7/5/13 Episode 41: Mirage Part I

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So today I’m going to talk about one of the very first sets I ever worked on. Now I did a podcast on Alliances, which is the very first set I worked on, but Alliances, like I said was, there was a billion people. I had thirteen people on the team? Something crazy? Mirage was the first team in which I was a major portion of the team. Of the development team. Remember, I was hired not as a designer but as a developer. So in my early years I did a lot of development.

So Mirage—so what happened was, I’ve talked about how R&D has different waves, sort of thinking about the people that were there. So Wave One of R&D mostly were people that were playtesters in the original Magic. So we’re talking about Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey. And at the tail end of that would be Charlie Catino, which I’ll talk about today.

Wave Two, people I consider to be people that came in the next sort of two years in, would be me, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jockusch and Henry Stern. Although Henry—Henry wouldn’t start until Tempest so he wasn’t there yet. So Wave Two, what happened was, Wave One was there, they had worked on Magic, Wizards got big enough that all the Wave One people went to work on other products or left the company. So they brought in this new wave of people, Wave Two, to sort of take are of the day-to-day of Magic. So meanwhile, Richard and Skaff and Jim, you know, all those, they were off doing other products and other things. And so the four of us were essentially Magic R&D. And so the Mirage development team was the four of us—me and Bill and Mike and William.

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

For example, the East Coast playtesters were people that made Ice Age and Alliances and Fallen Empires and Antiquities, which was Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey, Chris Page, those were people he met through school. Through U Penn, I believe. So this next group he met through bridge. There was a bridge club that he went to. So at the bridge club he met Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Catino. In fact, this whole group, I believe, are bridge club people.

So the design team for Mirage, Bill was—Bill and Joel I think were the co-leads of the design. And then Charlie Catino, Don Felice, Howard Kahlenberg, and then Elliott Segal. So I want to talk a little bit about the design team.

Because I’ve talked a lot about Bill, there’s not too much else to say about Bill—I mean, there is things else to say about Bill. I’ll tell a little story about Bill. But I’ve told a lot more fancy history stuff. I’ll tell a little—one of the things I used to do when I used to go home and talk about where I worked, that I would find some idiosyncracy—like little funny stories about each of my coworkers. Just, you know, to sort of show the lighter side of them.

And this is the story I used to tell about Bill, is—Bill loves making brownies. He—I mean, Bill—I’m not sure what it is exactly, but Bill just loves cooking brownies. He likes baking brownies. And one day, Bill said to himself, “You know, life is better when I have a brownie. So you know what? I’m going to make sure that every day, I have a homemade brownie.” And so what Bill did is he made brownies, and he made sure that every day he had a brownie. And he’s, like—he wanted to see how many days this could last.

And it went on for quite a while. It went on for months, I believe. And finally Bill was like “Okay, okay. I don’t need a brownie every day.” But it was funny that like just—you know. And (???) I have parties with my wife and I Lora, we have parties all the time. And one of our running jokes is, when we would invite Bill to one of our parties, because he made awesome brownies, we would always invite “Brownies plus guest.” “Brownies plus one.”

But anyway. Like I said, I’ve talked a lot about Bill. I mean, there’s plenty more to say. But I mean, Bill was one of the original playtesters. I mean, he is the one person in the Wave Two of R&D that was one of the original playtesters. The rest of us were just Magic players, you know, Bill was actually connected in the game from very early on.

And the other interesting factoid about Bill is, I was trying to figure out where drafting came from. And that the earliest drafting that was done in Magic, way way before Magic started, goes back to Bill. That Bill’s the person that did the first drafting. So anyway. If you like to draft, way way way back when, the precursor, the person who started drafting with Magic was Bill Rose.

Okay. Next, let’s get onto Joel Mick. So Joel… when I started, Joel was in R&D, and essentially he had the job I have now except back then, the Head Designer and the Head Developer were one person. And so he was the Head, you know, Designer/Developer. And quickly, not—not too long after I was there, maybe after a year or two, he went on to the Brand team, and Joel Mick for a while was the Brand Manager.

