9/20/13 Episode 54: Flavor Text (Special Guest Matt Cavotta)

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater and Matt Cavotta

MARK: Okay, I’m pulling out of my driveway! We know what that means. It’s time for another Drive to Work.So today I have a guest! Say hello, Matt!

MATT: Hello.

MARK: So Matt is driving with me to work. Now, regulars of the show might say “Wait a minute! But you normally pick Matt up!” Which I do. So why is Matt in the car?

MATT: Which you did.

MARK: So we were partway to work, doing Version One of our podcast, when my wife called Matt’s phone—not my phone, because my phone’s turned off so I can do my podcast. To say that her car was dead and we had to go home and jump her. So anyway, Take Two. So—

MATT: It was the best podcast in the world. Lost to all time.

MARK: (overlapping) I know, lost to all time. So today’s topic is flavor text writing. Because it just so happens that both Matt and I, at different times, have been in charge of flavor text. I less so than Matt, because I was in charge of Odyssey, because at the time the Creative team—we were in between Creative teams, and Bill Rose came to me and said, “Hey Mark, we don’t have a Creative team. Could you please run names and flavor text?” And I—being the wordsmith, I said “Sure.” And I also ran the flavor text for Unglued and Unhinged. Because it required a lot of comedy writing and I have a comedy writing background. So Matt, which—what flavor text were you in charge of?

MATT: Ravnica and Time Spiral blocks, and also Coldsnap.

MARK: Right, so that—so for people that are unaware, when Matt first—Matt’s had two jobs at Wizards, his first stint he was in charge of names and flavor text on the Creative team. And now he’s in charge of—what’s it, the look and feel of Magic outside the paper?

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: So, packaging and ads and such.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Okay. But that’s for another podcast. Today we’re talking flavor text. So your current job—useless right now.

MATT:Useless!

MARK: Your old job is what we need. So let’s talk a little bit about why we do flavor text. Why is there flavor text, Matt?

MATT: Because there’s room on the card! No, wait a minute. There’s more to it than that. I believe that there is flavor text because where card name and mechanic and art either leave off, or where they don’t intuitively make sense together, flavor text helps either fill that gap or provide that extra little bit of oomph that the card needs to be both a game piece and entertainment vehicle.

MARK:  A famous man once called it the mortar that holds the bricks together.

MATT: A famous man. I wonder when that happened. (both laugh)

MARK: So that—Matt—in our first version of this that was Matt’s analogy which I thought was very good. That each card is kind of—lives in its own world, and that something has to kind of bring them all together.

MATT: Right. Right. It—if you think about how an entire block might tell a tale, from the moment you first set foot on a new plane to the point at the end when it gets destroyed or what have you, flavor text is largely the best—the best place to find out what’s really going on. If you’re not picking up a comic book or a novel or whatever.

MARK: Another thing that most people might not realize, that Matt and I realize having done this process is, flavor text and names come last. That, you know, the mechanics come first, and then the art happens, and the names and flavor text are the last thing to happen. So if there’s ever any shifting during the course of the processs—

MATT: And there is.

MARK: And there is. What happens for example is, you know, we’ll make a card. Design makes a card. Development goes, “Okay.” It gets concepted, they get art for it. And then after art is done, after art is already locked in, Development goes, “Oh, wait, that’s not going to work. Yeah, yeah, we have to change that card.” Except--

MATT: For example, there might be a--a soldier that has first strike. And the art is commissioned to have a guy with a really long pike. Or something that would explain that. And first strike is taken away and vigilance is added, and all of a sudden that pike is no longer flavor-relevant, it’s just—it’s a pike. And the—the flavor text and the name have to pick up the pieces.

 

MARK: Vigilant pikeman. Ever-Watchful Pikeman. So yeah, one of the things that happens a lot is, like one of the things I joke about--in Unhinged we had a series of cards that you had to play a little minigame, and you got a reward. So one of the minigames was arm-wrestling. And so the mechanic is like “Arm Wrestle.” And we had to give you a reward, so the reward is you got a token. And it turned out to be an ape token. And so the thing was, well, what does arm wrestling have to do with you getting an ape token? And so the flavor text came to the rescue. You know. About how—something about—it’s like “He didn’t know why he did the arm wrestling, but he just couldn’t stop because hey, free monkeys.” 

