Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #76 - 1994

Episode Date: December 6, 2013

Mark talks about the second year of life of Magic.

Okay, I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today, last summer at the World Championship, I did a little segment called 20 Years in 20 Minutes. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game, I, in a very brief segment, covered every year of the game in one minute. And a lot of people felt like that wasn't a lot of time. I mean, the segment went over well, but like, I would like to learn more about each year than one minute's worth. And so I decided to start a mega-series in which, instead of 20 years in 20 minutes, it's 20 years in 20 podcasts. Although, to be fair, this isn't going to take long enough. I'm sure I will do later years, so probably more than 20 years and 20 podcasts. Although, to be fair, this is going to take long enough. I'm sure I will do later years, so probably more than 20 years.

But anyway, I already did 1993. Today is the second part, 1994. And so one of the things that's important to understand is that one of the things I see this podcast as being is I consider myself a historian of the game, one of the major historians of the game. I've been around for most of the history of it, and Magic has a deep and rich history,

and I want to make sure that people know this stuff. So part of me doing podcasts like this is to just fill people in and help people become more aware of the history of the game. As always, my little caveat is this is from my perspective. I'm going to explain Magic through my eyes because those are the eyes I've seen it through. So definitely it's a little slanted toward my own personal history but once again

my podcast so I guess you get to hear magic through my POV okay let's start in January of 1994 okay in December of 1994 my last podcast Arabian Nights came out.

But it turns out that there were two Arabian Nights releases. What? So it turned out that they... So one of the themes you'll see through this year is Wizards was just in the beginning of making magic. And that there were a lot of lessons to be learned along the way. And a lot of mistakes were made, and a big area of mistakes was printing. There were tons and tons of printing mistakes. For example, I talked about in 1993 in Alpha,

there were cards left off the sheets. There were things that were misprinted and things that were written wrong. And instead of mana symbols, there were letters. And there were all sorts of mistakes. And that would carry over into 1994. So what happened was the first version of Arabian Nights had some problems. The biggest problem was some of the mana amounts, the numbers, and the mana bubbles didn't line up.

And so there'd be bubbles, but the number would be outside the bubble. and the amount of bubbles didn't line up. And so there'd be bubbles, but the number would be outside the bubble. Also, there were some... There were some... Bubbles that were dark, that were hard to read. So they went back,

and they reprinted Arabian Nights. And so there actually was a second version that came out. It's not often that they do this. Not a lot of history of us doing this, but they did it on Arabian Nights. And so the first version came out in December, and the second version came out in January. And it's important to remember,

by the way, I talked about this before, but let me just remind you, that Magic at this point was just white hot. Like, they, I talked about in 1993, how they made product and it just disappeared, you know, instead of being six months worth, it disappeared in a week. And so what happened was, on the products I'm talking about this year,

until we get to the end of the year, products would come out and it would just disappear. Like, what you would need to do if you wanted to buy a product is, you had to go to the store the day it came out, and maybe, maybe, you know, by the day's end, usually it was gone. Like, I remember going to the store, I used to have a store in Westwood, near where I lived. Westwood's where University of Southern California is. Oh, no, I'm sorry. University, anyway, not USC, UCLA.

Anyway, I would sit out in front of the store until it opened, and there would be a line, and then I would buy my product. And, although Arabian Nights, Arabian Nights I actually got from my workplace. I talked about this story where we got four boxes in, and they said I could have as much as I wanted, and I ended up taking two boxes. Anyway, so Arabian Nights came out in January.

Also in January was the creation of the Dulles Convocation. What is the Dulles Convocation? Well, most of you probably know it by its current incarnation, the DCI. was the creation of the Duelist Convocation. What is the Duelist Convocation? Well, most of you probably know it by its current incarnation, the DCI. So DCI, if you don't know, stands for Duelist Convocation International. So what is a Duelist Convocation? So early on, now we like to use the word planeswalker, but I think early on we went back and forth between planeswalker and duelist.

In fact, the magazine The Duelist, I will talk about it in a second. And so the Duelist Convocation was the gathering of Duelists, of people who dueled with magic. And then later it would become international, and then eventually we'd shorten it because no one knew what it stood for, and we shortened it to DCI. But, so it did a couple interesting things when it first came out.