And Joel was the Brand Manager during a lot of big innovations. Like Joel’s responsible for putting the rarity on cards, putting the… what else, the, for the premium cards, the collector number, you know, Bill was very big at both sort of putting more information on the card and about sort of making the collect—making it a little more fun to collect by adding the premiums and stuff. And Joel was… Joel was a lot of fun. I mean, Joel was definitely someone who was very focused. And he ended up leaving Wizards a little bit after we were bought by Hasbro.

But—in fact, I saw—he swung by the office once a couple  years ago, and he’s doing well, and has a family, and—Joel was a fun person to work with, and then he always knew what he wanted, you know, some people are indecisive. Joel was never indecisive. And Joel—I think Joel was one of the better Brand Managers. I mean, Magic’s had some very awesome Brand Managers, so I’m not going to say he’s the best, but he was definitely one of the top. I think that a lot of good happened under his reign as Brand Manager. And that he—a lot of good things, a lot of good things came to Magic because of Joel.

Design-wise, I believe—so when Mirage got made, he would have been—he was still the Head Designer and Developer. So he put together the team, I assume. But—put together the team is incorrect. Now we select people, right?  Like, “This development team needs these people.” So when we started, for the first couple years the development team was “The guys who did Magic R&D.” That’s who the development team was. So myself and Bill and Mike and—William, were just—we were the development team. And then Henry got added a year later, and then the five of us were the development team.

Okay, so—oh, I want to add—let’s see, Don Felice. So I’ve met Don a bunch of times, I can’t say too much about Don. The little Magic trivia about Don is Feldon’s Cane is an anagram of Don’s name, with Don Felice. And they had tried to get Don’s name into a card earlier, and something happened. I forget what the card was. That it was supposed to be—was it Feldon’s… Don Felice… I’m trying to remember the story.

Anyway, Don’s a… Don’s a nice fellow. I’ve met him a couple times.  He’s never worked at Wizards, but he back in the day would swing by every once in a while, so I had a chance to, you know, have dinner with him a couple times and talk with him.

I think I met Howard Kahlenberg once, at an event, and Elliott Segal—or, I take that back. I think I met—no, I met Howard once, I think I met Elliott once. But I don’t have stories of either of them. They never really came out to Wizards. I saw them at events. And like I was introduced by Bill or somebody for two seconds and said hello.

But the six of them—anyway, let’s talk about how—how Mirage came to be. So when Richard first sold Magic—when it was clear that Magic was going to get made, Richard realized they were going to need expansions. Although once again, let me stress that in Richard’s mind, what was going to happen was, Magic was going to sort of refresh every year.

So the first year was going to be called Magic: The Gathering. The second year was going to be Magic: Ice Age. You know, that each year would be a new game, and that—remember, the card backs were going to change originally. And the idea was, this was this year’s game. This is this year’s game. And that the cards would be compatible with each other, and I don’t think Richard thought too much about the backs, like them being incompatible, he just thought like each year it would be a new sort of set of Magic that you could play, and that would sort of revamp what Magic is, and that the cards were compatible, you could play them together, and then basically Arabian Nights was going to have a different back, and then Skaff convinced Richard that not—not to change it, and that the back—Magic backs then had a consistent back.

Anyway, when Richard knew that they were going to need more stuff, more sets, he went to—he had three kind of groups that he dealt with. One of which was the East Coast playtesters that he knew from school, one was the bridge club, and one was his friend “Bit,” Barry Reich.

And each one of those—so, each of those playtesters, they ended up working on Ice Age. They made Ice Age. And Barry worked on a set called Spectral Chaos, which we would borrow pieces of it for Invasion. The domain mechanic is Barry’s—the Barry mechanic—he made it. And then the—the bridge club, they made a set they called Menagerie. And the idea of their set was, they had a story they wanted to tell, and the story was about three wizards that got in a war. And see if you can—if you know—if you know your Mirage, maybe you can name the three wizards.

So the three wizards were Kaervek, Jolrael, and Mangara. So where’s the name Mangara come from? For those wordplay aficionados, Mangara is the word “anagram” anagrammed. They thought that was funny. In fact, one of the things is, back in the day, the—people who made the set did a lot more naming.

Like now, nowadays, I’ll make a set, and I mean if I have a good shot at a name I will name a card that, and some of the names will stay, if I have a really solid name it sometimes will stick around, Innistrad for example we had a lot of top-down stuff, and, you know, there were plenty of cards that we made, that, you know, some of the cards like Jar of Eyeballs or, you know, Creepy Doll started by the name and then the name stayed because that was such a perfect example of what the concept was. But back in the day, most—I mean, the cards were mostly named by the designers in that, you know, so the designers would do a lot more of the story and stuff. Now there’s a whole creative team.

