Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #58 - Champions of Kamigawa, Part 2

Episode Date: October 3, 2013

Mark continues his podcast about Champions of Kamigawa.

Okay, so I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so last week I started talking about the design of Champions of Kamigawa, but I didn't finish. So this week I will continue. So when last we left, our Intrepid Design team was working on bringing to life a world inspired by Japanese flavor. And last week I talked about how they had come up with Soul Shift and Bushido, but they really were trying to find an identity for the set. And when I got handed over to development, so as I mentioned last week, although I'm credited in the designs, I was not on the design team. I just came up with the Splice Mechanic, which I'll credited in the designs, I was not on the design team. I just came up with the splice mechanic, which I'll get to today.

And I was given credit on the design team. I was actually, though, on the development team. So the development team was run by Randy Buehler. And it was a very interesting development team because the set, when it came came in was in a rough place. As I explained last week, the set decided to try to do something interesting. It started by making all the creative first, and then it went to build the design around the creative. But the problem, as I explained last week, is design is just a lot more flexible. I'm sorry, creative, flavor is a lot more flexible than mechanics.

You know, mechanics just don't have the nuance that you can get with flavor. And so what happened was a lot of the design got a little ham-fisted. It's like, oh, there's samurais. Okay, there's a samurai mechanic. Okay, there's spirits. There's a spirit mechanic. And everything's sort of... Because one of the things now, one of the things that I try to do in modern sort of design is that I feel the play of the game is part of the flavor. One of the things I was very happy in Innistrad was, Innistrad was about recreating a sense of Gothic horror. Emotionally, I wanted a feel of dread. That I wanted you to be scared.

I wanted you to have moments where you were worried about things. And so the design of the set, definitely, like for example, the werewolf mechanic is a perfect example where I put this thing out. You know this thing, if it ever flips, is going to be really problematic for you, but you don't know when it's going to flip, so there's this suspense, right? The mechanic built into it made you kind of worry

about it, because you knew something bad was going to happen, but you didn't quite know when, and so you were fighting to stop it, but you didn't quite know when it was going to happen. And there's a lot of other things we did, but we were trying to create a feel. The problem here was that it is hard to create the feel. The way we now do sort of top-down is we gather a bunch of the flavor and a bunch of mechanics and keep sort keep going back and

forth to try to make it right. We don't lock ourselves into one thing and flavor and go, well, find whatever mechanics you can. No, it's like, okay, we've got to figure out how best to represent it. And what was going on there was, it's like, we have samurai. Well, how do you represent samurai? They're good fighters. Okay, give them a fight mechanic.

But did the samurai, did the play of the samurais feel like samurai? I mean, they felt like good fighters, but one of the big things of samurai is the sense of honor. I mean, there's a lot that goes to samurai beyond just they fight. And it kind of got boiled down to the simplest version so they could make a mechanic for it. And I think one of the things that Kamigawa had is a lot of the sense you get. I mean, one of the things that Kamigawa had is a lot of the sense you get.

I mean, one of the things that's nice about hitting a real culture is there are feelings and senses that a culture will bring up. And I don't think this set did it. I mean, to Brian Tinsman's defense, he did try to do some stuff to have some of that feel, but it didn't match the flavor they were going for. match the flavor they were going for. And the flavor they did go for was something that, while very accurately Japanese, was a little more foreign to most of the audience.

So, the set came to development. It really had some identity problems. In fact, I was a thorn in Randy's side, because one of my messages was the set didn't know what it was.

And Randy would say, oh, it's the Japanese set. And I'd go, no, Randy, that's... But it didn't have a real sense of what he was trying to do, especially mechanically. Mechanically, it's like, oh, well, this matters, and that matters, and this matters.

And like, yeah, all those things tie into... But what's the feel? What are we trying to do? And so we went back and forth on that, on what exactly is the feel of a set. So, sorry. Must keep drinking if I want to talk consistently. So first of all, we knew we were missing some mechanics.

And second of all, we were missing a larger, greater feel. And I kept bringing it up. I kept saying to Randy, Randy, we have to commit to something. What is this set about? And we kept jumping around what the set was about. The set had a lot going on. I mean, you're introduced to this world,

and this world got in a fight with this spirit world, and there was this war between them, and, you know, there were a lot of characters, and it was definitely something that had a lot going on. So the first thing that Randy really wanted to do was, we needed some, we were short on mechanics. And so I had come up with a mechanic a while ago, and the idea of my mechanic, I don't even remember what I called it, was the idea that you could graph things onto spells was my flavor.

