Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #363 - Packaging

Episode Date: September 2, 2016

Mark talks about the history of Magic packaging.

I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. And I dropped my daughter off at camp yet again. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a very different part of the magic experience. I'm going to talk about packaging. So one of the things that's very interesting is when people think about wiz wizards it's very easy to think about like there's a lot of sections at wizards a lot of different people working there and i know it's

very easy to think like rnd and the people that make the you know make make the game but there's a whole other group of people that a lot of times people forget about which is there's a lot more to the magic than just literally the cards themselves in In fact, even the cards themselves have to be made. There's a whole section of the company that, I mean, R&D designs the cards, and we get the art for it, and we get the edited text and everything. We get all the components for it. But someone has to make that card. We call them caps.

And not only is caps responsible for the physical making of the cards, they also have to make the packaging that's another big important part and I know I mostly talk about making the cards I mean I don't even make the physical cards but making the cards that go into the product making of the game itself but anyway there's a lot of other facets

and today I want to talk about packaging talk a little bit about history of packaging and a lot of stuff that goes into packaging. Because I don't, here's an area I bet you most of you have spent very little time thinking about, is what exactly goes into magic packaging, what makes good magic packaging, or what is the history of magic packaging? So let's start with a little history lesson, because I like doing history on this podcast. Okay, so when magic first came out, what was the first product sold? When you went to, if you were going to buy Alpha, what is it could you buy? What exactly was, what was the packaging when Magic first appeared? And the answer was there were two different

products originally. What we used to call starter decks and booster packs. So starter decks were a box. They held 60 cards. I believe of the 60 cards, I think 20 were land at the time. Well, actually, it wasn't. The lands were segregated on the sheets through the coalition. So actually, it varied how much land you got. You got 60 cards. Of the 60 cards, you got two rares.

I don't remember how many uncommons you got. You got something like 13 uncommons, somewhere around there. Maybe a little bit more than that. And then you got a lot of commons. And the idea of a starter deck was that you could open it and just play it. You know, I mean, it was all five colors all mixed together, but at least it was playable. And it also had land in the beginning

one of the ways you got land is if you bought a starter deck it would have enough land in it that you could sort of build a deck um and we had booster packs booster packs were 15 i'm not sorry we're 15 and that dollar 15 uh card in a pack much like now they started with 15 cards in a pack um back then, once again, land was distributed randomly through. So what would happen is you would get, on average, one rare three-in-commons and 11 commons. But be aware that any one of those could be a land. On the rare sheet, there were land or islands on the rare sheet. So your rare card could be an island. The other thing to remember in the early days was

there was no rarity on the cards. In fact, wizards didn't want you to know the rarity. So we didn't tell you the rarity on the cards and we didn't tell you the rarity outside of the cards. So there's a lot of guessing in the early days of you know, if you open up a booster pack you start to realize the cards you saw a lot of and the cards you saw less of. And you can start extrapolating, but you needed to open a lot of cards to really know. Um, and the, the first time anybody ever published a card list was in a magazine called Shadist Magazine, S-H-A-D-I-S.

It was a role-playing magazine sold in Southern California. Um, and they got some stuff wrong, but, you know, they, I think they, I think they basically figured out all the cards, but they got some of wrong but you know they I think they I think they basically figured out all the cards but they got some of the rarities wrong but Wizards early on I've talked about this that Richard's vision at the time was that you discover the game as you played it

so Wizards didn't want to tell you what the cards were because they wanted you to experience it through the play and part of that was also not telling about rarity so early Magic there was no rarity indicator. That didn't happen until I think Urza's Legacy. And

so you didn't know what was what rarity. So let's talk about the packaging, since that's today's topic. So, the starter deck was very interesting. The starter deck, once again, it was a box. It came with the cards. It came with the original rule booklet came in that. And the packaging

itself looked like a tome. So a lot of people have always asked, what is the back of a magic card supposed to represent? And if you've ever seen the Alpha Starter box, you would know because the front of the magic is on it, and then all around it is a book. That's the front of a tome. And if you look on the side of the box, you see the pages, and the one side is the binding. In fact, if you look at the top, there's a bookmark in it. And that is what the back of a Magikarp represents, is the cover of a magical tome. And so the original starter deck really reinforced that and played up that theme. And the original booster pack,

original Magic, the packaging was very plain. It would just be of one color, and then it would be the words that you need to know. Art actually didn't start on the booster packs. Originally, there was just the name of the product. The standard had the look of a book on it, of a

tome, and then the booster pack... I'm trying to remember. The booster pack was I think it was light brown was an alpha. But it was, an alpha and beta, I believe, didn't change their packaging at all. In fact, the way you separate alpha from beta is not the packaging. Although there might be a change of the date on the legal text on the packaging of the beta that is possible. But anyway, so very first Magic Party came out.