So the Menagerie, that was the code name, the Menagerie team had an idea for the idea of this war between three people. Now, I don’t know if they had planned for it to be set in an African-style—so, Mirage’s art director was Sue-Ann Harkey was her name.  And Sue-Ann Harkey was an awesome art director, I think that she headed a lot of—a lot of people that went on like Kev Walker, Paolo Parente, a lot of people that went on to be very staple Magic artists for a long time were discovered, you know, or found by Sue-Ann Harkey.

The one quirk about Sue-Ann Harkey, which I will get to when we get to some of the stories about the set, is she did not understand Magic. She knew art, and she was a very good art—she knew her art. She was very good with that. But just didn’t know Magic. So we had—we had a lot of problems of the artist would paint something that she didn’t catch. And we would have to change a card because the art actually contradicted something about the card mechanically.

That happens very infrequently nowadays because Jeremy Jarvis, the current art director, like, is much more up on Magic and you know what we need, and, you know, a lot of times the art and the mechanics have a lot of, you know, there’s a looseness there that, you know, the art it just represented the concept, but sometimes the art does something so emphatically that it’s hard for the art to mechanically do something. As we’ll get to—there’s a whole bunch of cases of that happening.

Okay. So, they made Menagerie, and what happened was, Richard had promised his team that they could make some stuff, and meanwhile at the same thing, Peter Adkison had also gone, and he found some people to make sets. So if you look at the early sets of Magic, okay, so Arabian Nights was done very quickly by Richard. And Arabian Nights was done fast because they didn’t realize how fast they would need another set. And so Richard did Arabian Nights very fast.

And Antiquities was done by the East Coast playtesters, so that was one of Richard’s groups, Legends was done by Steve Conard, Richard’s very good friend and one of the founders of Wizards. Which was one of Peter’s friends. And then The Dark was done by Jesperd Myrfors, who was the art director at the time, was one of Peter’s friends, and then Fallen Empires was done by the East Coast playtesters, so that’s one of Richard’s friends, and then after Fallen Empires was… Ice Age, Ice Age, which was East Coast playtesters, and after Ice Age was Homelands, Homelands was done by Kyle Namvar and Scooter Hungerford, Scott Hungerford, who was Peter’s… people Peter knew, and then after that was Alliances, which was the East Coast playtesters again.

So in early Magic you can see, like, some were done by Peter’s friends, some were done by Richard’s friends. In fact, a lot of the early ones, you’ll notice were done by—I keep calling them the East Coast playtesters, but Skaff Elias, Jim Lin… Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey, Chris Page. Because they—three of them came out, they were the ones that were at Wizards so they were a little more hands-on, so I think a lot of their stuff got done earlier because they were just there to sort of maneuver it and work on it.

I just thought of something! I forgot somebody. I mean, I mentioned him in passing, but I did not talk about Charlie Catino! Which is a grave, grave error. So I’m going to jump back there. Here’s the thing I know. My podcast started getting transcripted. That when you hear me talk, and like I’m jumping around, like okay, that’s how people talk. But somehow when you read it, it just reads odd. So me being absentminded.

So Charlie Catino. So, I right now, if you look at Wizards, and talk about how long you’ve been there, I’m not—we’re not—not counting the people who were previously at TSR, stayed—you know, and then came over to Wizards, so some of them go longer. But just—have started working at Wizards, ended working at Wizards, the longest amount of time working there, I am number eight. The eighth longest. Bill is number seven, because Bill started two weeks before me. But number one! Number one, so the employee who’s worked the longest at Wizards consecutively, is Charlie Catino.

And Charlie was one of the original playtesters, he came out a little earlier than Bill, Bill had some responsibilities, Bill was at the time working in a chemistry lab. He was running a—he was the administrator, I think, of running a chemistry lab, and so Bill had been tied up and stuff, so it took a while for Bill to sort of get through that. Charlie was able to come out earlier. He didn’t come out as early as the original group, like Skaff and Jim, but he came out in January of ’95. Like I came out in October of ’95, he came out in January. Or February, actually.

