Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #398 - You Make the Card

Episode Date: January 6, 2017

Mark talks about the special series where we've gone to the public and sought their help in creating a Magic card.

I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today's podcast came from an interesting place. One of the people I follow on Twitter is MTGColorPie. And Robbie is somebody who writes a lot about magic, about magic theory, magic colors, and just talks a lot about sort of magic. And earlier this week, on his Twitter, he asked the following question. He said,

did a poll actually. Do you know who Mr. Baby Cakes is? Yes or no? And over half of people put no. And he was bemoaning how people didn't know the history of magic. And so as one of the historians of magic, I decided this was a prompting for me to tell you the story of Mr. Baby Cakes. And really what that

means is that I'm going to make a podcast all about You Make the Card, as you will see Mr. Baby Cakes as part of the You Make the Card history. So let me, I'm going to talk about what You Make the Card is, and then I'm going to walk through it. So what it is, basically, it's a promotion that we've done thus far four times. And the idea of it is, it's something in which it's a series of polls in which we ask the audience, the readers of MagicTheGathering.com, to, through a series of votes, make a magic card. So let me talk about where this came from, and then I'll walk through the different times we did it. Okay, so we have to go back, in the

Wayback Machine, back to 2001. So when magic, wizards had always been pretty good. You know, we had a website before most companies had a website. I remember in the early days that it wasn't, you know, as the web was slowly becoming a thing, you know,

companies started realizing they needed to have a presence. And Wizards actually got a website pretty early. For example, we actually have the domain wizards.com, so that shows that we were on the ball. But for a long time our website was really kind of just, hey it's Wizards and here's our products. There wasn't any content. And in the early days, we used to have The Duelist, a magazine that would sort of give out content. But The Duelist kind of went away. And one day, the brand team decided that looking around that really we needed a better web presence than we did.

We needed something. We needed content. We needed something. We needed content. We needed something. So they went to Bill Rose, who was the VP of R&D at the time, or still is, and said to him, we want a website that, we want a magic website. Can your team put that together? And Bill said, yes, yes we can. And so Bill came to me for a couple of reasons.

One is I was the member of R&D with a background in communications. This is what I studied in school. I had been the editor-in-chief of The Duelist and I was a writer, you know, and so Bill knew that I had the skills to put it together. So Bill asked me to put it together. I said yes. Took about a year to put all the pieces together.

Among the way, I hired Aaron Forsyth to run the website. I had to work with our online media department and stuff, and we worked together. But anyway, one of the things that was really important to me, and this was for my training from communication school, was I wanted to make sure that what we were doing was taking advantage of our strengths. So, for example, there were three things that I realized that we could do that nobody else could do. Number one, we were the definitive source of information. You know, if you read that Wizards said something on another website, like, well,

maybe they got it right, you know. But when Wizards says it, oh, that's the definitive source. So, A, we got to be the definitive source. B, we had access to behind-the-scenes information that nobody does. We can tell you, you know, one of the neat things that we could do that other websites couldn't do is give you the, you know, the behind-the-scenes tour. We had the ability to sort of show you content that nobody else had. And the third thing that we could do was we had the ability to talk with you. So there's a thing in communications called two-way addressability, a little fancy term

there. What that means is one of the things that media can do, and the internet does really well, is not only allow you to talk to your consumer, but allow your consumer to talk to you. And one of the things that we wanted is, we wanted, and I particularly wanted, the new website to give you, the audience, the chance to not just hear about magic, but feel like you could impact magic. That you had an ability to affect the game. So one of those goals, so basically I knew that we were creating and we needed to do all those things.

So I said, okay, I wanted to do something. I wanted to have a project. When I put together the website, I wanted something that A, could interact with the public to give this sort of sense of feeling like you were impacting the game. I wanted it to be something that would create content for the website.

That I wanted something that, you know, not only were we doing something, but we were making actual content. And I wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to be something that was enjoyable. I wanted to really get a lot of people involved. And to do that, I had to be something that was neat. So the idea I came up with, and I think from the very first time I came up with it, I called it You Make the Card.

