6/13/14 Episode 131: Story History

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

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

Okay. So today, I’m going to talk about the story of Magic. Actually, I’m going to talk about the story of the story of Magic. So today is not about the story itself, but about the different means and ways we’ve tried to tell the story over time. So it’s a history of the story, rather than actually the story. There’s a lot of story, and maybe one of these days I will do a podcast about different parts of the story. But today is more of a history thing about how the story has been done.

So we’ll begin, we go way back to Alpha. So when Richard Garfield first made the game, Alpha didn’t have a lot of story in it. It had a bunch of names, Urza had some glasses and he had some sunglasses, apparently he liked visionwear. Mishra had an ankh. Nevinyrral had a disk. There were people mentioned. But other than people mentioned, there wasn’t any inherent story. The flavor text didn’t really come together to tell you any larger story. There were just—there were characters mentioned.

So the first expansion was Arabian Nights. That did have a story, but not Magic’s story. That reallyw as just taking famous stories from Arabian Nights, you know, Sindbad and Aladdin, and bringing those to life. But the second expansion, called Antiquities, now that, my friends, that’s where we begin.

So what happened was, back in the day, the people that designed the set also did stories. There wasn’t a creative team at the time. So the people that did Antiquities was the East Coast playtesters. So Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Pettey, Chris Page. Also Joel Mick, who worked on the Mirage team as the co-designer of Mirage, also I believe worked on Antiquities.

So what happened was, by the way, Antiquities wasn’t the first design they did. What happened was, when Richard realized that the game was getting big, he had all his playtesters work on sets. But then when Magic started sort of exploding, they realized they needed to get some sets out. And so they quickly put together some smaller sets. Richard put together Arabian Nights, and East Coast playtesters, with Joel, put together Antiquities.

So one of the things that really drove the idea behind Antiquities—well, there was two things. One was it had a mechanical theme. It was an artifact set. It was the first set that had a mechanical theme to it, and obviously Arabian Nights had a flavor theme to it. And the idea was that the East Coast playtesters took the story that kind of was hinted at very briefly in Alpha, you know, Urza and Mishra, and said, “Okay. These guys were important.”

And what they did is, they tried to build a story such that you were like archeologists. And as you were playing cards, you’d see snippets of flavor text. And the flavor text would hint at the story. So Antiquities did this thing where they didn’t really tell you the whole story, but they hinted at a story. And gave you bits and pieces. And the idea was that you could fill a lot of it in, but that as you gathered these antiquities of days gone by, you could learn about where they came from.

And that, underlying it, was the story that we now refer to as “The Brothers’ War.” So for those that don’t know their Magic story history, Urza and Mishra, two young boys, they go in the Cave of Koilos and they discover what is it… the powerstones? The mightstones? [NLH—the Mightstone and the Weakstone] Anyway, they discover something, and they realize they could use it as a source of energy, they become artificers—Urza eventually becomes a planeswalker.

Anyway, they have a massive battle. The two of them, through their artifice, they make machines. And there’s a mighty war between the brothers. And Antiquities did a lot to introduce new characters, there was Ashnod and Tawnos, and it definitely sort of, for the first time ever, put context to Magic. That as you were playing, you realized there was a larger story going on.

Now, around the same time, Magic started doing novels. So the original novels for Magic, the very first one was called Arena, and it was about a man who fights with magic. After that there was a trilogy, I think they’re called the Whispering Woods trilogy One of them was called the Whispering Woods. Anyway, the main character is a guy called Garth One-Eye. And interestingly, Garth was not a planeswalker, but rather he was the victim of planeswalkers. And planeswalkers kind of ended up being the bad guys in the story.

In fact—so the very first chapter, Garth is like at home hanging with his family, and like two planeswalkers are fighting. And one of them casts a pestilence. And the pestilence destroys the village! And wipes out Garth’s family! And I remember reading this and I was like, “What?!” I’m like, “So every time I cast Pestilence, I’m like, ‘I wonder what family I’m destroying.”

