Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #41 - Mirage - Part 1

Episode Date: July 5, 2013

Mark Rosewater starts off his three part series about Mirage.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about one of the very first sets I ever worked on. Now, I did a podcast on Alliances, which was the very first set I worked on. But Alliances, like I said, there was a billion people. I had 13 people on the team, something crazy. Mirage was the first team in which I was a major portion of the team, the development team. Remember, I was hired not as a designer,

but as a developer. So in my early years, I did a lot of development. So Mirage, so what happened was, I talked about how R&D has different waves, sort of think about the people that were there. So wave one of R&D mostly were people that were play tefters in the original Magic.

So we're talking about Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty. And the tail end of that would be Charlie Coutinho, which I'll talk about today. Wave two people I consider to be the people that came in the next sort of two years in, were me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jockish, and Henry Stern. Um, although Henry, Henry wouldn't start until Tempest, so he wasn't there yet. But, so, wave two, what happened was, wave one was there, they had worked on Magic, Wizards got big enough that all the Wave 1 people

went to work on other products or left the company. And so they brought in this new wave of people, Wave 2, to sort of take care of the day-to-day of Magic. So meanwhile, you know, Richard and Scaf and Jim and all those, they were off doing other products and doing other things. And so the four of us were essentially Magic R&D. And so the Mirage development team was the four of us, me and Bill and Mike and William.

So let's talk a little bit about the design team. So what happened was when Richard first wanted to playtest the game, he went out to different groups that he knew of gamers and got them to playtests. Now, eventually there would be some intermingling, but when it first started, there were different sections of people that he knew. For example, the East Coast playtesters,

the people that made Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires and Antiquities, which was Scaffolias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page, those people he met through school, through UPenn, I believe. So this next group he met through Bridge. There was a Bridge Club that he went to. And so in the Bridge Club, he met Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Cattino. In fact, this whole group, I believe, are Bridge Club people.

So the design team for Mirage, Bill and Joel, I think, were the co-leads of the design. And then Charlie Cattino, Don Felice, Howard Kallenberg, and Elliot Siegel. So I want to talk a little bit about the design team. Okay, so I've talked a lot about Bill. There's not too much else to say about Bill. I mean, there is things else to say about Bill. I'll tell a little story about Bill, since I've told a lot more fancy history stuff. I'll tell a little...

One of the things I used to do when I used to go home and talk about where I worked, that I would find some idiosyncrasies, like a little funny story about each of my co-workers, just to sort of show the later side of them. And this is the story I used to tell about Bill, is Bill loves making brownies. I mean, Bill, I'm not sure what it is exactly, but Bill just loves cooking brownies. He likes baking brownies. And one day Bill said to himself, you know, life is better when I have a brownie. So you know what? Life is better when I have a brownie. So you know what?

I'm going to make sure that every day I have a homemade brownie. And so what Bill did is he would make brownies, and he would make sure that every day he had a brownie, and he wanted to see how many days this could last. And it went on for quite a while. It went on for months, I believe. And finally Bill was like, okay, okay, I don't need a brownie every day. But it was funny that I just, you know, and Bill, by the way, when I have parties, my wife and I, Laura, we have parties all the time. And one of our running jokes is when

we would invite Bill to one of our parties, because he made awesome brownies, we'd always invite brownies plus guests, brownies plus one. But anyway, like I said, I've talked a lot about Bill. I mean, there's plenty more to say. But, I mean, Bill was one of the original playtesters. He's the one person in the wave two of R&D that was one of the original playtesters. The rest of us were just magic players. You know, Bill was actually connected in the game very early on. actually connected in the game very early on.

And the other interesting factoid about Bill is I was trying to figure out where drafting came from, and that the earliest drafting that was done in Magic, way, way before Magic started, goes back to Bill. That Bill's the person that did the first drafting. So anyway, if you like to draft, way, way, way back when, the precursor, the person who started drafting with Magic was Bill Rose. Okay, next, let's get on to Joel Mick. So Joel, when I started, Joel was in R&D, and essentially he has the job I have now, except back then, the head designer and head developer were one person. And so he was the head designer slash developer.

developer were one person. And so he was the head designer slash developer. And quickly, not too long after I was there, maybe after a year or two, he went on to the brand team, and Joel Mick, for a while, was the brand manager.

