10/12/12 Episode 3: Planeswalkers (Special guest Matt Cavotta)

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater and Matt Cavotta

Hello and welcome to Drive to Work. I’m pulling out of my driveway, which means it’s time to start our podcast.

Okay. So today, be aware that I’m kind of doing this whole thing by the seat of my pants. Today I’m trying two different things at once. One is, I’m going to talk about something that’s not a set today, although it’s a design element, and I have a guest. So it turns out that I live in the same neighborhood as Matt Cavotta, who is a good friend of mine. And so I’m taking him to work today, so I picked a topic that Matt was involved in so he could join us for today’s podcast.

Now, I’ve never done this before, technically we’re using my phone, so hopefully you guys will be able to hear him and this will go across well. So I’m driving to get Matt, let me quick give you an update on Matt so you guys know the context.

So Matt Cavotta has worked for Wizards two different times. The first time, I hired him, and he worked in the Creative team in charge of names and flavor text. And then he left for a while and he came back and now he’s in charge of overseeing the look and feel of Magic. He works in what we call CAPS. And if you like, for example, the packaging for 2013, he was very involved in that. The black and silver.

So anyway, today we’re going to talk about the design of planeswalkers. Matt actually was very involved in this, and so I thought it’d be fun to have him involved. I’ve never tried this with back-and-forth with two people, so we’re going to try this today. I’m going to be picking him up momentarily. I live in what’s called Issaquah Highlands, so Matt lives very near to me, so he will be here for the vast, vast majority of the podcast today. And I am quite excited to see how this turns out.

So if you remember, for those that do not know, the planeswalkers were originally going to be designed for Future Sight. So when Matt gets in the car we’ll pick up the story there. And they didn’t actually get made until Lorwyn, so all of that will get explained. And as you’ll find out, Matt was actually the person who came up with the idea of making planeswalker cards. So we are going to talk to him and he is going to fill us in.

Now, I’ve known Matt for quite a while. So interestingly, Matt and I went  to the same high school, Orange High School in Pepper Pike, Ohio, but he and I didn’t know each other. I think I was a senior when he was in 8^th grade. At Orange High School, the 8^th graders were in the high school.

And I did not know when we both went to the same school, but since then I’ve obviously met him, and we’ve become good friends. I knew him from the days when he was just an artist. And as you’ll see, we’ll tell the story of how he got hired. Because that actually is a pretty good story.

Anyway, I see Matt, he is waiting for us, so let’s let Matt in the car.

MARK: Hey Matt. Hello.

MATT: Hey!

MARK: Okay. So I explained to you, Matt, that we are doing a podcast, so this is something new. I have never, ever had a guest on my podcast before.

MATT: I’m honored to be the first.

MARK: So I assume you have to speak up just because this is what we’re recording on. So anyway, here’s what I was setting up before you got here, was I was going to talk about hiring you, and how you led us to creating planeswalkers.

MATT: Well, that could be at least partially true. There were a number of characters in the play.

MARK: There were. But let’s start, for example, with you getting hired. So you originally were just an illustrator for Magic.

MATT: Correct.

MARK: How did that happen?

MATT: It happened when I first played Magic cards and decided this was the coolest thing, and the fact that I was already an artist meant it was high time to put the chocolate and the peanut butter together and make the greatest candy there ever was. It took a number of years to weasel my way in, but once I got my foot in the door it was good times had by all.

MARK: So your first set, I believe, was Mercadian Masques?

MATT: Yes. Yes.

MARK: How’d you get your first piece of art? How’d that happen?

MATT: I had been sending illustrations in to the former art director for a year or so, and was just getting to the point where he thought that I was ready. And I called him to find out what he thought of my most recent batch of work, only to learn that he had just been fired. So I was despondent, but the art director that took over for him was given the heap of portfolios that were on the previous art director’s desk, and mine was on top! And he thought he would exercise his new power and…

MARK: Hire a new guy.

MATT: Hire a new guy. And I was that first new guy. It was awesome.

MARK: Okay, so. Let’s cut forward a little bit. So I, for a while, was in charge of the creative team. When I didn’t have enough on my plate. And so I had a position I had to fill, and so I did something a little different. So this is what I made people do for the job was I said, “Okay, I want you to prove you’re creative. You have an eight and a half piece of paper. One side only. Do whatever you want. Just prove to me you’re creative.” And you did a pretty awesome audition. Tell people what you did.

