11/30/12 Episode 10: Time Spiral

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay, so last week, the very first Drive to Work came out. After the first two, because I did two the first week. So this is the first podcast I have since that information. What happened was, when I first made my first show, I thought I was just going to put it up on my tumblr and my Twitter, I wasn’t expecting it to be a big deal, but then work, I went in to ask them about it, and they were very excited about it and they wanted to put it up on the website, so it ended up taking a little while to come out. So I was plugging away every week, making an episode, and it took nine weeks to finally get it out. Which meant I got a backlog of stuff. Which means that this is the first week where I have some feedback from all of you about my podcast.

So it turns out that the one set that the most people wanted to hear about was Time Spiral. Now, Time Spiral was a very interesting set in that it is beloved by some, but was very disliked by others. And it was definitely a set where R&D learned some important lessons, which I will get to. But let me start from the beginning. According to a certain nun, that’s a good place to start.

Okay, the design team. So Time Spiral was led by Brian Tinsman, and the design team included him, Aaron Forsythe, Devin Low, and myself. So it was a four-person design team.

So it actually came from an interesting place. Both key mechanics in the set, both suspend and split second, both didn’t come from the design. They came from other designs. So let me talk about how this all came about.

So I think it was during Saviors of Kamigawa, which was also a Brian Tinsman-led set, they came up with the suspend mechanic. I don’t even know how they got to it, but they came up with it, and I said to them, “This is interesting, but I think it’s bigger than just a small set. A third set mechanic.” I go, “This is the kind of mechanic I would probably do all year long.”

And I really liked the idea of suspend. This idea that you were trading mana for time felt very cool. That you get things really cheaply, but you had to wait for them. And I liked that idea a lot. And I said, “Look, let’s hold onto that, I think it’s a neat idea.”

And I think that got in my head the idea of a block built around time. Of time mechanics. So when Time Spiral started, it was going to be a time block. That was my idea. Now, meanwhile, kind of completely separate from this, Brady Dommermuth, the creative director, was interested in sort of revamping the creative.

One of the problems was that long ago, when Magic first got created, the planeswalkers, where were the player analogues, kind of got made into gods. I mean, if you look at Urza or Yawgmoth—I guess Yawgmoth wasn’t technically a planeswalker. But if you look at the early planeswalkers, they were insanely powerful. I mean to the point of like, making worlds and destroying worlds.

Like it was not very relatable. That we realized that if you’re going to tell stories, it’s kind of hard to tell stories about gods. And so we needed to revamp the planeswalkers. So Brady saw this as an opportunity to do that. So we’re like, “Okay, well we’ll do a time thing. A time problem.” And we sort of revamped everything.

So when we started down the path of doing a time thing, one of the things that I started doing at that point was I’d become Head Designer in the middle of the Kamigawa block, but the first block I really had control over was Ravnica, and that obviously had a very solid block structure to it. We took 10 guilds, chopped them up four-three-three, the whole block clearly worked together.

So Time Spiral was my second attempt at doing a block plan. And Ravnica was what I called “pie model.” Like, we took it and we divvied it up. So that everything was kind of all there, but we chopped it up through the block how we gave it to you.

Time Spiral was trying something a little different. The idea was a sequential model in which there were three parts, and each part was connected to the larger whole, but sort of advanced in some way. And the idea I hit upon very early was, “Well, if you want to take time and chop time into three pieces, how do you do that?”

And the idea I came up with was, “Okay, past, present, and future.” What if the three sets were about the past, the present and the future?

Now, I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. It was just sort of like, “Oh, interesting idea.” So when we explored the idea of the past, what we got in my mind was, “Well, how do you represent the past?” Well, some of it was mechanics that represented things that had happened earlier in the game. But the thing that we kept coming back to is “Magic’s past.”

And we didn’t set out to have a nostalgia theme. Like when we started the block, it was about time. But once we got the idea of the past, it just—it kept popping up. Like, the designers just kind of liked the idea of referencing Magic’s past.

