a giant growth had to fill,

but also matched the theme of the set. And that's another big thing we wanted to do is looking at how your set is doing, are there any thematic things that you can do where tweaking your card a little bit helps make it in theme. One of the other things we also can do sometimes to tweak it is sometimes we'll reprint old things, meaning

essentially the idea is we've made giant growth. Alpha started, we had giant growth. And every set we either make giant growth or we make a tweak of giant growth. So sometimes the tweak is not necessarily a new tweak but is finding old tweaks that you've done or

a lot of times what will happen is we'll do tweaks, we'll try them we'll experiment and learn from those tweaks so we can make further tweaks. Now, with something like Giant Growth, what you'll find is all the basic tweaks we've done, you know, all the pretty simple tweaks, maybe not all of them, but most of them we've done, just because we've had so many sets and every set has a Giant Growth. Okay, you know, we've shifted around power and toughness. We've shifted around what other abilities you've got.

We've put a lot of keywords on it. We've done a lot to mix it up. So tweaking giant growth gets harder over time just because it's a staple ability we've done so many different times. That is why using the keyword on it is actually quite valuable because if I have a new keyword,

well, we've never used that keyword. I've never done that tweak. If I make mechanic Z and I've never used mechanic Z before, well, we've never used that keyword. I've never done that tweak. You know, if I make Mechanic Z and I've never used Mechanic Z before, well, Mechanic Z plus Giant Growth, that's a card we've never seen before. Okay. Another thing you can do when you want to tweak the cards is you can also start linking them together. So sometimes what's fun to do for combos is say,

okay, in this particular set, there's some synergy we're trying to create, and we're going to use this mechanic to make the synergy. So for example, let's say I have a set that has a plus one, plus one counter theme. Okay, well, in that set, maybe instead of doing temporary giant growth, I'm doing, I'm putting plus one, plus one counters

on an instant speed. So it functions like, you know, but it plays it into it. And then what you can start doing sometimes is you can start linking them in. Now, sometimes you're changing your ability to tie into the set, and sometimes you're changing your set to tie into the ability. A good example was with Infect. So Infect was in Scars of Mirrodin. It turned damage into poison.

But originally, actually, the way it worked was it was Poisonous N. And what that meant was if I hit you, I give you N poison counters. So Poisonous 2 meant if I hit you, I give you two poison counters. The problem was it wasn't really interactive. I mean, you could use evasion, I guess, but it wasn't that interactive. And so we changed it to make the damage poison. And what that meant was all of a sudden, now giant growth. In fact, we actually had to scale down giant growth because giant growth was too good in this act with infect. And that's another thing to keep in mind is the

power level of what your effect can be will vary based on its synergy or anti-synergy with the environment you are making for example infect was so good with giant growth that we that we were i believe we were going to reprint giant growth in the set and then once we realized we were doing infect as we were doing it we pulled back because it was a little too good with infect so understanding environment, part of your tweaking, I've been talking about how to sort of make it different. But another thing to keep in mind is sometimes the power level, depending on what you're doing, will fluctuate up and down.

Like if I'm making a set where power matters more than normal, hey, giant growth now matters more than normal. If I'm making a set where the focus is somewhere else, the creature combat is not the driving focus, although usually it's some focus, giant growth might just be a little weaker than normal. It depends on the environment you're doing. And one of the things you always want to understand is

what is the particular environment doing? What is the set doing? What elements matter? And when you're trying to make a tweak, figure out why, what you're doing. So for example, we'll use Giant Growth as an example today. So let's say I'm making a set.

And it is an artifact matter set. Okay, well I might say, oh, do I want to somehow find a way to make this on artifacts? Or do I want to find a way to maybe it's plus two plus two but plus four plus four to artifact creatures you know I will look and say is there some way to use this in a way that's organic to the set and the reason you want to start with organic to the set is I have to make a lot of giant crows every set has a giant crow

so yeah yeah yeah I can make, you know, plus two, plus two, and trample, but what's better is, let's say I have a set to solve our artifact creatures, plus two, plus two, plus four, plus four to artifact creatures,

that's not a tweak that's going to go in any set. That's a tweak that's going in this set. So one of the things I always want to look when tweaking cards is saying,

can I customize my tweak to this environment? Can I make something that I normally wouldn't make? Because then I'm not sort of, I'm slowing up my chewing up of space. And that's another thing. One of the things I talk about a lot is just one of my jobs long term is managing resources. And what I mean by that is, there are certain things that design uses that are, there's only so much.