We had done stuff like buyback and kicker where the spell came with it, extra bonus. Like, oh, if you spend extra mana, you can get this additional ability. And the idea I had is, I liked that. I said, well, what if we disconnect that from the spell? Meaning, instead of that bonus being on the spell you're playing, that bonus sits in your graveyard, or on your hand, and you can use it on whatever you want. I think my original version, by the way, actually had a flashback feel to it,

which was it allowed you to reuse things, I think originally from the graveyard, and then we decided that it was easier to have it in your hand. And so the idea was, is where splice came from is, well, we had a spell and you could splice that spell onto other spells. Now,

we ended up making arcane, which was a subset of spells that you need to this set. And I think arcane was just on instants and sorceries. Later on in the design, kind of too late, or sorry, in the development, kind of too late to actually test properly, um, we came up with the idea of splice onto Instants or splice onto Sorcery. Um, because one of the problems with splice onto Arcane is, talk about parasitic.

Like, I can splice Under this subset of spells. This subset of spells exists solely in this set. Now, I was happy with Splice for Limited, because I think it actually played very interestingly, and I think Splice did a lot of fun things for Kamigawa Limited. And for what it's worth, by the way, for as much as I might rag a little bit on Kamigawa's... I mean, I think the design had some issues.

I do think the actual limited play was actually pretty good, especially for its day, it was pretty good. There were some problems, and I'll get to some of the problems, but I think the set shown the most is unlimited, and the reason is, one of the set's problems was how parasitic it was. Once again, parasitic means it relied on other cards only in this set. But Unlimited didn't matter. You're parasitic.

Well, all the cards you're playing with are from the set. So that stuff didn't matter. In constructed and casual formats, it did matter. Because, like, oh, I want to play Splice. Well, I have to make a deck of nothing but this set. And one of the problems we've had for a long time is what we call the block monster problem. So one of the things we used to do is, I mean, we still do this, but we used to, every year it has a different theme to it.

And what we used to do is we would starve the theme right before it. So if we're going to do gold cards, no gold cards would show up for a set or two before it. If you're going to do artifacts, no artifacts show up for a set or two. We would starve whatever it is we were going to do. And what we ended up doing with that, the big flaw to that plan,

was you ended up with sets in which, well, the set before me had nothing to add, and the set, you know, so like, the set would become so strong and just have its own block that it would become

a monster, it would become a block monster. A, it would cause problems in the block construction format, but also, standard you want,

you know, the reason to have two years is to have those two years mixed together and our themes were so strong and we were pulling them away

that we weren't making it easy for things to go together. Now, we do it a lot differently. I mean, now we're very conscious of what's coming. And in fact, we try to make sure there's some overlap that, oh, well, there's some things from year one that year two will want and that, you know, it'll create some synergy between them. And then year two and three have something different that matters.

So year two has something else that year one doesn't care about, but year three will care about. And that's how you keep standard fresh, is make sure that the blocks sitting next to each other have some synergy with each other. Okay, so we made Splice. I pitched it to Randy. Randy liked it. We put it in the file.

We ended up making Arcane. We also pushed what we called Spirit Craft. The original design had some of this, but we way notched it up, We also pushed what we called spirit craft. The original design had some of this, but we way notched it up, which is kind of spirit matters. So we had a lot more cards that rotated around spirits. I mean, obviously, the design team in Turnworld of Souls shift was very much scared about spirits.

But we made more of like edge of the play and count spirits and things that did well in play counting spirits. We called it spirit craft. That wasn't an actual name. So what happens sometimes is the set has, I mean, a mechanic has a name, and it's on the card. So that's a keyword mechanic. Sometimes we put a name with it, but it's not a keyword,

and we call that an ability word. Also, sometimes we have an ability action, which is like a verb that's a keyword, but it's a verb rather than a noun. And that's, it's used in sentences. Like transform from, and an enestrade was a, was an action word,

not action word, an ability word. But sometimes we have nicknames for things. We don't officially call them that, but we like, in all our writing, we'll refer to it. So we call it that spirit of craft. Okay, next, the flip cards. And by flip cards, I do mean flip cards, which is funny,

because when people talk about the double-faced, indestructible cards, they sometimes call them flip cards. And I say, well, not exactly. Those aren't flip cards. These are flip cards. So what flip cards are, are cards that come into play one side up, and then if you do a certain condition, you flip them upside down, and then they're a different card.