And it became pretty fun for us. The thing you’ve got to remember is, all the Magic designers I’m talking about, so me, Brian, Aaron, Devin, Aaron, like we are old-time Magic players. We’ve been playing for a long time. And it is a lot of fun to kind of play with Magic and Magic’s past.

I mean, I had done with the Un-sets, the Un-sets definitely sort of make fun of stuff Magic had done before, but we’d never had a black-bordered set that really kind of acknowledged Magic’s past in a big way. And so once we started down that path, we were having a lot of fun. Like, “Oh, if you took Killer Bees, and Unyaro’s Bee Sting, you could marry them together and get Unyaro Bees!” And that tickled our fancy to no end.

And so we made all sorts of stuff that we thought was just kind of fun. One of the ones we tried to do but we didn’t do—we did a lot of combining cards, where like “What if Card A met Card B?” So one of the ones we tried to do, Creative stopped us because it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, was Pirate Ghost Ship. In which we took Pirate Ship and Ghost Ship and mashed them together.

I mean, Creative’s really backed off from Ship as a creature type. Rightfully so, since just like—well, we still do Walls, but just like Walls don’t make a lot of sense as sentient creatures, ships make even less sense.

But anyway, so we kind of got into that. We were very excited about exploring Magic’s past. And as we did that, we realized the nostalgia theme was slowly taking over. Like, “Wow, this was fun.” And our thought was, “We’re having so much fun, well the players will have so much fun.” And so we went to town.

And like I said, other than probably the Un-sets, there is no set we’ve ever done that is more things wedged in it. There’s so many jokes and references, and I mean, Time Spiral—if you have no idea—I know there’s some articles that have been written, but talking about just like all the jokes and things that are there, and people go, “Oh, I didn’t see this,” or “I didn’t see that,” and it’s just crammed full of a lot of stuff.

So let me talk a little bit—I jumped  ahead. See, (???) of this thing is, I kind of go where my mind’s going. So you can see how I think. Because I just hop around.

The design team—before I get into sort of where we went on the design, I realize I should talk about the design team a little bit. So Brian Tinsman was the lead of the set. So I’m trying doing the podcast sort of talk a bit about the history of all the designers in R&D, and kind of my thought is, as I come across them, I’ll tell you a little bit about them.

So today I’m going to talk a little bit about Brian Tinsman. He was a lead of the set, this was his set. So where did Brian Tinsman come from? How did he get in R&D? How did he become a designer?

So Brian’s first job at Wizards of the Coast was actually in the Market Research department. So for starters, we used to have a Market Research department. It’s no longer—now we outsource it. But at the time we had a department in Wizards that did all of our market research.

And Brian, I think what was going was, I think he was still in school. He was in business school. And so he was working at Wizards and at night going to business school. And he first got in on the Market Research team.

And then, what happened is, at lunch, R&D people like to play games. And one of the people that’s a big game player at lunch, they love the lunch playing the games, is Bill Rose. Our VP. Bill is a monster when it comes to trick-taking games, or card games, and anyway, I believe that Brian started playing some lunch with Bill, and so Bill got to know Brian.

And then he realized that Brian actually was getting his business degree, and so Bill proposed the idea to Brian that Brian come over to R&D and be the Business Manager. The idea was, we didn’t really have somebody who was managing things, and someone who had sort of a business sense working in R&D.

So Brian was not brought into R&D remotely to do design. In fact, he wasn’t even brought in to be creative. He was brought in to be a business manager. But what happened was, Brian really did want to do design, and so Brian did what a lot of people do, like there’s a lot of stories at Wizards of, “I started in Job X, but what I really wanted to do was something else.” And so Brian like said, “Hey, I’m here, I’m in R&D, I would love the opportunity to show what I can do.”

And so he started filling holes for cards and just making up stuff. And then he had ideas he would show off. And I think he made a mechanic or two he showed off. And then we finally put him on a team and he was really good on a team. In fact, I think what happened with Brian was interesting, is Brian’s first team—actually, Brian is in a unique category. I happen to be in this category, of his first team, he led. But, in Brian’s case it wasn’t quite the same as mine. I actually led my team. Brian was kind of lead by name.