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: And then the flavor text is kind of there a lot of times—and the name too, to—or the flavor text has a little more flexibility than the name, to sort of help explain what is going on. So another thing that I—my background being sort of a writer is that there is an art to writing flavor text.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: And I—I mean, that flavor text is a very difficult thing because you have a lot you want to say, but very little space to say it. And I—sometimes compare it to poetry—

MATT: Yes, absolutely.

MARK: You know, in that poetry is a lot of times about getting a lot of emotion—saying a lot with as fewest words as you can.

MATT: Right. When I was in college I had a—a writing professor who dispelled the—the youthful myth with all of us freshmen that poetry was how flowery you can be when saying something simple. And he said it’s the exact opposite. It’s how simply can you say something that is deep and complex.

MARK: Yes.

MATT: And that’s really important with flavor text.

MARK: Yeah, so one of my favorite pieces of flavor text that I did that I was very happy with from a—from a craft sort of standpoint, and I don’t even remember what card it was on—it’s on a white card in Odyssey, I believe. And the flavor text was “There is no victory without virtue.” And the thing I loved about it was, “Look, at the core of white’s being, the core of white philosophy, is this idea that, you know, there is an objective, you know, moral right. You know. And that in order to live your life, you have to live it correctly. And that you can’t just win, you have to win in the right way.

MATT: The ends does not justify the means.

MARK: Yes. And so I love the idea that that conveyed a pretty complex idea in five words that was alliterative.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Alliterative means, you know, the key words start with the same consonant. V in this case. And so—like, as a wordsmith, the idea that you can get a complex idea into a small number of words and make it alliterative and—like all that—that’s the stuff that the flavor text people are trying to do every day is, “How do I take this neat idea, but boil it down to something that is a—unto itself is its own little mini-work of art?”

MATT: When I was—when I was managing the flavor text process, and even more so afterward when I was—when I was just doing the writing, I would keep my eye out for the—the cards that had six lines of rules text. And that’s the—that’s like the threshold of—the longest amount of rules text where you can still sneak in one line of flavor text.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: A card has room for seven lines of—of goodness. And those are always the biggest challenge because a six-line rules text probably indicates that something is going on there. It’s not just a dude. But you only have one line to either bring it all together or add a little panache, and those were extremely challenging. And quite often I would skip the ones that had five lines and let somebody else write the epic tale, and I would find a way to—to come up with something really pithy. In that one line. And hopefully not create a groaner. That’s also—

MARK: (startlingly loud) You and I—you and I have different philosophies completely!

MATT: Fertile ground for the groaners.

MARK: I mean, two things. First is—one of the things about that, you’re right, that the—the one-liners—like, not only are you worrying about the one-liners, but you literally have to worry about the—not even the number of characters, but which characters. Like, one of the things you learn is, L’s don’t take up a  lot of space.

MATT: L’s are—

MARK: But W’s—W’s take a lot of space. You know. And so when you’re making words, it’s like—sometimes it’s like “Oh…” Like I’ve written those, where like I have to replace a word, and I go “I better use skinny letters.”

MATT: Yes.

MARK: The other thing—let’s talk a little bit about humor, since you brought up groaners. So one of my philosophies as a card designer is, I’m a big believer that I would rather create cards that really excite some players while maybe upsetting other players, than merely make cards that everybody is okay with. Meaning I want the highs and lows rather than everything just kind of being OK. And I feel—to me, flavor text is the same way. Which is every once in a while, I have a piece of flavor text that both was in the top five and in the bottom five.

MATT: That’s a winner.

MARK: You know. And I’m like, “That’s—that’s awesome.” You know. “That—that it really evoked something. And to me that’s way more exciting than a piece of flavor text that no one remembers.”

MATT: Yes.

MARK: Now, where do you stand on—on comedy in flavor text?

MATT: Well, I’ve actually had to think about the comedy factor even in my current job. When—when we’re thinking about marketing the game as a whole, or—flavor text in a way is presenting a card  as a product to somebody. And for me, what—what works for comedy and Magic is when the humor comes from a place of knowledge. If you feel like it’s funny because you knew something going in. Whether that’s wordplay that makes it funny, or the context of knowing something about another card or another character that makes it funny, that’s the kind of thing that I’m—that I really appreciate. But it’s funny because it’s about someone farting or something, that’s—I don’t know. That—I feel like that’s for other—another game. Basically, if it’s humor above the neck, I’m in. If it’s below the belt, I’m in, but not for Magic.