So anyway, it was a very odd choice, being that the game players were the planeswalkers. I’m not quite sure why they chose to make the planeswalkers these villainous creatures. But one of the problems, we’ll discuss this later, as you’ll see, is planeswalkers early on were god-like. They really could do almost anything. And it is hard to write characters that are god-like. Like I said, this will come back to become important.

But anyway, they did a bunch of novels. Originally, the reason the novels actually sold decently well was they put unique cards in them. What they called the book promo cards. And so if you bought Arena, you got two cards. Like Arena and Sewers of Essark. Estark? [NLH—Yes.] Anyway, after that, each book had one in it.

And some of the books—most of them were kind of innocuous. But one of them ended up being—Mana Crypt? Ended up being really, really good. And that’s the only place to get it. And so what happens is you’d buy the book and there’d be a page, and you’d rip it out and mail it in, and then you could get a card. They’d mail you the card.

And we decided we’d change the policy, we said we’re not going to put unique cards in products as promos anymore. That if you want cards, they come out of products you sell, and the promos now are altered versions of things, but not things that don’t exist in for-sale product.

Anyway, those novels did okay. And then eventually, the next batch of novels started sort of going to actual source material. So the next batch of novels I believe were like Ice Age and that actually—not after the fact, they had already come out, but they went back and started to write novels based on card sets.

And they writers they got for those, the thing that was funny about those was, because the card sets were finished and done, the writers tended to use a lot of card material. And so you almost could read the novels and go, “Oh, I see! He’s casting that spell. Oh, yeah, that’s (???) spell.” And so it was almost prescriptive in the amount of like direct card referencing there was.

So meanwhile, inspired by Antiquities, the people who designed sets—and what happened was, we started to get a creative team. It was called Continuity back in the day. But so after Antiquities was Legends. Now, Legends had stories built into it, but mostly what it was is, Steve Conard and his team were using characters from the role-playing sessions that he and his friends had played, and that the characters were characters from role-playing sessions. So there was a backdrop and there were characters, and there was some sense of story, but it wasn’t a Magic cohesive story as much as it was a lot of snippets of things going on pulled from role-playing.

Then we get to The Dark. The Dark had a tone, I think there must have been some story underneath it, but there wasn’t a lot of avenues for the story. There later would be a book about it, obviously. And then we get to Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires was also made by the Antiquities fellas, the East Coast playtesters, and Fallen Empires very much had a story. It was a war. In fact, there were five different factions tied to color, and then each faction had kind of a ruling race and a subjugated race.

And so there were fights between different factions, and then within any faction there was a fight between the two races within the faction. So there were some empires, they were falling. If you will. And there was a lot of conflict built in. So once again, the same people sort of built in a story into it.

Then we get to Ice Age. Also done by the East Coast playtesters. And Ice Age very, very much had a story built into it. It was about Terisiare, that was a continent on Dominaria, there was a great ice age that came, I mean there were main characters and there were villains. I mean, things happened.

Ice Age in some ways was the first—I mean, Antiquities clearly hinted at a story, but Ice Age was the first one in which concurrent to the set there was a story. Antiquities was kind of like, “Here’s some objects, they tell you something about this story from the past.” But Ice Age was like, “Right now, there’s a story with these characters, and the legendary characters showed up…” There was an ongoing story.

Then Homelands came after Ice Age. And Homelands top-down was about a story. It was about Serra and Feroz and their forbidden love and the place of Ulgrotha              and the Sengir family, and there was stuff going on. So what happened was, we started getting a team, and like I said, it was originally called the continuity team. It would become the creative team. They started saying, “Oh, there is a story.” And we created continuity and we made maps, and “Here’s where this story happens,” and “Here’s where these people are.” And there started to be a story going on there.

So eventually what happened was, there was a decision that said, “Okay. We need to start tying…” Oh wait wait, I’m jumping ahead. So the next thing that happened, actually I’m involved with this one, is I and a guy named Mike Ryan, Mike Ryan was an editor, I was obviously R&D, he and I were both writers, and we both said, “You know what Magic really needs? An ongoing story.”