There was a 60-card starter deck. There was a 15-card booster. That was it. So beta came out. Beta had the exact same thing. Like I said, I don't even think the packaging changed. I don't think you actually can tell alpha from beta from the packaging. But then came our first expansion.

Actually, did our first expansion come first? Oh, before our first expansion actually came, I think Unlimited happened. So, the first product was called Limited. It had a black border. Unlimited happened. So the first product was called Limited. It had a black border. So early Magic, one of the things they did was the first printing of cards would have black borders,

and then all future printing of cards would have white borders. The idea was it was a collector thing. If you wanted to collect the black border, you had to get the first version of it. And so it would make the idea that the first edition would have extra value to it because it would be the black-bordered edition. Eventually we realized, and we did this for many, many years, eventually we realized the cards just looked better in black

and then decided to do away with the white border and said, you know what, all printings are in black border. It just looks so much nicer. The white border tended to wash out the art a little bit and the black border really made the cards pop and look their best. So in, what was it, 10th edition? 8th edition? No,

I think it was 10th edition, I think. One of the later editions, somewhere between 8th and 9th, 10th, we did away with white borders. But early on, so the Unlimited Edition came out, and it had white borders. And other than that, though, I mean,

the packaging, I think, was similar. It said revised edition. In fact, it might have been exactly the same, except the word, not revised, sorry, unlimited edition on it. I think the packaging was identical. Okay, then we got to our first expansion, which was Arabian Nights. So Arabian Nights, for the first time ever, had a different size packaging. It came with eight cards

rather than having 15. The idea at the time was, okay, well, large sets will have 15 card packs and small sets will have eight card packs. And what they did at the time was they had fewer sheets for a smaller thing. So the idea was a large set would have common, uncommon, and rare sheets,

and the smaller sets just had two sets of sheets, common sheets and uncommon slash rare sheets. And whether you were an uncommon or a rare had to do with how many times you showed up on that sheet. And so one thing you'll see in early Magic, when they talk about rarities of things, sometimes they'll say like U2 or U5. What that meant is it talked about on the uncommon sheet how many times it appeared. So U1 or U2, which

meant appeared once or twice on the uncommon sheet, was considered a rare. And if you appeared more than that, three, four, five times, then you're considered a common. There might have even been some U6s. Also, on the common sheet, the common sheet also had some variants. Although we consider them all common, but there was some range. So the Arabian Knights booster,

the thing at the time was, the original plan was that each expansion would have a unique back. In fact, there was a purple back made for Raby Knights, which if you ever bought the Magic Encyclopedia, I know it's in there in one of the back sections on oddities and stuff.

But at the last minute, a bunch of people, I know Scaf was one of them, convinced the powers that be that it was a mistake to change the back. And the last minute they pulled it and didn't change the back and went to a normal magic back. So Aramie Knights, once again, it was purple.

It still, the early magic packaging did not have any pictures of any kind. It still was just like, they would change the coloring. So Aramie Knights, I think, was purple. Then came Antiquities. Antiquities also had eight cards in it. And it was silver, I believe. Okay, now we get to Legends. So, Legends was a large set, so it went back to the 15-card packs. It was like a blue sort of packaging.

And it also had starter decks. So, the idea was, if you were a large set, you got starter decks and boosters. And if you were a small set, so you got 60 card starter decks and 15 card boosters if you were a large set and you got 8 card boosters if you were a small set. That was the original idea. Then, after Legends came The Dark. That was an 8 card set because it was a small set.

Uh, after the Dark was Fallen Empires, it was an eight card set because it was a small set. Um, and then after that was, um, after Fallen Empires was Ice Age. So Ice Age was a large set. So it had, um, uh, a starter and a booster, but Ice Age was a large set so it had a starter and a booster but Ice Age started something new. So what Ice Age did on the packaging is for the first time it included art on the booster wrap. That now it wasn't just the magical logo on a singular color, it was an image. In fact the way it worked for quite a

while is the large sets had multiple images, and the small sets had single images. So the large set, back in the day, I believe there was three images for a large set, and there was one for a small set. Now sets, I think sets have four or five images. You guys should know better than I would on this one. But it was something early on that... The other thing that Ice Age did differently

is they went to foil packaging. Early Magic was a different thing. The problem, though, was they added a little bit of a transparency to it, and so people could manipulate the package to sort of try to peek through the package, which was the problem. So when Ice Age started, we started foiling, which was not transparent in any way.