MATT: I sort of—I don’t want to say spoofed, but I took the format of the usual MagictheGathering.com tournament-card-playing article, something that I generally didn’t read for my own card-playing aspirations, but I was aware of it, but I twisted it around and turned it into a sort of audition for the job. Where I faked up cards of my own to represent the experiences that I’ve had or the jobs that I wanted to do for Wizards, and I cooked it all up into a snappy little article with lots of pictures and plays on words and other random little flavorful tidbits.

MARK: So you did it as a draft article. As if you were drafting.

MATT: A draft, yeah. I’m glad you remember this. It’s a little foggy in my mind.

MARK: No, I was impressed. So what happened was, Matt would talk about his first pick was his wife, I believe—or no, his first pick might have been being an artist, and second pick was his wife. And he picked his kids.

MATT: I’m sure my first pick was my wife.

MARK: (laughs)

MATT: Actually I don’t remember.

MARK: But anyway, Matt, all the cards Matt had done, and they represented elements of his life. And it was just really well-done. I mean, I had known Matt at the time, because I’d seen him at shows, I think we’d both gone to the Worlds at Sydney.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: We had spent some time talking. I mentioned before you got in the car that we had gone to high school, although we didn’t know each other in high school.

MATT: Small world.

MARK: And his wife actually taught at my high school, although obviously way after I was there. But she and I were talking a lot about the school, and so I got to know Matt, and then he submitted this awesome audition, and I think then the next thing is we gave you a test. Right? Because the person who was going to do this was in charge of names and flavor text. So we gave them a  names and flavor text test. Which you did very well on.

MATT: It was okay. I would like to retake that test. I learned quite a bit in the time since then.

MARK:  Well anyway, so of the creativity test I thought he had the best one. Of the tests for the names and the flavor text, you were near the top, I don’t remember if you were at the top but you were competitive at least. So we hired Matt, and so like I explained before you got in the car, Matt worked here two different times. So the first time, Matt worked under me as the guy in charge of names and flavor text on the creative team, essentially the Doug Beyer position of modern day.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: So let’s talk about how—because you came to me with the idea of a planeswalker card. You were the first person to utter the words, “Planeswalker card.” So why don’t you explain to me how that came about?

MATT: Well, this was somewhere in the middle of the Time Spiral block, and we knew that there was a big reset happening with what the core essence of a planeswalker was to be. At that time, planeswalkers were not great storytelling vehicles because they had pretty much god-like status, they could do anything, they could think worlds into being, and that just generally doesn’t play into compelling conflict. If I can think my way out of any situation, that’s just kind of boring. So knowing that these new kinds of planeswalkers were coming around, and then the creative team had been looking, just desperately looking for any sort of through-line that we could create between one world and another, and in essence build some heroes that could last. It seemed like putting A and B together was the right thing to do. But a new card type had not been created since forever, and it seemed like “This is impossible, we can’t even do it.” But because Future Sight was the next order of business where anything was supposedly possible, seemed like the right time to take a stab.

MARK: Let me give some context to this. So Matt, by the way, was on the design team for Future Sight. Was that your first design team?

MATT: First and only.

MARK: First and only design team. And so what happened was, this is my memory of it, obviously, I remember Matt coming up—because they were going to revamp the planeswalkers to sort of de-power them. Because from a storytelling standpoint—

MATT: I would like to say not depower, but humanize? Like, give them something that we can relate to.

MARK: Well, but we also were depowering them.

MATT: Yeah, but that’s—

MARK: Urza, like—

MATT: That’s glass half empty!

MARK: (laughs) We were going to revamp them a little bit, I agree—

MATT: Revamp, I like that word.

MARK: And so what I remember from Matt, because Matt came up to me, we were working on Future Sight, Future Sight was kind of a crazy set. We were coming up with all sorts of weird things. And Matt said to me, he goes, “If we’re ever going to make people care about planeswalkers, they have to be cards. Because we had this shtick for a long time where we’d refer to them on cards—

MATT: Yes.

MARK: --and you’d see them pictured on cards, but Matt’s big argument, and it was a very compelling one, was “Look, players won’t care until they are cards.” And I was very drawn by that. And Future Sight was like doing all sorts of crazy things, so the idea was we’d do it in Future Sight. If it turns out to be a failure, we go…

MATT: “Ohh, that’s way in the future!”