So what happened was, I think Judgment was Brian’s first set that he was on, and Bill was going to lead it, but Bill ended up being busy, so what Bill said is, “Okay, Brian, I’m going to put you in charge, but I’m going to oversee everything and make kind of all the big calls, but you’ll be in charge of overseeing the set and making sure that everything gets put together.”

Because at the time, what happened was, the lead designer not only oversaw everything, but they constructed the set and they took care of the file. Now, by the way, if you’re interested, now what we do is we have what’s called a second on a design team, which is the person who’s trying to learn about how to lead teams, and the file is now put in their hands.

So for example, on Huey, Shawn Main is my second. Meaning I don’t touch the file, I oversee everything, I make decisions, but Shawn’s in charge of keeping up the file, because what we learned is, there’s a lot to learn about the structure by being the guy that keeps up the file. And once upon a time it was the lead designer.

Anyway, on Judgment, Brian was kind of made the second, but he was given actually the title, even though Bill really was behind the scenes making the key decisions on it. So Brian’s first set, he was at least in name the lead. And he did very good. Brian did a wonderful job. And it quickly spun into this creative job where Brian started doing design work.

And later, Brian would end up becoming the lead for non-Magic design, just like I was in charge of Magic design, if there was non-Magic design going on, Brian was in charge of—mostly it was new games was what Brian was doing.

Anyway, when we got to the set, I knew Brian had done a bunch of sets at that time, I know he had done Scourge, he had done Saviors of Kamigawa, I think I know he had done Champions of Kamigawa as well. And Champions—I’ll get to that on my podcast on Champions. Had its issues. I really felt Brian deserved a large set, and he seemed excited. His team had come up with suspend, so he was very eager to have suspend.

I think when design started for Time Spiral, in fact, Ravnica had pushed out hybrid, so I brought hybrid over to Time Spiral, with the idea of “There’s temporal chaos,” and part of the temporal chaos was making hybrid mana. Anyway, Ravnica would borrow it back, we would lose it.

But what was happening at the same time as that, Coldsnap was doing its design. And Coldsnap had come up with a mechanic that was trying to imitate interrupts. Because the whole shtick of Coldsnap was it’s this lost set. Hidden in a file cabinet. Anyway, that’s its own story when I get to the Coldsnap podcast. 

But anyway, we realized what they were doing was messing with time, because it was a spell that was so fast you couldn’t respond to it. It was kind of faster than other spells. And so we said, “Hey, this would fit really well in our set,” and so we borrowed it. So it’s funny that the design team for Time Spiral came up with neither of the two main mechanics.

So, we had suspend, we had split second. So that was playing into our time theme. And then what happened was the nostalgia started taking over. And so once we realized the nostalgia was in play, we said, “Oh, well, might it be fun… maybe bring back some mechanics, have some best-of.”

And I think at the time—so here’s one of the big things about Time Spiral. One of the things that you always look at, or I look at, is I look back and say, “Okay. A. How did the set do publicly? Did the public like it? Did they not like it? How did it sell? How did it do in our polling and all our market research?”

Number two is, what did we learn from it? And that some of the sets that have been the most instructive have not necessarily been the most successful. In fact, one of the things—I’ve talked about this a lot. I used to do a seminar in R&D, and one of my seminars, I think I wrote an article about this, was talking about mistakes. [NLH—Not sure which one he’s talking about. Here are three articles about mistakes.]

And what I was trying to say about mistakes is that I think people undervalue the importance of mistakes. People think of mistakes as being a bad thing. And what I try to say is, “Oh, no no no no. Mistakes are your teachers. Successes do not teach.” In fact, successes lead to bad habits. Because what happens when you’re successful is you go, “Oh, this worked. I should do that again.” And it doesn’t really cause you to stretch. It just kind of makes you repeat what you’ve done.