And Joel was the brand manager during a lot of big innovations, like Joel was responsible for putting the rarity on cards, putting the, what was responsible for putting the rarity on cards, putting the, what else, for the premium cards, the collector number. You know,

Bill was very big at both sort of putting more information on the card and about sort of making the collector, making it a little more fun to collect by adding the premiums and stuff. And Joel was, Joel making a little more fun to collect by adding the premiums and stuff. And Joel was, Joel was a lot of fun.

I mean, Joel, Joel was definitely someone who was very focused. And he, he ended up leaving Wizards a little bit after we were bought by Hasbro. But, in fact,

I saw he's, he's fun by the office once a couple years ago. And he's doing well and has once a couple of years ago, uh, and he's doing well and has a family. And, um, yeah, Joe, Joe was a fun person to work with in that he, he, he, he, he always knew what he wanted. You know, uh, some people are indecisive.

Joe was never indecisive. Uh, and Joel, I think Joel was one of the better brand managers. I mean, magic had some very awesome brand managers, so managers, so I'm not saying he's the best, but he was definitely one of the top. I think that a lot of good happened under his reign as a brand manager. And that he, a lot of good things,

a lot of good things came to Magic because of Joel. Design wise, I believe, so when Mirage got made, he would have been, he was still the head designer developer. So he put together the team, I assume. But putting together the team is incorrect. Now we select people, right?

Like this development team is these people. So when we started, for the first couple years, the development team was the guys who did Magic R&D. That's who the development team was. So myself and Bill and Mike and William, we were the development team. Then Henry got added a year later. Then the five of us were the development team. Okay, so, oh, let's see. Don Felice.

So I've met Don a bunch of times. I can't say too much about Don. I can't say too much about Don. The little magic trivia about Don is Felden's cane is an anagram of Don's name, which is Don Felice. And they had tried to get Don's name into a card earlier, and something happened, I forget what the card was, that it was supposed to be...

Was it Felton? I'm trying to remember the story. Anyway, Don's a nice fellow. I've met him a couple times. He's never worked at Wizards, but he, back in the day, would swing by every once in a while, so I had a chance to, you know, have dinner with him a couple times and talk with him. I think I met Howard

Kallenberg once at an event, and Elliot Segal, or think talk with them. I think I met Howard Kallenberg once at an event. And Elliot Siegel, or think it back. I think I met Howard once. I think I met Elliot once. But I have no stories of either of them. They never really came out to Wizards. I saw them at events. And I was introduced by Bill or somebody for two seconds and said hello.

But the six of them, anyway. So let's talk about how Mirage came to be. So when Richard first sold Magic, when it was clear that Magic was going to get made, Richard realized that they were going to need expansions. Although, once again, let me stress that in Richard's mind, what was going to happen was Magic was going to sort of refresh every year. So the first year was going to be called Magic the Gathering. The second year was going to be Magic Ice Age. You know, that each year would be a new game, and that, remember, the card backs were going to change originally. And the idea was, this is this year's game. This is this year's game. And that the cards would

be compatible with each other, and I don't think Richard thought too much about the backs being incompatible. He just thought, like, each year would be a new sort of set of magic that you could play, and that that would sort of revamp what magic is, and that the cards were compatible, you could play them together. And then, basically, Arabian Nights was going to have a different back, and Scaf convinced Richard not to change it, and that Magic Back then had a consistent back. Anyway, when Richard knew that they were going to need more stuff, more sets,

he went to—he had three kind of groups that he dealt with, one of which was East Coast Playtesters that he knew from school, one was the Bridge Club, and one was his friend Barry Reich. And each one of those, so the East Coast Plate Safters, they ended up working on Ice Age. They made Ice Age. And

Barry worked on a set called Spectral Chaos of which we would borrow pieces of it for Invasion. The domain mechanic is the Barry mechanic. He made it. And then the Bridge Club, they made a set they called

Menagerie. And the idea of their set was they had a story they wanted to tell. And the story was about three wizards that got in a war. And see, if you know your Mirage, maybe you can name the three wizards. So the three wizards that got in a war. And see, if you know your Mirage, maybe you can name the three wizards.