Actually, here’s a little—a little funny tidbit. So when I got hired, for the people that don’t know the story, I was out visiting, I said like I’d be willing to move to Wizards, and then Mike Davis who was the head of R&D at the time said “When can you start?” And then, many weeks went by and I hadn’t heard—I hadn’t heard from them. And so I finally called Mike Davis and he said “Oh, well, yeah… you know, the Magic team’s interested in hiring you, and The Duelist is interested in hiring you, and R&D’s interested in hiring you, so we’re trying to figure out, you know, who’s going to hire you.”

So know at this time, this is early Wizards, when I talk about Wizards, that things are very—you know, HR also—young. You know. Not a very experienced HR. So I hadn’t yet negotiated anything, and he told me that three different sections of the company were fighting over me. So when I went to negotiate, what I was told by someone who had done this was that it was harder to negotiate money, you can only push money so much, but just ask for anything that you can think to ask for. Just come up with other perks.

So one of the perks I thought to ask for was I asked for my start date to be technically January 1 of 1995 for all benefits. Meaning I would get a vacation right away, you know, that I—I just said “Look, assume I start at the beginning of the year, and then I accrue all benefits.” Now it turns out that that got me stock options because I was there longer. So it ended up being a really good deal.

The funny thing is, the way HR figured out how to do this is, they just stuck me in their computer as starting January 1. And so every year, January 1 it was like “Congratulations! Happy anniversary!” Because I negotiated that start date, as far as HR is concerned, that is my start date. So the funny thing is, Charlie is the actual oldest employee, but on the books I am the oldest employee because I negotiated for an earlier start date. Anyway. Little side thing.

Okay, so, Charlie… Charlie was on the design team for Tempest, so the design team for Tempest if you remember, my very first podcast was me, Richard Garfield, Mike Elliott, and Charlie Catino. Now Charlie, now, works very little on Magic, he works a lot on Duel Masters and Kaijudo, which is a game we make for the—well, Duel Masters is—we started a game for the Japanese market and then we moved it over to here, and over here it’s called Kaijudo. Yes.  It has an English name in Japan and a Japanese name in the United States.

But Charlie for a long time did a lot of work on Magic, although even at this point he had moved on meaning he wasn’t on the development team. But he had been on the design team. And one of Charlie’s quirks for the longest time—in fact it might still be going on—is when Charlie’s name was in the Alpha rulebook, I believe it was misspelled. And then what Charlie did is, from then on, he purposely misspelled his name but differently in every credit he got. So whenever you see Charlie, his name’s always messed up, and that’s a running thing that Charlie does. Charlie is an awesome guy, he’s a lot of fun, and when I get to the card by card Charlie—there’s a few stories that Charlie—about the set.

Okay. So now that I’ve talked about the people—oh, let me get back. The fun of my—this is how my brain works, I just (snapping fingers quickly) bouncing around… Okay. So we were talking about how the set finally got made. So Ice Age had gotten done, and Bill was now coming to—to Wizards, and Joel was now the Head Designer, and so Joel and Bill said “Okay, this is a perfect time, why—Bill’s going to be here, you know,” and they set it up so that Bill would lead the development for Mirage.

Which, by the way, (???) my trivia, there’s not a lot of times where the head designer of the set was also the lead developer. Nowadays you’re not—we don’t let that happen because we want a second set of eyes. But Bill was the co-lead of Mirage design and the lead developer of Mirage. Like I said, which is a rare thing these days. I believe Aaron, by the way, also did this because Aaron I think was the lead designer of Lorwyn and I believe he was also the head developer—the lead developer of Lorwyn. So I think he was.

Anyway, so what happened was, they’d decided that it was a good time because Bill was going to get there and Bill and Joel were now both there. And that way they could oversee their baby. And like I said. The idea of the set was, they wanted to tell about this world and this story, about this war between these three wizards. And one of the wizards—so Kaervek is the—you know, the evil one if you will. And what happens is Kaervek kidnaps Mangara, and he imprisons him in the Amber Prison. And so Jolrael has to go rescue Mangara. And in order to get there to free him, they end up using the Weatherlight. The flying ship Weatherlight.