First off, for the first ever sanctioned tournaments, before that, there was no, you know, there was nothing official. And once they sanctioned tournaments, they were able to lay down some rules. And a bunch of new rules got laid out when the DCI got formed, or the Duelist Convocation got formed. First was, up until that point, magic deck construction rules were 40 cards. And that proved to be a problem. It was just not enough. The decks were a little too consistent. And so two things were laid down. First it said, okay, for constructed, it'll be a 60 card limit, not a 40 card limit. Limited stayed at a 40 card limit, but construction

changed to 60. And it introduced the four card limit, something that seems kind of just natural now, but when the game began, that wasn't true. And if you can imagine having a 40 card deck filled with moxes and lotus Lotus, I mean, there were just decks that literally they could win turn one 98% of the time. It's crazy stuff like that. In fact, I actually went to a tournament in which there was no limits. You could have as many cards as you wanted. I think there might have been a 60-card deck restriction, but you could have as many copies of things as you wanted. And it was might have been a 60-card deck restriction, but you could have as many copies of things as you wanted. And it was just about to see who could win on the first turn

the largest number of times, basically what the tournament was. So the DCI also... Oh, also instituted the idea of a banned and restricted list, saying, oh, some cards are problematic. Most of the cards, there wasn't a lot banned early on. I think they might have banned the anti-cards. When Magic started, for those who don't know this, you had to take a card,

you would draw seven cards, and the next card on top of your deck you would put aside, face up, and whoever won that game would get the anti-card of a loser. When Richard first made the game, there was a little sort of marbles quality to it where you could win other people's cards.

And the idea was, you know, your deck would change because you would gain and lose cards. And while from a pure meta sense it was interesting, players did not like it. These are my cards. I care about my deck. I spend a lot of time tuning my deck. I don't want to... All of a sudden my deck doesn't work

because I lose my most important card. Plus, you know, people felt very personal about the card, so the threat of losing it made it not fun. I played a few anti-games in my day, but I agree. I'm not a huge anti-fan. So anti-cards got banned.

I know Scheherazade... I'm not sure if Scheherazade got banned right away, but that's a card where you play sub-games and it just took forever for tournaments. And then they banned a lot of cards. Some of them were obvious, you know, Power 9 stuff were obvious, but there were also some other cards banned like Dingus Egg and Orcish Aura Flame and a few cards that kind of historical, you know, with 2020 vision,

you're like, really? Really? That's what you're banning? And one of the things that's interesting is, back in the day, the people that ran events, that the early lists were not generated by R&D, but the early lists were generated more by the events team, what we now call organized play. And those people, I mean, had great intentions, but they didn't understand the metagame quite as much as we understand it now. And so right now, when we make

ban restriction lists, there's a lot more data that goes into. I mean, back in the day, there was much less data you could go through. Now with Magic Online and tournaments, we have a lot more stuff we can look at to figure out what things are causing problems. And R&D is very central in helping figure that out, because the development team are the people that are

balancing the environments in the first place. So they have a much better understanding of how metagames work okay also in january of 1994 was the first issue of the duelist um so what happened was in the early days magic was very secretive meaning uh remember the internet was very young and that there just wasn't a lot written about magic. Magic sort of didn't share card lists they didn't share deck lists they were trying to keep the mystique of the cards

and eventually just the internet, I mean eventually it proved to be that information wants to be free and that there was such good tools to get information around that wizards realized okay, it's kind of crazy to hide the information. It's going to get out. And then they said, okay, let's be open with our information.

But the duelist was a chance to say, okay, we're making... Peter had always been a giant fan of Dungeons & Dragons. And he would later go on, we'll talk about this in later years, he would later go on to buy TSR, the people that made Dungeons & Dragons, and brought Dungeons & Dragons to Magic. Not to Magic, to Wizards of the Coast. And so Peter, there was two magazines that went along with Dungeons & Dragons, one called Dungeon and one called Dragon.

And Peter loved those magazines. So when Magic became a hit, he decided that he wanted to have a magazine, or a magazine like that. And they ended up calling it The Duelists. Catherine Haynes was selected to be the editor-in-chief. I've talked about her a little bit in my podcast on The Duelists. And anyway, and they started up The Duelists. So in January of that year, the first Duelists came out. I was very excited.