Because what happened was, here’s Ice Age, and Ice Age would tell a story, and then there was Homelands, and Homelands would tell a story, and each set was telling its own story. And we said, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a story bigger than just one set?” If there’s a story that’s an ongoing story.

And so we pitched what ended up becoming the Weatherlight Saga. Or an early version of the Weatherlight Saga. And what we had done is we said, “Okay, let’s have a cast of characters. That we will identify and create and costume, and you’ll recognize these people. And then these people will show up every set. So it won’t just be different characters every time, it’s the same characters.” Now, there will be new characters as our cast of characters interacts with other people, but these are our heroes.

And so there was Gerrard and Tahngarth and Squee and Sisay and Hanna and Karn and Orim and Starke and Crovax and Mirri and… there was a cast of characters in our floating ship Weatherlight.

And the idea originally was, we were going to like tell a story in which our heroes go from place to place. But we were going to have some continuity. Like the same characters were going through these stories. And what happened was, they got in a big team, and we storyboarded and we figured out what the characters looked like.

And early on, in Tempest, we actually put a lot of the story—like not only was there a story, it was mapped out, and we tried to show every piece of it in art. And so if you go online, this was in The Duelist but it’s also online, and search on our website and on DailyMTG.com for Tempest Storyboard, you will see what I’m talking about. And there, we explain the story.

Imagine we had made a movie. That’s the kind of—it’s a story. It is a legit beginning, end, and middle story. Now, we were telling a larger story, so it ends in a cliffhanger, but the story of Weatherlight had kind of been—we were going to start with Tempest, and then people were so eager that we did a sort of a pre-story with Weatherlight. The gathering of the people together. But Tempest was the beginning of the story.

And Tempest, really, you see most of the art. You saw a little of the art with Weatherlight, but that was done kind of after the fact. So not too much art was in Weatherlight. A lot of art was in Tempest. We were telling the story. If you read the flavor text and looked at the art, yeah, you got a little help, that’s why we had that storyboard in The Duelist. But anyway, so we started telling the story.

Now, along with that there was a series of short stories. There was stuff in The Duelist. There was a whole novel of short stories. So we started telling stories about this cast of characters and about what’s going on.

Around that time, I believe we started doing novels. So the first series of novels was  the short stories on the Tempest story, Tempest block, and I believe, starting with Urza’s Saga, we began doing novels. If I can remember correctly. So what had happened was, a different group of people sort of took over the story. That’s for another day. And they decided that they wanted to get Urza involved, and so they went back in time, and so after the Tempest story, they spent the year doing a prequel talking about how all of this was Urza’s doing. That was sort of built into the story.

So Urza’s Saga was the saga of Urza, and basically from the story you learn about how Urza interacts with Yawgmoth and the Phyrexians, and how he realizes they’re a great threat. And so the Weatherlight Saga became this story of Urza through the Weatherlight trying to stop the threat of the Phyrexians.

And so Urza’s Saga—each set had a story that dealt with it. So there was a book on Urza’s Saga called Urza’s Saga, there was a book on Urza’s Legacy called Urza’s Legacy, there was a book on Urza’s Destiny called Urza’s Destiny. [NLH—This is not true.] So during that period, there were novels that actually explained the story of each thing of what was happening.

And this is when we first started learning—I mean, we kind of had known it was a problem. But we started to try to tell a story with Urza. And Urza was an old-school planeswalker. He was powerful. I mean, he literally could create and destroy entire planes. That’s pretty powerful. When you talk about being like a god, the ability to create and destroy worlds is pretty god-like.

And it became tough. A lot of what they found was they started telling stories of people around Urza. That like Barrin was a wizard that worked with, and Barrin was Hanna’s dad, for those that that don’t know. Anyway, so we started doing individual like novels to get the stories.