So the three wizards were Kerevec, Jor-El, and Mangara. So where does the name Mangara come from for those wordplay aficionados? Mangara is the word anagrammed. They thought that was funny. In fact, one of the things is, back in the day, the people who made the set

did a lot more naming. Like now, nowadays, I'll make a set, and I mean, if I have a good shot at a name, I will name a card that, and some of the names will stay. If I have a really solid name,

sometimes they'll stick around. You know, Innistrad, for example, we had a lot of top-down stuff, and, you know, there were plenty of know, Innistrad, for example, we had a lot of top-down stuff, and, you know, there were plenty of cards that we made that, you know, in fact, some of the cards, like Jar of Eyeballs or, you know, Creepy Doll, started by the name, and then the name

stayed, because that was such a perfect example of what the concept was. But back in the day, I mean, the cards were mostly named by the designers, and that, you know, so the designers would do a lot more of the story and stuff. Now there's a whole creative team. So the menagerie, that was the code name, the menagerie team had an idea for this war between three people. Now, I don't know if they had planned for it to be set in an African style.

So Mirage's art director was Sue Ann Harkey was her name. And Sue Ann Harkey was an awesome art director. I think that she added a lot of a lot of people went on, like Kev Walker and Paolo Parente, and a lot of people that went on to be very staple magic artists for a long time were discovered or found by Suhan Harki. The one quirk about Suhan Harki, which I will get to when we get to some of the stories about the set, is she did not understand magic.

She knew art, and she was a very good artist. She knew her art, and was very good with that, but just didn't know magic. And so we had a lot of problems of the artist would paint something that she didn't catch, and we would have to change cards because the art actually contradicted something about the card mechanically. That happens very infrequently nowadays

because Jeremy Jarvis, the current art director, is much more up on magic and what we need. A lot of times the art and mechanics have a lot of... There's looseness there. The art is just representing the concept. But sometimes the art does something so emphatically that it's hard for the card to mechanically do something. And as we'll get to, there's a whole bunch of cases of that happening.

Okay, so they made Menagerie. And what happened was Richard had promised his team that they could make some stuff. And meanwhile, at the same thing, Peter Atkinson had also gone on, he found some people to make sets. So if you look at the early sets of Magic, okay, so Rabid Knights was done very quickly by Richard. And Rabid Knights was done fast because they didn't realize how fastly

they would need another set. And so Richard did Rabid Knights very fast. So Antiquities was done by the East Coast Playtester, so that was one of Richard's group. Legends was done by Steve Connard, which is a very good friend and one of the founders of Wizards, which was one of Peter's friends. And then The Dark was done

by Jesper Miraforce, who was the art director at the time, was one of Peter's friends. And then Fallen Empires was done by the East Coast Playtester, so that was one of Richard's friends. And then after Fallen Empires was Ice Age, which was the East Coast Playtester's Empires was Ice Age, which was East Coast Playtesters. And after Ice Age was Homeland.

Homeland was done by Kyle Namvar and Scooter Hungerford, Scott Hungerford, who people Peter knew. And then after that was Alliances, which was East Coast Playtesters again. So in early Magic, you can see, like, some were done by Peter's friends, some were done by Richard's friends. In fact, a lot of the early ones, you'll notice, were done by the, I keep calling them the East Coast Playtesters, but Scafilias, Jim Lynn, um, uh, Scafilias, Jim Lynn, um, Dave Petty, Chris Page. Uh, because they, three of them came out, so they were the ones that were at Wizards, and so they, they were more hands-on.

So, I think a lot of their stuff got done done earlier because they were just there to sort of maneuver it and work on it. I just realized something. I forgot somebody. I mean, I mentioned him in passing, but I did not talk about Charlie Coutinho, which is a great, great error. Someone can jump back there.

Here's the thing I know. My podcast started getting transcripted, that when you hear me talk and, like, I'm jumping around, like, okay, that's how people talk. But somehow when you read it, it just reads odd, so. Maybe absent-minded. Okay, so, Charlie Coutinho.

So, I right now, if you look at Wizards, and talk about how long you've been there, I'm not, we're not counting the people who were previously at TSR, stayed, you know, and then came over to Wizards, so some of them go longer. But just, had started to work at Wizards, ended to work at Wizards.

The longest amount of time working there. I'm number eight. The eighth longest. Bill is number seven because Bill started two weeks before me. But number one, number one. So the employee who has worked the longest at Wizards consecutively is Charlie Cattino. And Charlie was one of the original play tefters. He came out a little earlier than Bill.