I've talked about this in my Duelist podcast. I read the first one, and I was like, out. I was very excited. I've talked about this in my Duels podcast. I read the first one and I was like, wow. I was excited to see it. Richard Garfield was writing an article on other stuff and they gave glimpses of cards upcoming and it was exciting. But I felt that it wasn't a lot for the experienced player. Too much of it was just for the beginner

and I wanted to create some content maybe. So I wrote in. In fact, in February, I met Steve Bishop at a convention in Los Angeles. Back in the day, Wizards of the Coast went to every convention known to mankind.

They just sent people everywhere. Literally. If there was a convention, a game convention, somebody from Wizards was there. And I met Steve Bishop for the first time. I've talked about Steve Bishop

a little bit. He definitely had sort of a rocker sort of look. He had leather pants and long curly hair with a bandana. Steve was the first of a rocker sort of look. He had leather pants and long curly hair with a bandana. Steve was the first person who ran, at the time it was called

Events, we're not going to organize play. And Steve liked games. He wasn't, he played Magic, but he wasn't up on the rules as much. And definitely one of the, you'll see, I'll talk about the U.S. Nationals, that Steve didn't quite, didn't quite, he tried hard,

but there's some things about running tournaments he didn't quite grasp. And when I get to the U.S. Nationals, there's a good story about that. Okay, so the duels comes out, and that's how I get involved. I start writing puzzles. The real short story is I talk to Steve. He hooks me up or tells me Catherine's the person I want to talk to. I come up with two sample puzzles. I think I came up with three sample puzzles, and I sent them to Catherine.

And it turns out that one of them didn't work. I actually had a mistake in it. The other two did work, and they used one of them in issue number one and a half. The other one got used in issue two. And then, and what happened was, they decided to use it, and it never called and told me.

And so I called them one day, a month later, going, hey, what's going on? Are you guys ever interested in the puzzles? And Catherine was like, oh yeah, it's in the next issue. So, okay. So in March of 94,

Magic's second expansion came out, Antiquities. Oh, I didn't explain this before. So second expansion came out, Antiquities. Oh, I didn't explain this before. So both Arabian Nights and Antiquities were small sets. In fact, they were very small sets. Arabian Nights, I think, had 81 cards, and Antiquities had 94. Both of these numbers are off the top of my head, so I might be off by a smidgen. But they both came in eight-card packs, so they were very small. And, oh, the way it worked back then was there was only two rarity sheets.

Right now, we have three rarity sheets. We have a common sheet, an uncommon, and a rare slash mythic sheet. And there also is a land sheet, for those that want to be technical, which is its own rarity. But back in the day, there was a land sheet, there was a common sheet, and then the uncommon sheet had some cards appeared once or twice, those were the rares, and some cards appeared three, four, or five times, those were the uncommons. And so if you ever look at old things talking about cards, they'll reference them as being a U1, a U2, a U3. That means that's how many times they appeared in the uncommon sheet. If you were a U1 or a U2, you were considered a rare. If you were a U3 or a U4 or a U5, you were considered an uncommon. Anyway, antiquities

was designed, so Arabian Nights was designed by Richard Garfield. Antiquities was designed by the East Coast playtefters. So Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, and Chris Page. They were people who would go on to do Ice Age. At the end of the year, we'll talk with them to do Fallen Empires. They did Alliances, which is the follow-up to Ice Age. They were one of the most innovative early design groups. I was always very impressed with the work they did.

Antiquities did something very interesting. First off, Arabian Nights had a top-down theme. 1001 Arabian Nights had a top-down theme. It was 1001 Arabian Nights. It's a book with a lot of... It's kind of like... It basically was a collection of tales from all around the Middle East. I believe it started as a Persian book and then spread,

and then other things got added in, and other cultures from all around got added to it. But the core story was about Scheherazade, the card that I talked about earlier. She tells, every night to keep alive, she tells a different tale. And then each of those tales ended up being

one of the sort of classic Middle Eastern, I don't know if fairy tale is the right word, but kind of like a fairy tale. A mythological tale. So Antiquities was the East Coast playtesters tackling the theme of artifacts. And if I remember correctly, all but four cards. So other than Strip Mine and the Urzitron, Urza's Mine, Power Plant, and Tower, all the cards, every single card other than those four,

either was an artifact or in its rule text mentioned artifacts. And you can even argue that Urza's Mind, Power Plant, and Tower were meant to get you extra mana to be able to play artifacts. It was colorless mana. So, Strip of Mind is probably the only card that really, really had nothing particularly to do with artifacts. Ended up being a very powerful card. So anyway, Antiquities was very much all about artifacts. Before I came to Wizards, by the way, it was my favorite. I loved artifacts. I just loved Antiquities.