You know, design is not infinite. It's big. I don't plan to run out of design space tomorrow or anything. But for example, let's say giant growth. Hey, giant growth tweaks. Now, be aware, we can reprint giant growth. We can reprint tweaks of giant growth. So it's not that you always have to do something new and different.

But if giant growth was never new and different, I think people would be unhappy. And so one of the things we're always looking at is trying to figure out how to make as many giant growth tweaks as possible. And one of the ways to maximize that is always to look out to see, is there something unique I can do here that makes sense here? Like the aura with flash makes a lot of sense in a set like Theros. Putting plus one counters makes a lot of sense in a set that cares about plus one, plus one counters. It matters when and where and how you're going to do it. And that's something you always have to keep in mind. there's when and where and how you're going to do it. And that's something you always have to keep in mind. Another thing to look at when you're tweaking cards is to think about curve, which is

where in the game do I want to play this? So giant growth, as an example, tends to be a cheap thing that has more range. So my example here is, I'll go off John Garth for a second. So we'll talk about direct damage for this particular thing. One of the things you want to be very conscious of is when you make a set, sets have, what's the word for this, sort of have a sweet spot

for mana costs. For example, in Mirage, it was four mana. But that's kind of where the game kind of started hinging, is things you did when you got to four mana. Some games, it's three. It changes from environment to environment. But one of the things you want to be aware of is you want to understand in the environment you're making,

where are the pinch points and where are the things that matter? And part of doing your tweaks is figuring out where they go in the curve. So, for example, direct damage, there's a lot of give on how big it is and how much mana you're spending for it. And so one of the things you want to be careful of, you want to think about is, oh, does this want to be one drop, two drop, five drop? Where does it want to go in the curve? And the curve is a pretty important thing.

And so that's something you always want to sort of keep in mind is the cost, not just how much it costs for variety's sake, but sort of what it means to your environment, especially your limited environment. What does it mean? Oh, I have a one drop direct damage. I have two drop. I have a four drop.

I have whatever. What does that mean? And making sure that there's balance. Now, something like direct damage, the thing to keep in mind is, you know, there's usually one, maybe two giant ghosts at most in a set. Direct damage is a lot more. You know, usually a common is at least two, sometimes three direct damage spells. And there's more uncommon and more rare. So you also want to say part of doing your tweaks is not only being aware of where you need to be for your environment, but staying off of other versions in the set. You know, part of making your tweaks is, like, sometimes, one of

things to remember is, what you want to do is, you want restrictions to help you. Remember, restrictions breed creativity. It's okay, like, one of the things to me is, I will always put new things in a set before I fit the staple things in, because the staples, I little more flexibility yeah yeah I need a giant growth but does it have to cost one no it costs two or three you know I can vary that up um so one of the things you always want to look out for is stick in the things you need to stick in things stick in the new things the things that are difficult to work around get those in first and then say okay oh look I don't have enough three drops maybe my drug damage belt needs to be a three drop. So you can keep that in mind.

And so one of the things that I like doing, and this helps with tweaks, is let other things come first. Figure out what parameters the other things are making for you and use those parameters as a way to make a tweak that's a unique tweak. Because if you say to me, okay, oh, well, I need three mana and I'm trying to be synergistic with this mechanic,

okay, that might give me enough to do a unique direct damage spell you've never seen before. That's something that's very different. Another thing that you can tweak is you can tweak obviously size of effects, as I talked about, but you can also tweak how many things it targets, or who it targets. And there's a couple different ways to do this.

I use direct damage. So one thing with direct damage is I can choose, do I hit creatures? Do I hit players? Do I hit creatures and players? In fact, if you notice a comment, we usually will do three direct damage spells a comment, one of which hits creatures, one of which hits players, and one hits creatures or players. Now we'll shake it up, that's sort of our default. But right there, for example, that just makes things a little bit different. Another thing we'll do sometimes is you hit one thing or two things, occasionally three things.

Can I break up my damage? Sometimes it's like, oh, well, oh, do three damage to a creature. Do three damage to a creature or player. Do three damage, divide as you like. Do two damage to two different creatures. You can sort of look at the effect and look at how many things it's hitting or who it's hitting. That's another way to sort of change things up. Giant Girth, for example, only hits creatures, but Drug Damage, because you get players, you have a lot more going on. Another thing sometimes that we'll do with tweaks is we will tie them, instead of what they normally are, spells,

is we can tie them to creatures sometime. So, for example, it's very common to say, oh, well, normally we do effect X. What if I make it an enter the battlefield effect instead? Now, notice that without flash on the creature, it functions a lot more like a sorcery. So you're more likely to replace sorceries. Or every once in a blue moon, you'll give it flash so you can have an instant light quality. We do that more infrequently.