Bill had some responsibilities. Bill was at the time working in a chemistry lab. He was the administrator, I think, of running a chemistry lab. And so Bill had been tied up in some stuff, and so it took a while for Bill to sort of get through that. Charlie was able to come out earlier. Bill had been tied up in some stuff, and so it took a while for Bill to sort of get through that. Charlie was able to come out earlier. He didn't come out as early as the original group,

like Scaf and Jim, but he came out in January of 95. Like, I came out in October of 95. He came out in January. Or February, actually. Actually, here's a little funny tidbit. So when I got hired, for those people that don't know the story, I was out visiting. I said, like, I'd be willing to move to Wizards. And then Mike Davis, who was the head of R&D at the time, said, when can you start? And then many weeks went by,

and I hadn't heard from them. And so I finally called Mike Davis, and he said, oh, well, yeah, the Magic team's interested in hiring you, and the Duel is interested in hiring you, and R&D is interested in hiring you, so we're trying to figure out who's going to hire you. So noted this time, early Wizards, when I talk about Wizards,

that things were very, you know, HR also, young, not very experienced in HR. So I hadn't yet negotiated anything, and he told me that three different sections of the company were fighting over me. So when I went to negotiate, what I was told by someone who'd done this was that it's hard to negotiate money, you're going to push money so much, but just ask for anything you can think to ask for.

Just come up with other perks. So one of the perks I thought to ask for was, I asked for my start date to be technically January 1st, 1995, for all benefits. Meaning I would get a vacation right away. I just said, look, as soon as I start to get a year, then I accrue all benefits. Now it turns out that that got me stock options

because I was there longer. So it ended up being a really good deal. But the funny thing is, the way HR figured out how to do this is, they just stuck me in their computer starting January 1st. And so every year, January 1st, they're like, congratulations, happy anniversary. Because I negotiated that start date. As far as HR is concerned, that is my start date. So the funny thing is, Charlie is the actual oldest employee, but on the books, I am the oldest employee, because I negotiated for an earlier start date.

Anyway, a little side thing. Okay, so Charlie was on the design team for Tempest. So the design team for Tempest, if you remember my very first podcast, was me, Richard Garfield, Mike Elliott, and Charlie Cattino. Now, Charlie now works very little on Magic. He works a lot on Duel Masters and Kaijudo,

which is a game we make for the... Well, Duel Masters is... We started a game for the Japanese market, and then we moved it over here, and over here it's called Kaijudo. Yes, it has an English name in Japan and a Japanese name in the United States. But Charlie, for a long time, did a lot of work on Magic. Although even at this point, he had moved on, meaning he wasn't on the development team, but he had been on the design team.

And one of Charlie's quirks for the longest time, in fact, it might still be going on, and one of Charlie's quirks for the longest time, in fact, it might still be going on, is when Charlie's name was in the alpha rule book, I believe it was misspelled. And what Charlie did is, from then on, he purposely misspelled his name, but differently, in every credit he got.

So whenever you see Charlie, his name's always messed up, and that's a running thing that Charlie does. Charlie's an awesome guy. He's a lot of fun. And when we get to the card-by-card, there's a few stories about Charlie about the set. Okay, so now that I've talked about the people, oh, let me get back to, okay, so the fun of my podcast. This is how my brain works. I just bounce it around. Okay, so we were talking about how the set finally got made.

So Ice Age had gotten done, and Bill was now coming to Wizards, and Joel was now the head designer. And so Joel and Bill said, okay, this is a perfect time. Bill's going to be here. And they set it up so Bill would lead the development for Mirage. Which, by the way, I might save my trivia, there's not a lot of times where the head designer of a set was also the lead developer. Nowadays, we don't let that happen, because we want a second set of eyes.

But Bill was the co-lead of Mirage Design and the lead developer of Mirage, like I said, which is a rare thing these days. I believe Aaron, by the way, also did this because Aaron, I think, was the lead designer of Lorwyn. I believe he was the head developer, the lead developer of Lorwyn. So, I think he was.

Anyway, so what happened was they decided that it was a good time because Bill was going to get there. And so Bill and Joel were now both there. And that way they could oversee their baby. And like I said, the idea of the set was they wanted to tell about this world and this story, about this war between these three wizards.

And one of the wizards, so Karavac is the, you know, the, the evil one, if you will. Um, and what happens is Karavac kidnaps Mangara and he imprisons him in, um, the Amber Prison. Uh, and so, uh, Jor-El has to go rescue, um, Mangara. And, uh, in order to get there to free him, they end up using the Weatherlight, the flying ship Weatherlight. That's where the Weatherlight... I think... I'm trying to remember

when we made the Weatherlight story whether or not we knew... I think we knew about the idea of the Weatherlight ship, and we... I think that was already part of their story, and we said, oh, we could make the Weatherlight Ship the home base of our characters for the Weatherlight Saga.