And they did something else really, really interesting creatively, which was Alpha had introduced Urza and Mishra. There were Glasses of Urza and Sunglasses of Urza and Anka Mishra. So he introduced them as characters, but Antiquities told the story, what was known as the Brothers' War. Although, instead of telling the story, it just kind of gave glimpses of the story, as if these were Antiquities you were digging up, and little snippets of legend you would hear.

And so it kind of hinted at the story that wasn't fully actually spelled out. Later, there would be a book and things. But at the time, it kind of gives a glimpse of the story of these two brothers that were both artificers that had a major war, and you were playing with a lot of the remnants and the tools they were using.

And anyway, I thought that was very fascinating. It was, I mean, Arabian Nights, obviously obviously was playing into the flavor of the Arabian Nights and Alpha had little bits of flavor text, but none of it was ever cohesive. It wasn't telling a story. Or I mean, Arabian Nights might be telling the Arabian Nights story, but as far as a magic story. And Antiquities was the first one to do that. Also, it was just, there's a lot of really cool cards that came from Antiquities.

In fact, if you look at how much stuff has been reprinted, there's a lot of really cool cards that came from Antiquities. In fact, if you look at how much stuff has been reprinted, there's a lot of stuff from Antiquities. Like Triskelion and Tetravis were there. And there also were some powerful cards like Ivory Tower and Stripmine. The Urzitron was there. There were just a lot of very exciting cards there. And it was a very, there were both things that were reprinted a lot, and there were things that were very powerful,

although both of those were done together. Usually, if we figured out they were powerful, we'd try not to reprint them. Also, by the way, that set introduced Atog, which would go on to be one of my absolute favorites. In fact, up until Maru got created and became sort of my personal nickname when I was on different sites and stuff,

I used Atog. I loved A-Togs. Although that card got much maligned by the way from a little history. So A-Tog came out as a common in antiquities. Then, in a second I'll talk about Revised. It came out in April. It got reprinted in Revised. And I think there was a period of time

that it was the most printed non-basic land card. And early on people hated him. I don't know why. He actually was pretty good. But he was much maligned. And I used, people hated him. I don't know why. He actually was pretty good. But he was much maligned, and I used to play Aetog. I think I championed him, because he was so hated, and I thought he was such a good card.

And I thought he was so cute that I definitely championed Aetog. Okay, next. Revised in April. So I talked about in December that we came out with Unlimited. So Unlimited, Alpha and Beta were known as Limited. They were Black Border. Unlimited came out in December. It was the same thing, but in White Border. So, Revised

was the newest version of the core set, but with the first time ever that it changed some cards. So, what it did is it took some cards from Arabian Nights and from Antiquities and put them in. Although, without an expansion symbol, which will become important in a second.

And so, a bunch of cool things that were in those sets were in the card set. And the idea was, Richard's master plan and Arnie's master plan was that they would introduce cards and some of those cards would then get rotated in into the core set, in the basic set. And that,

so that people, because what happened was, as I explained earlier, magic was here and gone. If you blinked, you just missed the Rabian Nights. And same with Antiquities. So what happened was, Revive was kind of like, hey, new person to the game, you might not have been around for these things, but we're going to

tip our head and give you access to them. Now, the following year, 1995, both Chronicles and 4th Edition would come out. Those would, that would lead to a problem that would cause us to make the reserve list. I'll talk about that in the 95 podcast. This was the first step in that direction of us reprinting old cards.

But we didn't reprint anything that was super valuable, so Revive didn't cause a lot of problems. Okay, in May, I think in May and June, there were three nationals held in 1994. U.S. headed nationals, France headed nationals, and Belgium headed nationals. And in fact, all three, the winner, the top four, I think, of all three tournaments got sent to the U.S. nationals. I'm sorry, the U.S. world, not U.S. world, the worlds that would happen later in the year.