MARK: Yeah, I mean—I agree with you that to me the best flavor stuff in which—I mean I—as a color pie purist, I love finding flavor text that gets the essence of the colors. And I truly believe that all five colors have a sense of humor. But what they find funny is very different.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: You know. Yeah, everybody gets red’s sense of humor because—for example, I kind of feel like if you’re going to do below the head kind of humor, if you’re going to do it, red’s where you do it. Red is definitely—if any color appreciates lowbrow humor, it is red. But I think something like—like green to me, the thing that I love about green’s sense of humor is that green just looks at the world and sees the world and goes, “Hey, that’s kind of funny.” You know.

MATT: Sure.

MARK: And I love when we can find flavor and humor outside of the obvious place. I mean, obviously goblins are funny, and we’ll do that. But it’s neat to find flavor text that can sort of show you something pithy from other places. And I agree with you, one of the neat things about writing flavor text is it is an exercise in wordplay, in that you are trying very hard to use your words very conservatively to sort of convey something, and that—I love when you—like, one of my favorite things as a flavor text writer is, when somebody references my flavor text, like just they quote it, or they—

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: That’s awesome. Where like some flavor text manages to sort of stand out. Because it is. It is low man on the totem pole. Like, when you talk about a card—well, first off, the number one thing people—I mean, you can argue whether—between mechanics and art, but those are the two things that clearly grab people’s attention. You know, I mean, it’s  a game, so the mechanics are super important, and the art is—

MATT: It’s a media.

MARK: It’s a media, it’s flashy and colorful, it takes up half the card, and—you know, it’s hard to miss the art. (honking) Woo! That’s my wife, almost hitting us. (Both laughing)

MATT: Oh my God. What are the odds?

MARK: So… yeah, see, the accident show, or—anyway. My wife obviously is wanting to get where she’s going, because she was late. Because her car died. That’s the real stuff you get in this podcast. Actually driving on the road with near-accidents and…

MATT: Oh, that was good.

MARK: Anyway, what I’m saying was, when you’re doing flavor text, and you’re looking for the right, you know, word choices and trying to capture that essence. When—when you get people to sort of speak it, it’s amazing because it is the least—it is the low man on the totem pole.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: Right? I’m talking about how mechanics are sexy. People want to know the mechanics. Art is sexy. Even the name—people have to refer to it. So the name gets used.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: But there are people—for example, there are people who will play the cards, and they will not read the flavor text for like months into having the card. Like, so a lot of people read it the second they see it. But there’s other people who are like “Eh, whatever,” they just kind of ignore it. And then usually what happens is they’re in the middle of playing the game and they’re bored or something, so they go “Okay…”

MATT: They’re playing a guy who’s playing blue…

MARK: Right…

MATT: Just sitting there… “Eh, I think I’ll read some flavor text.”

MARK: And I love when the flavor text just can kind of make you laugh or smile.

MATT: I like the ones especially that encourage a player to invoke them while playing. If the flavor text is--

MARK: Oh yeah.

MATT: --is a rallying cry or something that while they’re attacking, or while they are casting a creature, they reference the flavor text because it offers something—

MARK: Oh, yeah, yeah.

MATT: That is fun for the game.

MARK: Yeah, one of my favorite is writing flavor text for counterspells. Because one of our running joke on counterspells is they’re always trash-talking. Like somehow if I counterspell you, I must trash-talk you as I counterspell you.

MATT: It’s not bad enough that all of your plans are being foiled, you have to have your nose rubbed in it.

MARK: Yeah, something I—just somehow, blue mages are just—just kind of—kind of—you know.

MATT: I know what you want to call them. We won’t say it.

MARK: Yes. It’s—it is a family show. But they are—they are sometimes not the nicest people. And (???), for example, another one that I love—one of my favorites is written for Jaya Ballard. Or Chandra. In my mind, they actually had a very similar style, which is the red mage is kind of just in your face, like “Take it!” sort of, you know.

MATT: Yeah, yeah.

