Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #4 - Invasion

Episode Date: October 22, 2012

Mark Rosewater talks about the Invasion set.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my garage. That means it's time for another drive to work. So today, I thought I would talk about a set that I did not lead, but I was on. I realize I have a lot of podcasts to do, so I thought it would be fun to sort of talk about stuff where I was in the supporting role. Anyway, so where do I start? So Invasion had a team of three, Bill Rose, who's the current VP of R&D, and Mike Elliott, who was a long-time designer. Let me talk a little bit about sort of where this all comes from. So I believe that there is a couple different waves of R&D. So the first wave of R&D was the people that worked with Richard on the initial design, the original Playtafters,

and that back in 94, a bunch of them, Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Charlie Coutinho, they came to Wizards when Magic first became popular. So the second wave is what I consider first, you know, became popular. So the second wave is what I consider myself part of, which was in 95, a year later, basically what happened was Wizards was doing so much stuff that they needed more R&D people, and the people that were there were interested in working on other things, so they wanted to bring people in to work on magic. So what happened was, so I've told my story a billion times, basically I was freelancing for The Duelist, and I turned into other freelancing work, and eventually I said I'd be willing to come to Wizards. They hired me.

So Bill Rose was one of the original playtefters. He could have been in the first wave, except he didn't come out that fast. He had a job, and by the time he was able to come out, well, you know, the second wave had already started. But he knew everybody from the first wave, so he was much more connected. In fact, it's funny. When I first came out to Wizards, I was there about a month before I was going to come back. It was my last, like, freelance trip. And I was trying to secure myself a desk because there were a lot of fight desks for desks.

And there was an open desk, but Joel Mick had saved this one desk for Bill. So even though I was there trying to claim a desk, it was already claimed for Bill. Anyway, so Bill was one of the original playtesters, but he came out a little bit later. He got... I mean, he knew everybody was how he got hired.

Mike Elliott was actually at a game convention. He had not done much game design, but on his own, he had made his own magic set, and he was very interested in game design, and I think he met Joel Mick. So Joel Mick, real quickly, when Richard first started playtesting, he had people he played with, and they were kind of groups. And as you'll see in a second, these groups would go to make some sets that became, obviously, very famous magic sets.

Joel Mick was part of the same group as Bill Rose's group, the group that made Mirage. And Joel had come out early along with some of the other people. And so Joel was one of, maybe the first head designer slash developer. Back then it was a combined thing. The head designer and head developer were one position. And so Joel was at a convention. He met Mike. Mike intrigued him.

They talked a lot about magic. He liked what Mike was saying. And so he pressed him enough that they ended up offering him a job. The other two people that I would say were sort of second wave, a guy named William Jockish, who literally he wrote a letter to, uh, Richard Garfield. He was a math professor, like Richard had been, and he just, I don't know, he said the right things in the letter, and, uh, he and Richard talked, and Richard gave him a job.

Um, and the final person who came a little later with a tail end of second wave would be Henry Stern. Um, I knew Henry from L.A., and I was the one that recommended we hire him. And he had back-to-back world top fours, and so we knew that he was someone who had some play experience and knew what he was doing. Anyway, so in Time Invasion, what had happened was two years earlier, we had made Urza's Saga.

And for those that don't know, Urza's Saga block was one of the biggest train wrecks. I mean, as far as power, we just made a set that was crazy, crazy powerful. I mean, I know the joke at the time when Urza Saiga came out was there was the early game, which was shuffling, and there was the mid game, which was choosing to mulligan or not, and then there was the end game, turn one. Anyway, we got pulled into the office and chewed out by our CEO.

The first time it ever happened. I'm sure when I do the Urza Saga podcast, I will get more into this. But anyway, we got chewed out. We were basically told if we made another broken block, we would all be fired. And then McKinney Mask came around. That was not a broken block by design. But Invasion was the set after that, and we kind of knew we needed to get Magic back up,

because Merkinian Mass was kind of low-balled in purpose, because we had a lot of motivations not to overshoot. But we said, okay, we really need to, you know, Magic, we knew there was a downturn on Merkinian Mass. Like, okay, we need to come back strong and do something really cool. And so, to explain what happened here, let me go back a little bit and talk about where Richard first, so when Richard had the playtifters, magic goes off, magic is successful, and Richard's like, oh, we're going to need some sets. So he turned to all the playtifters, and there were different groups that he worked with, and he assigned each of the groups,

