Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #87 - Year 1995

Episode Date: January 10, 2014

Mark talks about the third year in Magic History and the year he started working for Wizards.

Okay, I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, I'm back from the future. After I finished my Theros podcast that went on forever, I realized that I needed to do a few podcasts to break it up. So once again, I've come from the future today to talk about the past. And I've come from the future today to talk about the past. So today I'm going to do another of my series, 20 Years and 20 Podcasts, in which I'm going to talk about each year of magic for a whole podcast. And today I'm going to be talking about 1995. A good year. So I have done two previous podcasts on 1993 and 1994.

So go listen to those if you haven't. I'm going to assume you have when I talk about 1995. Okay, so last we left, um, magic was exploding. It was going all over the place. But, uh, it had a lot more to grow. And there were a lot of growing pains. But it had a lot more to grow, and there were a lot of growing pains. So last time I talked about Fallen Empires, that was the first... Everything we had printed sold out immediately, and Fallen Empires, we finally got the printing under control.

We said everybody will print what you want. They didn't believe us, overordered, and it flooded the market. it flooded the market. And so, Magic was struggling a little bit at this point, because they you know, they hadn't, if you look at

1994, 94 had a lot of products. If you count the second printing of Arabian Nights, there was Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, The Dark and Fallen Empires, and also there was another revised, all came out.

That's six sets that came out in one year. So this year, things didn't come out quite as fast, although there was plenty that did come out. So the first release of the year was actually in April. Nothing came out until April. And remember, Fallen Empires had come out near the end of the year, so there was a good gap

before anything new came out. And it wasn't even a new expansion. It was a core set, fourth edition. And fourth edition had some controversy because one of the things they'd always planned to do

with the core set was use it as a place to reprint cards from other expansions to bring some stuff from the expansions into um make it more accessible because i also remember a lot of people had missed getting some of the sets and so um what they did is they took some cards and printed them but the problem was because a lot of the cards had been kind of scarce because they hadn't printed that many of them reprinting them devalues some of the cards and been kind of scarce because they hadn't printed that many of them, reprinting

them devalued some of the cards. And in some cases, it was a significant devaluing of the cards. And people were kind of upset about it. As you will see later in the year, this will lead to something. The other thing that happened in April of that year... Oh, one more thing about, I guess, 4th edition. So 4th edition tried to remove a lot of cards. So Alpha and Beta came out, the Unlimited came out,

then Unlimited, which was the same, you know, minus fixing a few things with the same card pull. When Revised came out, they tried to get rid of what they thought was the most broken thing. So the Power Nine were all gone. A lot of things that were really complicated were gone. But they hadn't got rid of everything yet. And so 4th edition was the next sort of purging of powerful things.

4th edition was the first core set not to have dual ends in it. It got rid of a lot of the stuff that had been ban-restricted. Interestingly, not everything had been removed from 4th edition. 4th edition actually had a few cards that are still pretty powerful. Balance is probably the wackiest one. It still had Channel. It still had Mind Twist. There were still some cards in it

that were pretty... I think it had Demonic Tutor still. There were some powerful cards that were still in it. And at the same time of it coming out, the ban restricted list had started the year before, but it continued. In April of this year,

Balance and Fork and Xurn Orb all got restricted. Balance and Fork had been from Alpha. Balance, by the way, was still in Forth Edition. And Fork might have also been. Xurn Orb was from Ice Age. It had never got stuck in, but it finally got restricted. It just proved very

dangerous with a lot of the combos, Balance being one of the big ones. Okay, so in May was the 95 U.S. Nationals. The reason that's kind of important, I mean, I guess to me it's important, for starters, it was a sign that the Nationals were starting up. Now, 94 had had a U.S. Nationals. The reason that's kind of important, I mean, I guess to me it's important. For starters, it was a sign that the Nationals were starting up.

Now, 94 had had a U.S. Nationals. This was the second U.S. Nationals. But for the first time, they did something different they'd never done before. They did Regionals. Before, Nationals was kind of just like show up in San Jose, because San Jose was the 94 U.S. Nationals. This year,

there were different Regionals that happened. And so one of the things is I worked in the Southwest because I was in California and I was a judge at the time. And so the Southwest regionals were famous in that it was the introduction of Mark Justice, who had gone on to be, in early magic, he ended up becoming the first sort of big name player of Magic. You know, if I talk about the history of Magic and talk about when, you know, every once in a while there's a player

where everybody, you know, goes, this is the best player, this is the best Magic player. Mark Justice was kind of the first one that, there's pretty group consensus that he was the best player. And he ended up coming in second at U.S. Nationals, losing to a guy named Joel Unger.