So the idea was pretty simple, which was we were trying to do some more storytelling, and we liked the idea of these heroes that turned into champions, sort of, that became powerful characters. And so they would start out simple. I think the way a lot of them is they weren't even a legend yet, and they'd flip into legends.

I'll get to the legendary thing in a second. So where flip things came about, so I did a card in unglued tooth that never got released called Heads Up, Tails Spin. And the way the card worked was there was a tiny sliver piece of art at the top, half the size of a normal piece of art,

then the text box, then on the other side there was another sliver of art. And so the text box was split in half, so if you had the card up one way, it's called Heads Up, and then it was a positive thing for your creatures. And then the other way is called Tailspin, and if you flip the card upside down, then that art was face up, and that rules text was face

up. And then you slip a coin every turn, and either you get heads up or tailspin, was the idea. I mean, the real innovation of the card was the idea that it was two cards that you went back and forth between the states. So what we did here was a couple things that were different. One, we talked to the art director, who at the time was, I believe, Jeremy Cranford. And Jeremy liked the idea of, instead of having two unique pieces of art, because he thought it was just hard to have such a small piece of art,

he suggested having one piece of art, but in which you have two images, that when you flip it up, one image pulls your focus one way, and one image will pull your focus the other way. That they were sort of two pictures melded together, but the artist would know that they were being one giant picture. That had some success. One of the things when we ended up going to Double Face Cards in Innistrad was having two clear, distinctly different pictures, I think proved, made it a lot easier to sort of get the differences between the things.

Flip cards also were very limited in the amount of space you had to write the words, just because you had half a text box. I know Richard was also involved in making these cards. Richard, I don't think, wasn't on the design team or development team. But he was somebody who was around, we would talk to,

and I think some of the execution flip cards Richard came up with, I think Richard was the one that said, look, they start in one state, and they go to the second state, and they never come back. That way it's clear, because heads up and tails spin, it went back and forth. And the problem with going back and forth was

we were afraid, especially when the card is, like, for example, flip cards are also the problem when you attack them. Well, which orientation were they? Which one were they? Like, it just became hard to remember which was which. But Richard's thing was, if they go back and forth, it's even harder to remember. If they just go one way, well, you have to remember whether it's switched or not. You know, if it did, then you know that it's one thing, and that would help.

The other big theme that development brought into it was we knew that we'd wanted to play up legendary characters a little more. And so the development team definitely played that up some. But in... I said design team. But in development, one of the things I kept saying to Randy is, what's this all about? And Randy would say, well, it's a war.

I go, well, if it's a war, then we should play out the two sides of the war and have each side represented and have probably a mechanical identity for each side. So Randy said, well, maybe it's not about a war. Maybe it's about the legendary characters. And I said, okay, well, if it's about legendary characters,

then you have to have a lot of legendary characters. And that's when I pitched the idea of all the rare creatures being legendary creatures, as well as a bunch of uncommon creatures being legendary creatures. I was like, well, if you're going to do it, it's going to be your theme. You kind of have to really make it your theme.

So one of my favorite things that I've said, in fact, it came from this. I learned this lesson from this very set, which is, one of my themes, one of my little truisms about design is, magic design, is if your theme isn't common, it's not your theme. And what I learned from this set

was that it's fine and dandy to say, here's my theme. But if you don't play the set and get the theme in the vast, vast majority of the games you play, then it isn't your theme. You know, like we did this legendary theme, but you could open up ten packs

and never see a legend, you know. I mean, maybe five packs and never see a legend. I guess all the rare creatures, eventually you'll see one. And even if you open up ten packs and you saw one or two legends, you know, let's say you opened up ten packs and got a couple rare legends. Well, fine, maybe you happened to get a couple rare legends. It didn't...

