5/30/14 Episode 124: Creature Types

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So today, I thought I was going to talk about an aspect of design that overlaps with an aspect of creative. Today, I’m going to talk about the creature type.

So I’ll sort of explain what it is and explain why it’s a very interesting—okay, so let me walk through what a creature type is, and there’s a lot of interesting behind-the-scenes about the creature type.

Okay. So on a Magic card, there is the title, there is the art, there is the card type line, there is the rule text, there is power/toughness, artist’s credit, other stuff like that. Okay. Today we’re talking about the card type line, and specifically, so the card types, there are seven card types right now. There’s instants and interrupts—not interrupts. Instants and sorceries. Interrupts are long gone. There’s creatures, artifacts, enchantments, land, and planeswalkers. One day, maybe I’ll do a history of different card types. But today I’ll talk about creature types.

So anyway, creatures are the most common card type. They make up like 55% of the cards usually. Okay. So every type, or some types can have what’s called a subtype. And a subtype is a subcategory of the type. So for creatures, we have what’s called a creature type.

A creature type, for example, I mean you guys are very aware of this, is “Goblin.” “Soldier.” “Merfolk.” So when Magic first started, in fact instead of having the card type Creature on it, it in fact said, “Summon…” and whatever the creature type was. So the word “creature” actually until recently didn’t appear on the cards that were creatures. Let’s say it was a goblin, it would say “Summon Goblin.” And the idea was that this was a summoning spell that summoned a Goblin.

The problem was, it didn’t say “creature” anywhere on the card. And so I think during Sixth Edition is when they changed [NLH—Yes]… but some point we changed so instead of being “Summon Goblin” it’s “Creature—Goblin.”

And the point of the creature type is twofold. One, it’s flavor. It sort of defines what the creature is. And it’s important, if you want to be able to mechanically interact with some aspect of the game, you need to be able to mark it.

In fact, when people ask me things I would do if we did Magic all over again, I would probably do a little more with supertypes and subtypes. For example, there really aren’t a lot of spell subtypes. I might play around a little more with like fire or ice or things in which you see on multiple spells, that maybe you could have a fire mage that interacts well with fire spells. Anyway, we didn’t do that. But we did do it in creatures. Creatures is the one area we did do this. And so the idea is, all creatures are something.

Now, in t he beginning, they usually were one thing. So if you go back and look in Alpha, they either were—we have now since divided them into two things. We call “races” and “classes,” which is I think based off DnD terminology.

A race is like, goblin. elf. merfolk. It’s what or who you are. What race you are from. Are you human? And the funny thing is, well, I’ll get there. Then a class is the job you have. You are a soldier. You’re a wizard. You’re a shaman. You’re a warrior. And so early on in Magic, you had one type. And what happened was that if you were human, we tended to say what you did rather than you were human. Human wasn’t a creature type early on.

So let’s say you were a human wizard, like Prodigal Sorcerer. He was just Summon Wizard. And what happened was, at some point, in fact it happened around Mirrodin, I think Mirrodin’s the set that it first appeared in. [NLH—Yes.] Which is funny, by the way, because the set before it was Onslaught, which was the first tribal block. And the fact that we updated the creature types the set after, that shows that our ducks weren’t all in a row. We really should have done that the year before.

But anyway, we moved to what we call a race/class system, which says, “If you have both a race and a class,” and by that we mean a supported race and a supported class, then you get both. Usually the class tends to be on humanoid things. If you’re a giant beast or—usually if you’re a larger creature, you don’t have a class. You’re just what you are. You’re just a Beast. But if you have a role, let’s say you’re a soldier, now you’re a Human Soldier. Or a Goblin Soldier.

And so one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve tried to make use of the creature type. I talked about how it has a flavor, it also has a mechanical means. And the creature type—the reason I decided to talk about it today is, it is a very interesting—of everything on the card, if you took the components, you pretty much can divvy up who’s responsible for the component. Between Design/Development and the creative team.

For example, the title: that’s the creative team. Every once in a blue moon, in Un- sets especially, it can matter. But pretty much the title is the title. There’s two reasons it can matter outside Creative. One is that sometimes you will reference the title on another card, although usually as long as the title is referenced it doesn’t matter. But we have made things where there’s a connector.

And sometimes, we use the name to connect the fact that cycles are together, or that cards are together, or that we have a mechanic that’s united but the mechanic isn’t keyworded, but we want you to know they all work the same. So some of the time we use the title as a connector to make you realize that these things are connected.