And then, at U.S. Nationals, Mark Justice played Henry Stern in the finals and managed to come back to beat him. The U.S. Nationals that year were in Philadelphia. And it was hot, by the way. I was there. It was like you would go out late at night and you'd open the door because it was air-conditioned inside the thing.

And then you would just hit this wave of heat. It was like as hot as you would expect on a hot, hot, hot summer day, except dead at night, which is not usually that hot. And it was actually a double elimination. What happened was, once you lost, you had to lose twice to be kicked out of the tournament. So in the finals, uh, Mark Justice had come from the loser's bracket. Henry Stern was from the winner's bracket. Henry Stern had to win one match, and Mark Justice had to win two matches. But he did. Mark Justice came back.

Uh, he almost messed it up. He, he, uh, almost screwed up how he did channel fireball. Because his, uh, his deck had a Channel Fireball as one of his kills. Henry played a deck called Vice Age. It also was a tournament where, what's it called, Demonic Consultation. Mike Long, the top four of that year, by the way, the U.S. Nationals, Mark Justice came in first, Henry Stern came in second,

and third was Mike Long and a guy named Pete Lyre, who for a long time would be a teammate of Mike's. Anyway, they would go on to be the U.S. team. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So that was the first year that regionals happened in the United States. It was also the first year that there were significant foreign tournaments. I believe there were 14 foreign tournaments. I believe there were 14 national tournaments. There might have been a little bit more than that. That's my memory. But what happened was, it's the first year where, we'll get to the worlds in a second, but where multiple countries had nationals and sent their nationals to

worlds. There was quite a number of them. I mean, compared to the previous year where there had been, I think, three countries that had run nationals, it had been the United States and France and Belgium had run nationals. Okay. Now, this year, there have been nationals in a whole bunch of countries. It was in the teens. My memory's 14. Might have been tied at 18. But anyway, so right after in June was Ice Age. Now, Ice Age, a couple things.

First off, Ice Age had the very first pre-release. Now, it wasn't a pre-release in the sense that there were a lot of pre-releases. There was one pre-release. It was in Toronto. And I was there. In fact, at the time, I was freelancing for The Duelist, and they flew me to Toronto to

cover it for The Duelist. And an interesting twist, I actually played in the event, because they wanted the vantage point of someone, you know, I wrote the article as someone who had participated in the first pre-release. But what happened was there was a cut to day two, and I made the cut to day two, and then I was informed that I needed to drop out, because they didn't want somebody, they had flown there to win the thing. I, by the way,

had opened up a Zurn Orb, I might have had twouron Orbs. And I had... What's the name of that? It's a card where you activated it and made your opponent name the top card of their library. And if they didn't name the correct card, they lost two life. I'm flicking the name of the card. But anyway, at a previous tournament, when no one knows the names of their cards,

it was pretty powerful. And basically, once I got that out, I tended to beat people with it, and then I made my Xuron Orbs to keep from dying. Anyway, I did pretty well. That event would go on to be won by Dave Humphreys, who would become a Pro Tour regular, who would be on Team Your Move Games, who won a Pro Tour as part of Team Your Move Games, would go on to become, get inducted into the Hall of Fame,

and later would get hired by Wizards, where he currently is our development manager, the manager of our development team. Anyway, Dave came to attention. In fact, when we were putting the first Pro Tour together, one of the things that we were keeping in mind was we were trying to find good players, and so we invited people that had done well at events. In order to invite Dave Humphreys, we said,

well, the winner of the Ice Age pre-release gets invited to the first Pro Tour. And so because of Dave Humphreys, that was one of the things that got you invited, so we got Dave Humphreys there. I'll talk about that. In 96, I talked about the Pro Tour. That doesn't happen for a year. So Ice Age was created by the East Coast Playtafters, so Scaffoli, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, and Chris Page.

In fact, when Richard first realized that magic was going to happen, he talked to his different playtest groups, because he had a bunch of different playtest groups, and most of them ended up kind of getting an assignment to work on a set for magic. The first thing they worked on was Ice Age. In fact, the plan originally was

Magic the Gathering would be the first year of Magic, and they were talking about Magic Ice Age being the second, that it would be a new, that Magic was going to shift every year, and that the Gathering was not going to be the follow-up every year, just each year would rotate to a new name. And so Scaf and fellows, the East Coast Playtesters, were working on Magic the Ice Age, or Magic Ice Age. Now, Ice Age

was not the first large set. I mean, Legends had been the first large set expansion. But Ice Age was the first one in which they kind of had sealed in mind, although to be honest, it was painful.