In fact, being very successful can be very dangerous because you have to be willing to take risks. And what happens with mistakes is, you are forced to take risks. You are forced to try new things. You are forced to say, “Oh, well let’s examine what I did and figure out what I did incorrectly.”

And the problem with successes is, every success has good and bad parts about it. But when things go well, people want to assume everything about it is good. And the reality is, usually there’s something good, that’s why it was a success. But not everything was good. And it’s hard to learn from it, because you’re not kind of motivated to find the things that were a problem.

Meanwhile, mistakes, they motivate you. And Time Spiral had a lot of mistakes in it, one big mistake really, that taught us a great deal about Magic. And what that thing is, is, for a long time--there’s certain metrics. We don’t know who all the Magic player are. I mean, we have a lot of different ways to capture bits of them, but we are most in tune with the people most in tune with us. Like, we know who comes to our website, but hey, you’re already kind of enfranchised if you come to our website.

And so, we’re always looking for more information. So one of the things that we could do is we can make correlations between things. So for example, we used to look at people playing in tournaments, and look at sales, and say “Oh, well, it seems like when sales are good, attendance for tournaments is good. Oh, there’s some correlation here.”

So clearly, when people like things, well, they come and play it. And so what happened during Time Spiral is, those two numbers that had always been in lockstep, like when one did well the other did well, started diverging. Sales were doing poor, but all the tournaments were doing well. And we’re like, “What’s going on? If tournaments are doing well, why aren’t sales doing well?”

And that’s when we discovered—at the time we called them “the invisibles.” But the idea is, there are a lot of people that we don’t see because they’re what I’ll call “off the grid.” And the idea of the invisibles is, look, a lot of people play Magic. But only some percentage of them are people that we really see.

And what happened with Time Spiral was, it was the first time that we kind of separated the two in a very easy-to-see way. Because what happened was, we said, “Okay. We’re going to embrace Magic’s past.” And to do that, we sort of loaded up with a lot of things, a lot of mechanics and a lot of references, and the idea was, well if you know Magic’s history, well this won’t be so hard.

I mean, here’s the crazy thing. I think there were 12 old mechanics, or 12 mechanics total, I think the 12 doesn’t count split second and suspend, which were new, so I think there were 12 old mechanics. Anyway, between 12 and 14.

Okay, think about that. Would we ever do a set with 12 mechanics in it? No, never! Never ever ever would we do that. But we had this mindset, like, “Well, these aren’t really new mechanics, eh, the players have played with these before, this won’t be that hard for them.” And we were forgetting that the newer, casual players that weren’t so—didn’t know all of Magic’s past, well we made a set with 12 mechanics in it. And that was just the first set! Forget that we added more in the second set, and added way more in the third set.

And so what happened was, we made a set that made all these references that a lot of players didn’t get, that had all this complication that was only manageable if you had already absorbed it. If you had been playing Magic for ten years, and then played Time Spiral, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I remember this, and I remember that.”

And the problem was, hey, a lot of players weren’t like that. And it was overwhelming for them. They didn’t get it. And yes, there’s always examples of people who started out and go, “Oh, the best of, and I was excited.” [NLH—Me!] Because at the time, the justification was, “Look. If you’ve never heard a band before,  and the first thing you heard was the best-of, well that would be kind of fine. You get to hear some of the best things they’ve done.”

But we did not take into account kind of the complexity. And I talk about how mistakes are important. New World Order really—the germ of it, the first push toward it was Time Spiral. Because Time Spiral just bowled people over. Like, “What? What’s going on? Huh? Brain hurt! Brain cramp!” They couldn’t get it all.

And yes, yes, the established players—this is the funny thing. I talk about Time Spiral as a failure. Whenever I do, I get all these people coming out of the woodwork getting really mad at me. And they’re like, “That was the best set you guys ever made. That was the best block you ever made. How dare you say anything bad about it?”