You couldn't see through. And one of the things that happened was it was a combination of things. Usually you see jumps at times. And so Ice Age was a jump forward where we started the foiling and started the pictures on it. Another thing that happened along the way is I'm trying to think when this happened. When Magic started, it had a

blue logo. And if you look at the back of a Magic card, the logo on the back of a Magic card is Magic's original logo. And what happened was, they realized that it wouldn't pop on shells. The blue, one of the things when you look at packaging, somebody remembers we're talking about packaging, is one of the goals of packaging

is you want people to draw the eye to it. And you want people to you want people to get excited to have it. Oh, one of the things that, so, actually, let me finish this story and then I'll tip the other one. So one of the problems they realized was that the magic logo wasn't doing a good job of pulling focus, of getting people to look at it.

It was a little too dark. So what happened was, I'm trying to think when it changed. I think it, I don't know exactly. Sometime, sometime, I think it was after Ice Age, but I know for sure it was changed, I think it may after Ice Age, but I know for sure it was changed, I think it may have got changed around alliances? Sometime around here. We changed to a new logo,

and the new logo, instead of being blue, was yellow. And that, the current, we've tweaked the logo over the years, so the logo right now is not exactly the same as it was when we changed it over to yellow. But it was a big switch of changing it from blue to changing it to yellow. And a lot of people, it's something that's subtle that a lot of people don't, interestingly don't notice, even though the logos are very different.

You look at the back of the card versus a box. Another thing to keep in mind, by the way, about the boxes, something that people don't, is when I talk about packaging, there's not just the wrap for the boosters or for the starters. And that was the box itself, the booster box itself. One of the things you want to do is, we have what we call point of sale, which is you want to create something that can stick right by the register, that is an enticing thing, because Magic has a lot of impulse buying to it, which is, oh, look, Magic. Oh, I should get another pack of Magic. I mean,

some people, the more franchise players, obviously will buy whole boxes, but for people that are a little less enfranchised, they tend to buy a booster at a time, and, you know, it's very common for, for example, people go, oh, I'll buy three boosters today, and the next time I'll buy, yeah, two boosters. So you kind of want a nice display.

So the way the booster boxes work, if you've ever thought about this, is they need to fold down flat so that we can mail them. One of the things that's important is you need to make packaging so it can be transported because a big part of getting packaging is you have to mail it to people. And then you want it to be able to look nice when you set it up in the shop.

So if you look at a Magic Booster Box, what it does is the top part of it usually has some artwork that can be disconnected and you can open it up and disconnect it and then how do I explain this? Imagine, for example, if you, when you disconnect it, it pops open and then you can tuck the flap in the back part of the box and it sticks up.

And then it gives you, in the early days, it gave you a logo of the set. Now it gives you not just the logo, but a picture as well. And that allows us to just sort of draw your eye

to the booster packs. And then the booster packs themselves now have art on them, so it's a lot prettier. But if you go back to the early days, you know, if you open it up, it would just say Magic. Sure, it would say Magic. I think it would say the name of the expansion.

But starting with Ice Age, we started sort of jazzing it up, and I think Ice Age was the first one which had pictures on the booster box itself and the pictures on the flow wrap. Flow wrap is what we call the boosters. So for those that never thought of it, the way a booster pack is made is it actually is a long, imagine the material that you see on a booster pack, just in long ribbons, if you will. And what happens is it's actually made as a tube, essentially. It's wrapped around in a tube and then cards go in it

and then a machine crunches the top and bottom and then cuts them. And so the booster wrapping is one long giant tube that keeps repeating the image on it. And so you basically crimp and cut and then you make your booster pack. Usually crimping involves

some heat, I think. And the material is made such with a little bit of heat it seals, so it sticks together, so you can't open it. Like one of the important things about a booster wrap is you don't want, you don't want people to open it, like once it's open, it's open. You don't want people to be able to open it and shut it again.