MARK: Crazy future! That you’ll never see. And so I said, “Okay, why not? Let’s try to do this.” And so the original plan was we were going to make three planeswalkers, I believe it was going to be a blue, a black, and a green planeswalker. And we were going to put them in the set. Oh, little tidbit for people who like their history, they were in the set for a while, and then they got removed because as you’ll see in a second, we decided they needed more work. But the card that got removed when we put the green planeswalker into the set was… I’m blanking on it now. The Lhurgoyf. 

MATT: Tarmogoyf.

MARK: Tarmogoyf. So Tarmogoyf got taken out of the set so we could put in the green planeswalker, and then when they came out it went back in the set, and when I made the card it was a */*, and when Mike Turian, who was the lead developer, put it back in, he assumed it was */*+1 because Lhurgoyf was */*+1, so he changed it, not meaning to change it, just that’s what he thought the card was because he did it from memory.

MATT: Right.

MARK: He also got the—I did it at 2G, he did it at 1G. So the green planeswalker, some way, made Tarmogoyf the card it is.

MATT: Yes, yes.

MARK: Anyway, so you suggested “Let’s make planeswalkers.” I said, “Okay, let’s make planeswalkers.” Do you remember what happened next?

MATT: Umm…

MARK: I’m testing Matt’s memory here.

MATT: My memory is fuzzy in this area because a lot was going on for me at the time. And the ultimate development of planeswalkers actually happened outside of my view.

MARK: Well, let me walk people through. You were involved in the first part. So the first thing we did is, I let the Future Sight team see what we could do. And so the first thing we did, one of the most immediate things we did, which I had done, was during Ravnica, Richard Garfield had invented—he called them “structures.” And the idea was, they represented buildings because we were in a city world, and the idea of structures was they had a kind of a toughness to them, so you could attack them to destroy them. But they weren’t creatures other than they had a toughness that could be destroyed.

MATT: Right.

MARK: So they were kind of like enchantments that would just sit in play, and the only way to get rid of them was to attack them with creatures. I loved the design, but Ravnica was so like filled to the gills with stuff…

MATT: Yes.

MARK: I mean, I took out hybrid at the time because I thought Ravnica had too much in it. And Development ended up putting it back in. But so anyway, I liked structures. So I said to the team, I said, “Okay, I like this idea of…” I mean, I think we knew the following. We knew the flavor of planeswalkers was, “Hey, Jace, come help me!” That you were getting the planeswalker to you. And I think early on we had the idea of loyalty, in the sense that this wasn’t like a creature that you just blinked into existence. You had to get them to voluntarily help you.

MATT: Well, I remember early on, and this might have even been pre-Future Sight design team, when Brady and Brandon and I were sort of vetting the idea at its core. The concept we were trying to hit on was “How do we make this card seem like another player?” Like, it’s another player at the table. It’s another one of us.

MARK: Yeah.

MATT: Sort of doing its own thing.

MARK: So that led to actually our first design. That’s a good segue there. So we always kind of knew they were going to do three things.

MATT: More than one, at least.

MARK: Or more than one. I think three was our go-to. And so the original cards, the very first design, what happened was it would come into play, turn one it did number one, turn two it did number two, and turn three it did number three. So the idea was, you didn’t even control it. It just did its thing. And I remember the green one, because the green one, a little later would become Garruk, they just had made-up names at the time. I forget—I have the playtest cards. I think what happened was the first one, it would make a creature, a token, on your first turn…

MATT: Didn’t it double tokens?

 

MARK: Well, see, no. The second turn, it doubled the tokens.

MATT: And then Overrun. 

MARK: And then the third turn, it Overran.

MATT: That’s awesome.

MARK: But here’s what happened was that let’s say for example turn one you would make a token. And then your opponent would bolt the token.

MATT: (???)

MARK: And then turn two, he didn’t do anything!

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: And so what happened was, we playtested him, and then I think Mons Johnson was the leader of like, “These guys are idiots. I want a planeswalker not to be idiots. And that’s when we had the idea of “Okay, well let’s give you the player a little bit more control.” So here’s what happened. (???) time frame right. So we tried those versions of them, what we called the robo-versions. And they played interestingly but they had a lot of dumb moments where, right, they would do things that didn’t make any sense. Because they were assuming something that didn’t always happen because your opponent would obviously mess with you. And I think at that moment, what they had done was, they were cool enough that everybody had realized there was something really interesting, but they weren’t good enough that we wanted to do them. Like, I think we had proved they were something awesome we should do, and so…

MATT: We just hadn’t found the answer yet.