But definitely take a look and say, okay, I need to have a naturalized like effect. Where instead of making it naturalized, what if I made a creature that ETBs, enters the battlefield and naturalizes. You know, that's definitely a way to do it. And one of the things that, the reason that tweak will happen a lot is we'll run out of spell space. Because there's more space for creatures than for spells, especially in certain colors. Green, for example, is number two in creature volume. So it's very common in white or green, for example,

to say, oh, I've run out of space. I can't do that life gain effect. I can't do that naturalized effect. Okay, well, I'll just put it on a creature. And there's a couple different ways to put it on the creature. The easiest and simplest is an enter the battlefield effect the nice thing about that is it functions a lot like a sorcery, then the creature becomes virtual

meaning it's either just a vanilla or a virtual french vanilla it's a very simple creature it has complexity when you play it, but then it goes away and it's just a thing it is you also can do it as a sack effect or a death trigger, which means when the creature dies or when I sacrifice

it, it does it. That's a little more complex, although not super complex, depending on how big the effect is. And then sometimes there's activated abilities, but those are a lot different. We do those, but we're less likely to do those at Common. The, um... Yeah. And this is another place we'll get for tweets

sometimes what happens is you run out of space and what you have is you'll have two things you need to accomplish but only one card slot and so a big trick for doing that is in crossing over the abilities like oh I need giant growth

and I need a life gain oh what if I did a and I need a life gain. Oh, what if I did a giant growth and a life gain? Or, I need a giant growth effect but I don't have any spell slots left. Oh, what if I made a flash creature that had ETB plus two plus two?

You know, that a lot of times you can function, find roles through things and you can tweak your things by sort of stapling them to other things, if you will. And putting them on creatures is a pretty popular way. Sometimes it's combining spells together so they do double functionality. We do that a lot. And like I said, a lot of your tweaking is being reflective to what your set needs.

We do not... Well, okay. When you're looking for your mechanics, you always look at basic effects. So it's very often that you'll find early in design, you'll use your basic effects to do your new effects. I got my new keyword. Okay, I do my Dr. Diamond spell. I do my giant...

You do some of your basic effects. Sometimes it goes there. But if it doesn't go there, usually what you want to do then is pull back a little bit. Like one of the tricks that I'll do in design all the time is when I'm not sure what I want, I just throw I just throw in

the reprint as a test holder. And then as we play test and we get data, and then I start to figure out oh, we're missing something, okay, that the reprint was just a placeholder I can add something to if I need it. Like, let's say I put, for example, I'm like, okay, I need a giant growth.

Okay, for right now, just put giant growth in the set. It's giant growth. Then giant growth will teach us plenty. You know, we need a giant growth-like effect. Well, giant growth is a giant growth-like effect. So, and then what'll happen sometimes is like, okay, oh, now that I've played with the set a little bit, oh, I'm light on trample.

Oh, I'm light on trample. Well, maybe I'll have the giant growth grant trample. Okay, that makes it a little bit different, and now it helps my set. So it's a very common place to do your tweaks is to sort of put filler in, play test, and as you realize things you're missing, that's a nice easy place to fill it in, is to take your basic effects and say, okay, well let me tweak this base effect a little bit. Okay, now tweaks don't just have to be on

base effects. I spend a lot of time, that's the major place we'll do tweaks. Like, oh, it's giant growth. Another place that we'll do tweaks sometimes is we want to do something. We want to reprint something. But the reprint isn't quite what you want. And there's a bunch of reasons. It might use an ability that we've phased out. It had fear or banding or intimidate or land walk or something we no longer use. Or it could just do something

that kind of isn't as relevant anymore. I know for Eldritch Moon, we were thinking of bringing back Wild Mongrel. But for example, Wild Mongrel had this ability where you ditch the card, it changed the color of the creature. Well, the reason we did that in Odyssey was almost all the Black Hills spells had a non-black rider.

So being able to change your color protected you from black kill spells. But we've really shifted away from that. So we have a lot less color mattering going on in sets. So shifting your color just wasn't relevant. It didn't mean things. And so we shifted and made a variant of the card because that ability was kind of a useless ability. Another reason we'll tweak things is tribal. Like sometimes you're doing a set that has tribal components. You're like, oh, well, I want to reprint this card, but hey, if it could

be a goblin or hey, if it could be an elf or hey, if it could be a vampire, it would help me whatever tribal I'm doing. And so sometimes it's like, well, let's bring it back. And the tweak is to sort of push it, you know, in a creature type or something that you need, you know, that you need for this set. But it's very common for us to take things that we liked before that it's kind of, oh, almost a perfect fit, but not quite a perfect fit. We like doing reprints. When we can find places to do reprints, we will do reprints.