I think we actually just thought about, like, does it need another name? And it was, no, we like You Make the Card. And I think the name came from in sports, they do this thing called You Make the Call, back in the day, I may still do it, where they would show you something and then say, oh, if you were the referee,

what would you do? So I think the name came from You Make the Call, so you make the card. And anyway, the other thing is there have been a lot of, when I was looking at sort of media, there have been a lot of things where one of the ways that the public was interacting, I'm sorry, that the companies were interacting with the public was doing things where they would let the public vote on things. For example, like, let's say, at one point, like, M&M's was deciding to add a color to the M&M bag. And so they let the audience vote between three choices.

And the choice that, you know, the audience picked, that was the one that got added to the M&M's. Or likewise, I remember DC Comics did this thing where there was a storyline where the Joker had captured Robin. And, like, they said to the audience, should the Joker kill Robin? You decide, yes or no. And, sadly, sadly, the audience said yes. It wasn't the original Robin, Dick Grayson.

It was the second Robin, a character named Jason Todd. But anyway, by a narrow margin, the audience decided to kill off Robin, or have the Joker kill off Robin, but we all know the audience kind of killed off Robin. For those who were worried, that Robin would later come back and become a different sort of, come to Red Hood. So Jason Todd lived. But the audience

did kill him off, and so there was this idea of the audience having this direct thing where you let the audience vote, and directly you could see, hey, now there are, I think it was the red M&M they put back or, you know, Robin's dead or whatever. The audience voted and it had an impact and you could just see the impact. And that was powerful and potent. And so I wanted to do that. So the idea was, could we let the audience make a decision or impact something? So the thing I liked a lot was the idea of,

could I let the audience make something? Could the audience do choices that directly affected the product itself? You know, could you guys make decisions? And in the end, when you opened up a Magic Booster Pack, you're like, hey, that was because of a decision I made. So I came up with the idea of, could we make a card? And once again, I wasn't interested in one person making a card.

One of the ways we could have done it is, hey, hey audience, you get to make a card, and everybody turns in their card, and then I pick one, and hey, one person got their card made. That's not what I wanted. I wanted as many people as possible to feel like they were involved in the making of the card. So the idea I came up with, sort of taking all these ideas and blending them together, was something in which, and the way I pitched to R&D is I said, here's what I want to do. I want to go through the process of making a card and at every level I want the audience to make decisions. Whenever there's a

decision to be made, the audience makes the decision, and whenever there's something creatively to make, the audience creatively makes it. And so the idea was part of this would be voting and part would be submitting things which would eventually get voted. So the website started in January 2nd of 2002

and on that day we announced that very soon, it ended up starting on the 16th, January 16th of 2002, we announced that we'd be starting a special thing. I'm not even sure whether we told the name of it on the first day of the website opening up but we announced that we'd be starting a special thing. I'm not even sure whether we told the name of it on the first day of the website opening up, but we said we were going to be a cool thing. Maybe we did call it You Make the Card, I forget.

But anyway, we said very shortly we were going to make a cool thing. So the very first You Make a Card started right after the new website started. And so I'm going to walk you through. I decided what I wanted to do is I'm not going to walk you through all of them. There's four of them.

I wanted to walk you through the first one to sort of make you understand kind of how the decisions got made and what got made. And then I'll talk about the rest after I'm done. But I wanted to go in depth on one of them, the first one, Mr. Baby Cakes. Okay, so here's what happened is the first step, we said to you, choose a color. And we only let you choose the five colors. Choose Cakes. Okay, so here's what happened is, the first step, we said to you, choose a color. And we only let you choose the five colors. Choose a color. So, green won that vote by 25%. So, I didn't write down what came in second.

But green won with 25% of the vote. It was pretty evenly split, obviously, the winner. Well, I'll get to that. As you will later see, I started having runoffs because I made a limit of having 30% be the... I wanted at least...

Or 33%. I wanted at least a third of the audience to pick. So I would later do runoffs. I actually didn't do runoffs with the color. So the color's one of the few ones that actually got in

with under a third of the vote. Okay, step two. Once you had a color, I wanted you to choose a card type. And you guys definitively chose a card type. 51% of you chose creature. So over half the audience wanted creature. So you had a color, I wanted you to choose a card type. And you guys definitively chose a card type. 51% of you chose creature. So over half the audience wanted creature.