MARK: Right, so I guess at the time, Randy was still the director of Magic.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: And so I think Randy said, “Look, these are cool, let’s take our time. Let’s not rush them. This is something neat.” I mean, I think what happened was, everybody kind of got on board in your vision  of “Look, we have… if we don’t have planeswalker cards we can’t make people care about planeswalkers.” And so everyone sort of said, “Okay, these are interesting.” Everyone realized we were like on the cusp of something. But we hadn’t quite figured it out yet. And so what we said was, “Okay. These don’t have to be in Future Sight. Let’s just spend the time to get it right.” And…

MATT: That was the right move.

MARK: Right. I, by the way, for the record—I think planeswalkers—you talked about making a new card type. We had never made a new card type. If you want to be antsy, we had made equipment, which was a pretty substantial subtype.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: We had made—at one point they had turned Dark Ritual into a mana source. But it wasn’t really making something new, it was just relabeling something that the game already had. This was the first time we’re like “Hey, new card type.” And I think everybody sort of bought into “Okay, if we’re going to add something, planeswalkers made sense.” Oh, let me explain this, this is another—a lot of things going on at once is, so we for a long time have been trying to go to Hollywood and say, “Hey, let’s make a Magic movie.” And one of the problems we always would get from them is “Well, who’s your Mickey Mouse? Who is your most identifiable character?

MATT: Right.

MARK: And it’s like “I don't know, Serra Angel?”

MATT: Eugh.

MARK: Who was it? Like it was these characters that would come and go, and there wasn’t a constant. And we realized, “Oh, well we need our Mickey Mouse. We need our group of characters.” And so I think the reason that Brady and the creative team wanted to do this revamp during Time Spiral was look, we needed to have characters we could make into something we could tell stories with.

MATT: Right.

MARK: And when we came up with the idea of a card, we’re like, “Well, this all comes together. Let’s bring this to Magic.” And so obviously Brady said “Okay, take your time.” So we took them out of Future Sight, Tarmogoyf went back in, a little change for the better I guess, or the worse, depending on how you want to see it. Okay. So what happened then was, I made a design team. I had a sub-design team, but I don’t think you were on the sub-design team.

MATT: No, I had already left.

MARK: And that team was mostly designers.

MATT: Bad times.

MARK: I think Aaron might have been on that team. Was Ken Nagle there yet?

MATT: I don’t think so.

MARK: No, Ken was not there yet. So there was a bunch of designers that I think aren’t there anymore. And we sat down, and I think that’s when we came up with the idea of loyalty as a cost. Oh no no no no no no. Okay, so (???), so what happened was, we went through a version where they came with a certain amount of loyalty. And then as you did effects, they gained or lost loyalty, but it wasn’t a cost. And then somebody, Aaron? Somebody said “Well, what if the loyalty was the cost for doing things?” So certain abilities would cost you things and certain would leave, and so in some way, the Garruk card that I had made, the make a token, double the tokens, overrun your creatures, had been—there’s something about it I liked that had felt like progression. It felt like your planeswalker was smart, and it was planning something.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: And so I think what we did is we said, “Okay, we’ll give you the player a little bit more control, but we still want a story. We still want the planeswalker to feel like they’re trying to do something.” And then that’s when we came up with the idea of what we now call the ultimate, is “Well, what if they build towards something?” It’s not that you the—we wanted the cards to feel like there was a progression, that the planeswalker was moving towards something, but we gave you the player a little bit more control, so he didn’t do dumb things that just didn’t make sense.

MATT: Yes, you serve as the planeswalker’s proxy brain.

MARK: Right. And I think loyalty was, “Look, you can suggest things for him. If he likes what you’re suggesting, well, he gets more loyal. If he doesn’t, well, you test his loyalty a little bit. And the flavor of loyalty, by the way, which I like a lot, is the planeswalker doesn’t die or anything. Just at some point he’s like “I’m out of here. Enough.” You know. And that the more you’re making him do things he doesn’t want to do, the more he’s like “I’m out of here.”

MATT: You keep letting those goblins hit me! I’m out of here!

MARK: And by the way, the structure element, the fact that they had a toughness, you could attack them, that stayed the whole way through. I think I realized it’s pretty cool, and one other people saw it—

MATT: That is also part of the planeswalker-as-a-player thing. We were dead set on finding a solution for being able to hit that guy with direct damage and things that could affect players.