The winner of the U.S. nationals, I was at U.S. Nationals, it was in San Jose, California. The winner was a guy named Bo Bell, who won with a mono black deck. Oh, but here's a story from the U.S. Nationals. So we get to the tournament. My dad and I actually both went. My dad lives in Tahoe City. I lived at the time in Los Angeles. We both met in San Jose, and we played in it.

But before the tournament gets up, Steve Bishop stands up on a table or something and says, okay guys, before we begin, I don't know if you've heard, but we're not going to allow any cards from with expansion symbols on them. So if you have a card with a little

scimitar from Rabianites or a little anvil from Antigua, you can't play those cards. The tournament's in ten minutes, so you might want to change your decks. Like, what? What? And, in fact, Bowbell the winner actually, I believe, got a couple racks from my dad because my dad had some racks that were revised racks that didn't have expansion symbol on them. Because you could play revised racks, but you could not play Antiquities racks. Anyway, Bow luckily had a deck that was mostly actually not expansion.

I think one of Bo's reasons for success is, and he was able to trade with my dad to get the Rax he needed. So he was able to play, it was a discard deck. Anyway, in June, Legends came out. So Legends was designed by one of the founders, actually, of Wizards of the Coast, a guy named Steve Connard, who was a really good friend of Peter Atkinson. And he worked together with a guy named Robin. I forget Robin's last name.

But what Steve did was he took the... Steve and Peter and their friends had been role-playing forever. They took a whole bunch of characters from their role-playing game and turned them into magic cards. So most of the legendary creatures from the Legends expansion were, in fact, role-playing characters from their role-playing games. In fact, a quick funny story is, one of Peter's characters, a guy named Alcor,

and they made a card to reference him that was supposed to be Alcor's tome, because Alcor was a wizard. But the artist misunderstood it and made Alcor's tomb. So they ended up having to make it Alcor's tomb. So Peter's character got inadvertently killed in Legends. So Legends introduced the

concept of multicolor and the concept of legendary permanents. At the time, they were just creatures and they were actually they were legendary lands too. The creatures though were actually, the lands had a super type

and the creatures had a sub type. So legend for a while was a creature type. In fact, early magic both wall and legend carried rules baggage. If you were a wall, it just meant you couldn't attack. Didn't say any rules text, just meant you couldn't attack. And if you were a legend, it meant that

the early legend rule was if I play a legend, it meant that the early legend rule was if I play a legend, I can't... Once a legend's in play, I think I couldn't play the next legend? Oh, no, no, no, no. The early rule for legends was if there's a legend in play and I play the legend, I...

Did I destroy the legend that was there? No, I think you couldn't play a legend. Man, we've changed the legend rules a couple times. I think it might have been once you play a legend, no one else can play that legend, which was kind of frustrating. And we would later go on to change the legend rules multiple times.

And so legends was another thing that was horrendously successful. In fact, my story with legends was the store I went to, the guy had gone all in. He had spent tons and tons and tons of money on legends. And he was worried because he was like, am I making the right call? Because he took all the money he had in his inventory tons and tons of money on Legends. And he was worried because he was like, am I making the right call? Because he took all the money he had in his inventory

and spent all of it on Legends. And I remember I waited in line the beginning of the day. I went in. I got two boxes. I opened them all up at home. I went back to my third box. Went home, opened that up, and then went back to my fourth box that I put away that I later would trade for a case of Revised. Which actually was a very good trade.

Okay, later that summer, Wizards would try to fix some of the problems that happened in Revised. There were a bunch of mistakes made. The most famous was a card called Serenade of Afrit, that was a blue card but had a green frame. So there were a couple mistakes. There were some artist misattributions. And so they tried to make a product, which they codenamed Edgar, that is now known as Summer Magic. And the printing went badly, so they decided not to release it. Except a couple cases got out in England.

And so it's something called Summer Magic that's super, super rare. In fact, that card had its own misprint. A famous one, it was a Hurricane that was blue. So the Summer Magic Blue Hurricane is one of the rarest cards in existence. that was blue. So the Summer Magic Blue Hurricane is one of the rarest cards in existence. In fact, when it first came to Wizards, one of the guys in R&D,

a guy named Glenn, actually had just purchased a complete set of Summer Magic, which I didn't realize how rare that was at the time. That might be one of the few ones in existence, but not the only one in existence. So anyway, it's very interesting, Summer Magic.