With the boxes, the other thing we started doing, which I think we did relatively early on, maybe we did all the way back to the beginning, is for the booster boxes themselves, you put flow wrap on it, which means you put plastic wrap on it. And the plastic wrap usually has Wizards' logo on it. And the idea is it's sealed,

so you know whether a box has been opened or not, whether a booster box has been opened or not. And then on the starter decks, we also did cellophane wrap on it so that you had to open it to know that you opened it. Starter decks went away. I'm trying to think when starter decks went away. A lot of today is being done from memory. So starter decks lasted quite a while. It was very common. All large. So starter decks lasted quite a while. It was very common. All large set had starter decks.

And then eventually we phased them out. It was many, many years. It was like 8, 10 years into the lifespan of Magic before we started phasing out the starter decks. And the reason we did is we found that people were mostly just buying... People weren't really buying starter decks. And the reason we did is we found that people were mostly just buying, people weren't really buying starter decks, people were buying booster packs. And it just costs a lot more to make starter decks than it costs to make booster packs. And people

seem more interested in booster packs than starter decks. And so it just was, you know, it was, booster packs were a lot more economical, and players preferred to buy booster packs, so we ended up moving to the booster pack system. Another big part of it is drafting, which early on was not a big part of Magic, later became a big part of Magic. And so having things in booster, a lot of people like the boosters, because a lot of people are like, well, if I'm going to open my product, I like the drafting experience, I get an extra bonus if I use my packs first to draft with. And so a lot of people who wanted to buy stuff, especially in franchise players who are buying

boxes of things, were buying boosters and not buying starters. So that's why we eventually phased out starters. Okay, so we had boxes of, I'm sorry, we had booster packs of 15 and booster packs of 8. Okay, so now we get Ice Age comes out, then Homelands comes out. So Homelands was back to an 8-pack. Now we get to Alliances. Alliances was a 12-pack. Now, I'm not quite sure I understand how we got to 12-pack. The idea originally was large sets were 15 and

small sets were 8. Alliances was a little bit bigger than the small set. The other thing to remember is over time the small sets got bigger. So Arabian Nights, which was the very first small set, had I want to say like 78 cards in it. And then Antiquities had like 90 some cards in it and then um antiquities had like 90 some cards in it and then so little sets kept getting bigger um up to the point where for a long time 143 was the size of a small set um then small sets became 165 and now they're 175 i think um over time the small sets have grown and the large sets have shrunk. Originally large sets, it was very common in large sets to have, in the early days, to have three sheets of 110 cards each. And so not counting basic land, you could have 330 cards, 110 commons, 110 uncommons,

110 rares. That ended up being a little overwhelming. And remember, when you had 121 rares, all your rares were mythic rares. One thing people don't seem to understand when we introduce mythic rarity is we weren't actually introducing a brand new rarity. What we were doing is saying, hey, what we've called a rare goes through a wide gap of things. And, you know, we had sets, for example,

that had 121 rares, which technically, I guess, 121 rares is every rare is a mythic rare. 110 would be closer to mythic rare than rare, but not quite at current mythic rare status. But anyway, the early days, we just had large, and we ended up, over years, shrunk the large set. I mean, it's gone up and down, but it is smaller now than it was back then.

Anyway, Alliances, being a small set, I don't know how we got to 12 cards in the pack. I'm not sure what prompted that. But, oh, so that had 12 cards. Let me go through another, a few other quirky cards. Unglued, the original unset, how many big were your booster packs? It had 10 card booster packs. Once again, I don't know how we got to 10 card booster packs. We also, for a while, made mass market booster packs that had five cards in it. So we've made five cards.

So we've made five, we've made eight, we've made 10, we've made 12, we've made 15. So there's been a lot of different package sizing. But eventually what we realized was, and this is once again, something that matters for packaging purposes, is every time you change the size of your boosters, you have to change the size of your box. And the other big thing is, once you figure out how, like right now our booster boxes, I think, hold 36 packs, which they've always had. They've held 36 packs. Actually, that might not be true for some of the less than 15 packs. I'm not sure about those. 15-car packs have always held 36 packs.