That’s where the Weatherlight… I think—I’m trying to remember when we made the Weatherlight story whether or not we knew… I think we knew about the idea of the Weatherlight ship and we—I think that was already part of their story, and we said “Oh, we could make the Weatherlight ship the home base of our characters for the Weatherlight saga.” And so we ended up borrowing that and said, “You know, a flying ship seems like a good…” Because we knew we were going to—every year we were going to go to different worlds, and we were like “Well, in order to do that and have a cast of characters, well they would need to travel from world to world.”

And then we ended up with the flying ship and… so anyway, the—Sisay and the Weatherlight, you know, make an appearance in Mirage and Visions, and then in Weatherlight obviously the whole story kicks off, the Weatherlight saga. And so, anyway, they wanted to tell the story, I know—I mean Teferi was involved… because Teferi was doing experiments… I’m trying to think, I mean I don’t know exactly how the whole story plays out. I know Mangara gets imprisoned by Kaervek… anyway. But anyway, they were trying to get a feel. Teferi was also involved. Teferi… was it four wizards? I thought there were three wizards. Anyway, Teferi was involved, he was doing experiments, so that leads us to one of the mechanics.

Okay. So the set had two major mechanics. Flanking and phasing. Now phasing—the idea was that Teferi was messing around with time, and the idea of phasing—and I don’t know which came first, my guess is that phasing came first and the Teferi part of the story was to justify phasing. Phasing was a mechanic that said, “You are there every other turn.” So let’s say you play it on turn one. Turn two it disappears. Turn three it’s back. Turn four it disappears. Turn five it’s back. And so the idea was, you got a much bigger creature than you would normally get because you only had the creature half the time.

And I—well, the—phasing was interesting. I mean, the gameplay of phasing was interesting. It had a few—the biggest problem I think was how long it took before you could attack with a phasing creature. So if I played the creature on turn one and it had summoning sickness, turn two it would phase out, turn three it could attack. So it’s like I had to wait three turns to attack with this phasing creature.

I think that was—that caused a lot of problems with it from a—from Constructed. We did figure out a way to make things Constructed with phasing, which was things that could phase themselves out. So phasing as a means to protect oneself, meaning “I’m there all the time, but whenever there’s a threat I can phase myself out,” meaning I would go away and then come back next turn. And that turned out to be something that was good. Especially when it didn’t cost you mana. But we’ll get to that.

So phasing was sort of a costing mechanic, and then flanking was a combat mechanic. So what flanking was is whenever you were blocked by a creature without flanking, it got -1/-1. Flanking was supposed to represent horseback. Horseback would go on to be represented by horsemanship, in Portal Three Kingdom. But the idea was that I’m up on a horse. And so if I attack you, you are at a tactical disadvantage because I’m higher than you. But if I run into somebody else that has a horse, that’s on horse, well there’s no disadvantage.

And so flanking was represented—because one of the things they were trying to do was, it was a war between these different wizards that put together their armies, and I think part of what they were trying to do was that each—each section had their own army and cards that represented their army. Between this fight. And so… I’m not sure whether the horse—flanking was one particular army. It would have been Jolrael’s army because Jolrael was the one that had all the animals and such. So maybe it was Jolrael’s army that had—so… anyway, you can tell my knowledge of (???) story.

But anyway, so phasing and flanking were the two named mechanics. There were a few other not named mechanics. So probably the other big thing that—biggest thing that they introduced was Mirage was the first set to have charms. And so charms were cheap spells that had three different effects. So they all cost one colored mana and then you got three small effects.

And the idea was, sometimes there’s effects that were just too small to put on cards. And so the idea the team had was, “Well what if you gave people an option?” That any one of them wasn’t worth the card, but the flexibility it gave you with the three of them was worth the card. And charms would go on to be very popular, so much so that, I mean, we keep redoing charms. We keep making new charms. Now obviously we just—Return to Ravnica had two-color charms that we hadn’t done before. And so… but yeah. Mirage was the first set to have the charms.

It also was the first set to have… I’m not sure what to call them. I think people call them insta-enchantments. But they were enchantments that you can cast essentially with flash, although flash did not exist at the time. Oh but oh, the trick about them was they weren’t straight up flash. The trick about them was, you could play them normally like a normal aura, but if you played them at instant speed then they only lasted for the turn.