So you had the option of creature, enchantment, instant resource, or anything that could be a green spell. Okay, the third step, what I said to you is, I want you to choose your path. I gave you three paths. I said we could choose the mechanic first, we could choose the card type first, or we could choose the size of the creature first. What do you guys want to do? And you guys chose to choose the mechanic first, we could choose the car type first, or we could choose the size of the creature first.

What do you guys want to do? And you guys chose to choose the mechanic first. So step four was, okay, I'm taking submissions for mechanics. And the idea was, I said, I want you to send me mechanic ideas. And it's a green creature, send me mechanic ideas. Now, at this time, I didn't limit how many ideas. Later on, I would limit people to one idea per person. You'll see why in a second.

I said, okay, send as many ideas as you want. So we set up a website. The online media people set up a website for me and organized it. And then I went up to them and they printed out. They set it up so they could print me out all the submissions. And Kevin Endo was a guy who worked on the team. I remember I went up to Kevin and Kevin handed me what I believe was about eight inch stack of paper.

Just imagine paper stack, eight inches high. That was how many submissions. We got thousands and thousands of submissions. This was a really, really popular thing. And I had allocated not a lot.

I felt like you guys have a week to turn things in. And I have, I think it's like two weeks or so to grade them. Or maybe I give myself three weeks. But anyway, it was, I way, way, way underestimated. In fact, there's multiple days that I sat on the couch in R&D just doing nothing all day long but reading through all the submissions.

And eventually what I do, I started having to draft other R&D people. Like I'd come up to them and say, hey, and I'd give them like a half an inch of paper. I'd go, I need you to look through these and pick the ones you like. And so I managed with some help from a bunch of other people. I really ended up pulling up all of R&D into this because there was so many submissions. But anyway, step number four, we narrowed them down. I'm sorry, step number five, we narrowed them down to ten mechanics. And one mechanic got the most votes, number 10,

got 27% of the votes, and we ended up having a runoff. And then the mechanic number 10, which was turned in by Alex Freeman, ended up getting 40%. So the mechanic that we chose, so the mechanic that was chosen was whenever any player

plays a spell, you put a plus one, plus one counter on this creature, and then during your up spell, you put a plus one, plus one counter on this creature, and then during your upkeep, you may move the counters from this creature to any other creature. Alex Freeman turned that in, and when Alex Freeman won, I said to him, okay, you made the mechanic,

you get to name the card. I mean, not the real name, but you get to give me a design name. And so the design name he gave me was Mr. Baby Cakes. That's where Mr. Baby Cakes came from. So up until it got a real name, we just called it Mr. Baby Cakes. And there are a lot of people even to this day... Oh, so the finished card was called Forgotten Ancient.

It ended up in Scourge. We'll go along and see how it forms. I'll run through the full card when we're done. But the card we're talking about ended up being called Forgotten Ancient. We'll get there. Okay, so once we had the mechanic, clearly it was the kind of mechanic where you didn't want to put the creature in too much jeopardy because it was so valuable to get bigger.

That one of the questions I said is, okay, guys, step number seven was wall or no. You know, this could have defender on it, which would allow us to be cheaper with it because if we can't attack with it, you know, it could be less. It could cost less. But if you want to attack with it, well, that costs more. So we asked the audience, and by a 54% vote, you said no.

We want to be able to attack with this. So step number eight was we asked you the size. You want to be a small, medium, or large creature. And I think what that meant was, I think we added up power and toughness and said if it was, I think what we said was, I think combined of five, power and toughness combined equal five was small. I think six to nine was medium, and ten and above was large. And the audience, 60% of you said you wanted a small creature.

You wanted to get this thing out quickly because, hey, every spell made it bigger, so you wanted to get it out as quick as you can. Okay, so number nine was we gave you ten different choices for combinations of power toughness with mana cost. So we combined them. Like, if you want this power toughness, here's the mana cost. So the three that ended up going to the runoff, because step number ten was the runoff,

was 0-3 for one green greengreen, a 0-1 for green-green, and 0-3 for one— I'm sorry. Well, those are the top two vote-getters. 0-3 for one green-green got 28%, 0-1 for green-green got 20%. And then we did a runoff. I think we did a runoff on the top three, but those votes, number three was way, way behind. And really, the big question was, do you want this to have a toughness of three or not?