Another thing is, this doesn’t happen a lot, the title is on the same bar as the mana cost. And if your title is long enough, it can fight for space with the mana cost. And so what happens is, sometimes we will have to shorten either the name of the creature, or we’ll have to shorten the casting cost. Well, how do you shorten the casting cost? And the answer is, having less colored mana and more colorless mana. Because if you are 3BB, you’re three mana symbols. But if you’re 4B you’re two mana symbols.

There’s actually a third category I just realized. If the text is very, very busy, and Tek is an example of this. If you have to reference the creature and the creature has a long name, sometimes it won’t fit in the rules text. So in order to fit in the rules text you have to have a short name. And Tek is the one I remember. The reason it has a three-word name is we literally couldn’t do the rules text if the name was longer than three letters. So we made it short. Also remember, by the way, when you look at letters, all letters are not equal. An m is very wide, an l is very skinny. You can have a whole bunch of ls vs. one m.

Anyway, so the title pretty much is Creative. The art and the concepting and all that, Creative. The card type line is mostly mechanical, but when you get to the creature type it’s both. I’ll get back to that in a second.

Get to the rules text, the non-italicized part of the rules text, that’s mechanics. That’s Design/Development. The flavor text, that’s Creative. Then the art credit is Creative and then the power/toughness is mostly mechanical, although that’s the one other place that Creative gets involved.

But the area where there’s a lot of overlap is the creature type line. And essentially the way it works is, if the card doesn’t mechanically care what creature type it is, then it’s up to the creative team to decide what it is. But if it’s relevant, then R&D will dictate.

And there’s two ways we dictate things. One is, “This has to be a goblin. We’re doing goblin tribal. This is part of goblin tribal. This has to be a goblin.” The other thing is, “Oh, we did goblin tribal last year, goblin’s really good, this card, if a goblin, is too strong. So in order to print the card, it can’t be a goblin.” So those are two different things that we’ll dictate.

And what we do in the file is, we put an exclamation point after the creature type. If the creative team sees an exclamation point, we’re like, “No, we need that. That’s—we need that.” If there’s not, that means the creative team can do whatever they want.

And the way it works is, usually at the start of a design or early on, the creative team makes what’s called a “creature grid.” And what a creature grid is, they figure out what creatures exist in the world that we’re at. And what they try to do is, Magic has a slew of creatures. So other than a few places, Ravnica for example is made of this hub. So it has a lot more creatures than normal. But outside of a few exceptions like Ravnica, when you go to a world they want to refine the world and give it flavor. Part of that is exclusion, which is, “Oh, these things are there, these things aren’t there.”

And you have to be very conscious. What’s not there is often very important. Now, Magic has certain iconics, and certain—I talk about iconic races and characteristic races. Let me talk about that for a second.

So what we try to do is each race has a small creature that is kind of the one you see most often, that is what we call the “characteristic race.” So I’m going to go backwards today. So green is elves, red is goblins, black—these days it’s mostly vampires but every once in a while it will mostly be zombies instead of vampires. Blue is merfolk, and white I guess is human, it doesn’t really have a characteristic race other than you could argue human is its characteristic race, white has more humans than anybody else, white is definitely the most human-centric of the five colors.

Iconics, now we’ll go forward. White is angel, blue is sphinx, black is demon, although sometimes we use vampire. The vampire’s more characteristic these days.  Red is dragon. And green is hydra. So, how did we get to those? So let me explain.

So Alpha came out. And in Alpha, there were three cards that cared about creature types. There was Goblin King, cared about goblins. There was Lord of Atlantis, cared about merfolk. There was Zombie… what was the zombie called? Zombie Master? [NLH—Yes.] It cared about zombies. 

So early on, those were the three races that mattered at first. Elves did not matter, although there were a few elves in green. And elves were definitely something that was very high-profile. Alpha had an angel in Serra Angel that became very popular. It had both a demon in Lord of the Pit, and it had a vampire in Sengir Vampire that was very popular. Red had Shivan Dragon, so it had a dragon.  Blue had Mahamoti Djinn, which was a Djinn. And green had Force of Nature, which I think was a “force of nature” at the time? [NLH—Just a force.] Now we call it an elemental.