That allows you to stack 12 packs three wide. So it's 12 high, three wide. That's the right amount of size. The other thing that's changed over the year is Magic is packed in what's called cases, meaning when you buy Magic, you buy it in a case. In the early days, cases were

I think 10 booster in a case. In the early days, cases were, I think, 10 booster box per case. And nowadays, I think there's six booster box per case. But stores usually don't buy individual packs. They buy cases. That's how you buy magics, by the case. And one of the things you have to keep in mind is you have to make sure that the box is the right size. And if you keep changing how big the booster packs are, you have to keep changing how big the boxes are. And eventually we just said, you know what, let's be consistent. That there's a lot of waste that comes from constantly changing your size and a lot of work that gets to be redone. done where if you make things a set uniform size it allows things like caps would rather focus on making the coolest looking box they can not figuring out scopes to how big the thing because once again remember um our case boxes are a certain size and so if you change the size of

like it's a trickle effect you don't't really realize that when you take a booster pack and you change the size of a booster pack, that changes the size of the box, which affects the size of the case. Things that seem real simple. One of the things we have right now is, so Magic for the longest time had 15 cards in a booster.

Eventually what happened is brand decided they would like to put an add card in. We ended up having a 16th card. Turned out that's all we could add. That a booster pack actually had a little bit extra room. It could fit the 16th card and that's all it could fit. That's all a booster box could fit. And that you couldn't make it any bigger to fit both in the booster and in the box.

And then in the case, obviously. And what happened was originally the add cards were I think the way it started was, brand wanted to do ad cards, but they knew they didn't want players to be unhappy with the ad cards. So they came to R&D and said, okay, here's what we're going to do. One side will be the ads, and the other side will let R&D do whatever R&D wants to do. And we've messed around. We've done a lot of different things on the backside of ads.

Tokens have been the most popular. We've done tip cards. We've done rules cards. You know, we've done all sorts of cards to give you different gameplay things to help you. In the end, the most popular have been tokens. So what happened over time, A, we shifted from 50-50.

R&D actually does slightly more than 50% now, I believe. There's not always ads in every single pack now because we're slightly over that. Although it's close, I think. And then because tokens were so popular, we've now upped the amount of tokens. So most packs, one site site you'll get a token. So a lot of people have asked, by the way, if you guys do token cards, you know, you do add cards that are double-faced, oh shouldn't that be easy to do double-faced cards? The answer, by the way, is no. That the ink we use to make the add cards is slightly different than the ink in the process

we use to make normal Magic cards. So the idea was the ad cards didn't quite need to be at the quality level that our normal cards need to be. Like one thing about magic cards, we work really hard to keep the quality at the highest level possible. We want the cards to be crisp and look good and last a long time. But the ad cards didn't quite have the needs of a normal card. So the ad cards aren't quite up to the standard of normal cards. And thus, the technique we use for those is not the technique we could use, for example, for double-faced cards. Anyway, so we decided to uniform the size of the booster pack to 15. And there was a couple of reasons.

So one was a production reason. One had to do with trying to make it as easy as possible. If you keep changing what you're doing, it just makes a lot of extra work. Another reason, though, was drafting became very popular. In the early days, there was just not a lot of drafting, so having eight-card packs didn't mean anything. But once drafting became a thing, not having 15 card packs really caused problems. Like one, for example, a lot of times people,

I know, want to draft unglued with unhinged. And the problem is unglued is 10 card packs and unhinged is 15 card packs. So the tip I always say, by the way, if you ever want to draft unglued unhinged, is draft two of each. So two 10 card packs and two 15-card packs. Technically, that's 50 cards rather

than 45 cards, but close enough that usually you'll be okay. And that's, by the way, if you want to draft just Unsets. As always, I encourage when drafting Unsets to mix in other sets with it. I believe that Un is best when it... Well, I mean, it depends. Unglute, for example, and to some extent

Unhinged, wasn't as designed. Unglued wasn't designed to be drafted by itself. It was designed to be drafted with other things. And Unhinged, I kind of knew people would draft it by itself because they did that with Unglued. So Unhinged was a little more geared toward drafting by itself. But even then, I still think Unhinged was better when supplementing some other drafts. So when the silliness was not at full throttle, but half throttle, I think a lot of times, made some of the most compelling games.

Sorry, I'm yawning today. One of the things about having kids, I have to get up early every day and get the kids up and out of camp. Normally during the school year, I get them off to school. But I apologize for being, I'm going to take a sip of water. Anyway, the booster bag.