Now, what had happened at this time was the following problem, which was: the previous set of novels were about Magic sets. But they were about already-finished Magic sets. “Here’s a book about Ice Age. Now that Ice Age is 2 years old.” And what the thought was is, “Well, we want to be telling stories about the current things. Not the past sets, the current sets.”

And so we launched this mighty plan of, “Well, when Urza’s Saga comes out, the Urza’s Saga book comes out.” The problem with this plan was that the timeline between how much advance knowledge the writer needed to write the story and how much advance knowledge we needed to do the card set didn’t really work well, meaning that we needed to know…

So, for example, one of the characters, I forget which of the Urza’s Saga books, but one of the major characters in one of the Urza’s Saga books was Xantcha. So for those that played Urza’s Saga, you guys remember the legendary creature Xantcha. No, you don’t, because it didn’t exist. Because we didn’t know until too late in the process that this character mattered. And so here’s a major, major character in the book that literally didn’t show up in the card set. And we had a lot of those kind of problems, where it was hard to do the link-up.

Now on top of that, the other problem was, right now, we have spent a lot of time and energy creating processes where Design and Creative are intertwining all the time and making sure that everything is working together. That didn’t really happen back in the day. I mean, it happened during Tempest only because I was in charge of the Tempest story and I was the one designing Tempest. But after that schism, there was kind of a break between R&D and the storytelling people. I guess you could piece this together here.

And so they really weren’t consulting with us. And so there was a story being made and there was a card set being made, and they really did not interlink as much as they needed to. To the point that like major characters would show up in the novels that weren’t in the card sets, things would happen in the card sets, there were major cards in the card sets that weren’t at all any way acknowledged.

And so some things overlapped, we tried. I mean, I actually did the card concepting for Urza’s Legacy. So I remember getting notes on the story, and I was trying where I could to show scenes. Like there’s a card called No Mercy. So for those that don’t know, Urza’s Legacy actually is one of my favorite parts of the Urza’s Saga story.

So Urza had started, he had Tolarian Academy, the Tolarian Academy. And he was messing around with time, he made Karn, Silver Golem. The reason Karn is made out of silver is silver’s the one object that can travel through time, and Karn was meant to be—anyway. Whole (???) story.

But anyway, there’s an accident on Tolaria, and Tolaria had—there were time bubbles. So there was a time explosion. And different bubbles on Tolaria were trapped such that time went at a different speed. So for example, Teferi, young Teferi, he was a student at the time, was trapped in a slow-moving bubble, and they had to watch him, and he was trapped for a long time, in which he was moving super, super slow.

Meanwhile, the Phyrexians were there, and were planning this—I don't know, invasion or whatever. They were planning something. And they got caught in a fast time bubble. And so where they were, they were evolving so fast that even though Urza and his people could see they were there, whenever they would try to invade to stop them, the Phyrexians saw them coming as if they were coming in slow motion. And easily were able to dismantle any threat that came at them. And so No Mercy shows the Phyrexians dismantling the oncoming attack from Urza. And so like we tried what we could to show stuff. But it was problematic. It was not a perfect system. And the schism kind of grew wider with time.

So eventually, I mean, that continues for many years, us doing the novels and so we started trying to do some other stuff. And so what happened eventually was, so if you look at Magic, we had really done—up until—when we get all the way through—so after Invasion, so Invasion was the end of the Weatherlight Saga.

After that there were two blocks that were set on Otaria, which was a continent of Dominaria. Which is where the story of Kamahl and the Cabal took place. Sounds like a little kid’s book. “Kamahl and the Cabal.” And that was a whole story about the Mirari and pit fighting, and anyway. We got a little better about trying to match up stuff. As we got a little farther I guess, we started at least having the characters match up, and the characters that matter in the story were there.

But the problem was, the novels were written by people that were separate from the building, and it was very hard, and so little details didn’t always match up. But eventually what happened was, we decided that we needed to get off of Dominaria.