And the reality is, it’s not that it was a bad block. It’s one of my favorite blocks. I enjoy it immensely. I enjoyed making it, I enjoyed playing it, if I was dropped on a desert island and I could only play one block for the rest of my days, I’d probably pick Time Spiral block. That block has a lot going on, there’s a lot of fun stuff. The complexity that’s a negative for a lot of players is a positive for me.

I get it. I understand why people like it. I’m not trying to dis something people like. I’m trying to explain in my role, as the guy who’s in charge of understanding what does and doesn’t work, Time Spiral in that regard was a failure.

Now, that doesn’t mean we didn’t do right things in it. Just as successes have problems, mistakes have things you did correct. I do believe nostalgia on some level is valuable. You’ll notice, in both Scars of Mirrodin and Ravnica, we had played into that. We definitely nodded, “Hey. If you’re familiar, you will find this more enticing.”

But we tried hard not to make that stuff exclusive for people that didn’t know the information. I mean, Time Spiral just—holy moly, we threw you in the deep end. “What does this mean? What does that mean?” “Oh, you’ll figure it out.”

Oh, let me talk about another thing that happened. The thing that I am proudest of, of my contributions to Time Spiral. And by the way, I like the past/present/future—it did give a very strong feel. One of the things I like about block planning is that each set has its own identity. Meaning, if I said, “Here’s a card from the block,” you could tell me which set it’s in. That means I’ve defined the sets well. And the reason that’s so important is, good design comes from having a good bullseye. 

That’s my job. My job as Head Designer, my job when I’m a lead designer, is to say, “Here is the target. Here is the bullseye.” When everybody is going in the same direction, we have an amazing group of designers, we have an amazing group of developers. They’ll do good work. What causes them not to do good work is when they’re working at odds with each other. They’re going in different directions. They’re pulling in different directions. And so the role of Head Designer, of the lead designer, is get everybody focused in the same direction, because when they all are working toward the same goal, amazing things can get accomplished.

Anyway. So one of the ideas I had while we were doing the design was I said, “Well, wouldn’t it be fun if every once in a while, since we’re referencing the past, just an old card shows up.” Like you’re just drafting, and “There’s Sol’kanar, the Swamp King.” You know? “Sol’k—what’s Sol’kanar the Swamp King doing here?”

And when I originally pitched it, I think my idea was it would be something we’d stick on either the foil sheet or—something (???) that happened infrequently. When I first pitched it, I thought it was such a crazy idea at the time, I go, “Well, it would happen every once a box, maybe. Not very often.”

And then as I pitched the idea, the team was like “Well, why only once a box? Why not every pack?” So one of the things I’ve learned in R&D is, when I tend to pitch things, I tend not to pitch the wildest versions of them, because if you go too far people are like, “Oh, that’s crazy.” So I tend to pitch kind of smaller versions of them. And then people get excited, and fan it along, I’m like, “I’m there.”

So (???) “Maybe more than once a [box],” I’m like “Oh, every pack. That sounds good. I like every pack.” And then we got the idea of the time-shifted sheet. We called it the “bonus sheet” at the time. And originally the idea of the bonus sheet—so there’s 121 cards to fit on a sheet, so okay. We have 121 cards to play with. What do we want it to be?

Originally the idea was, they could be anything from anywhere in Magic, I mean they couldn’t be on the Reserved List obviously, but they could be crazy powerful cards. Because the idea was, they were just going to show up infrequently. Limited can handle a random powerful card.

And the idea was, “These are going to be old frames,” because we wanted to show that they were old cards and differentiate them from the new cards. And not everybody would recognize the old cards, so we put them in the old frame. And that would communicate the past. And we liked the idea of bits of the past slipping in. Because one of the themes of the set was “Time’s broken, and the past is merging in with the present.”

And so once we had the idea of “Once per pack, we’re going to do crazy stuff. Just all sorts of things you would never expect.” But then it got brought up that like “Are people going to understand that they can’t play these in Standard?” And we said, “Oh, well, that’s a good point. How do they know they can’t play these in Standard? Every other time in Magic, when you open new packs, that’s playable in Standard.”