So we decided to move away from the 8s and the 10s. The 5-pack in mass market still exists, but that's a different animal. Oh, I didn't get into mass marketing. So another thing about packaging is early Magic, we mostly went into hobby stores. We mostly went into local game stores and stuff. But eventually Magic got big enough we started going to mass market. Well,

mass market has different needs than a local game store. So a local game store, what we want to do is we want to package a booster box that you get and then you open it up and open up the flap and then stick it by your register. That's not how mass market works. Mass market is peg based, for those who don't know a lot about American mass market. And what that means is most of the things in the store, there is a series of pegs and you need to be, you need to hang on it.

So the problem is, how exactly does a magic booster hang on a peg in Walmart or Target or whatever? And the answer is, well, the first answer is, we do, what's it called? I'm blanking on the name of this. So there's a process by which you take a piece of cardboard and then you put plastic on the front of it. What is that called? I'm sure people here have a name for it. That is how we used to do it. At the very, very beginning, is that bubble wrapping maybe? When Magic first started, that's how we did it. You'd have a cardboard back,

you'd have a plastic bubble, and there'd be one, two, or three packs inside it. And you would buy that. But eventually, it's wasteful, it takes up extra space, it's more expensive. We ended up getting to

the next thing is we made a sleeve that holds the booster that itself is... The sleeve advertises the product, and then the booster goes inside it. Then eventually we moved toward paper packaging that you'll see now. I'm not sure whether the foil is still inside it. We've experimented a lot with packaging in which the packaging itself is made of

paper. You'll see with Modern Masters for example, that was their big experiment to try to see if we can make the whole booster out of recyclable material, cardboard essentially. And we had some problems with it. The biggest issue is because it wasn't, the thing about a foil is it holds the card real tight when you crimp the top and bottom. They really don't have any room to move. But when we tried making the cardboard,

there's a little bit of space in it. And what happens is the cards could move. They could go up and down. And in transport sometimes, it sometimes would injure the cards. So we are dedicated. Hasbro is dedicated, Wizards is dedicated. It's environmental, it's very important. And so we're looking at trying to find

the best packaging we can. The trick is we also want to make sure that, you know, it's secure and it meets all the requirements we need to packaging. So Modern Masters was a good chance of us trying something new. Didn't quite work the way we wanted, but we learned a lot from it.

Especially, for example, as I'm talking about in mass market. Our parking in mass market has a strong cardboard component to it. Anyway, you'll see as we find things and can update things, it is something we're working on and trying to improve upon. I know we get

asked from time to time about that and it's something that we're working on trying to get better. But anyway, mass marketing is a whole different series of challenges for the packaging. And that's, once again, like I said, I always talk about making the game, about making the mechanics and stuff. Packaging is equally complex. There's a lot of math to it. You have to build something that will you want to, for example, be able to make a display with it, but at the same time you want it to be able to be mailed through the mail. There's a lot of components there to doing that and packing it right and making sure that

there are, one of the things that's very interesting is, and I've talked about this a few times, is sometimes when you make changes or do something, I want to do something, it has a lot of interesting ramifications. And I don't think people always think about, oh, well, something you might do in one place actually affects something like the packaging. So I did, by the way, here's a little quick story. The one time that I actually did a little bit of work on packaging, that's the question, can you name the set where I had a little bit of work on packaging? The answer was Unhinged. I really, one of the things I thought was important is I like where we can put jokes wherever we can in the unsets. And I got permission to work with the packaging people to try to make the packaging a little more fun.

So what I did at the time is I looked at how our packaging was done and then I did a parody of it. So normally on Magic Packaging back in the day when Unhinged came out, we used to show you other products on the back of the packaging. And so I did the same thing except, I'm sorry, not on the, I apologize. That's on the box, not on the booster wrap. On the box, we used to show you other products that were affiliated with it, like fat packs or whatever. So I showed you other products associated with Unhinged, but I just made them up.

So there was like the Unhinged ham and the Unhinged booster rocket and the Unhinged... I just made weird products up. And then there's legal text that's on a box that explains all sorts of stuff. I got permission somehow. I'm not sure how this happened.

I got permission from legal to write for legal text. And the way it worked was they told me things I had to say and then I added in the stuff I wanted and then I ran it all by illegal to make sure that everything was in fact legit, that the legal text was proper. But if you've never had a chance, and obviously this is not easy to do, but if you ever

get your hands on a box of Unhinged, I wrote the flavor text on the box of Unhinged. Not the flavor text, the legal text. And I had to tell you that there was no such thing as an Unhinged branded booster rocket that was made up and not real.