MARK: Like—some of my favorite flavor texts I’ve done has just been—because Jaya is so much fun to write, and Chandra is so much fun to write, that just kind of—I don’t know, something about the red mage just kind of like, you know, they’re snappy and in your face, but in a fun way. You know, blue’s kind of snotty, but red’s a little more like, “Ha ha,” you know.

MATT: I really, really enjoyed writing for the Gruul.

MARK: The Gruul? Yes.

MATT: I mean, I—it’s not hard to understand why I consider myself one of them. But there was—there was something about the—if you combine that red fiery sensibility with someone who is downtrodden, doubted, marginalized, that it colors that with a little bit of, you know, acid. That I really, really enjoyed sort of internalizing and then throwing out there in some gruff and hard-edged words. It was a lot of fun.

MARK: So here’s an interesting experience I had. So one—I don’t do a lot of flavor text writing anymore, I just don’t have the time. But once upon a time I did a lot of flavor text writing. So during the Weatherlight saga, which was we—for those that don’t know, way back  in the day we told the story, it ran over four blocks, there were key characters that showed up in the art. And so what we did is, we divvied up the characters. And so each flavor text writer got two characters to write about, or two or more characters. So I got Ertai and Karn.

MATT: Does that mean you wrote about them, or you wrote as them?

MARK: No, we wrote as them. So Ertai was this young whippersnapper wizard that—and he—I talked earlier about writing the counterspells. He was definitely—his whole shtick was he was—went to this fancy wizard school, and he thought he was the best thing ever, and so he was just really full of himself. And he was fun to write because he was just the most arrogant—you know, I mean he was good. But he was arrogant. And then the other one was Karn, who is the archetype called the Gentle Giant. And Karn’s shtick was he was there to protect Gerrard, but he—even though he was this powerful golem, he had vowed—because he had accidentally killed somebody. And he’d vowed not to get in a fight. He was a pacifist. And so for Karn, I decided that I liked him telling little parables. And so Karn’s flavor text were me telling, like, little tiny stories, but in, you know, two and three lines.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Which—which was a challenge, but it was very—I was very proud of it. A lot of my favorite flavor text has come from some of Karn’s stuff of just telling the simple little story, but in a real little amount of space.

MATT: Yeah. That’s like the Native American chief telling a small tale in between puffs on the peace pipe.

MARK: Yeah. And then that was interesting because that was one of the times that we—we really went at it from a character angle, where we wanted the characters to be consistent, so different writers would write different characters. And one of the things I like a lot—I mean, this is way back when, but the Weatherlight Saga—I really liked how we used the flavor text to really, really convey character. Because one of the things about Magic in general is, we have stories and we have characters and we have places and we have civilizations and there’s a lot going on. And it is hard to convey a lot of it anywhere but flavor text.

MATT: Right.

MARK: You know. Like, one of the things that the creative team does is, they will figure out an entire cosmology of a world. And, you know, the—a particular race of people have beliefs and do certain things and function a certain way, and that we try to hint at that in the art and the names and the mechanics where we can, but in the end sometimes flavor text is the only one that just can actually tell you.

MATT: Right. Right.

MARK: So let me bring up another—I don’t know if controversial is the right word, but another topic—where do you stand on real-world flavor text?

MATT: I think that it is… I think that it’s cool to—to put on a promo card or maybe a core set card. Although the core set has been filling a different function as of late. Cards from particular worlds have been concepted that way in the core set, whereas in the past the core set was kind of an agnostic hodge-podge. So I don’t know that—I think that the venues for real-world flavor text are shrinking.

MARK: Yes. I mean, I like finding the spots we can—although I do understand the idea that “Look, you know—our flavor text has so much important storytelling to do that especially in expansions, we just don’t have the room.” Like, we need every—you know…

MATT: Yes.

MARK: Every scrap we can get to try to explain the world. And even then, the flavor text shows a little tiny, tiny portion of the world because there’s so much to convey. But I do—when we find the places to do it, it is nice to take—to be fair, as good—as good as our flavor text writers are, there’s been some better writers out there.

MATT: Yeah, maybe not as good as Robert Frost.

MARK: You know. I mean—I always wonder what would happen if like, you know, Shakespeare was alive now, and, you know, he was one of our flavor text writers. Like, “Too lengthy, Will. A little shorter.”

MATT: You know where we’ve never gone though, is music lyrics. Have we ever done that?

MARK: No, because we have to use public domain.