said, hey, make me a set. So one group was Scaffolias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, what people know as the East Coast Playtifters, and they ended up making Ice Age. That's the set they worked on. They would later go on to make Alliances, make Antiquities, make Fallen Empires, but the first set they worked on was Ice Age,

which they called Ice Age, which they called Ice Age. That was actually the play's just name. And then another group, which was Bill Rose and Joel Mick and Charlie Coutinho, that group was working on Mirage, called Menagerie at the time. And then the final was a single person,

a guy named Barry Reich. So Barry has the fame of when Richard first made magic, like the very first person that he sat down with and played magic with was Barry, Barry Reich, also known as Bit was his nickname. So Barry was assigned a set, but he worked by himself. So his set was called Spectral Chaos. And he came up with the idea of multi-color. Now, meanwhile, completely independent to this, Peter Atkinson, who was one of the founders of Wizards and

the CEO at the time, he had gone out and promised some of his friends, or people he knew, sets for them to make, because Magic was just a runaway success very early, and they were scrambling to make sure they had enough sets. So he turned to a guy named Steve Connard, who worked at Wizards at some point. I'm not sure if he worked at Wizards when he made Legends. But anyway, Steve Connard and Peter Atkinson were role-playing buddies. They were both big fans of Dungeon Dragons. Peter would later go on to buy Dungeon Dragons for Wizards from TSR. And really, Legends was Steve Connard

trying to take a lot of the role-playing games they had done and bring them to life. So a lot of the Legends in Legends were actual characters played by Peter and Steve and their friends. Anyway, someday I'll do the Legends podcast. There's a bunch of funny stories there. This is one of the fun things about doing this podcast.

There's a lot of other podcasts I can do. So this the fun things about doing this podcast is like, there's a lot of other podcasts I can do, so this seems like I might be able to keep this going for a while. Okay, so Ice Age got done right away. Once, when Bill first got to Wizards,

one of the earliest things the second wave worked on was we worked on Mirage. And all of us, what happened was, all five of us pretty much developed every single set. You know, now we have different development teams. But for a while, like, we were the developers. We developed every set. And so what happened is,

and this is all tied together, I promise. So Invasion, we decided that we needed a hit. We kind of, Mercadian Mass was not, didn't go over all that well. And so Bill said, okay, I'm just putting together the strongest team I can. And that team was me and Mike Elliott and himself. We really were the three designers at the time. I mean, Bill obviously had done Mirage. I had done Tempest.

Mike had done Urza Saga and Mercadian Masks. You know, Mike and I had proved ourselves on Tempest. I talked about it on my Tempest podcast. And really, the three of us had been the main stuff. They were doing the main thrust of design. So Bill was like, okay, I need my power hitters here. We need to make a good set. So let me really quickly explain a little bit about Bill and Mike.

I talked a little bit about Bill already. So Bill was one of the original play tefters. He ended up, I think he was working in a chemistry lab. He was overseeing it, an administrator. And then magic came out. He decided he wanted to come work for wizards. And he came here. Mirage and Visions were, he both oversaw the design for those sets.

And he led the development for them as well, which is a rarity. We don't, not a lot of people lead both the same design and development. We don't tend to do that. So he came out and Bill and I started within two weeks of each other. Although here's a funny story. So Bill started two weeks before me and then William started the week in between me and Bill. So we all started at the same time.

Mike would start the following January. We started in October. So Bill has this list, what we call the Reach Out and Touch Someone list, which is our phone list. And Bill printed up the one right after he started.

And then as people left, he scratched off the name. And so I think Bill is now the seventh, as far as how long they've been at Wizards of the Coast. Bill's the seventh longest. I'm ninth, I believe. Yeah, somebody in between us, and not even William Jackers because he's gone,

but somebody else in between me and Bill in our two-week span. And so Bill definitely was on the management track. I mean, Bill was the one who succeeded Joel Mick So Bill definitely was on the management track. I mean, Bill was the one who succeeded Joel Mick as being the head designer developer. And then Bill took that and ended up going and eventually becoming the VP of R&D. So Bill and I have very interesting tracks in that Bill was very interesting in management. Bill loves structure. Bill loves organizing things.

Bill is very good at networking and stuff. I always had a passion for design. So it's interesting that we kind of started at the same time, but we went very different paths. But obviously we work well together, and I'll tell you this story, we made Invasion. Mike Elliott, so he got hired. He had met Joel Mick. Mike, like me, started as a developer.