If you do, it costs a little bit more. R&D believed that the green, green, zero, one was the more powerful card. But what happened was a lot of people really didn't like the lightning bolt existed at the time in the environment. And the nice thing about zero, three is if they cast a lightning bolt,

whenever you cast a spell, even if your opponent casts a spell, it gave the creature a plus one, plus one counter. So you couldn't destroy it with a lighting bolt. And so the concern was, the green green for 0-1, it could get destroyed by a lighting bolt, maybe before you could build it up. And so the audience ended up voting for 0-3 for one green green. And in the runoff, 53% voted for that. Number 11 was the creature type. So we gave you 10 choices for creature type.

And that was based on looking at, we went to the creative team and said, okay, based on this card mechanic, what do you think this could be? And we gave the audience 10 different choices. We then had a runoff. So elemental won with 19%. And then we had a runoff. Usually, by the way, the thing that won when everybody voted 10 to 1

when we had a runoff, I think that always was the case. So in the runoff, it was Elemental versus Spike and Fungus. Those are the three big vote-getters. Elemental got 40%, Spike got 31%, Fungus got 30%. So it ended up being an Elemental. Then number 13 was making the card concept. So what a card concept is, is we give the artist, what does it look like? What's the concept of this card? So we had the audience turn in card concepts. And then number 14 was voting on the

top 10 card concepts. The top concept got 23.9%. We did a runoff. It then got 46.2%. The top concept got 23.9%. We did a runoff. It then got 46.2%. Next, number 16, we had you vote on the artist. We gave you 10 artists to choose from. So step number 17 was the runoff from the artist. Mark Tanin, Jim Nelson, and Matt Cavata all got runoffs. Mark Tanin won.

Then we had time to make the card name. So we had a card concept for the card. We knew its power, its toughness, its abilities. We knew it was an elemental. So it was time for the audience to name, to create names for the thing. Meanwhile,

while you guys were making names, we were trying... One of the things we were trying to do also, which I thought was interesting, is not only were you getting to make a card, but we were trying to educate you on how our card got made. A lot of the things we were trying to do also, which I thought was interesting, is not only were you getting to make a card, but we were trying to educate you on how our card got made. A lot of the choices I was trying to do was show you at each step how, okay, there's options, there's roads, where do you want to go?

That's why I let you choose the path. There's a lot of trying to let you, that's why Waller know. There's a lot of options that came up that I want. Whenever there was a decision to be made, I always put it to the audience. There's a lot of options that came up that I want. Whenever there was a decision to be made, I always put it to the audience. So Mark Dineen, we had him turn in three sketches. So you, the audience, got to pick which sketch you like better.

Often artists will do multiple sketches and the art director will pick. But we let you pick because this was you make the card. Then what happened was development had played with the card and realized that 0-3 for a 1-green-green was too good. So they came back with a couple options. And so there's a choice between 0-3 for 3-green, so 4-mana, 1-green, 0-4 for 2-green-green, so 4-mana, or 2-green, or 0-1 for 1-green-green. This was actually a close vote off. 0-3 for three green, one with 35.1%,

but 0-4 for two green green had 32.5%, and 0-1 for one green green got 32.4%. So it was really, really close, but the one that won in the first place won again. And that was the final card by the way. It was 0-3 for three in the green. That was the final card cost. So next we voted on card names and then asked you to make flavor text.

We had a card name runoff. I forgot to write down the percentages. Obviously, I forgot an ancient one. I forgot an ancient one here. And then finally we had a flavor text runoff. It's blood is life. It's body is growth with 36% won in the flavor runoff. Okay's blood is life, it's body is growth with 36% won in the flavor runoff.

Okay, so let's put it all together now. So the final card was called Forgotten Ancient. Costs three and a green, so four mana, one of which is green. Was a 0-3 elemental.

When any player casts a spell, you put a plus one, plus one counter on the card. In the beginning of your upkeep, you may move counters

from this to any other creature. It took us, we started on January 16th, 2002. It took us, we started on January 16, 2002. It took us until December 6 of 2002, so almost a year to make Forgotten Ancient. Like I said, it ended up in Scourge. So there were 24 steps

to be made. And it was a big hit. The audience really, really liked it. They had a lot of fun making it. So we decided we would do it again. In fact, we did it right away. So this one ended December 6, 2002. And then on January 31, 2003, we started up the next one. So we did it right away. So I'm not going to get into the details of the other three. I'm going to talk about them. But I didn't write down the step-by-steps of all the other ones just because they tended to work very similarly to the first one.