It's hard to communicate all the rare creatures or legends. It's really, really hard to communicate. In fact, it pretty much is impossible to communicate in a booster pack. And so we kind of set ourselves up to do something that wasn't going to be noticeable in a way it needed to be noticed. I mean, we talked

about it. The other big mistake we made, with Legends, there's something that's special. Legends are something that people really like. The reason we wanted to use them was they were something that people loved, which is interesting because the legendary mechanic, mostly, I mean, Commander didn't exist yet,

at the time, it was mostly just a drawback. It just said you couldn't play with all of them. Now, yeah, development got to give it a little tiny bit of boost, not as much as people think. But people thought of Legends as being cool. And the problem with doing all your rare creatures being Legends is all of them can't be cool. Some of them have to suck. It's the nature of the beast that, you know, yeah, you have some good cards, but you have some bad cards. And we guaranteed that we'd make some really bad legends. Yeah, we made some really good legends, but we made some really bad legends. And that kind of undercut the whole idea in general of legends are cool. And that's another big lesson there is, A, if your theme's not a comment, it's not your theme. And B, be careful, you know,

if your theme is not a comment, it's not your theme. And B, be careful. You know, things people love is a resource. Use it accordingly. Don't waste it. If people really love something, you have to dole it out and be careful. Because if you don't,

then you make the thing less valuable to people. And a really important part of trading card game design is you only have so many resources you have to use them carefully you can't sort of waste them because every time you waste one you're just down on resources you have to go find more resources and there's things to find in magic but it's not an endless supply we have to manage our resources

so a lot of doing magic correctly is reusing the resources okay what else did we do other small things we did We have to manage our resources to do magic correctly is reusing the resources. Okay, what else did we do? Other small things we did. So, before this, part of making the legendary thing work is we changed how the legendary rules work. Now, recently, we've again changed. So, let me walk you through the legendary rules real quick.

So, when Legends, the set Legends came out, it introduced a creature type called Legends. So, Legends, the set Legends came out, it introduced a creature type called Legends. So literally in Legends, there were creature Legends. Now they all happened to be gold cards. And interestingly, Legends was the first set with gold cards and the first set with legendary creatures. And all the legendary creatures were gold cards and all gold cards were legendary creatures. Pretty splashy, actually. And so the rule in the beginning was, you may only have one creature,

only one creature could be in play at a time. And so what happened was, let's say you and I were playing the same legend. Oh, and early on, by the way, legends were on the restricted list. Every single legend was on the restricted list. Meaning you could only play with one of them in your deck. And so the original rule was once a legend is in play, no other version can be played.

So if I happen to get a legend in play, then you're stuck. That's it. Your legend's dead. It can do nothing. And it made for bad gameplay. And so we were very shy about pushing legends because the gameplay was bad we didn't want to make one good enough that both sides

have to play it and we did make the mistake Urza's Saga for example had legendary lands that were very powerful and in fact here's how crazy the rule was so Tolarian Academy was this power harsh card people would put Tolarian Academy in their deck,

not even have blue mana or blue spells to use with it, or even artifacts to fuel it. It was in solely because if they could play it before you played it, they'd just shut yours off because you couldn't play yours. Decks that could not play it, that could not use it, played it merely as a countermeasure to Tolerant Academies, played by people who wanted to play them. I mean, that's how crazy the card was,

but that's kind of silly. So we decided that, I mean, we eventually got rid of it being unrestricted. You can have as many legends as you want. And to make better gameplay, we came up with the idea of just reversing how it worked. Because for a long time

what happened was, legends worked one way, and world enchantments that had a similar flavor. So world enchantments, or as they were called originally in legends as well, enchant worlds, would be an enchantment, and it would affect the game state. The flavor was you were on a different plane.

And then when a new enchant world came in, the old one would go away, and the new one would be an enchantment, and it would affect the game state. The flavor was you were on a different plane. And then when a new enchant world came in, the old one would go away, and the new one would be dominant, and it said, well, now you're here. And we realized that that was more dynamic play, because it said, if I have an enchant world in my hand, I can cast it. And it became an invulnerability for the previous enchant worlds, but it allowed you to play them.