So early on, it wasn’t that Richard was trying to make iconics. The reason that we started down that path was that you wanted colors to have identity. And part of that was you kind of wanted to have some expectations of some things to be there .And so the reason we started getting the characteristic race…

So the characteristic race came about because we’re like, “Oh, well, what’s showing up enough that we want to care about tribal?” And so—I mean we would from time to time do what we call “lords.” Usually a lord was a creature that grants an ability to all creature types. Of a certain type.

Originally, the way lords worked, the way like Goblin King and Zombie… Master? Zombie Master? And Lord of Atlantis worked was they would grant it to all creatures                 of that type. So for example, not just your goblins got +1/+1, all goblins got +1/+1.

The other thing that the original lords did was they themselves weren’t the creature type. Which was confusing, because the Goblin King sure looked like a goblin. And the Lord of Atlantis sure looked like a merfolk. Maybe it could be argued that Zombie Master wasn’t a zombie.

And so a couple things happened. First off, we realized that it should only affect your creatures. We made that change, I don't know, 6, 7 years in. The second thing is we realized that especially if flavorwise, like Goblin King is a goblin, well he needs to affect himself. Mostly we did that because it would confuse people.

Also, people liked when you stacked lords, that the lords themselves beefed up, they fit In the deck better. But I think it was done more for just confusion, in that you really expected a Goblin King to be a goblin, so when it didn’t get the boost the gameplay fought your intuition, which we don’t’ like.

So what happened is, we would make lords over time. And we tended to make lords of things in which A. there was enough creatures to warrant a lord, and B. we thought that people would enjoy making that. It wasn’t until Onslaught that we had the first what we call “tribal theme.” Although you could argue Fallen Empires  definitely sort of—Fallen Empires, while it                  didn’t—it definitely had tribes, and there was a tribal war, and it had some of the feel. It wasn’t as mechanically tribal as Onslaught or Lorwyn would be. But it did have decks that would encourage you to play those things together.             And in Fallen Empires, it was a little bit more toward color forced you there, where we started getting to Onslaught, we called out creature types by name.

In fact, at some point I will do the Onslaught podcast, but the little story I’ll tell is, when I was trying to convince Bill that tribal was a good theme, one of the things I pointed tow as how much people liked playing         tribal decks even though at the time they weren’t particularly good.

And that what we found was, I refer to this as what we call linear, which was in design, there’s two different mechanics, which we call “linear mechanics” and “modular mechanics.” A linear mechanic means that the mechanic kind of tells you what else to put with it. So a lord is a good example. If Goblin King says, “All your goblins get +1/+1,” or it says all goblins, but the new ones say all your goblins, well it says “Put goblins in your deck!” If all goblins get bigger, fill your deck full of goblins.

A modular card is a card in which it doesn’t tell you. That it just does what it does. But it doesn’t sort of say, “Hey, you want to play these other kind of things.” People—I mean, Magic is modular in nature, we want to make sure we have a lot of modularity to it. But people really do enjoy linear themes because it kind of tells you what to do. It’s fun. “Ohh, I get it, I’m supposed to do this thing.”And the reason that tribal is very popular was that people enjoy, like, “Ohh, I like…” Pick your race. “I like that race. I’m going to build a deck out of them.”

So anyway, the characteristic basically ended up being things that we just liked using a lot. And what we realized is because we did tribal things, people got extra satisfaction out of red things being goblins. SO we started… defaulting’s the wrong word, but making sure that assuming the environment—ooh. Assuming the environment… that was a traffic “ooh.” Somebody cut me off. Assuming that the world had the characteristic race, we wanted to make sure there’s enough of them.

And it’s the kind of thing where we don’t do a tribal theme all the time, but we do a little bit of tribal all the time. Like, for example, in Theros right now it’s not at all a tribal block,  but oh, minotaur tribal is a little bit of a tribal theme that goes on in it.  That every set there’s some—we up how much tribal there is, but it’s something we always do a little bit of because people really enjoy it.

So the characteristic races kind of came about because they’re the ones we wanted to support for lords and things. For tribal stuff. People loved goblins, goblins have always been super popular. People love elves, elves have always been popular. Merfolk were popular but for a while they went away because Creative didn’t really like merfolk, because we’re a land-based game, we’re fighting on land, and merfolk were kind of weird. And we took them away for a while, but players really, really wanted them. We finally said, “What are we doing?” and we brought them back. And so merfolk returned. And they’re back, and so they’re pretty much part of blue.