I mean, one could argue Mirage was the first set that truly developed Sealed in mind, although to be honest, it was painful. One could argue Mirage was the first that truly developed Sealed in mind. But Ice Age was the first one in which Sealed was played. There wasn't much Sealed played with Legends. I mean, I did do a little bit of Sealed Legends, but that was horrible. But Ice Age was the first in which they ran Sealed events. It became part of how things happened.

Draft hadn't really happened yet. That didn't happen until the Pro Tour started. But there was people playing sealed events. In fact, down in California, we had started something we called Mini Mafters. Or, I'm sorry, we started Grand Mafters, which is you started with a... We used to have... They had a called Starter Deck. It had 60 cards, and then there were normal boosters that had 15.

And Grand Mafters, you opened up a seal and started playing with it, and then if you beat your opponent, you got his cards, and then you could rebuild your deck. Minimasters were the same idea, but built out of a booster. Anyway, Grandmaster and Minimaster,

I'm pretty sure came, I know Minimaster did, but I believe came out of California. So Ice Age, what else went on with Ice Age? So Ice Age did a bunch of little things the white mana symbol changed all the mana symbols had gotten made

Jesper who was the art director decided that he didn't like the white mana symbol and so it officially got changed for Ice Age one of the interesting things is there's some promo cards that went into magazines one of which was a white card and the promo card had to be printed earlier, and it didn't have the new white mana symbol,

and then the one that appeared in the set did have the new symbol. And so the promo card actually is a quirky little thing in that it's the only version of that card that has a different mana symbol. So it's a little bit of a collector's item for those that have it. I think it was Prismatic something. But anyway, it was a white, I think it was an Aura. Okay, Ice Age

did very well. It was definitely very popular. It had a theme, it had a story. It took place on Terrasier, which was on Dominaria, and there was an Ice Age, if the name didn't give that one away. There was a first time

there was a promotional video made to support it, which you've never seen, by the way. If you've never seen, go on Google right now and put Ice Age, I don't know, Ice Age trailer, teaser, or something, and you will see something that is

quite fun to watch. It is, it is, it is interesting. I don't want to say much more, just go watch it, it's quite interesting. I mean, it's a relic of its time. Ice Age also was, like I said, it's the first large set in which people really could get their hands on the cards, and it was definitely, it was a popular set. It was the big release of the year, and it had, you know, introduced cantrips to magic, cantrips being what we call when you draw a card, a spell that has a draw card tacked onto it. The cantrips in Ice Age didn't let you draw a card to the beginning of the next turn,

because they were worried about, I don't know, they'd be too strong, which we learned they weren't. It introduced Kingdom of Upkeep, which is something we used for a while. It had, what else did it have? It had, I mean, it had more legendary cards that had been introduced the year before. I didn't write all the mechanics down. But anyway, Ice Age definitely had a very strong flavor theme, and it was pretty popular.

Okay, following Ice Age in July was Chronicles. So what Chronicles was is Wizards felt like there had been a lot of fun cards, and because of the short supply, a lot of them weren't in players' hands. And some of them weren't the kind of thing they felt they could put into a core set. There was gold cards, there was legendary creatures, there were just things that the core set didn't do. And so they made a set called Chronicles that was kind of a best of the previous year. I believe it had in it stuff from Arabian Nights and Antiquities

and Legends. I think The Dark? Anyway, it was mostly the best of 94. And they printed it. They were able to print plenty. So what happened was, much like when

4th Edition came out, but this was even harsher, is there were cards that were very valuable because they were very rare, because very few people had them, and all of a sudden, the quantity of the card that existed shot way, way, way up. And so the cards plummeted in value, because a lot of the reason the cards had the value they did was because of rarity.