MATT: Oh. That’s—

MARK: For those that are unaware, when we do real-world flavor text, we have to do flavor text that’s in the public domain, and so things that are owned by somebody we don’t have the right to do. And so that’s why—that’s why we’re not quoting song lyrics and—

MATT: We could do like John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.

MARK: We could. If we can concept a—“Hey, design, can you create John Jacob…” Oh, here’s something that—

MATT: For like a clone!

MARK: Something that’s interesting that happens sometimes—this happens more for names than flavor text, but sometimes happens for flavor text, where somebody will come and say “We want to convey a certain thing, can you make a card to give us the opportunity to convey that?” That happens from time to time. The creative team will come to us and say, “This world really needs to show something, and we know we want to talk about it, but unless you guys give us something we can talk about it on, we can’t make it.” And so from time to time, creative will ask for something, and then we will make a card so that Creative has the opportunity to do that. Like a good example is—I know in Zendikar, that they came to us and said “Please could you make the Eye of Ugin? We want to talk about the Eye of Ugin. It’s really, really important to the story.” And so we went out of our way to make an Eye of Ugin.

MATT: Did they happen to ask you not to make it too complicated so there was actual flavor text, right?

MARK: Yes, yes, yes. So—

MATT: And that’s—here’s one thing that has always bothered me. There—there is nothing in the Magic cosmology that is more enduring and important to our storytelling than planeswalkers. At least at this point. And they have no room for flavor text!

MARK: Yes, they don’t.

MATT: It’s a beating!

MARK: Yes. We talked about that when we were laying out the planeswalker frames, that it’d be nice if there was room for flavor text, but what we felt was there was so much else going on that we didn’t want the—every planeswalker to have micro font you couldn’t read because we were trying to convey something. So we’re like “Well, the rest of the set’s going to have to pick up the flavor text about the planeswalkers.”

MATT: Well, we have done a pretty good job of earmarking non-planeswalker cards to be—

MARK: Yeah, planeswalker-relevant.

MATT: Places for their quotations or places for their—their backstory.

MARK: Yeah, another thing that happens, and Matt was alluding to was sometimes that the—I mean, obviously the game mechanics tend to take priority, and you know, flavor text will suffer sometimes because look, the card just has to play correctly. But I do know there’s times when the person with flavor text will come to Development and say, “I had this awesome thing I want to say here, could we make this card a little simpler? Just to free up space, so I can say what I need to say?” That doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens every once in a while. And usually it’s on a card that’s not a major role card, it just—you know, we’re trying to explain something. I know for example, sometimes—and this is—this happens a lot nowadays, where there’s one key event that happens, and they’re like “Okay, we want to make sure that people see this one key event. Okay, Design, Development, can you make us a card so we can show off this one key event?” And what that means is, the art will show the event, we have room for flavor text, we can talk about the event. And we definitely make those. We are definitely very conscious to have, you know, a card or two that are just meant to be windows into something really important about what’s going on. So here, I’ll bring up something—a little trivia. Do you know what “Flavoracle” is?

MATT: Flavoracle?

MARK: Yeah. So this is an idea that I came up with when the website first started. And the idea was, it was oracle for flavor text. And the idea was, some cards don’t have flavor text because they just—they didn’t fit. So what if we—and the idea was to use the audience, and we’d have crowd (???) and stuff. We could come up with flavor text for the cards that didn’t have room for flavor text. And they would go in Flavoracle. (???), somehow that never took off. Like, we did have a lot of other things that were successes. But Flavoracle never really—never really took off.

MATT: We talked—and this is years ago, about having rare reprints sans the rules text, sort of the way in full-art cards it’s just known. Like, we know what Lightning Bolt does.

MARK: We did some of those. We did some ones that—they’re just the name and it’s all art. There’s no text.

MATT: In this case, it would be the regular card frame, no text, but an opportunity for a full seven-line blast of flavor text on something that otherwise wouldn’t have it.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: That didn’t happen. I’m sure there’s a number of reasons why.

MARK: Yeah. Yeah, I guess they—I—I  guess if there’s no text, then you feel “Oh, I must—I—the text doesn’t exist.” But with…

MATT: Oh, here’s the thing—you probably did this when you were—when you were managing the flavor text process. But there were a number of times, especially when it was just one line, and nobody had a solid one-liner, where the right decision was just to use none.