So I wanted to walk through the first one so you got the idea of the essence of it. And then, like, once again, it was really important that, like I said, I wanted this to be as educational as it was entertainment. And it was very entertaining. A lot of people, like, some of the highest hits we ever got on the website at the time was people interacting with You Make the Card. A lot of people, like, some of the highest hits we ever got on the website at the time was people interacting with You Make the Card. A lot of people voted.

There was people discussing. Like, one thing that was neat was we would put an article up. Normally the way it works is we give you a vote, and we give you some time to vote, usually a couple days. And then the audience would write an article talking about what's the right thing to do and what should we do. And it was neat seeing the audience discuss. You know, it became a thing that went beyond just our website.

When the community as a whole would discuss things, there would be web pages and people talking and a lot of discussions about what they should be doing. Okay, so it was time to do the second you make the card. So I decided to mix things up. What we did is we started again from choosing a color, but we threw a wrinkle in, which was we didn't let you choose green

because we'd used green last time, but we did let you choose artifact. So in some level, we were letting you choose the frame, I guess. So you could choose, you know, white, blue, black, or red, or artifact. And the audience chose artifact. So this had less steps to it. This only had 14 steps to it. Part is because we really,

artifacts just have less choices to make in it. Like one nice thing about a creature was a creature had, you know, more options into it. You got to choose creature type and power toughness. But we walked through basically the same steps. What we did is we let people sort of, once they chose an artifact, oh, because they chose artifact, we said to them it was a non-creature artifact because we had done creatures before. So I think I said up front that we weren't going to do a creature this time and we weren't going to do green this time. So by choosing artifact, they chose a non-creature artifact.

Then we let them choose mechanics. So the card that ended up getting made called Crucible of Worlds was an artifact that cost three generic mana. And the card says you may play land cards from your graveyard. So this card ended up being a pretty powerful card. It seems to play in vintage. It's a pretty cool effect.

Actually, I did not write down the name of the person who submitted the mechanic, but I do know that, for trivia, the playtest name, or the design name of this card was Gazargo's Plow. That's what he called it when he turned it in.

Oh, something I forgot, by the way. In the first Forgotten Ancient, when people turned in mechanics, a lot of people turned in mechanics that weren't remotely green creature mechanics. But one of the ones that was really cool, which wasn't at all a green creature mechanic, was called Double Strike. And somebody had come up with a neat way to take First Strike and do something interesting

with it. We liked it so much, we up using it so not only did we did we make forgotten ancient but actually double strike came out of the very first you make the card okay back to second you make the card so we um once again we had it the audience voted we ended up making an artifact um it uh the audience voted on the card concepting and voted on the sketches and the name and the flavor text. One of the things we always try to do on You Make the Cards is make sure there was room for flavor text. So we tried to make sure that we picked abilities that were small enough that we still had room

for flavor text. We wanted the audience to be able to make flavor text. So Crucible of Worlds went over really well, but there was a little bit of a gap. So this one, the second you make the card, started January 31st, 2003, ended November 18th, 2003. You'll notice there were a lot less steps, but yet it took almost as long. Why was that? Because this time we took into account how long it took to look at audiences' things. And we actually budgeted correctly um i also think we what we started doing with this one is we got um we would get people out we got we got like um

freelancers what we would do is we would take all the submissions turn them to somebody that a little bit of training but basically said to them what i want you to do is anything remotely interesting keep just get out all the fluff. Because a lot of what got turned in, you know, there was awesome things turned in. There was truly amazing things. But a lot of it was either things we had done before or was out of color or wasn't particularly, you know. Like, while there was amazing things turned in, the vast, vast majority of it, you know, was fluff. And so we got somebody, in fact, maybe multiple people, freelance people that came in

that had enough design chops that they could sort of understand color pie, you know, and they could whittle it down. And then, you know, I then looked through all the whittled down versions, and the whittled down versions was still hundreds of entries. You know, I think like I don't remember the exact number, but you know 10,000 whatever entries we could turn in and it got whittled down to 500 that I

would read the 500. The other thing I think we did with the second one is we started restricting how many you could turn one thing in. Maybe we let you do up to three or something. But we limited how many you could do because we realized how just how much time it took. And we allocated time to be able to go through them

and pick correctly. Okay, so the third one didn't happen for a little while. We ended in November 2003. The third one didn't start until January of 2005. So basically, January of 2002, 2003, and 2005,

we'd started. For some reason, we always started them in January. Oh, by the way, 2003, and 2005, we had started. For some reason, we always started in January. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention, Crucible of Worlds ended up in 5th Dawn. Ended up at 5th Dawn. Okay, so the third one, I wanted to do something a little different. So I tried something a little bolder. I decided we were going to make a top-down card.