Reprints are cool. In fact, there's a... I did a whole podcast on reprints. There's a nice sweet spot when you find the perfect thing to reprint. You know, like in Eldritch Moon, we brought back Peace of Mind, which was this beautiful...

Like, we'd never reprinted it before, and it was this enabler in white that allowed you to discard cards, and it was life gain, and it's like... Thematically, it made sense, and it just was enabler in white that allowed you to discard cards, and it was life gain, and it's like, thematically it made sense, and it just was like this beautiful reprint that sort of perfectly fit what we needed. And when you find those, those are beautiful, put those in. But a lot of times what you also will find is,

oh, this card would almost be perfect if it only had a different creature type, or if only the name was a little different, if only this one ability wasn't there, if only this one ability was this new ability, a lot of times it's like, oh, let's update it, let's make the cool new thing, and take the old thing and we can tweak it. The other thing in general, I've been talking

a lot about cards, but be aware you can tweak things beyond cards. Sometimes we'll tweak mechanics. I mean, Devotion being the classic example where we had Chroma, and Chroma didn't really go over well, but in my heart of hearts, I believe it inherently had cool things about it, and I feel like maybe we could tweak it and bring it back. We changed it enough that we could give it a new name.

We tweaked it. We tweaked the mechanic. You can tweak mechanics, not just tweak cards. Sometimes we'll tweak cycles. Like, we'll bring cycles back. Or sometimes we'll bring part of cycles back, but change the other cycles. Like, for example, in Odyssey, I really wanted to do Kindles. And I wanted to make a cycle. And so, you know, in order to make them sort of work similarly, I brought back, instead of doing kindling in, I did a slight tweak on kindle so I could make a cycle. We made the burst cycle. So you can tweak cycles.

You can tweak mechanics. You can tweak, sometimes we'll tweak rarity. Sometimes like, well, we like this card, but it's at the wrong rarity. You know, when we first did it here, but magic has changed something fundamentally, so we can bring it back and change what its rarity is. We can tweak creative. Sometimes the card is perfect as is, but it doesn't match the creative. And so sometimes we bring it back and like, oh, well, this is a perfect card mechanically,

but wow, the creative doesn't make any sense. Well, let's reskin it. Let's tweak the creative. You can tweak that. You can tweak whole sets. Like sometimes, for example, I mean, we have themes that we've revisited enough times now that I have the ability to go back

and look at how we handled the theme and tweak elements before. Oh, we're doing a graveyard set? Well, guess what? I can look at previous graveyard sets, learn lessons from those graveyard sets, and I can tweak the components of the theme. You can tweak themes. Like one of the things, one of the big advantages of having a game that's 20, almost three years old now, is that you have a lot to look back on and you have

a lot to use as structuring. But my lesson of today is just because we did something a certain way doesn't mean that's exactly how you have to do it. And part of the fun is there's a neat space in between. Like, yes, it is neat to bring back things exactly as they were. We should do that. We do do that. Yes, it's neat to do brand new things we've never done before. Yes, we should do that.

But also, and sort of the topic of today is, there's a sweet spot in between where you've learned things, you've done cool things, there's things that like you definitely want to bring back, but it's not exactly the way you need it. And that's okay. You have the freedom to take anything you need and tweak it. You can take old things and tweak them slightly to make them better to bring back. You can take new things and tweak them to bring them toward, to do the basic effects that you need. Like, yes, I want new things to be new, but I want them to fit into the game. And so one of the neat things,

like one of the reasons it's so beautiful to take brand new keyword and old ability and put them together is you kind of, it's a marriage of, look, the game needs its giant growth, but it also needs its new things. And hey, now I have a giant growth that the game needs, but it's doing

it in a slightly different way. It's got a new mechanic. So how I'm going to use it is a little bit different. Not completely different. It still functions as a giant growth for your effect. It helps you make the game feel the way it needs to feel, but it's a little bit different. And so anyway, today

it just sort of says that there is a lot of value in being similar but not exact. And there's a lot of science. I think that like, you know, we talk all about the skills of using old things or making new things. There's a big skill of adapting things, of tweaking things. And so that, my friends, is the tweak that was. But anyway, I'm now in my parking space hope you guys enjoyed today's

lesson and I it's a valuable thing that I really we spent a lot of time on and I haven't spent a lot of podcasting time on so I hope you found it interesting but anyway I'm in my parking space we all know what that means, it means it's 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