Black, for a long time zombies were the go-to characteristic race. We had this problem with the iconics, that black was fighting between demon and vampires.  And finally we decided that maybe a better way to use vampires is not to restrict them to just have one or two, but make a whole race of vampires, that you could make a vampire deck. Because vampires have clans and things. And so we thought we would make black a characteristic race.

Now, black is the embarrassment of riches color for creature types, in that it has two different characteristic races. It can also use zombies. Zombies are  also very popular. So we go back and forth between zombies and vampires depending on what the set needs. Or if the set’s like Innistrad, it gets both!

White’s been a problem child. We’ve kind of for now settled on humans. Humans do show up in all five colors. So the quirky thing about being a characteristic race of white is, while white has more humans, all the other colors get humans, whereas other than us bleeding for tribal purposes… Now when we make a tribe, something that we push, we tend to put it in a second color just to give you a little more flexibility in how to build a deck and what you can do with it.

Not that you can’t build a monocolor deck, because you can, but just by having two colors it gives you more options and more choices. And one of the problems sometimes with linear decks is if you don’t give enough space, all the decks look the same, and so that’s why for example, you’ll notice now, like in Innistrad, in Lorwyn, with minotaurs in Theros, we give you a second color to give you some options of what you can do.

Iconics—so dragons and demons and angels—well, angels and dragons showed up in the very first set, were beloved in the very first set. We’ve kept them, I mean from time to time we have a world where they don’t show up, although dragons show up in most worlds. Angels will disappear a little more often, like angels aren’t in Theros for example.

Black we had demons and vampires, we went back and forth for a while. We took demons out of the game, just like merfolk, and the reason that happened was we were a little gun-shy. We were worried that maybe demons would create some bad publicity, and so we took them out. When the game was young, we were a little more careful, we didn’t want to offend anybody, and what happened was, they were gone for a couple years.

And we probably just looked at mass media. And like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and just other things that were like very accepted, very popular things, and like look, there were just demons all over the place. We’re like, “Okay.” And so we brought demons back. I wrote a whole article called, “Where Have All the Demons Gone”  where I explained this in a lot more detail than my quick story. So we decided to make demons black’s iconic and push vampires down to be a characteristic race. From time to time we’ll make an iconic vampire. But really the more iconic races is demons.

The thing about the iconic, by the way, is we want them to embody the color. So the reason we like angels is, angels are protective and they very much are defensive in nature, and they have sort of this moral sort of quality to them that very well represents white. Dragons are fierce and want to be free and are kind of like do their own thing. And they definitely have a lot of the red feel of kind of like, “Don’t tell them what to do. They’re going to do what they want to do.” And the red dragons that we play up in red are much wilder, and we don’t tend to play the smart dragons up in red. Then black, demons, well, demons, they’re all about power and being sneaky and making you kind of make deals you shouldn’t make. And so those three were very good.

So the problem we had for a long time was blue and green. Trying to find the iconics for blue and green. So for blue, we tried a couple different things. We tried djinn for a while. But what we found was, we liked that djinns have a sense—they fly, which was good, because blue was one of the things was the color of the air, and so not all the iconics have to fly. Demons don’t always fly. We do make angels and dragons always fly because angels have wings, and if you have wings you fly in Magic. For confusion purposes. And everyone assumes dragons fly, so we make dragons fly. So angels and dragons always fly. Demons sometimes fly, sometimes don’t. If you see wings on them, they fly. But some demons do not fly.

But we wanted blue’s iconic to fly. Djinns—Creative felt that they—I don't know, I think they felt that they were a little more humanoid than they liked. And they didn’t really, they were weird in that they came with sort of an implied ethnicity that was a little quirky, that kind of the way they dressed made sense in a certain world, but other  worlds just wouldn’t make any sense, in that a lot of the trappings of djinns didn’t translate well to a lot of different worlds. And so they decided  that djinns just weren’t a good fit. So we tried a bunch of other different things. Eventually we settled on the sphinx.

Now, you could argue, “The sphinx, isn’t that Greek mythology?” And the answer is, its origins is Greek mythology, but it has less trappings of Greek mythology. It comes across more like a creature—but I mean, sphinxes are tied to knowledge and being smart. And they had a very distinctive look. The other problem I think with djinns is, the only way to give djinns really a distinctive look is to go super, super kind of Arabian Nights sort of look, and you can’t always do that, and that once you start taking away a lot of those trappings, can you tell it’s a djinn?