And that when Chronicles got printed, that rarity dropped significantly. There was a huge outcry, a combination of both 4th edition and Chronicles, mostly from collectors, but just from average, I mean, every player on some level is a collector, and so there was a big outcry. So in August that year, I believe it was August, that's my research, they created something called the Restricted List. believe it was August, that's my research, they created something called the restricted list. And the restricted list said, okay, okay, we're not going to print any uncommons or

rares. Well, for every set, I guess we were allowed to take 20% of the cards and those could be reprinted and the remaining 80% of the uncommons and the rares, oh, actually, of the rares of sets going forward and some of the uncommons and some ofres, oh, actually, of the rares of sets going forward, and some of the uncommons of some of the earlier sets would not get reprinted. The uncommons would later be redacted a couple years later. But basically, it said,

here are cards we will never print, and had a list. It is something Wizards has kept. This was 18 years ago. We have kept that promise. It is a thorn in the side of R&D, a thorn in the side of the player base. It is something that is very controversial even to this day. But Wizards has tried to hold true to its word.

I mean, we haven't tried. We have. And we have not reprinted anything from the reserve list and do not plan to. But this is where the reserve list happened in August of this year. Also in this year, in August, there was something called the Renaissance. So I talked a lot about how magic was growing,

and I mentioned a little bit in 95 how it was growing in the United States, but that it hadn't really grown too much internationally. And 95 was the year of magic starting to go international. I believe in early 95, Italy was the first, Italian was the first language outside of English to print magic, and they printed an Italian legend. So actually, if you ever, not only is there a legend in English, but there was later Italians in, I'm sorry, there was Legends in Italian. Renaissance was...

So here's the trick is, when we started doing the core set in other languages, there were gaps. Oh, one of the... Okay, here's what it was. One of the promises was that we would do new cards in a black border before they existed in white border, and the core set was in white border. So Chronicles was

a chance to take cards that I think were in the core set that that language started in, and that varied, Renaissance would vary a little bit. I think for French, German, and Italian, it might have been either 3rd or 4th edition. It was black-bordered cards of the cards they had in white border, allowing them to get access to black-bordered cards in their language. And so Renaissance was the first time that, well, I mean, it was a product specifically made to help get cards in black border

into languages that didn't have those black border cards in that language and it was definitely one of the times that this was a year in which French and German and Italian all started getting printed and we produced magic for the first time ever in these languages, and it started

in 1995. Some of them were early. Italian was first, and then I think French, and then I think German. Also, by the way, to talk about the international quality of magic, in August that year was the first, well, not the first Worlds. 1994 was the first Worlds. But the first Worlds that was its own event.

1994 Worlds that was held at Gen Con. American Zach Dolan beat Frenchman Bertrand Lestray. This year, we rented out the Red Lion Inn right by the Seattle airport, by SeaTac airport. And we held an event that was not, it wasn't another event. It was the Magic World Championships. It's the very first one. There were somewhere between 14 and 18 teams.

All the teams that had Nationals showed up. Alexander Blumke from Switzerland ended up defeating Mark Hernandez from France. And it was the second time. So France had come in second at the first two Worlds. They also would later come in second at the first Pro Tour, which would begin a little streak of them having trouble coming in first, but coming in second a lot.

That would be a running joke for a while. The Mark Justice and Henry Stern, by the way, came in third. And so they both did really well. Oh, the U.S. team, by the way, I mentioned this before, Mark Justice, Henry Stern, Mike Long, and Pete Lyre won the very first team event, which for those that wrote an article where I wrote about it, I really, really wanted us to do a team event. I could not convince anybody there that we should make it more high profile,

but I was given permission to track it. And so I tracked it and I reported it. And so it's the first event where we reported a winner for the team event, which is, there was no playoff or anything. It was just those are the people that had the best scores. The interesting thing about it was the U.S. national team, their average, their player average was the cutoff for top eight because two of the team members made the top eight and two more, I think Mike Long was one match away from making top eight,

and Pete Lyra was two matches away from making top eight. So it was a very, very dominant team. It was the first year America would go on to win. In the first seven years, I believe, of the Pro Tour World Championships, they won six of the seven, losing only, I believe, in 97 to Canada. Anyway, we'll get to that in future years okay so

Worlds went off quite well there was a few hiccups but it happened U.S. Nationals earlier that year by the way was famous for Steve Bishop at the time

was the guy who ran it and the player meeting before it ended up running for three hours as the players argued with Steve about how the UF Nationals should be run. A little tidbit of the craziness of some early events. Okay, in September of that year, we introduced the idea of something called Typh2.