MARK: Right. For a while, by the way, the rules were anything that could target a player could target a planeswalker. The problem was--

MATT: Planeswalkers can’t draw cards.

MARK: Right, there’s too many effects that didn’t make any sense for a planeswalker. So we ended up doing the redirect thing. Which I admit is, of all the designs, the clunkiest element of the design.

MATT: It’s flavorful though.

MARK: Like if Magic for example had started with planeswalkers, I think we just would have said stuff like “Deal 3 damage to target creature, player, or planeswalker,” and that would just be part of the vernacular of the game. But since they came in many years into the run, we sort of—it is the clunky part of it. We did talk about target player meaning it could hit planeswalkers, but right. Target player draws two cards, it just—what does that mean, the planeswalker draws cards? It didn’t make any sense.

MATT: I was going to say, another cool thing about planeswalker cards that I like quite a bit is the way that their name is part of their type, so you can’t play two of the same planeswalker at the same time.

MARK: Right. That was built in pretty early.

MATT: Yes. Very quickly.

MARK: And the reason was, we knew that because these were going to be the Mickey Mouses of our game, we knew we were going to keep them. Like they weren’t disposable. Like, one of the problems with our creatures as being—is A. we have the core set, I guess? But you didn’t want your most iconic thing only to show up in the core set, and extra expansions changed every year, so there was no way to keep this ongoing character easily. That’s why the creatures didn’t make a lot of sense. But planeswalkers, we’re like “We’ll make a small number of them, and we’ll keep seeing them again.” So we knew we were going to do multiple cards of them.

MATT: There was one other thing that I thought was really cool, but ultimately turned out to be too much burden on developers, is early on we had the thought that planeswalker cards would be legal in any format. Meaning this planeswalker might be from the Zendikar set, but because he can go anywhere, he’s legal in Ravnica block or whatever. And I thought that was really cool, but unrealistic.

MARK: Yeah, but what was fun with planeswalkers—so another thing that was important to us is, once we decided to make planeswalker cards, and we knew the importance they had in the whole game, the idea was “Look, we couldn’t make this suck.”

MATT: Right.

MARK: Like, we couldn’t make a brand-new card type, and then for example, when we make rares or mythics, we make a lot of them as good as we can, and we definitely try to make mythics extra splashy, but look. Every card can’t be good. And so you’re going to have some bad rare cards, for example. That you just can’t avoid it. And so we decided that we didn’t want the planeswalkers being bad. We didn’t mind them being narrow, meaning they’re really, really good in a certain deck, but we just didn’t want to make them bad. So there was a lot of challenge. And one of the things for Development was we call them knobs. That a card has so many things that you can change to try to balance it, and the more elements  you have, the more knobs the card has.

MATT: Right.

MARK: And so planeswalkers are nice in that they’re knobby. They have lots and lots of knobs on them. But they are also very hard to balance. And now what happens is, Design will kind of take a first shot at it, and then Development will spend a lot of time redoing it, because there’s so many moving parts to making a planeswalker work. But anyway, what happened was, Randy said, “Take your time.” It turns out we figured it out pretty quick. We put together a team, and we came up with a version we liked, not that much later. I mean, too late for Future Sight, but clearly in time for the next set, which was Lorwyn. And the interesting thing about Lorwyn, by the way, if you notice, they have nothing to do with Lorwyn. Nothing. Like, they are literally like “By the way, here’s five planeswalkers.” We knew, by the way, we wanted to do five, because we said, “Okay, this is a brand-new thing.” We knew we were always going to use them like this, but we wanted them to be something everybody had access to. So the very first five were done to be like purposely monocolor, and super, super that color.

MATT: Yes.

MARK: And Brady said about making he thought was going to be the five basic planeswalkers. And they had spent a lot of time working on that. Of coming up with like sort of what these guys were. And so we ended up putting them in Lorwyn. And the original plan, by the way, was they wouldn’t be in every set. Like, if you notice, for example, they were in Lorwyn, and then the next ones didn’t show up until… Shadowmoor didn’t even have them, did it? It didn’t show up until the following year, right?

MATT: Yeah. The next block.