And what that meant was I wanted it to be based on flavor rather than on mechanics. And so what I did was, for the third one, we said, okay, we want you, the fans, to draw art. And we had the art, the artists, the fans made the art and turned art in. And we had a whole bunch of art turned in. And then we went through and we picked from all the art turned in what we thought were the top ten pieces of art. And then we put the art up and we let the audience vote on the art. So what happened was the first thing we picked was the art. This one ended up having nine steps. It had less steps because one of the things about top down is things get locked in a lot cleaner

because once you sort of like, once we picked the art, which showed a woman sort of holding her hand out and there's like wispiness. Once we picked the art, which showed a woman sort of holding her hand out and there's like wispiness. And so it was clear from the art, like, okay, this had to be probably an instant or sorcery or an enchantment, I think. We didn't want it to be a creature. It could be a done creature. It clearly wasn't an artifact, nor would we let you choose artifacts. From that, it became clear that the audience chose to make it an instant. We also gave you the option of, when we let you choose colors,

we gave the option of it being multicolored, that you guys chose to make it multicolored. So the card ended up being Vanished into Memory. Two white-blue for an instant. Exile target creature. You then draw cards equal to its power. And then beginning of the next upkeep, you return the card under its owner's control, and then you discard a card equal to its

toughness. It was a quirky little card. The problem was, Forgotten Ancient ended up being a pretty good card. Crucible of Words ended up being a really good card. But Vanishing in Memory ended up in Cold Snap. It just, it was quirky, like a cute card, but it never really ever did anything.

And it's funny that it's called Vanishing into Memory because it kind of has vanished into memory. It's also interesting that Forgotten, three of the cards, three of the first, two of the three, yeah, two of the first three cards all have the idea that they're not remembered forgotten ancient vanish into memory um so anyway we did vanish into memory it kind

of made a so-so card and it just i think that one of the things about you made the card was it really took a lot a lot more time and energy than we had thought and after doing them a couple times kind of the like early on the audience was so excited and Vanishing in Memory, for some reason, never quite caught people and just less people voted. And so what I thought was, well, maybe this is just petered out. Let's move on and do other things. And we moved away. And the audience from time to time kept asking us, you know, hey, when do you make the card again? We did other stuff like in choosing eighth edition, we let you pick cards make the card again? We did other stuff like in choosing 8th edition, 9th edition, where we let you pick cards for the course and stuff.

But anyway, people asked from time to time and we're like, oh, maybe one day we'll do it again. And then in 2013 or probably 2012 because it took a while to set up, we decided we would do another one. And this time, Magic 2015 did this

promotion where we went outside and we had game designers from other games make Magic cards. We thought it might be nice in combination with that, let the audience make a card. And so we did another You Make the Card. Now the first three I personally had done, I wrote up all the articles. I mean the articles were not even like generic. I was the all the articles. I mean, the articles were not even, like, generic. Like, they were... I was the host of it. I mean, it was...

They were by me, and my picture was there. And, you know, I would talk to you in my voice and stuff. But I was busy. I was doing other things. 2013, this point. Back when I did the earliest ones, I wasn't head... Well, actually, I was head... I was actually head designer some of the early ones.

But anyway, I was busier. I had a lot more going on. So for the fourth one, I handed over the reins to Ethan Flesher, who actually had won the second grade designer search. Speaking of things we did on the internet. Anyway, so we set out to make a card for Magic 2015. And we ended up making a card called Waste Knot. So Waste Knot is an enchantment.