So if you look back, up through the end of Onslaught, technically Arabian Nights was on Rabiah. A-rabian nights? Rabiahn nights? Anyway. Homelands was on Ulgrotha, and then Tempest block and Nemesis were on Rath, and Mercadian Masques was on Mercadia. Other than that, everything in Magic had been on Dominaria.

And as part of the story, Rath and Dominaria got overlaid, so even Rath was gone. We didn’t really want to go back to Rabiah, Ulgrotha was not very popular, Mercadia was not very popular, so we didn’t have a lot of worlds ready to go. So we decided that we wanted to start making our own worlds. That hey, part of what made Magic exciting was you went to a new world every year. We should actually go to a new world.

It was a plan we had started to do with the Weatherlight Saga, but it kind of got derailed. So we were trying again. Mirrodin was our first attempt. That’s in which the creative team itself made the world. That’s the first world really where the creative team crafted a world. You talk about our modern world-making, that’s the first kind of real world that the creative team—that’s the beginning of kind of the modern-day creative team. Was Mirrodin. And the world in which it was crafted to match what the mechanics of the world wanted to be, which was an artifact world.

And so Mirrodin was crafted to be an artifact world. Kamigawa, we tried an experiment of doing a top-down based on Japanese mythology. With obviously some mixed results. After that was Ravnica. And Ravnica was us building a city world, which went really well.

And so what we found was, both Mirrodin and Ravnica had gone very, very well. Kamigawa had some problems, but we realized what we had done wrong. But we really realized we were getting good at making worlds.

So then, the big problem that was lasting was, the “planeswalker as god” problem. Which was what we wanted to do, really, when we would leave Wizards and go talk to other people about our story, they always would ask “Who’s your main character?” And we were always like, “Well… this year…” And what we needed was, we needed something that was sort of, “What is Magic about?” And we sat down and said, “Okay. What is Magic about? Magic is about people fighting with magic! It’s about planeswalkers! That’s what you the player are.” The center of our IP should be our planeswalkers. But the problem was, our planeswalkers were so powerful that it was hard to tell a story about them.

And so one of the things I remembered was, so with Superman, Superman got created in the ‘30s. And when he was first created, he wasn’t that powerful. Not as you think of Superman today. In fact, if you know—he was more powerful than a locomotive, faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. And like, “Why do they talk about him jumping over buildings?” Because he couldn’t fly. He just could jump really far.

And faster than a speeding bullet is fast, I mean bullets are fast, or mightier than a locomotive is strong, but those aren’t particularly—Superman would later go on to be able to like change the rotation of the earth, or like to clean his outfit he used to fly through the sun. And so what DC, the people who made Superman, decided  was, they needed to depower him a little bit. And so they had a thing called Crisis on Infinite Earths, where they sort of revamped everything. Not just Superman.

But when they brought him back, they needed to depower him a little bit. He couldn’t just breathe in space. Like, he had to hold his breath. He needed some oxygen. He could hold his breath for a while, but he needed to hold his breath. And he wasn’t quite as strong as he had been. He couldn’t rotate the earth anymore, and he couldn’t fly through the sun.

We needed to do the same thing with our planeswalkers. We needed to depower them. We needed to make characters that we could tell stories about. And so Brady Dommermuth was the head of the creative team at the time. He and his team came up with the idea of having this time calamity, which would take place on Dominaria, this is Time Spiral, and that the planeswalkers would have to use their sparks.

So for those that don’t know what spark is, within certain people, and like on in multiple millions of people, it’s very, very infrequent, they had this thing called a spark. If the spark ignites, which usually is caused by some trauma, you are now able to walk between worlds.

Understand the average person has no idea that they live in a multiverse. As far as they know, the world they live is the world that is. And so one day, something happens, boom, their spark happens, they walk to another world, and like “Eye-opening! Other worlds! What?!”

And so we liked the idea of our planeswalkers being people that were not super-powerful. And so what we did is all the planeswalkers ended up giving up their sparks. Some voluntarily, some not voluntarily, to heal a rift. That the Multiverse was breaking down.