In July, we also won the Origin Awards and won Mensa Select Award. Origins is the tournament that we first... Gamma, the Game Manufacturers Association, puts on a convention every year. They give out awards for game design for games. Magic won it that year, and also Legends won it for an expansion.

Magic won a whole bunch of awards that year. And also Legends won it for an expansion. Magic won a whole bunch of awards that year. So also in August, Gen Con happened. That is where the first Worlds happened. And it was a single elimination tournament. I actually played in it. A little trivia question. The only Worlds I ever played in. I believe it was

1664 single elimination tournaments that cut to four. And those four played in a final 64 elimination, single elimination tournament. It wasn't Swiss by the way, single elimination. And in the finals was American Zach Dolan versus French Bertrand Lestray. I believe Bertrand might have actually won French nationals and three and four, I don't remember their names off the top of my head, but they were from Belgium and they had topped four of the Belgium Nationals.

So the three national, the three countries to hold nationals were the three countries that had representatives in the top four. And I believe everybody but Zach actually were from their nationals because the French and Belgian nationals flew their, I think they flew their top four, their team, if you will, to Gen Con. And it was three games. I don't know if you've ever seen the coverage. I actually, I went to Gen Con, ended up convincing Catherine Haynes to let me write for the Duelist. I actually covered the worlds.

If you've ever seen a picture of the finals, like Zaxxon one side, Matron, and I'm in the background transcribing the games. So what I did is I wrote an article about it for the Duelist and then I transcribed it for the Duelist Convocational. They had a little newsletter that I transcribed it. We didn't actually give the deck list at the time. I did write it down and later give it away in one of my columns.

But at the time, I just walked you through exactly what happened in the game, because there wasn't video at the time. So I transcribed the game. So somewhere, actually, somewhere there's actual transcriptions of the very first Magic World Championship. The story of Zack, by the way, the real quick story, is that he was on his way to Gen Con. His car broke down. He ended up, I think, hitching the rest of the way. And when he won, by the way, there was no money on that thing.

He won like a Hurdle and Minotaur jacket, which is something only Wizards of the Coast employees had, and just like lots and lots and lots of product. In fact, so much product that he had trouble carrying it. So, okay. So also in August, The Dark came out. So The Dark was, the design was led by Jesper Mierfors. So Jesper was Magic's first art director.

He's the guy that made the back of the card, that designed all the original card frames, that did the mana symbols. So another trivia question, is the only art director to ever lead a design of a set is Jesper? the card, that designed all the original card frames, that did the mana symbols. So, another trivia question, is the only art director to ever lead the design of a set is Jesper. You know early magic, he did a bunch of art in early magic.

And his goal for this set, for the dark, was to try to do a dark that was led by mood and tone. And it was all about seeing the dark underbelly of the five colors. And, like I said, Arabian Nights was the first top-down design. Antiquities was the first sort of thematic

design. Legends had a lot of flavor to it and introduced a lot of cool concepts. The Dark was the most first kind of tonal design, all about capturing a mood and a feel. And he definitely played around with how can each of these, what's the dark evil side of each of the colors?

And then the final set in November was Fallen Empires. So Fallen Empires is an interesting story. I'm almost to work, but I think I have time. So Fallen Empires was designed by the East Coast Bicepters, Scaffolias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page. And it was all about war. It took place in Dominaria, but a different continent and each color had a dominant race and a subservient race

that was subservient to the dominant race and there was wars between colors but wars between the dominant and the master race and subservient race had wars and they mess around a lot with what tokens and counters could do. I mean, Alpha,

other sets had counters and tokens but this set sort of turned it to 11, if you will. In fact, Alpha, other sets had counters and tokens, but this set sort of turned it to 11, if you will. In fact, the Duelists, when it came out, had little punch cards because there were so many counters and so many tokens that it came out with little punch cards, little square punch-outs

that you can use for your tokens. Okay, the real story of Fallen Empires is, so I explained that every set was just selling out. And so what was going on is Wizards would print something, it would sell out. They would then go back to the printer and double the printing every set was just selling out. And so what was going on is wizards would print something, it would sell out. They would then go back to the printer and double the printing, and it would sell out.

Then they'd double it again, and it would sell out. And they just kept trying to get more and more, printing a larger and larger amount. And eventually they were making enough money that money was no longer the issue. Early on, like, they could print as much as they could afford to print. Eventually it became finding printing time. The very first place we printed was a place called Cardamondi.