Where Legends, if I had a Legend in my hand, and you already had one in play, it was just a dead card. So we decided we allowed you to play them. Where Legends, if I had a Legend in my hand and you already had one in play, it was just a dead card. So we decided we were going to change our Legends so that instead of the second Legend just not being able to come and play, it would come and play and then destroy the first one. So

the reason your Tolarian Academy became good if you're appointed to Tolarian Academy was you could use yours to destroy theirs. And that proved to be, we thought, better gameplay, so we made that change. I mean, obviously, you know, come Magic 2014, we'd make another

change to the Legendary role, but we'll get there later. It's not really today's issue. So, one of the things we did is, okay, so Legendary, well, first off, at this set, or maybe right So, one of the things we did is, okay, so we, legendary, well, first off, at this set, or maybe right before, maybe in the, I'm not sure whether it changed with this set or the horse set right before. I guess it must have changed with this set. We did a couple things. So, legendary was no longer creature type. We got rid of the

legend creature type, and we moved it to legendary, so we made it a super type, which made a lot more sense because we wanted to have legendary things. We wanted to have legendary artifacts. We wanted to have other legendary things. And interestingly, the way it worked was, well, I'm saying this a little bit wrong. We had legendary things, but creatures weren't legendary. And we're like, well, this is weird why these things line up and are supposed to work the same

and some say legendary is a super type and some have it as a creature type. Anyway, so we said, okay, they're all legendary. Everything's legendary. And the other thing we did is because legends, there were two creature types that carried rules baggage on them.

One was legends, because it had the legendary rule. And the other was Wall. Because at the time, if you had Wall on you, if your creature type was Wall, you automatically couldn't attack. So what we did with Kamakawa was we changed it so that Defender became an ability. We retroactively gave all Walls Defender and promised that all Walls so that Defender became an ability. We retroactively gave all walls Defender

and promised that all walls would have Defender, but then said that wall no longer carried any baggage. So, anyway, that would... It's funny because the previous year, a couple of years before, we had done a card called Mistform Altimus, which had all the creature types, and then it had to have

the card text that it could attack as though it wasn't a wall, because we thought it was cooler to have all of them rather than have all but wall. And so we sort of said, it has all, and then it said, well, but ignore the wall rules. And then when this changed, we just could take that off in Oracle. It had all the creature types.

Okay, so those were the key changes that we made. And like I said, we spent a lot of time in development working on Limited, trying to give the set an identity. Oh, something else I want to talk about, which I think was one of the failings of the set. And it had to do with the names.

I admire what Brandon was up to. Brandon Bozzi did the name and flavor text. And that he was trying hard to give the set a real strong feel. And I think he did do that. I think that... I think the plus on the name and flavor text was they did have a Japanese feel.

The downside was that one of the points of names and flavor text was they did have a Japanese feel. The downside was that one of the points of names and flavor text is as handholds for recognition. You know, that a card has a lot going on, but if you can anchor all the idea of the card in a singular name that people can share, then you have a concept people can talk about. And names do a lot of important work. Names not only help you remember a card once you know it, but they also help you figure out

what a card is. That you don't really think about this, but names sound different. And one of the problems with Champions of Kamigawa was, for the first time, we really didn't do that. That the names had enough of a foreignness that, you know... I mean, the classic example was Council of the Soratami, okay?

Because we actually had this in a court set for a while, and it caused a little bit of problems, which is, what card type is Council of the Soratami? You know, and what we found was, well, it depended on how you spelled the word council. You know, like, it didn't, like, obviously, if you understood that, well, you know, C-O-U-N-C-I-L is a group, you know, C-O-U-N-C-I-L

is a group of people, and C-O-U-N-C-S-E-L is advice given by somebody, you know, but the problem is you would hear of a name, go Consul of Soratami, and you're like, oh, I guess the Soratami got together? And you're like, oh, no, no, no, it's the advice of the Kamataui who are telling you, hey, you get two cards.

You know, and that the set literally... I didn't do this, but if I just started calling off names. You know, and the set literally, I didn't do this, but if I just started calling off names, you know, especially lesser known cards, cards that didn't end up

being constructed, and said, okay, name this card type. Kamigawa would do the worst of any set I can remember of you being able to identify the card type.

You know, usually, for example, you know, instants are verbs. Like you see a verb, you go, that's an instant. You know, sorcer, for example, you know, instants are verbs. Like, you see a verb, you go, that's an instant. You know,

sorceries and instants are verbs, and enchantments are nouns, and artifacts are things, and the problem with Enchantments of Gamagawa was it was trying to be,

you know, you know, it who suffers. Well, it who suffers. Well, okay, it suffers. Oh, does that mean, I'm making names up,