So essentially, they were kind of like an instant that just lasted until end of turn although technically they did, you know, go on the creature. Or it was an aura that stuck around, and you kind of had your choice. Later on we would simplify that to just being… we would just put flash on auras because like we don’t need the—there’s enough negative from auras, we don’t need them to fall off if you cast them with flash.

 Oh, something I forgot on flanking, by the way. I’m a little scattershot today. Flanking—the problem with flanking was, the self-referentialness to flanking, meaning only flanking creatures—like if you had flanking, you didn’t get -1/-1, it made a lot of flavor sense because it was the flavor of the horses, but mechanically it caused problems. That people didn’t seem to remember that, that it was…

One of the reasons flanking hasn’t come back is because we kind of liked the cleaner version, which is just “Block me you get -1/-1, to anything that blocks me.” And that remembering—the self-referential element actually makes it—made it harder for people to play and harder to remember, and that’s one of the reasons that flanking—the reason phasing hasn’t come back is it just had a lot of rules complication.

It’s one of those things where if we actually—I mean, we’ve figured out how to write it on the card, but modern-day phasing really is flickering. And the idea that we can send things away and come back. A lot of what made phasing valuable wasn’t that it was there every other turn, but rather that it had the ability to go away and come back. And so modern-day sets have flickering, which captures I think the best part of phasing.

But—phasing hasn’t come back because it’s just kind of complex. There’s a lot more going on, like it had this weird thing where it kept—like if you had enchantments on it it kept the enchantments, but it didn’t trigger comes-into-play effects but I think it did trigger leaves-play effects… it was complicated.

The other thing that it introduced which  you also saw in Return to Ravnica was the guildmages. So the way it did guildmages was it had a monocolored card that had two activations, one in each of its allied colors. And then the guildmages as we redid them in original Ravnica and then we had a new version in Return to Ravnica, was more about “I have activations of the color that I am.”

But they still had multiple activations. The guildmages always had two activations. Guildmages always had two activations. I’m not sure—somehow that—the guildmage-ness. But that was the first set to do guildmages.

Another big thing that you would see us do later but this is the first set that did it is Spirit of the Night. So what Spirit of the Night was, was a card which there were three cards, Breathstealer, Feral Shadow, and Urborg Panther, and if you got all three into play, you could turn them into the Spirit of the Night. Which by the way, was supposed to be Spirit of the Nightstalker, but it didn’t fit—the words didn’t fit on the card. And so we had to chop it to Spirit of the Night.

And other people don’t realize this, but I think if you combine all the power and all the toughness, the… like if you put all of them together that’s what makes the creature. And this was the first time that we’d really done the idea of multiple cards can make up a singular card. And Visions would do it again—we’ve done it a bunch in Magic. But this was the first—like, remember, Mirage was relatively early. Mirage is, you know… year three of Magic?

And so—I mean a lot of things—I mean—oh, the other big thing Mirage did, I didn’t even bring this one up is, Mirage introduced the concept of a block.  Now I understand that Ice Age kind of had Ice Age and Alliances and they counted Homelands for a while, but—Alliances was meant as a follow-up to Ice Age, but it wasn’t in the same terms, where Mirage was the first set where like “It’s going to be a block, it will be large-small-small, it will go on the whole year.” You know, Mirage was the first modern-day set where the sensibility of being a block.

And also by the way was the first set where it really developed the idea of thinking about Limited. Now we had a lot to learn, we did a lot wrong, I mean we had a lot of room to grow, let’s say, but Mirage was the first set in Development where really—I mean when I talk about the ages of Magic, I talk about the Golden Age, the Silver Age, Mirage is the beginning of the Silver Age as far as design goes. That it is—you know, it is the set in which we for the first time we were much much more conscious of the idea of a block, the idea of Limited play, and it was the entry of the new wave of developers. Like I said. So Mirage to me is the Silver Age if you will of Magic design.

Anyway, I have just gotten to work. And what I realized is, I have all these awesome stories about cards, and so I am going to have to continue this to next week, we’ll do part two, so today I mostly talked about the makeup of the team and the mechanics and stuff, but next week I’m going to talk about—it’s going to be full of stories. Because there’s lots of stories about Mirage. And I’m trying to make these—the recaps of set designs a little longer because I know you guys like them so much. So next week we’ll do part 2, which will be about stories—Mirage card stories.

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