So what happened was, I think we let you choose whatever color we wanted. We didn't restrict you from choosing colors you had already chosen, but because we had made a green card and made a white-blue card, the audience actually, black was first and red was second. It was clear the audience was kind of like, hey, we already made these colors, let's pick a color we hadn't done. And then when we picked a card type, they picked enchantment. And I think enchantment was first and sorcery was second,

meaning the audience very clearly wanted to make something we hadn't made yet, even though in the choices for the fourth one, we didn't put that on you. You guys could have done that. Some of the early ones, we didn't let you make choices you'd already made. Here, you guys just kind of wanted to make something you hadn't made, so you chose black enchantment. Anyway, you ended up making Waste Knot. So Waste Knot is an enchantment, costs one and a black.

So two mana, one of which is black. It says, if an opponent discards a creature card, you get to put a 2-2 zombie token into play. If they discard a land card, you get two black mana in your mana pool. And if they discard a non-creat land card, you get two black mana in your mana pool. And if they discard a non-creature card, you get to draw a card.

So the idea was it was a discard enabler. That you play this card and then make them discard cards, and then you're gaining advantage every time you make them discard. Either you're getting creatures, you're getting mana, or you're getting cards. All things that will advance you and help you win. Because one of the problems in general in discard is discard strategy stops your opponent, but often doesn and help you win. Because one of the problems in general in discard is discard strategy stops your opponent but often doesn't help you win. And so this enchantment was made to do that. So one of the things

that happened is when Ethan came to do the fourth one, he came to talk to me and sort of said, okay, what do you need to do? In fact, I got pulled in the early meetings because one of the things I said that had gotten forgotten a little bit over time was how much work it was and how long it took to do things. So I made sure they set up the schedule so there was enough time to do things, that they had outside contractors to be able to narrow things down,

that we did things like restrict how many submissions people could do so we weren't overrunning the submissions. But anyway, it was definitely one of those I was happy to see it come back. And you guys, one thing I will say about all four of these cards is they were actually really interesting cards.

Not all of them were powerful. Vanishing in Memory was probably the weakest of the four. But all of them were really neat. Even Vanishing in Memory. It's quirky. You've got to figure out what to do with it but there are cool and neat things about all the cards and so it was fun doing that

so this begets the final question which is what about you make the card five? and my answer to that is I think the success of the four of them has proven to us that it's something the audience really in fact does like to do.

You guys do enjoy the very reason I started in the first place was to give you all a chance to be part of the process. And it was neat doing that and I do think it's something we'll do again. In fact, we

had talked about doing a You Make the Card in conjunction with Kaladesh. In fact, we were talking about doing You Make the Artifact. The idea was since it was Kaladesh, it was going to be an artifact. And we even talked about doing it and the only reason it didn't happen was just logistic things,

kind of boring stuff behind the scenes. But we had some idea and we were all set to do it, and just for dumb reasons behind the scenes didn't end up happening. But hopefully, what it should say is that there are, that we are willing and we want to do another You Make the Card.

It's just a matter of finding the right time and place and the right resources to do it. One of the things about having done it now four times is when we do it correctly, the audience gets really into it, it's exciting, we get a lot of votes, but when we're not careful, like, I think we made some mistakes, for example, on You Make the Card 3, which is one of the reasons that people kind of drifted away from it and we didn't do it for a while. So I want to make sure if we do the, when, when we do the Next You Make the Card, we'll make sure that we're doing it

correct. And so... But anyway, that, my friend. So hopefully I did empty the card. Bye, right? Like I said, I really want one of the roles of this podcast, not the only role, but I like to think of myself as one of Magic's historians. And I want to tell you things.

Not everybody knows You Make the Card. Or even if you know about the last You Make the Card, you might not know about the early ones. You might not know about Mr. Baby Cake. So I wanted to make sure that you guys knew that stuff. And so you can remember,

you know, go look them up on Gather if you haven't seen them before. Forgotten Ancient, which is in Scourge, Crucible of Worlds, which is from Fifth Dawn, Vanishing Memory

from Cold Snap, and Waste Knot from Magic 2015. Go take a look at them. Magic 2015, the Waste Knot actually has a credit that says by the makers of the readers of magictheatom.com. But anyway, go take a look at

them. They are really cool cards. So hats off to you, the audience. You did some good design. I appreciate it. And I hope you guys enjoyed this little foray into a little piece of Magic History. But anyway, I'm now at my daughter's school and and I gotta drop her off. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic and magic history,

it's time for me to make magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.