And basically what happened was, it healed the Multiverse, and the Multiverse sort of redistributed sparks, but the sparks were not as powerful as they once were before. And we created a new batch of planeswalkers. Originally the plan was for them to come out during Future Sight, but it ended up we needed a little more time, so they ended up coming out the next set, in Lorwyn. What people now know as the “Lorwyn Five.”

Which was… let’s see. White was Ajani, blue was Jace, black was Liliana, red was Chandra, and green was Garruk. Each one was meant to be the epitome of their color. That the white mage was very white and noble and looking for the greater good, and the blue mage was curious and mental, and the black mage was selfish and out for power, and such.

And we worked very, very hard at stylizing them and getting them a cool look. And so we made the new planeswalkers. And at the time, I had a podcast on this, Matt Cavotta came up with an excellent idea that said, “If we want people to care about planeswalkers, we’ve got to bring them in the game.” And that led us down the path to making planeswalker cards. Which have become very important to our game.

And so we went down the next path of trying to tell stories of the new planeswalkers. So we wrote some books about the new planeswalkers. And we tied them in to different sets we were doing. But then we said, “Okay, let’s try some other stuff.” The books weren’t doing all that great, not a lot of other people were buying the books. For a while we put them in our fat packs, and the number one means by which we were selling books was through the fat packs.

So we decided to try some other things. We did a series of webcomics where we had different Magic artists illustrate comics and then we told stories that tied into the different sets. Eventually the novels turned into novellas, The Secretist was the one done by Doug Beyer for Return to Ravnica. And currently on sale, Part One’s on sale, Part Two, hopefully by the time you guys hear this, it’s going to be on sale, is Godsend, which is by Jenna Helland and is about the Theros story and all about Elspeth and her story.

And so we definitely started doing that. We started up a thing called Uncharted Realms, which is a column on Wednesdays that is a short story column. In which we use it to tell lots of different stories about what’s going on. Some of them tying to the big part of the story, some of them are minor that just fill in little gaps. “What is Kiora doing on Theros? Well, there’s a story to tell you.”

And so we’re trying really hard now, one of our goals is—and this has always been a goal, but as we move forward, it’s becoming more center is, we want the story to be something that everybody who plays Magic can partake of at the level they want to partake of.

And the way I like to think of it is, for the people that don’t want to go outside of the cards, we want to make sure that the cards are telling you enough that you have a gist of the story. You’re not going to have all the details, but you know, “Here’s Deicide.” That kind of tells you something that happens in the story.

And I will tell you that we are moving even more in this direction. That we’re making sure that if you just play the card set, we want to make sure that there’s enough story there for you. But on the flip side, if you love story, if you want to dig deep, if you want to know the intricacies of how the world works and the cosmology, we’re providing that as well. And so what we’re trying to do is give a story for Magic that allows you to sort of participate at the level you want to participate.

And I know there’s a lot of energy right now—I mean, we work years ahead. So like, I can see the future. Story is something that is very important. And one of the things that I hope to stress in today’s podcast is that we have tried lots of different ways to communicate story to people. We’ve tried in written form, we’ve tried it through flavor text, which I guess is also written, but I mean we’ve done it through books and novellas, we’ve tried through comics. I even mentioned like right now there’s a comic that IDW puts out about Dack Fayden. “The greatest thief in the multiverse!” And that’s definitely showing a different aspect of Magic.

One of the things that we hope is we want Magic to be big enough that there are different facets going on. Now, always there’s a major storyline, that we want people to care about, and that storyline’s something that’s going to be something that people are able to pay attention to.

But also we love having a lot of the little tiny details. Like, one of the things I love about the Uncharted Realms is that it’s great to have a story about Elspeth and her journey and what she’s up to. But also, “Hey. I like hearing about Fblthp. What’s Fblthp up to?” For those that don’t know Fblthp, he’s the little one-eyed guy from Totally Lost who’s become a fan favorite. I have a stuffed Fblthp at my desk. Anyway.