We still print there. They're in Belgium. And we were just trying to find enough time. The very first place we printed was a place called Cartamundi. We still print there. They're in Belgium. And we were just trying to find enough time. So we were, as we were getting bigger and bigger, we were using more and more of the printing presses. And finally, with Fallen Empires, they believed they had caught up with demand. And so what they said to their distributors is, okay guys, okay, we, because up until that point there have been allocations, meaning you would order some amount, and you would only get some portion of what you ordered. You wouldn't get all of what you ordered.

And so what people had learned was, let's say I want 100 cases. Well, if I order 100 cases, I might only get 30 cases. So I order 500 cases or 1,000 cases. And so when I get a tiny percentage of what I ordered, I actually get what I wanted. So when Fallen Empires came out, they said, you know, Wizards said, okay, guys, okay, we got it. We're going to print to demand.

Whatever you ask for, we will print for you. But nobody believed them because that had never been true. And so even though Wizards swore up and down, they're going to print to demand, give us what you really need, people hedged their bets and still overordered by a lot. And then when Wizards printed it all, it flooded the market. And Fallen Empires was the first set. Every other set, if you came the second day it came out, it might not be there.

But the Fallen Empires was there, and there for a long time, because it got over-printed. In fact, if you played early Magic, there was a period of time where you could actually buy very cheap Fallen Empire packs, because it flooded the market so much that it just was hard to sell it. And so it was the first example where Magic had a major, major mishap. It was the first time where we had excess product on shelves.

That hadn't happened. And Fallen Empire has had some issues. It was a very sloggy limited play, although limited wasn't a huge thing yet I think there's some rarity problems with it in that you want exciting cards at all three rarities

or all four rarities now but at the time all three rarities in that there are stuff that come that really shouldn't have been common that should have been

other rarities in that you want to sort of balance the things and it was too easy to get the cards you wanted in that you kind of want

exciting things that you're hunting for, but there was stuff that really should have been rare that was common, and anyway, from a design standpoint, there was a few mistakes made. So, it was a set that sort of collided, where the set had some design issues, had a few development issues, and it had some major printing problems. So, anyway, I am now at work. So that, my friends, is 1994 in a nutshell, in a podcast, if you will.

I think if I look back on 94, that is the year of growing pains, that magic was kind of exploding. I mean, 93 was just kind of like lightning in a bottle or like the first glimpse of genius that was the game. But the second year really was Magic kind of trying to live up to

what was becoming a phenomenon, and like just trying to print enough cards, and not make mistakes in printing, and there were all sorts of things that were going on during that year. Like I said, a lot of products came out the year. So, I mean, if you count the second half of

Ruby Knights, Ruby Knights, Antiquities, Revised, Legends, The Dark and Fallen Empires all came out

that year. That's six sets. That's, that might be a record for any one year. You know, the DCI started,

there was sanctioning, the, you can see the tournament structure was starting, there were, you know,

nationals, there was worlds, we were winning awards, we were, like, Magic was just starting to were winning awards, we were, like, Magic was just starting to spread. Now what you will see when I get to 1995 is that Magic was mostly

national in the first year. Obviously, seeing that there were French and Belgian nationals, the game had gotten to Europe, although the English cards had gotten to Europe, there was no foreign language cards. I think at the very, very end of the year, I'm not sure whether it was early 95 or late 94,

Italian Legends was the very first set ever made in another language. There was Italian Legends, and there was Italian, I think Italian Revised? Yeah, I think there was Italian Revised and Italian Legends. And those were the first cards ever printed in a language other than English.

But anyway, 94 was an interesting year. It was a year of kind of stepping up and filling the void. Magic had become this giant thing, and it was a tiny company. And Wizards went from being a tiny company to becoming a big company to handle what they had made. That magic really

exploded. And it exploded in 93, but kind of the explosion continued in 94. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed my little peek through, my little tiptoe through 94. Once again, I'm not doing this consecutively, but later on this year, I will do 1995,

another awesome, interesting year as magic continued to grow and expand. Anyway, thank you very much for listening to my reminiscing. But, I gotta go, because if you want to have more future years of magic, I have to go be making magic. Anyway, thanks for listening. Talk to you soon, guys.