You guys might know it now as Standard. The idea was we introduced the concept of a format. Before that, there was one way to play Magic, and that one way was

whatever cards you had. We had limited you to four of them. There was a ban of restricted lists, but you just played with what you owned. For the first time ever,

we said, you know what? We're going to make a format in which only recent stuff's allowed. I'm not sure how it was defined originally, but it was the most recent sets. It was around two years.

And originally, original Magic was called Type 1 when you play anything. The new one was called Type 2. We would later rename them. Eventually, Type 1 would be Vintage and Type 2 would be Standard as we know it today. They had a few names in between that. In October, I believe we had a new restricted list,

Chaos Orb, Falling Star, Channel, or they all got banned. Those cards got banned. And we had, on October 14th, something called The Gathering in New York City. So the pre-release, essentially, for Homeland was a special event that we had run in New York.. So the pre-release, essentially, for Homeland was a special event that we had run in New York. It was very expensive.

I believe we spent like a million, or Wizards, spent like a million dollars on it. And it was this event. There was a tournament that was part of it, but there was a lot more. I called it like the Dominaria Haunted House, where there's this experience you went through.

And R&D was there, gunslinging. I was flown in for the event. I wasn't officially, I think I had been hired, but I hadn't started yet. And they flew me to the gathering. In fact, I still have my shirt. And I did a lot of gunslinging. And there was, I don't know, artist signings and all sorts of stuff. It was the first truly, I mean, I guess we had done the pre-release at Toronto for Ice Age.

This was the second kind of big event we had done. And it was really blown out. And then, in October of that year, Homelands would come out. So, Fawn Empire has had all sorts of problems because it, I mean, there were some rarity problems and, uh, it was printed way too much. So Homelands was the first set that really did not get a super strong fan reaction. Um, it was a very flavorful set. I've gone on record as saying that I believe Homelands is the worst design set in Magic history. And real quickly, the story behind it is when they realized that Magic was going to go big,

both Richard and Peter each went to different people and had asked them to work on Magic sets. Or people, in Peter's case, I think people came to Peter because Magic had been successful and asked if they could make a Magic set. And the two people, it was Scott Hungerford and Kyle Nemvar. Kyle, I think, was the head of the customer service, and Scooter, Scott also known as Scooter, was on the continuity at the time, what we call the creative team at the time was called

continuity. And they had made a set that was super, super flavorful, uh, but, um, neither one of them were really game designers. They had no sort of technical, uh, at least with magic, and when they had turned the set in, R&D was not happy with it. Uh, and R&D at the time, which mostly was the East Coast Playtafters, um, and Richard, said that they didn't think we should print it. And, uh, Peter overruled them and said said no, I promised them we would do it. And so there's a lot of tension around that set. I think that R&D at the time because they were very upset said, oh, okay Peter

if you think this is so good we don't want to change it and lose its vision. So they really did not do a lot of development on it because they were very frustrated that they were being forced to put it out when they did not do a lot of development on it because they were very frustrated that they were being forced to put it out when they did not think it was acceptable. And so Homeland definitely had this issue of it came out,

it had some design issues, it wasn't strongly developed. And so it's the first set that really kind of made a sour taste in the sense that it was perceived publicly as not being very good. Like I said, I think it did a good job of trying to hit some flavor, but the flavor was very... They kind of took all these things that were popular in Magic

and sort of put them all in their own world, the world called Agothra. And so it had a lot of cool elements. It had the Sengir, it had Sera, and it had different things. It was a little called Agothra. And so it had a lot of cool elements. It had the Sengir, and it had Sera, and it had different things. It was a little moshposhy, though. It definitely didn't have a cohesion that you'll see in later sets where it was clearly one world. It was kind of a world that, like,

you know, here were vampires, and there was sort of like Australian minotaurs, and there were dwarves, and there were... It had a lot of interesting things that people liked, but it definitely was a hodgepodge. Also in October, one of the things that I consider to be

one of the highlights of magic for me is I was hired in October of that year. In October of 1995. I actually started on October 30th. That's my anniversary of the day I started. I started at the end of the month because the way insurance worked at the time,

that your insurance kicked in the first month, the first first that you were there. So by starting at the end of the month, I kicked in right away. The reason I started on the 30th was that I wanted to be there for Halloween,

and so I came the day before. For those that read my article about me meeting my wife, that is the year where I dressed up as Master Mime, the world's first mime superhero that could talk as a superpower. And nobody

understood my costume, but I thought it was funny. So, basically, by the way, when I talk about R&D, there's different waves. So the first wave was most of the people that have been playtufters. So that was Scaf Elias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, at the very tail end of that, Charlie Cattino,

Richard, obviously. So it was the people that kind of had been with magic before it began. The second wave, magic was big enough, or wizards was big enough, that they were branching out and doing other things. And so most of those people wanted to be working on other aspects for wizards, and so they brought in fresh Blood to work on Magic.