So we decided, “Okay, okay. What we’re going to do is, we’re going to take this and make it so all the cards are playable in Standard.” Which means, revamp the list significantly. I mean, there were lots of crazy things on there. And Aaron was in charge of the make-up of the sheet. And it constantly was changing. And we kept suggesting different things. But once we knew they were going to be Standard-legal, we ended up changing things around a little bit.

And we knew we wanted a wide range. Because one of the things that’s important is you want to create all sorts of expectations and excitement, and you want some sort of suspense and surprise. And I talked about this in my Bad Card article.[NLH—Actually several articles.] I’ll do a podcast on bad cards one of these days, because it’s very, very worthy of a podcast.

But one of the reasons bad cards are important is, you need to have something—you need to have low lows for high highs. So we knew on the bonus sheet that we needed to you to have things you literally would not expect us to print. I think Psionic Blast being like the “Holy moly, I cannot believe they printed this.” And the opposite end of the spectrum was Squire. And I mean, we knew Squire was bad. We knew Squire was a horrible card. It was bad on purpose.

Now, I mean Auratog was on the bonus sheet as well. That is a 1W 1/2 with an ability. So clearly we were aware that it was bad. But like (???) Psionic Blast was good, we needed the range. We wanted you to “Who knows what’s going to happen? Who knows what you could get?”

And we tried really hard on the bonus sheet—timeshifted sheet—to make sure that it was just from all over the place. I think the only limitation we had was, it had to be Standard-legal, it had to not be on the Reserve List, and it had to be in the old card frame. We decided that was the point where we’re going back. Because we wanted all the cards to show up in the old card frame. But anyway, other than that--we redid the list a countless number of times. I have no idea how many times we redid that list.

Another thing I should mention is, Brian Schneider was the lead developer of the set. This was a very complex set, Brian had a lot to do with some of the changes in the set. Like stuff like Saprolings and how morph was done. Brian had a lot to do with that.

I mean, when I talk about this was complex, this stuff was complex through and through. I mean, it was complex in the art. I know it was complex in the rules text. It was complex in the naming and the flavor text. Like, the number of flavor texts that make references to old—like, if the card was referencing something, then the flavor text made reference to that card. And all that sort of stuff.

But anyway, we put it all together, and it was fun. I mean, it’s funny. I know I dog on it a bit, just because it ended up being too complex. But it was a blast. A blast to put together. I mean, I remember having meetings where we just like put things together, and we’d be laughing hysterically, and like “Couldn’t we do this? I don't know! Yeah, we could do this!” I mean, it’s one of the sets that I just remember having the most fun time with.

Like I said, Brian and Devon and Aaron were all old-time players. Like, all of us were very well-versed in the Magic—the IP and the depth of the history and the games and the mechanics. The other thing I decided to do, which is funny, I decided to say “Okay, if we’re going to the past, that means we’ll explore the color pie of the past.” Which has lots of mistakes in it.

For example, I do not like Hornet Sting. In fact, I hate Hornet Sting. With a blinding passion. Yet I was on board with Unyaro Bees, which is a green card that does direct damage. My thought process was, “Look, we’re exploring the past, I’m willing to accept there’s a strong thematic reason to do it, to do a little but not too much, and make things too strong.” And Unyaro Bees was not particularly strong.

And I said, “Okay, part of doing this…” That’s why Psionic Blast is sitting on the bonus sheet is like, “Okay, if we’re going to revisit the past, we’re going to revisit a little bit of where Magic was.” And in retrospect, looking back, I mean Planar Chaos obviously took the color pie and messed with it in  a completely different way.

I am a color pie purist in the sense that I think the color pie does a lot of very important things. And I’ve realized over time that like it is so easy to be lured to mess with it. And like I said, I was lured in Time Spiral and Planar Chaos. And that I’ve since then sort of said, “Okay, I’ve got to be more of the hard-liner, I’ve got to try to toe the line,” because man does inertia push people to just want to stretch and bend and break.