MARK: Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely, definitely..

MATT: And there are cards like Lighting Bolt or like Wrath of God—

MARK: Right, that don’t have flavor text.

MATT: The choice is to have nothing but that one iconic blast of rules text.

MARK: We still do that in the core set.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: I think normally what we do nowadays is we pick one cycle, the most iconic card in each color, usually a spell, not a creature, and we—it’s like—it’s clean, it’s simpe—

MATT: Yes.

MARK: You know. And there’s an elegance to that. And I—

MATT: Yes.

MARK: And sometimes the correct answer for flavor text is not to use flavor text. And I think that—people don’t always realize how the absence of something sometimes is very powerful—sometimes has a lot of power. The other thing that is interesting about flavor text is I think that there’s a lot of neat moments that happen in flavor text where—I think like one of the things I find very interesting is that, like I said, there are people that like until they stumble across it because they’re bored or whatever, they don’t read it, and then all of a sudden they’re like “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know that.” You know. I think flavor text has the ability to really fill things in. I mean, to the mortar to the bricks sort of analogy, that really does fill things in and that I’m—as a flavor text writer, or as a flavor text manager, you know, I was always happy when I somehow like just found that perfect thing that just made everything click and fit together.

MATT: There’s another element of flavor text that I have always appreciated, and that is that it allowed a single card  to challenge a—or, you know, tickle the fancy of an intelligent person.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: Magic is—Magic fans, by and large, are pretty sharp folks.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: And they get to—they get to—to apply that sharpness in combinations of cards and how they build their decks. And the order in which they play cards. But if you’re just looking at a single card, flavor text is the place where you can, you know, challenge their ability to parse a pun or to consider a deep thought or whatever. And I have always—I felt a responsibility to have a certain number of intelligence-challenging pieces in every set.

MARK: Oh, well here’s a good story. Let’s talk about the flavor text for Niv-Mizzet.

MATT: (laughs)

MARK: Because that was under your watch, right?

MATT: Yes.

MARK: So for you—

MATT: At the time—

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: At the time, the Izzet were a new thing to us, and we were really having a lot of fun playing with them as mad geniuses. And I wanted, on the signature card of the guild, to create something that showed some of that madness, and that allowed Magic players, who I consider to be closer to Izzet than any other—any other guild just naturally—

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: --as Magic players. To test their—test their mettle.

MARK: And for those that have never seen the flavor text of Niv-Mizzet, when you first look at it, it just looks like a bunch of random symbols.

MATT: Yeah. It looks like an impossible math equation.

MARK: Right. Yeah. It looks like a math –it looks kind of like a math equation. And there’s a secret to it, right? I don’t want to give it away for people that haven’t cracked it yet, but there’s a message there. 

MATT: There is a message to it. I will give you a hint, it’s not a mathematical equation even though I was at a prerelease once, and some guys who fancied themselves as mathematicians told me that they had solved—that they had solved—

MARK: The equation.

MATT: The equation! And that it did—that it worked. The way the flavor text works is it’s got a bunch of random characters and then it says “equals one.”

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: And they solved it and claimed that it equaled one, and that’s really interesting.

MARK: I’m glad my math worked out. So, anyway, we are now here at work, after our long ordeal, but—to wrap up, I think that flavor text is something that might get less attention than other aspects of the card, but that doesn’t mean that any less work on our end is put into it. In fact, a huge amount of work is put into it, and that I—I’m always happy when people are able to appreciate the flavor text, because it is a chance for us to flex our muscles in a different area than we normally get to—you know—

MATT: It also shows that those people are digging deeper.

MARK: And like I said, I—I’m happy—I mean, obviously there are people that love flavor text, I know we have an audience that really gets into it, and that it’s not—not everybody’s thing. Some people could get—could take it or leave it. But I just wanted to show you today that like, even this aspect that a lot of people might think is just whatever, throwaway, is not. We use it very—it is a very valuable resource. And that we spend a lot of time and energy on it, as two people who have been in charge of it at different times. It’s a very, very important tool. And so I guess I’ll leave today by saying “Hey, take a—take a look at the flavor text.”

MATT: Read some flavor text.

MARK: Anyway, so thanks for joining me today, Matt, for both trips, and anyway, guys, it’s time to go make the Magic.