by the way, that wasn't actually a card. But it's the kind of thing where, like, oh, it who suffers. Well, okay, I guess. Oh, does that mean... I'm making names up, by the way. That wasn't actually a card. But it's the kind of thing where, like, oh, it who suffers. Well, okay, I guess it's a creature, because only creatures suffer, but then it's like, oh, no, it's an artifact that it suffers, you know, thematically. And, like, the set had a lot of stuff like that where, like, you just

couldn't... And one of the things you'll notice is, as evidence of what I'm trying to explain is, people were famously bad at remembering the names of the cards from from Chimney's Kamigawa. That just like, oh, what's that name again? What's that name? Because it didn't have the handholds

to remember. And that's by the way, real quickly, I mean, I did a whole podcast with Matt Cavada about, oh no, I haven't done names yet. We did one about flavor text, but Matt and I will do one about names, one of our future carpools. But one of the things about names, I'll give a little preview of what you'll hear us talk about,

is that names are all this function and that a lot of what goes on in the creative, on the surface looks like you're just trying to make things look pretty, if you will. But there's a lot of functionality. A lot of the rules of the name and the art are helping people shortcut and identify

what it is they're using. And when you start muddying that up, you start realizing that, wow, it's hard to remember. There's a lot of cards to remember. And that without the little sort of mnemonics of the creative to help you, it becomes very hard. And this was a set, I think, where creative,

especially in the names, names sort of fell down a little bit in that, in that role. Okay, so I'm almost to work. Um, so this is going to be at least a three-parter because I have a whole bunch of cards I want to talk about. Um, but, uh, so here's what I'm going to do since I have, I have a few minutes to get to work. I'm going to start by talking about a few of the cards as a little lead-in to next week.

So as a little taste to make you come back. Okay, so we're going to start with the Brothers Yakazami. So, Yamaki? Yamaki. Brothers Yamaki. Sorry. Like I said, these are names that are hard to remember. So I had an idea that wouldn't it be cool... We decided we were going to do legendary creatures. And I said, wouldn't it be cool, we decided we'd do legendary creatures, and I said, wouldn't it be cool

to have a legendary set of identical twins? And I thought this was an awesome idea. Like, we have a card, and the card, you know, there's two of them, and that you can have two of them in play. And then we said, you know what's even better than that? It represents twin brothers. We'll have two copies of the card,

one with each picture. So it turns out, for those that don't understand how magic cards are made, I'm not going to go into great detail, but basically there's a large sheet. We print a large sheet because that's how you print things. And then we chop them up into cards. And so the way it normally works is each rarity has a sheet that's its own sheet. There's a common sheet and an uncommon sheet and a rare sheet. And the one thing at the time I didn't really appreciate was, well, how exactly do you get two pieces, two images on a rare card? And the problem was, in order to do that, you had to have a separate sheet with a separate picture. So unbeknownst to me, who just on

a whim, like on a whim said, oh, wouldn't it be cool that they're brothers and they're twins, you could have two of them and there's two different pieces of art. We ended up doing two different rare sheets solely for this one thing, which obviously I had no idea. And it cost us a lot of money. I didn't realize this much, much later that like my random idea that I thought was just cool, and maybe it was cool but uh it was

it it was one of the might be the most expensive idea I've had as far as here's the card idea let's execute that um because it ended up being quite costly and and the problem at the time was I mean weren't much better now is I had a great idea but I had no idea how the printing worked printing said okay I guess that's what they need and never questioned what we were doing. Printing never said, really, you want to do it for that? Okay, you want to do it. Like I said,

I think the general flavor was cool. I mean, we had a legendary theme so we definitely were playing around with the idea that we wanted

to goof with legends and do different things with legends than we'd done before. And as I go through the cards next week, you'll see there's a bunch of legendary things that we're doing. Anyway, that was just a before. And as I go through the cards next week, you'll see there's a bunch of Legendary things that we're doing.

Anyway, that was just a teaser. A teaser of the kind of stories you will learn next week, because I'm here at work and I must go and do my thing. But I want to just give a little teaser of next week is going to be about

the cards. One of the things I've been trying to do in my design podcast is at least spend one podcast talking about actual card stories. And I felt like there were some fun stories

to tell. The Brothers Yamaki. Any one of them. But next week, I will tell you I have many more. I have a whole sheet worth. Maybe more than one podcast.

I'm not sure. At least one podcast. So make sure to join me next week. You'll hear about some Champions of Kamigawa cards. And anyway, it was fun talking today. But you know what, guys? It's time to go and make the magic.