But anyway, one of the things that we have to do for packaging is remember that different stores will have different kind of packaging. But wait! There's even more! But not only do we have to do for packaging is remember that different stores will have different kind of packaging. But wait! There's even more! So not only do we have to worry about local stores versus mass market, we also have

lots of different languages. And so one of the goals in Possible when making packaging is we know we have to translate it, but we want to limit how much translation we have to do. Because the goal is not the goal is to try to make a template for a packaging and then use that to the best of our knowledge

in each different market. But remember, Magic's in 11 languages right now. Each language needs its own unique box. Now the boxes generally look the same. You know, the key art, as we call it, will be the same between the boxes. The logo, some, it depends on the market. Some of them use the Magic logo in English.

Some use it in their local language. The ones that aren't in English usually then have translation below it. But anyway, so not only is there packaging that has to be done for, you know, like hobby stores and mass market stores, there are also stuff that has to be done for all the different languages. And for some of the languages, they have mass market versus hobby.

You know, there's all these different gradients of things they have to do. So when you talk about, oh, we have a set coming out, how many different packaging, the packaging people, you know, might have to make 20, 30 different packaging, that there's a lot of different packaging going on. And the other thing to keep in mind is there are a lot of factors that have to happen. For example, in order to sell the booster pack in certain places, there's certain rules about what you have to have on the packaging. That certain countries require you to explain certain things.

And because it's hard for us to... One of the things we'll do is we tend to put that stuff on all the booster packs. If any market needs it, we often will put it on all the booster packs, just because it's hard to swap all the different things out. Another thing to keep in mind when we talk about packaging is it's very important that the sets that are connected to each other have a visual through line, that we want you, if we're making a block, we want to make sure that all the sets in the block

connect to the original set. And that's something that sometimes is really blunt, sometimes a little more subtle. Like Return to Ravnik had an interesting thing where they had this background sort of pattern, this texture pattern. It's kind of a cityscape texture pattern. And then each set was a different color, but that texture pushed through. That if you actually look at the boxes next to each other, they had a very similarity to them. That one of our goals is,

and this is something that took us a while, like early on we used to design boxes in a vacuum, like let's make this box look as good as possible. And then we ran into the problem that when people were doing drafts and block, they would mix up the cards because the cards in one booster pack, one set, would look too much like another set.

And so we got the feedback of oh this is causing problems um and that's one of the biggest things about about packaging that i don't i'm not sure people really keep in mind i mean it's not your job to really think about it but there's so many different things packaging is trying to do try to be functional like can people tell which card sets are out it's trying to be sexy it's trying to sell this that sits on the shelf the packaging has a lot of? It's trying to be sexy. It's trying to sell the set that sits on the shelf. The packaging has a lot of roles. It's trying to be functional. You have to ship it.

You have to convert it into the display at the register. You know, it has a lot of different functions that it has to do. And all those things have to work in conjunction. So just as I talk about doing design and all the different things we think about, you know, packaging has lots of different features. And, for example, I'm not someone who does packaging. I'm not someone who messes with that world at all. And I'm sure we get McIvada or someone that does that in the car.

There are so many different facets that I'm sure I'm unaware of. Just as I sometimes talk to you about the minutia of design, there's minutia of packaging. There's things about packaging of, for example, one of the latest things we did is we did a slight redid of the card frame in Magic 2015. And one of the reasons we did it is we put code at the bottom of the card. A lot of people like that code

because it makes it easier to read information, you know, what set it is and stuff. We now have a three-letter code, so not everybody is good at memorizing the symbols, right? Because the expansion symbol, there's so many of them, it's hard to remember them all. But a three-letter code gives you a lot more clue of what the expansion is. But the main reason we did that was actually not a functionality. I mean, while we had to do it, we made sure it was functional was done for printing because printing technology

has changed so much that now the printer has the ability to monitor what cards are getting printed and what's going where. But in order to do that there needs to be a means by which to track individually each card and that is what the code at the bottom of the card, I mean it has multiple functions I guess, but the main function was as a means for the printer to track what cards are going in what booster. The cool thing, and we're not quite there yet, the cool thing is we are on the cusp, and cusp might mean many years, but we are, at least we can see it, of what we call digital printing, which does exist right now,

it's just not, it's not quite at the point where I can do the stuff I want to talk about in a second. One of the cool things about digital printing is eventually we'll be able to have a lot more customizability about what goes where. For example, when we made double-faced cards, I had wanted at the time to have a card that you play that then goes outside the game and gets a double-faced card and puts it in play. The double-faced cards were more token-y originally.