Whereas sphinxes are very distinctive-looking. You can tell. And we liked the idea that the sphinx connected to knowledge. And that blue is all about wanting knowledge. And sphinxes are all about knowing things. So that felt like a good fit.

Green was the last one we figured out the iconic with. Which was, we tried wurms, we tried treefolk, we tried beasts, people didn’t really warm up to wurms or treefolk. Beasts were a little too nondescript. And also the iconics, you kind of not want to show up on a regular basis, and beast was too catch-all, and we used beast at common. We also kind of liked using treefolk at common.

So hydra—it took us a while to get hydra, because hydras originally in Alpha  were in red. Rock Hydra. And I think the reason it was in red was because of “Rock” Hydra, and red is the earth. But what we realized was, hydras are all about growth. Right? You chop off one head and two more grow, and that the thing about them is they’re feral and they’re wild, they live in the jungle. And so we said, “Okay,” we thought that it’s neat that hydras had this cool quality, and that we’ve started sort of building more exciting hydras, and people really seemed to like them. So we have made hydra the green iconic.

Anyway, so the way it works is, I explained this earlier is, when Design is making  a card, if we care about what the creature type is, we mark it, if not, we don’t. And then the creative team figures out what it wants to be. Based upon the grid that it made. Did I finish this story?

At the start of a set, what happens is, they figure out what they want in the world. They’ll sit down with design. More often, if there’s tribal needs—like Lorwyn, we sat down and hashed out what tribes we would be supporting. And that was a give and take between things we knew we wanted to do and things Creative felt would fit the world. And that we started with a few things we wanted and went back and forth.

Usually, something like Theros is like, well, we knew we wanted to do some tribal, we decided we wanted minotaur tribal, we knew minotaurs would be there, we double-checked with Creative to say we wanted to do this, “Do you mind having these in volume?”

Now, the other thing that comes up is the creative team will also dictate size, and this happened with the minotaurs in Theros, which is they have a general sense of how big things are supposed to be. And so if you want to make something, and be a certain type of creature, sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, well it needs to be bigger than that.” Or “Smaller than that.”

The classic example, though this card didn’t end up coming, was I had made a Hercules card for Theros. A legendary creature. And it was a 12/12. And Creative was like, “Look. We get he’s the strongest man ever to walk—he’s a demigod, but 12/12’s just too much.” And that when you look at human warriors, like I think they get up to maybe 6/6 or 7/7, and those are like the best warriors you’ve ever seen. And so we have to be careful, that part of making the flavor make sense is we have to match the essence of what it wants to be.

Now, one of the things R&D has done, or Design and Development have done, certain creature types we have tied to certain [characteristics(?)]. For example, if you see a wall, it will have defender. Wall, by the way, like demons and merfolk, we took away, I was part of this group, in which I am not a big fan of walls being creatures. They’re not sentient. Or most of them aren’t sentient. Like, Wall of Stone is literally an object. It’s not even a creature. But oh, the players, they love the walls! So we brought them back. You guys—it makes no sense, but you like the walls   . So we bring them back. I don’t know what accent I’m doing. I’m just making random accents up.

So walls will always have defender. Although it used to be that walls came with rules baggage that basically said they had defender, and legends came with the legendary rule. And we decoupled those so that wall no longer means defender, although every wall happens to have defender.

Other things that are tied. We tend to tied specters to hit you—combat damage does discard ability. Usually specters fly, but not always. Shades we tie in black to pumping. Which is if I spend black mana, I get +1/+1. Sometimes you get increments. But shades always pump. That’s a shade thing.

Trolls always regenerate. Those are in green. So if you have a troll, they have the regeneration ability. Certain creatures like angels fly, dragons fly. Generally all birds fly. But what about birds that don’t fly? Well, we try not to do those, because it confuses people when they see birds that do not fly.

The famous example is a bird called Whippoorwill, in The Dark, in which literally, in the art, the bird is shown in mid-flight, except the bird didn’t have flying. And it confused people because, “Oh, look, flying bird, I can’t block it.”

So  one of our rules now is it has to be very, very clear that if you look like you fly, you fly, if you don’t look like you fly, you don’t fly. And in fact, we’ve had art come back and have to go, “Oh, I guess this won’t fly,” or “I guess this must fly,” because the art implies something that the card didn’t previously do. So there’s certain—I’m blanking right now, like harpies fly, like anything that has wings. Sphinxes fly. Anything that clearly looks like it flies must fly.