And so we ended up borrowing that and said, you know, a flying ship seems like a good, because we knew every year we were going to go to different worlds, and we're like, well, in order to do that and have a cast of characters, well, they would need to travel from world to world. And then we ended up with the flying ship. So anyway, the sissay and the weatherlight make an appearance in Mirage and Visions. And then in Weatherlight, obviously, the whole story kicks off with the Weatherlight Saga.

And so, anyway, they want to tell the story. I know, I mean, Teferi was involved because Teferi was doing experiments. I'm trying to think. I mean, I don't remember exactly how the whole story plays out. I know Mangara gets imprisoned by Kerouac. Anyway. But anyway, they were trying to get a feel. Teferi was also involved because Teferi, was there four wizards?

I thought there were three wizards. Anyway, Teferi was involved. He was doing experiments, was there four wizards? I thought there were three wizards. Anyway, Teferi was involved. He was doing experiments. So that leads us to one of the mechanics. Okay, so the set had two major mechanics, flanking and phasing. Now phasing, the idea was that Teferi was messing around with time. And the idea of phasing, I don't know which came first. My guess is phasing came first and the Teferi part of the story was to justify phasing, I don't know which came first. My guess is phasing came first and the fairy

part of the story was to justify phasing. Phasing was a mechanic that said, you are there every other turn. So let's say you play it on turn one. Turn two, it disappears. Turn three, it's back. Turn four, it disappears. Turn five, it's back. And so the idea was you got a much bigger creature than you would normally get because you only had the creature half the time. And I... Well, the phasing was interesting. I mean, the gameplay phasing was interesting.

It had a few... The biggest problem, I think, was how long it took before you could attack with a phasing creature. So if I played a creature in turn one and it's summon sickness, turn two would phase out, turn three it could attack. So it's like I had to wait three turns to attack with a phasing creature. I think that was that caused a lot of problems with it

from a from constructed. I mean, we did figure out a way to make things constructed with phasing which was things that could phase themselves out. So phasing as a means to protect oneself, meaning I'm there all the time, but whenever there's a threat I can phase myself out,

meaning I would go in and come back next turn. And that turned out to be something that was good, especially when it didn't cost you mana. But we'll get to that. So phasing was sort of a costing mechanic, and then flanking was a combat mechanic. So what flanking was is whenever you were blocked by a creature without flanking,

you got minus one, minus one. And flanking was supposed to represent horseback. Horseback would go on to be represented by horsemanship in a portal-free kingdom. But the idea was that I'm up on a horse, and so if I attack you, you are a tactical disadvantage, because I'm higher than you. But if I run into somebody else that has a horse,

that's on horse, well then there's no disadvantage. And so flanking was because one of the things they were trying to do was, it was a war between these different wizards that put together their armies, and I think that part of what they were trying to do is that each section had their own army, and I think that part of what they were trying to do is that each section had

their own army, and the cards would represent their army between this fight. And so, I'm not sure whether the flanking was one particular army. It would have been Jor-El's army, because Jor-El was the one that had all the animals and such. So maybe it was Jor-El's army that... So, anyway, you can tell my knowledge of way back when story. But anyway, so phasing and flanking were the two named mechanics. There were a few other, I mean, not named mechanics. So probably the other big thing, the biggest thing that they introduced was Mirage was the first set to have charms. And so charms were cheap spells that had three different effects.

So they all cost one colored mana, and then you got three small effects. And the idea was sometimes there's effects that are just too small to put on cards. And so the idea the team had was, well, what if you gave people an option that any one of them wasn't worth the card, but the flexibility of any of the three of them was worth the card? And charms were going to be very popular, so much so that, I mean, we keep redoing charms. We keep making new charms. I mean, obviously, we just, Return to Ravnica had two-color charms that we hadn't done before.

And so, but yeah, Mirage was the first set to have the charms. It also was the first set to have I'm not sure what to call them. I think people call them insta-enchantments. But they were enchantments that you could cast essentially with Flash, although

Flash did not exist at the time. Oh, but the trick about them was, they weren't straight Oh, but the trick about them was, they weren't straight-up Flash. The trick about them was, you could play them normally, like a normal aura, but if you played them at instant speed,

then they only lasted for the turn. So essentially, they were kind of like an instant that just lasted to one turn, although technically they did, you know, go on the creature. Aura was an aura that stuck around, and you kind of had a choice.