But the problem was in order for that to work, I needed the card that went and got the card, the double-faced card, and the double-faced card to be in the same pack together. And the problem was

we could only do that at a 90% accuracy rate. Well, one out of ten not matching up is pretty bad. The last thing is, here's a card that casts a double-faced card. We're not giving you the double-faced card. So that wasn't good enough. We weren't willing to do it, so we ended up changing how we did double-faced cards. But once we have the ability to tie things together, once I can say if card A is in a booster

pack, I need card B in a booster pack, it opens up a lot of interesting design space. I don't want to get too into it because it still weighs off and I want you to get excited for something that isn't quite here yet. But if you want a little glimpse of the future, there is a lot of neat dynamics that when you can say, I want to make sure

that card A and B go together, that whenever you open card A, you also open card B, that means that I can start making mechanics that tie between cards. And because I can guarantee you can get them together in the future, I can make mechanics like that. And so there's, that's another example, for example, where the capabilities of packaging, of making the cards,

can allow me to do things. Like, one of the parameters that I have to work under in designing cards is I have to design cards to the technology that they are. You know, like if you go out on a video game, there's a lot of, you know, a trading card video game can do a lot of things that a trading card paper game can't do just because the quality of things or how things can change or how things can track is just different. The same holds true for when you think about your packaging. Your packaging impacts the kind of things of how and what you can do. So, but anyway, I'm almost to work. The point of today, I hope, is that I don't think people necessarily spend a lot of time

thinking about packaging. As I explain things today, maybe you'll go back and go, oh, oh yeah, you know, I remember that. And maybe I have no idea why we stopped doing eight card packs or why, you know, all the different things we've done, why we've done what we've done. But, and like I said, there's a whole dedicated team. When I talk about CAPS, CAPS is actually a bunch of different people. when I talk about Caps, Caps is actually a bunch of different people but they're the graphic designers and the people that deal with all they're the people that deal with making things

physically making things, not designing them like R&D makes what the card does but it doesn't physically make the card or physically make the packaging which is what Caps does and one section of Caps is packaging there's a graphic design section packaging there's one team that's dedicated I mean there's a graphic design section and some of them

there's different things they do but one section does the packaging and the amount of time and energy because you want the packaging to convey what the product is you want it to be exciting you want it to be evocative and you want it to be unique

in that you don't want every magic booster just blending together but at the same time you have to feel like you are a magic product evocative, you know, and you want it to be unique in that you don't want every magic booster just blending together, you know. But at the same time, you have to feel like you are a magic product. So the fine line the packaging walks is all magic products are seen like magic products, but it shouldn't seem so monotonous that you feel like you've just seen it before. And it's got to convey the set that's in. It's got to sell whatever the set is. Now, obviously, we have magic art to help us. That's a big plus

that our packaging has. But anyway, really the goal of today is, and I like to do these podcasts from time to time, where I just get into a very different topic than you're normally used to

listening to me talk about. So you can realize all the different parameters of that topic, of all the different kinds of things that go into it. That when I talk about packaging, it affects everything. It affects how design design things.

It affects how logistic and sales deal with things. It affects everything around it that is very important and that we spend a lot of time and energy making sure our packaging is the best that it can be. Just like I talk, I mean, I spend all this time and energy talking about how we, R&D, makes magic the best game it can be. But at the same time, we've got another really dedicated, really talented group of people making sure our packaging can be everything

our packaging can be. And that's one of the cool things about Wizards is there's all these different sections doing all these different jobs to come together to make a finished product. And I know when you rip it open your Magic Pack, maybe you're not so focused on the packaging, you're a little more focused on the cards. But take a moment next time, take a moment to really, really look at the packaging. Really just take a moment, look at it. Look at the front,

the back, the components of it. Look at the texturing. There's a lot of details that sometimes get glossed over, I think. And that when you really look at it, it's actually really beautiful and a lot of hard work and like I said a really talented team puts that together. So my goal today is to say packaging matters take a look at the packaging. There's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of change that's happened over the years

but just as magic technologies evolves, packaging technologies evolve and we've done a lot of cool things and as I hinted at there's even cool things in the future you know one day I'll be able to do things I've never been able to do before as a game designer

because the packaging and the way we put the sets together will allow me to do things like that. And that, my friends, is quite exciting. Okay, but I've now

parked my car, so we 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. Talk to you guys next time.