In fact, essentially so did Bill. All of us were hired as developers. The idea was we had Richard, he was the designer, we were the developers. But what happened was Richard was busy, and like, oh, we did need designers to do magic, and that's when Mike and I stepped up. He and I were both on Tempest.

We kind of proved ourselves, and then we started to be giving a lot of design stuff. In fact, Mike and I, for a while, we were alternating doing sets. And so, another important part of this story is, let me talk a little about my father. My dad's named Gene. He's a gamer, gamer his whole life. I mean, he's the one who introduced me to games. And when I first got into Magic, I was very excited to share with him the game because I, you know, I, like, I literally, I first learned about Magic and I remember

calling my dad, like, that weekend and saying, oh my god, dad, this is the next big thing. I think on the phone I'm like, like, this is, like, the next Dungeon Dragons, although I think bigger than Dungeon Dragons. I immediately saw the potential in it. I mean, it's funny, because long before the game, I mean, the game was just starting to take off. And what people don't realize about Magic is Peter Atkinson, the founder of Wizards, drove up and down the West Coast demoing to game stores. And so Magic came out on the West Coast

really before it hit the East Coast. I joke that I bought two boxes of Arabian Nights. I that, like, I bought two boxes of Arabian Nights. I think the state of Montana got two boxes of Arabian Nights. So, like, it really took a while to permeate through the rest of the country. Anyway, so my dad got into magic very early through me. And when I started working at Wizards, you know, he said, hey, oh, so my dad, for a long time growing up, he was a dentist, and then he retired early, and he moved to Tahoe, and became a ski instructor.

Mostly, he loved skiing. All our family vacations growing up were ski vacations, and he just loves to ski. His favorite place to ski was Tahoe. It was warm, but the snow was good, so he ended up buying a house at Tahoe, and, you know, he retired early, moved to Tahoe, became a ski instructor. And so he said to us, you know, if I want to come up or bring my friends, you know, that he would love to entertain us. And in the early days, R&D went up a bunch of times, actually, to my dad's house. But for this story, Bill and Mike and I went up. So before we got there, we only knew two So before we got there, we only knew two things before we got there.

One was, so they had made Ice Age, they made Mirage, but Spectral Chaos, which was Barry Wegg's set, had never been made. And, you know, there were some interesting things about it, but it didn't quite hold together completely. So they knew that we needed to,

you know, they needed to, there's ideas that we could take out of it. Meanwhile, connected to that, we kind of knew that gold as a theme was, had a lot of potential. And I talk about the different ages of design. So Invasion is where I started, the start of the third age. So the first age is, you know, Richard Midd cards. And it was all about designing individual cool cards, you know. And that once the second age started Mirage, where the idea of blocks came along, that you have a mechanic that is lasted for the course of the year and would evolve during the course of the year.

Invasion was really the first time where you said, okay, let's have a theme that runs through the block, you know. Mirage and Tempest had story elements, as did Urza's Saga and McCain and Mast to a certain extent. But Invasion was the first time You know, Barrage and Tempest had story elements, but, as did Urza Saga and Requiem to Mass to a certain extent, but,

and they were the first that said, okay, we are about something. We have a mechanical heart. We're a gold block. That's what we are. And so we knew

walking into Tahoe, okay, we wanted to do a gold block. We wanted to see what we could get from Spectral Chaos. We were sort of,

you know, pick up things from it, and we were going to make a set. And the interesting thing is, we left to go to Tahoe knowing only those two things. We came back from Tahoe a week later with, I mean, the raw skeleton of what we were doing. I mean, I'm not saying we finished it in a week because we didn't. But we did an amazing amount of work. I mean, it's not often in magic history where, like, that much sort of vision got done did an amazing amount of work. That was, I mean, it's not often in Magic history

where, like, that much sort of vision got done in that short amount of time. And so we got there. I think we skied once or twice. But other than that, we just worked every day. And the big thing was we knew we wanted to do multicolor, but we didn't quite know how. So let me walk through the mechanics.

I think Bill had tried to do something on Mirage where there was extra mana, and Bill had come up with the idea of Kicker. Interestingly, looking back from a design standpoint, I think Kicker made a mistake of being a little too broad because too many other mechanics fall underneath Kicker, and Kicker should have been a little more defined. We actually have gone back and redefined it a little bit.

Kicker is now, when you kick something, you make the spell better by usually making the effect better, or by bringing in a second ability that really synergizes with the first ability. Essentially, when you kick something, you're kind of upgrading the spell. We're trying to do lots of other effects, so those will be different mechanics.