So, I’m not too far from work. So I’m going to wrap this up. So basically, there is a second part to this story. A second part to this podcast. This is actually Part I. But I got up to modern-day! What else is there to talk about?

And so what I want to talk about next time is gameplay. So I’ve talked about how the creative team tries to tell the story. So what I’m going to talk about next time is how I, the Head Designer and my designers have tried to and are trying to tell the story. And so Part II of this little podcast is going to be about the essence of “How do you tell a story as a game designer?” And to me that is a very fascinating topic. So if you enjoyed today—so today, by the way, was more the history of the telling of the story. And less so about the design I’ll get into next time.

So anyway, I’m stopped at a light, so I’m seeing any final things to bring about the story. I will say this. If you have never really dug deep into Magic’s story, there’s a lot there. In fact, the story kind of breaks into a couple parts. There is a story of Urza and Mishra and the Brother’s War—and by the way, one of my favorite novels of all time, written by a guy named Jeff Grubb, is The Brother’s War. Which told the story of Urza and Mishra. And one of my favorite of all the Magic stories put in book form, it is one of my favorites. I would recommend that.

There was a lot of stories that went through the sets, obviously with the Weatherlight Saga, the story on Otaria with Kamahl, that was a two year story, and then what has happened was, one of the things that we’ve been trying to do is, that the Magic story, while it as pieces, all ties together. That the story of the Brother’s War and what happens in Terisiare, what happens on the Weatherlight Saga, and what happens on Otaria, all that’s tied together. It’s all connected. And that what you will find…

For example, Otaria introduces The Mirari. And the Mirari becomes a major important source of that whole two year storyline. But the Mirari’s also important. The entire—well, I don’t want to give anything away. But the Mirari plays an important role later, a very, very important role later on in the Magic story.

Just like for example, Nicol Bolas was introduced in Legends. He’s actually part of the Legends story. Part of the Elder Dragon legends. And he has gone on to be a major part of the modern-day story. I mean, he is one of the big villains right now of the story.

Karn comes from the Weatherlight saga. In fact, he’s one of the few characters I’ve created that’s still in the game. And Karn comes from a different time period, and he’s still a relevant aspect of the current story. So you know, as much as we’re always doing new things, we’re trying to make sure there’s some history. I mean, if you have not delved into the history of Magic and the story, it is a very deep well. There’s a lot of fun and interesting things. A lot of stuff happened. Some of them I was involved with the storytelling, and like I said, one of these days I’ll tell the Weatherlight saga. At least I hope to.

Let’s see, I’m almost at work. Final wrap-up is—so definitely delve in deep. If you’d like to know more about the story, I believe the comics, the webcomics are still on the web. The entire archive is there. If you’ve never read Uncharted Realms, I highly recommend reading it. Jenna’s novella is I believe currently for sale. If you want to read Godsend, I think you maybe can still get The Secretist if you’ve never read about Jace and Return to Ravnica.

But let me leave you with this. I’ll leave you with this thing, which is: as excited as I am about storytelling, I have to say that the creative team is upping their game. And that good things are coming. One of the thing that I’m really, really excited about is, I love storytelling. I come from a background of storytelling. And I have—all this stuff I’m telling you about, I’ve lived through most of this. I’ve been around for a lot of it.

And that I believe that the current creative team cares more about conveying the story and just trying to find more ways to make sure that everybody can get involved at whatever level they want to be involved. And that the future of the story is very, very bright. That there is a lot of cool stuff coming.

And I guarantee you, when I’m talking about this two years from now, when what is my present is your present, you guys are going to be smiling ear to ear that there’s so much cool stuff coming for the story. So if you guys love the story, there is a lot of fun stuff coming. And I’m excited to be part of it, and I’m excited—design’s going to be a huge part of it. And so you will see.

Anyway, as much as I love talking about Magic and Magic’s story, even more I like making Magic, so I got to go, but remember, join me next time, when I’m going to talk about storytelling through design. See you then.