Other connectors we make mechanically… there’s some general size restrictions. Most of the characteristic races we tend to not make much bigger than 4/4. There’s exceptions, there’s super-special goblin or something. The average goblin usually is 4/4 or smaller. And even 4/4s a lot of times are a bunch of goblins, although Creative does not like us doing bands of things all that much. They prefer that the card represents a single thing, not a bunch of things. 

 

The other thing that’s quirky is that if you show something on a mount, that the mount is not referenced in the creature type. So a horse is a creature type we support, but a knight on a horse is not Knight Horse. It’s just Knight. And so the mount is not referenced in the creature type.

What else do we do mechanically? I’m sure I’m missing something. Oh, basilisks and medusas with deathtouch. Or some ability that implies that they have the death gaze. Deathtouch is the most often. There’s a few other things. Usually they have to have some killing ability.

What else? There’s size restrictions… so pretty much, when we make cards and we care about the creature type… so sometimes what happens is, we in design will put down creature types we like it to be. Theros is a really good example, where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that we did a bunch of top-down Greek mythology things.

And so what we would do there is, we would put them in the name. We didn’t put an exclamation point, because it didn’t have to be that. But we went through and let the person who’s doing the concepting know, “Look, we went out of our way to concept some stuff that could be creature types that made sense in Greek mythology.”

And so that’s kind of a soft suggestion. It’s more like, “Well, we did make this to be a catoblepas, if it can be a catoblepas that would be nice.” That kind of thing. Maybe there was  a symbol we—I don’t remember this. Ethan was my strong second, so he did the file, so I’m not sure if he notated that in the file.

So when we do top-down, more often we’re more likely to go, “Oh, this is a zombie card.” Like a good example is—well, actually, Innistrad’s a poor example because it had a strong tribal theme, so we had a lot of exclamation points because it’s tribal themed. A better example might be, I just make a card where a bunch of zombies come back and you’re like, “Well, this is a zombie.” And we try to let them know when we do top-down that we’re really trying to hit something in particular.

There’s some classic cases where in the past we didn’t explain the flavor, and then they would completely change the card,  and like, “Oh, well…” I had a card in Mirrodin that was called Magnetic Man, and had the ability to force artifact creatures to block it or keep artifact creatures from blocking it. But I didn’t really communicate that well to the creative team, it so it ended up being a juggernaut or something. The ability seemed like it was the weirdest thing in the world, when it was actually a top-down design. That it could attract or repel metal.

Anyway, I am driving here to work. Mostly what I wanted to explain today is that if you take any small nuance of a card, like literally I’m just talking about the subtype to creatures, and there’s a lot that goes into it. In fact, in this particular case, there’s two whole teams that care about it. Three teams, I guess, if you think of design and development as being different               teams. That it’s something in which a lot of different people put a lot of energy and care in.

And that—I just parked, I realized I didn’t even talk about the Great Creature Update. This is how much stuff goes on with creature types. Real quickly, we realized at some point that we had done a poor job retroactively, and we went back and said, “Well, this is clearly this. It’s clearly a goblin.” Okay. Goblin Rock Sled is actually a goblin, even though it said “Rock Sled” rather than “Goblin Rock Sled.” We made it a goblin. So we went back.

And that was its own controversial thing. In fact, I’ve run out of time, but real quickly,  the reason it was controversial is, we like when cards tell you what they say. And so obviously Goblin Rock Sled, you kind of think it’s a goblin even though it doesn’t say goblin. But some of the cards that were human where we marked as human, it wasn’t clear they were human vs. something else. It wasn’t always as obvious.

And so there were pros and cons to the Great Creature Update. I think it did a lot of good, but it also—it did some bad. It was kind of a mix. But it’s hard in the sense that once you’re saying humans are human, well, isn’t that a human? And if it is a human, you need to mark it as human.

So anyway, my point today is, there is a lot that goes on with this one little tiny aspect of a card. And the amount of energy and time and thought and process, and through the course of Magic how much it’s changed, a lot goes into it. And that’s kind of my point today is the creature type might just be one tiny aspect, but it’s important.

Okay. Well, as much as I love talking about Magic and talking about creature types, even more I like making Magic. So it’s time for me to go. Thanks for listening to me today, guys. Talk to you soon.