And it does not do well to have one mechanic be in place of what could be more fine-tuned mechanics. So Bill came with Kicker. The domain was one of the things for Spectral Chaos. In fact, it was called the Barry mechanic

because Barry Reich had made it. And one of the things domain did that really, I think this is the other thing that Spectral Chaos brought to the design of Invasion was the idea of play lots of colors. You know, this set said, not only am I multicolored, but I'm going to enable you to do something that you've always wanted to do but had trouble doing. Play lots of colors. Three colors. Four colors.

Five colors. Just play tons of colors. And so Domain helped sort of push that theme. We did a lot of enabling. I mean, in modern terms, we didn't do enough enabling in the land. But at the time, we'd done more than we'd ever done before.

I mean, that's a common thread, by the way, in design, is, like, we'll go forward, and we think we're advancing a lot. And, like, in retrospect, we're like, oh, wow, we have a lot more we could do. But it takes us a while sometimes to realize that. So we had to main. So split cards

came about because I had done Unglued. In Unglued, I made a card called BFM, Big Furry Monster. It was the most popular

card of the set from all the God Book studies. So I made a second set called Unglued 2. Not Unhinged, by the way. That will come later.

And Unglued 2 got far in. Like, card art was done. We had art in, and it got canceled. It got put on a hiatus, but that's never a good thing. And so in Unglue 2, I was trying to sort of riff off of BFM. I said, okay, well, BFM was a card so big that it took two actual physical cards to represent the whole card. So I said, well, what if I go the opposite direction? What if instead of being so big, it's so small? What if it's so small that two cards can fit on a single magic card? And the idea was, oh, well, kind of neat. You could play either card. And I was very enamored with it, but UnBluetooth, you know,

put it ahead of us. So, while we're at the house in Tahoe, I said to Bill, Bill, I have an idea, it's a little out there, but I think it really makes sense in this set, and I think it's a very cool idea. So I pitched my idea of the split cards, and Bill loved it. Bill

thought it was great. Mike, on the other hand, hated it. Hated it. But Bill and I liked it. Mike didn't. Eh, two to one, you know, so we went in the set. The funny thing about split cards, I've talked about this in my column, but since you met me, I've read it and it's a funny story anyway. So one of the interesting things is I like split cards.

I mean, obviously I made them. I was enamored with them. Bill really liked split cards. He really, he got it. Like, I showed it to him and he got it right away. Richard Garfield was the one other person who I showed it, and he wasn't as excited as me or Bill, but he liked it. He goes, oh, that's

neat. And then other than the three of us, everybody hated it. Hated it. Because they all felt like we were just deviating too much from magic, you know. And it's funny, because it's so easy when you have, you know, the 20-20 hindsight of time to go, oh, this isn't going to break magic. Oh, yeah, magic can do this.

But at the time, it was very radical. And the thing I remember is, so I'm on the development team. Bill isn't because the lead designer by this point isn't on the development team anymore. We separate those. But I was on the development team. And Henry Stern was the lead developer. So the very first meeting, the very first meeting, the very first things Henry says, like the first sentence of Invasion development is, can we just kill these things? And I'm like, no Henry, just give them a chance. And

Henry actually went to Bill, because Bill at the time was the head designer, and said, can we kill these things? And Bill said, well, you have to keep them in for a month. You know, you have to play with them. And then I called Henry down, because I explained to him, I said, look, Henry, we could, you know, here's how they would look like more traditional cards. We don't have to lay them out side by side.

That's just one option. But, you know, look, let's play with them. There's multiple ways we could lay them out. Now, in the back of my head, I knew we were going to lay them out side by side. That's the way you do split cards. But I was just trying to contend with it. Look, you know, don't let that throw you. Let's see if they're fun. Play with them.

Meanwhile, the brand team wanted to kill them. And, like, Bill spent a lot of energy stopping the brand team. And, like, anyway, when the dust settled, it's funny because it came out. People loved them. And, like, you can look back now and people are like, oh, when the dust settled, it's funny because it came out, people love them. And like, you can look back now and people are like, oh yeah, I love split cards. And when I look at you, I'm like, no, you didn't. Oh, the other great story about split cards, which I've never told is, so there was a sheet from the printing press that somehow got leaked out and ended up on eBay. And so we were worried because we had hidden the split cards.