MARK: Shards of Alara. So we were planning to have them be every once in a while we’ll do some, and they were so popular, like so popular that we ended up realizing that yeah, they’re part of Magic. Every set needs to have a planeswalker. And we’d dialed back a bit, because I’ve talked about this in my column, but there is a limited amount of design resources for planeswalkers. Of every card, there’s the least amount of design space. And Development found out that in order to make them good, to make them powerful, you just couldn’t have that many because they were so powerful. So we kind of decided that we wanted the core set to have some, we wanted every expansion to have one. So we ended up coming up with a number, it’s about ten, that we could have ten in any one year. Some of which might be repeats in the core sets. And then we got to a place where we had enough that they mattered, but there was a balance so that it didn’t—like we didn’t want to make this card type be too good because then we’d have to nerf it because it’s too good.

MATT: Yeah, that would be bad. Saying that these are your poster boys and have them outshined by random common goblin.

MARK: Yeah. So what happened was, we put them in Lorwyn, huge success. And then we figured out I guess during Alara block, we’re like “What are we doing? We should have these every set.” And I think Conflux was… like we really kind of sold the set on, “Hey, Nicol Bolas is in the set.” Right? In fact, (???) this. It’s going to be a surprise. Were you around for this, or did you leave before?

MATT: I was not around for this.

MARK: Oh, so what happened was, it was supposed to be a big surprise that Nicol Bolas was going to be in Shards of Alara. In fact, we had done this very clever thing, where four of the shards all had a planeswalker that was related. And then there was one that was missing. And there was the clues in the card set, like there was a card that had flavor text that you could see Bolas’s image in like a reflection or something, we had all this subtle stuff to like “Can you figure out that Bolas is coming?” And then the names of the cards leaked because someone got the card list ahead of time. Not even what they did. Just like the list of the names of cards. And all you need is, “Nicol Bolas,” and that gives that away. And so it kind of got spoiled.

MATT: Worse than that is it says, “Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker.”

MARK: Oh, Planeswalker! Right.

MATT: In case you didn’t know.

MARK: Anyway, so it worked out really well, they ended up becoming kind of the key staple. And like yeah, it was kind of a runaway success in the sense that—I mean, I was really worried. We came up with a new card type, and it was bold, but it is a dangerous thing to add a new card type to the game. I mean, the game is so well-structured, and then like whenever you sort of add a new element, there’s always this danger of just toppling the apple cart.

MATT: Right.

MARK: Plus, the other thing by the way is, once the dust settled, they’re complicated.

MATT: Yeah.

MARK: We made two big decisions, by the way. One was, we decided they would be the rarest they could be. In Lorwyn  that meant rare. Once mythics came along, we said, “Okay, they’re mythics. They’re special.” Like, the flavor, by the way, I don't know if people understand this. In any one world, you go to a plane, how many people have the spark in that world? Maybe one? Two? It’s a really rare thing.

MATT: Potentially zero.

MARK: Maybe zero. The idea of the spark was, it’s a super, super rare thing. It’s not something that people are even aware of. Like it’s a pretty secretive thing. And so they wanted to be mythic rare and not too many of them also, to try to represent “Hey, there’s not that many planeswalkers. It’s  not like there’s 8000 planeswalkers in the multiverse.” And the other thing is—two things, I lost my train of thought. We made them mythic rare, we put them in every set… (???) thing we did?

MATT: We cheered at their success!

MARK: We did cheer at their success. I don’t remember! So we… oh, the other thing I was talking about is, we decided that the default was going to be three things, but in the back of our head we knew we might do differently because when we made the original frames to test them, we actually asked them to test planeswalkers that had four abilities. So that was like we kind of knew ahead of time that we would do that. And then in Worldwake we’re like “Well, let’s start with Jace,” because Jace was our Mickey Mouse essentially. Well, explain why do we think Jace is going to be the main one?

MATT: All along, Jace’s character was considered to be the closest analogue to the Magic player. If you took the sort of person who plays Magic, who spends his time on intellectual challenges, applying his creativity and his wits, and may also not be generally gregarious or political. All the things that seems to embody the cloaked one, the behind-the-scenes, the…

MARK: And also, there’s no—we know the established player gravitates toward blue. I think we knew that Jace was just kind of in the right spot. Anyway, by the way, I see the Wizards of the Coast sign, we are at work, which means it’s time for us to wrap up. So thank you very much for joining us for our first ever—

MATT: Thanks for having me. And for the ride to work.

MARK: You’re welcome. Okay, I guess it’s time to make the cards. Bye-bye, everybody.