And so essentially, I was hired. So in October of that year, I was hired, Bill Rose was hired, our current VP of R&D, and a guy named William Jockish was hired. In January of 96, Mike Elliott would be hired, and the following year, Henry Stern would be hired. The five of us were really what I call the second wave of R&D. And the way it worked back then was

there weren't teams for each development. The five of us were the development team for every set. And so early in Magic when I first got there I was just on every development team because there weren't teams. Just, hey, we were the Magic R&D people. We did all the development. And anyway, at some point I'll do a podcast on early Wizards.

I mean, I've talked about the history of Wizards, but there's a fun podcast on R&D, early R&D. It was definitely a very unique place. Anyway, the year ended on a sour note. So what had happened was, if you remember, Peter started the company as a role-playing company. And although Magic had gotten bigger, there was also a lot of role-playing that still went on. As Magic got money,

Peter invested some of that in their role-playing. But the problem was that the role-playing... We would later, and I'll talk about this when we get there, would acquire TSR and acquire their biggest property, Dungeons and Dragons, but at the time we didn't have Dungeons and Dragons so all of our roleplaying was much smaller scale and it was losing money, and so Peter came to the conclusion that we needed to stop doing the roleplaying

which by the way was very very hard for Peter to do. Peter loves role-playing. In fact, the reason he started the company was role-playing. So for Peter, giving up the role-playing was a sad thing. And it was known in the company as Black Wednesday. Basically what happened was we used to have an all-hands where literally every single person in the company would get in one room.

We still have all-hands, but now we have to go to an auditorium, but everyone would get into one room, and Peter would come up and talk to everybody, he'd introduce the new hires, and at the time, we're talking about a couple hundred people, the company had a couple hundred people. So anyway,

we got called into this meeting, and Peter said, okay, there were two groups at the time. I forget. There was Project Group 1 and Project Group 2. So Project Group 1 was magic and all the magic related things. And Project 2 was everything that wasn't magic. And so what happened was, the way the story was told to me, because I was in Project Group 1, so Catherine Haynes, who ran the duelist, did not get along really well with the guy who was in charge of Project Group 1, so she had gotten permission to put the duelist in Project Group 2.

So she attended the Project Group 2 meeting. And so, as she describes it, basically they got in, and the head of product group two said, okay, everybody, we're going to have some layoffs. Everybody in this room, oh, except the duelist, is being laid off. And all the role-playing, all the stuff we had been doing that was outside of Magic. I mean, Magic obviously was very successful, but everything that wasn't Magic-adjac which was role playing, stopped that day. There was a lot of layoffs. It was a very sad time. Magic up to that point had just been growing, growing, growing, growing, hiring as fast as it could.

This is the first time we ever sort of cut back. ever made a, I call it like a, you know, kind of like a grown-up company decision where, you know, we had to do something that like the company, for the health of the company, needed to get done. But it was very, very hard. It was particularly hard on Peter and it was hard on the company.

And remember, I had just got there at the end of October. So, I mean, I'd been freelancing for a while and I knew a lot of people from Wizards. And it was very sad for me, but it was, for the people that had been there a little longer, it was even sadder. But anyway, that was 1995, and I'm now at Wizards. So a little recap on the year.

It was definitely a year of growth. We expanded into international markets. It also was a year of the Revise and Chronicles and the Restricted List and sort of lessons learned. I mean, Ice Age definitely was probably the high point of the year as far as set releases. We had regionals

for the first time. There was nationals and worlds, and for the first time ever Magic had its own worlds. It was its own event. I got hired. So 9 to 5 had a lot going on. It was its own event. I got hired. So 95 had a lot going on. It was a new wave of R&D. But anyway, it was a year of growth, a year of some growing pains.

I mean, I said 94 was a year of growing pains. I think 95 was a little extension of some growing pains, but starting to find our feet, starting to get international. I think in 96 we really start taking off. And anyway, thanks for joining me to hear about 1995. It's always fun to talk about Wizards history. And thanks for listening. So as much as I enjoy this,

I love talking about Magic's past, but I also have to work on Magic's future. So if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you next time.