We didn't preview any of the split cards. We wanted people to open the packs and go, oh my God, what? And then here was this actual press sheet on eBay, and people were looking at it, and they're like, what is this? There's two cards in this one slot. And they just kept rationalizing away, wow, that couldn't actually be what it was. My favorite was that people were like, well, that couldn't actually be what it was. My favorite was that people were like, well, this must be a test sheet.

And so they don't know which card's going to go there yet. So that just represents one of those two cards will go there. So anyway, the pre-release for Invasion, once upon a time, Wizards of the Coast had stores, had stores and malls around the country, retail

stores. And our big one was in the U District, the University District, the University of Washington here in Seattle. And so I went to the U District, the basement, it was a giant room. They could hold, you know, hundreds of people. And so I went to watch people open up their invasion packs. And my favorite, one of my favorite ever moments of watching someone open a pack is the guy opens the pack. He pulls out his

cards he takes a card he turns it sideways like aha i can see okay he has a split card and first he'll look at his face it's just utter like what like he's just confused and then he's kind of thinking and then like i can see the light pop in his head and he gets all excited and then he taps his friend's shoulder and he shows him the card, and his friend goes, this is the exact same facial, you know, like, what, huh, oh, you know, and it was just great, I mean, I, split cards probably are still my favorite personal, I mean, I'm very proud of hybrid, there's lots of mechanics I did that I'm proud of, flashback, and, you know, imprint and stuff, but the one that sort of, I don't know, emotionally to me, split cards just have a very special place in my heart, and, oh, and the other thing, here's a quick story about split cards, so originally, the continuity, the creative team, just gave them names, like

you would name any card, like, this is, you know, blah-de-blah, and that's blah-de-blah, and I'm like, but, guys, no, no, no, like, these are split cards, like, that you need to have a, the names need to have some reflection to the fact that both cards are the same card. And so they literally said to me, yeah, well, how do you do that? I'm like, I'm sure there's a way to do that. They go, we do it. So I went out and said, okay, well, we'll name the card

so it's blank and blank. Which is crazy, by the way, that we didn't write them blank slash blank when all the names are done such that they're blank and blank. God, we tried to change this so they would be notated with an ampersand, but somehow there's some fights that, like the dog-hound fight that I lose.

They're like, how did I lose that fight? Anyway, I lost the fight. They're blank, slash. I will always say blank and blank, though. And I remember my sample one's funny. The reference one I did was the red-green one, which was called Hit and Run, because it hits you in the face with a direct damage spell, and the green thing made like an elephant.

But... So, anyway, we had split cards, we had the kicker, we had domain. I mean, we had a few other things. We had the cycles, like you could play the instant speed cycle at rare. Domain. I mean, we had a few other things. We had the cycles, like the... You could play the instant speed cycle at Rare.

But pretty much that was the shell of what we were putting together. And the other big thing that I was huge on is I love cycles. When I talk about cycles in Magic, usually cycles are five-card cycles, one in each color. When you talk about multicolor, you know, you have them... Like, the allied colors will be a five-card cycle. And I was very big on there being a lot of cycles. I was one of the ones that pushed real hard to kind of have a lot of cycles in invasion.

I mean, multicolor pushes you towards cycles anyway, but I think I was one of the things that really tried to get us a little more connected. Oh, another important part, another big factor. So during the initial design, we designed all ten pairings. And then during the design,, we designed all ten pairings. And then, during the design, Henry Stern and I, independently, I think it was either during late design

or early development, he and I each went to Bill, unaware the other person went to Bill, this happens a lot, and I call it parallel design, where two people have a great idea and just don't realize that someone else has the exact same idea. And we both basically pitched to Bill,

oh, you know what? Let's hold the enemy cards. Like, you know, here's a way in my mind, Invasion was the first block planning we ever did. Because we said, oh, well, we could make a theme out of the last set if we just don't do it. That has to be pent up to man and then we'll deliver it. And it's just funny that Henry and I came up with the same idea,

almost the same time. We each went to Bill independently, you know, and Bill was like, that's funny, you know. Henry just said that, or Mark just said that. And anyway, that was another big part of the design. It happened late in design, I believe, because we did design, in fact, a lot of Apocalypse was designed

during Invasion design. And not all of it, but a good chunk of it. So, we had our week, we plotted things out, and then we came back, and mostly it was us just trying to fill things in.