Later on, we would simplify that to just being... We just put Flash on auras, and said, like, we don't need it. There's enough negative to auras, we don't need them to fall off and be cast into Flash. Oh, something I forgot on flanking, by the way. I'm a little scattershot today.

Flanking, the problem with flanking was the self-referentialness to flanking, by the way. I'm a little scattershot today. Flanking, the problem with flanking was the self-referentialness to flanking, meaning only flanking creatures, like if you had flanking and you didn't get minus one, minus one, it made a lot of flavor sense, because there's the flavor of the horses, but mechanically it caused problems that people didn't seem to remember that.

One of the reasons flanking hasn't come back is that we kind of like the cleaner version, which does, hey, block me and get minus one, minus one than anything that blocks me. And that remembering the self-referential element of it actually makes it harder for people to play and harder to remember.

And that's one of the reasons that flinking... The reason phasing hasn't come back is it just had a lot of rules complication. It's one of those things where if we actually I mean, we figured out how to write it on the card. But what happened, modern day phasing really is flickering.

The idea that we can send things away and come back. A lot of what made phasing valuable, it wasn't that it was there every other turn, but rather that it had the ability to go away and come back. And so, Modern day sets have flickering, which captures

I think the best part of phasing. Phasing hasn't come back because it's just kind of complex. There's a lot more going on. It had this weird thing where if you had enchantments on it, it kept the enchantments, but it didn't trigger and comes into play effects, but I think

it did trigger the play effect. It was complicated. The other thing that it introduces, which you also saw in Return of Ravnica, was the guild mages. So, the way it did guild mages was, it had a mono-colored card that had two activations, one in each of its ally colors.

And then the guild mages, as we redid them in the original Ravnica and then did a new version in Return of Ravnica, was more about I have activations of the color that I am, but they still had multiple activations.

A guild mage has always had two activations. Somehow that's the guild mageness. That was the first set to do guild mages. Another big thing that you would see us do later, but this was the first set that did it, is Spirit of the Night. So what Spirit of the Night was

was a card in which there were three cards, Breath Stealer, Feral Shadow, and Urborg Panther. And if you got all three into play, you could turn them into the Spirit of the Night. Which, by the way, was supposed to be Spirit of the Night Stalker,

but it didn't fit. The words didn't fit on the card, and so we had to chop it to Spirit of the Night. And other people don't realize this, but if you... I think if you combine all the power and all the toughness, the... Like, if you put all of it together, that's what makes the creature.

And this was the first time that we'd really done the idea of multiple cards can make up a singular card visions would do it again we've done it a bunch in magic but this was the first remember Mirage is relatively early Mirage is year 3

of magic a lot of things the I mean, oh, the other big thing Mirage did, I didn't even bring this one up, is Mirage introduced the concept of a block. Now, I understand that Ice Age kinda had Ice Age and Alliances and they counted homelands for a while, but um, Alliances

was meant as a follow-up to Ice Age, but it wasn't, it wasn't in the same terms where Mirage was the first set where, like, it's going to be a block, it's large, small, small, it'll go on the whole year. You know, Mirage was the first modern-day set where the sensibility of being a block. And also, by the way, was the first set was really developed with the idea of thinking about limited. Now, we had a lot to learn. We did a lot wrong. I mean, we had a lot of room to grow, let's say.

But Mirage was the first set in development where really... Like, when I talk about the ages of magic, I talk about the Golden Age, Silver Age, that Mirage is the beginning of the Silver Age as far as design goes. That it is the set in which for the first time, we

were much, much more conscious of the idea of a block, and the idea of limited play. And it was the entry of the new wave of developers, like I said. So Mirage to me is the silver age, if you will, of magic design. Anyway, I've just gotten to work.

And what I realized is I have all these awesome stories about cards and so I'm going to have to continue this until next week. We'll do part two. So today I mostly talked about the makeup of the team and the mechanics and stuff, but next week I'm going to talk about, it's going to be full of stories, because there's lots of stories about Mirage.

And I'm trying to make these the recaps of set designs a little longer, because I know you guys like them so much. So next week we'll do part two which will be about stories, Mirage card stories.

Anyway, I'm glad you joined me for today. It was a lot of fun and it's time to go make the magic.