But I mean at the time, it’s kind of—you learn from your mistakes. I guess I understood why I did it at the time. I appreciated it, it did have value. One of my big things is, you don’t break rules to break rules. You break rules because they accomplish something in a way that no way within the system could work. My quote I always used to give Brian Tinsman is, “Don’t look outside the box until you look in the box.”

And that I think a lot of design is saying—for example, there’s a great scene in Apollo 13, where something goes wrong on the ship, and they go to the scientists and they have a box. And they dump the box on the table, and they go, “This is what they have up in the capsule. In 16 hours they run out of air,” or whatever the problem was. “They’re going to die if they don’t solve it. Here’s what you have to solve it with. You have 16 hours, here’s the things, go.”

And the point is, they solve it. Because as I like to see, restrictions breed creativity. And that part of I look at the color pie is, it is a good set of restriction. It is something to force designers and developers to do better work. That one of the things I believe firmly is, when you have no rules, when you can do whatever you want—I mean I talked about this in my article once.

So David Lynch did a TV show called Twin Peaks. It was a while ago, so let me explain it. So David Lynch is a very eclectic director, made very weird films. Like, I took a class in cult films in college. I watched some of his films. He’s the kind of guy—he did Blue Velvet and Eraserhead.

Anyway, originally his idea was, the show was about a murder mystery, a girl named Laura Palmer’s murdered. And what was supposed to happen in the first episode was, a naked Laura Palmer washes up on the beach. But this is TV, and they go, “David! This is TV! You can’t have a naked woman!” So he ended up wrapping her in plastic. So she washes ashore, naked, but wrapped in plastic.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. “Naked girl wrapped in plastic” is infinitely more interesting than “naked girl.” Naked girl, it’s like “I don't know, she was swimming or something. Who knows.” A. you’ve seen it before, and B. it doesn’t have the sense, you go, “What?” But you see it wrapped in plastic—huh? Why would she be wrapped in plastic? And all of a sudden, you’re off somewhere. And I think some of David Lynch’s best work was on Twin Peaks because he had restrictions. Because he couldn’t just do whatever he wanted.

And that I think for an artist, saying to them, “Hey, there’s some constraints. You can’t just do the first thing that comes in your mind. You have to work within some constraints.” Like, there’s a great exercise that goes on, where writers will go to other writers and say, “You do this thing all the time. I, your friend the writer, recognize that you, the writer, do this thing. So here’s what I’m going to say. I’m going to make a rule for you, you have to follow this rule.” And then they write, following the rule set by their friend, which is trying to get them out of the habit they always do. And supposedly, it is a very liberating sort of experience to try to go, “Oh, I always rest on this crutch. I don’t have it anymore. I’m going to have to do things a little differently.”

Anyway, got off on a little tangent there. I’m arriving at work. So let me sum this up about Time Spiral. I believe it was good for its time. I believe we learned a lot from it. I would never want to not have done it. And I’m kind of glad that it exists in Magic’s history. I’m glad we kind of did that kind of set. I don’t think we can do that set ever again, I think that it’s—or at least not where the game is right now. I mean, if the game ever shrinks greatly, where all we have is a small tiny core, I guess we could do this again.

But I am glad we did it. We learned a lot from it. It was immensely fun to do. It’s one of my favorite sets to put together. And it was—you look back, I mean I think when you look back at your career, you sort of have highlights. And Time Spiral to me is one of the highlights. I really enjoy the people I was working with. I enjoyed the work. I did enjoy the player response. Meaning the players that loved it loved it. The players that were enamored of it loved it.

Even to this day, it’s the favorite set I know of a lot of players. And I respect that. I don’t mean any—when I say it’s a failure, I only mean from a marketing sort of as a game standpoint, trying to sell a game and make it for a lot of people. I mean, it was successful in that look, it impassions people. It is hard to make people’s favorite set. And so I am glad that I had my hand in a block that to many, is a high point for them. And that’s exciting for me.

But anyway, I am now here at work .I’ve got to wrap this up. It’s time to go make the Magic cards.