Oh, another thing we did that I thought I was very impressed with, that I was happy with, was we defined Kicker in a very interesting way. So what we defined was, if you had extra mana that was colorless, was we defined kicker in a very interesting way. So what we defined was if you had extra mana that was colorless, you were increasing your effect. But if you wanted to sort of do something else,

you had to pay a colored mana. So the idea was if you're just trying to make the effect bigger, it's colorless. If you're trying to sort of broaden the effect and do other things,

it had a colored on it. And so that meant that whenever you were kicking off another color, you were you're trying to sort of broaden the effect and do other things, it had a color on it. And so, that meant that whenever you were kicking off and off the color, you were adding an effect to it. That monocolor stuff tended to get bigger, and multicolor, or monocolor with multicolor kicker, off-color kicker, tended to broaden out what the effect would do.

One of the other funny things, and this is something that didn't really work out, is we came up with the idea that there would be a symbol for so one of the things that was going on behind the scenes is Invasion was the final part of the Weatherlight Saga that's it's own blog

but at the time what happened was it was the culmination of the Phyrexians invading and it was the Dominarians versus the Phyrexians and it was the culmination of Urza Phyrexians, and it was the culmination of Urza's big plan, and here's a funny story. So this is called Invasion, because the Phyrexians are invading.

We always tease Mike Turian, because Mike Turian always talks about how he never gets the story, and one day we're talking about the invasion in Invasion, he's like, well, what are you talking about? We're like, well, there was an invasion. He goes, all right, I never got that. We're like, Mike, it was called Invasion. He's like, well, what are you talking about? We're like, well, there was an invasion. He goes, all right, I never got that. We're like, Mike, it was called Invasion. He's like,

yeah, never got that. Which goes to show, by the way, that you can think you're being very obvious, that it's hard, that getting flavor across sometimes is tough.

I mean, I think in recent time we've done much better of figuring out how to sort of match them, of how to take the mechanics and sort of sell the stories through the mechanics

and that it's more ingrained into the set. But back then, that's not how it worked. Like, we would design a set. We're done. Here you go, creative. And they would put a story on top of it. But there were, I mean, Tempest was the only exception because I was in charge of the story and in charge of the design. So I actually

intermeshed them more so than any other story at the time. But Invasion was, okay, we're just making a set. And they're like, well, okay, it's Invasion. And so one of the things that they had done was that there was a symbol for the coalition,

and then they tried to fit the symbol in wherever there was a kicker. And anyway, if you ever look at Invasion, you can find all these random symbols because we were trying to show

that, well, if you had a kicker, you would have a symbol. And that kind of taught us, not that we learned this lesson at the time, but, you know, trying to connect direct visual things to mechanics can get very complicated. Oh, here's another silly story,

just because I'm showing silly stories. So, Mercadian Masks was coming out when we were designing Invasion, and the continuity, people who were in charge of the naming at the time named Mercadian Masks with the spelling they did, with the Q-U-E, and we were really like,

come on, guys, can't we just spell it M-A-S-K-S? They're like, no, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing. We're like, but no one's going to know how to spell it, and they're going to mispronounce it. And anyway, we lost that fight. But out of protest, we took the file invasion, and we changed all the playtest cards, so instead of a K appearing, a Q-U would appear.

So, for example, imagine the card Black Knight had been Invasion. I mean, it wasn't. But imagine it was. It would have been B-L-A-C-Q-U Q-U-N-I-G-H-D. And so, that caused all sorts of confusions. I think it's funny because R&D definitely has a rebel

quality to it, but I think as time goes on, back in the day, we were definitely a little more... We'd make statements if we'd do things. We don't do that as much anymore. Although I think also R&D is more established than we were. Back then, we were kind of the young upstarts, which is no longer the case.

We're neither young nor upstart anymore. Anyway, Invasion came out, and it was very well received. It was definitely I mean, I think Tempest was the first thing I did that just really went over well with the public. I mean, really, really went over well. And Invasion

was kind of the second thing, where just people ate it up. And it was a bunch of things. One was, it really cemented for us how popular gold and traditional multicolor is. One was, it really cemented for us how popular, you know, gold and traditional multicolor is. And also, I think it just, I think Kicker was a

very popular mechanic. I think it showed us kind of what Kicker could do. Split cards obviously went over by gangbusters. Oh, anyway, I see the wizard sign. So, I think that's all we're going to have for today. Got to wrap it up. But, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. Uh, making invasion was fun and, uh, join me next time.

It's time for me to go make some magic cards.