9/19/14 Episode 158: Block Design, Part I

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 recently, or somewhat recently, I do these ahead so it’s always hard to predict, I had an article where I announced the end of the three-set block. And then when I was thinking back, I realized that I actually, since I’ve been Head Designer, have oversaw the block plan for ten three-set blocks. And I thought, “You know what? I talk about individual sets all the time. I don’t talk block plans all that much.”

So today, and probably next time, will be all about block plans. And I’m going to walk through all the three-set block plans I did as Head Designer, and talk about sort of how the block plan itself came together. Not the individual sets, but how we formed the block.

So we will start with the very first set that I led, the very first block that I oversaw as Head Designer, I also happened to lead the first set, Ravnica: City of Guilds.

Okay. So one of the big innovations, when I talk about sort of changes happen over time, is when I took over as Head Designer, I was very big on the  idea that we needed to do more planning for our blocks. That there had to be more—we had to be careful how we doled things out.

And before that, we had a few blocks that kind of backed into a block plan, but he way we used to do it is we’d do the first set, and then when we were done, we’d do the second set, and then we were done, we’d do the third set.

And sometimes we’d leave something, but it wasn’t really thought out. We would back ourselves into a corner a lot. Like, “Oh, uh-oh, because we did this and this, oh, it would have been nice if we had thought it out ahead of time.” So, when I became Head Designer, I said, “Okay, we’re going to think about this. We’re going to plan our blocks out.”

Okay, so Ravnica, during design of Ravnica, I stumbled upon the—I walked into it knowing that I wanted to do—it was a multicolor block, we knew that walking in. And I liked the idea to separate it from Invasion, which was the previous multicolor block, instead of focusing on playing lots of colors, focusing on just playing two colors. In order to be multicolor it would be the other end of the spectrum. That’s where you needed to be.

And then Brady Dommermuth, who was Creative Director at the time, came back with the idea of, I said I wanted all ten-color pairs to play equally, and he came back with the idea of the guilds. That we were in a city world, and that each combination was represented by a different group.

I loved the idea. The second I heard it I was like, “That’s awesome.” And I’m like, “Okay. That is going to be the backbone of our structure.” And so what I decided was, there was a bunch of different ways to do a block plan. And so I wanted to do an experiment. I wanted to try different ways.

So one of the means that I was interested in trying is what I’ll call the “pie method.” And the idea here is that the block is one entity, and all you’re doing is chopping up the pieces. Like on some level, I’m not sure Ravnica even necessarily had any chronological movement between sets. I kind of feel like all three sets took place at the same time, and we just were showing you different portions of it. That we chopped it up like a pie.

And like four tenths of it was here, and three tenths was here, and three tenths was here. And so the idea was, what if we used the guilds and said, “Okay, let’s show off the guilds.” And the way to do that is, we would emphasize a certain number each time.

Now, remember at the time this was considered a somewhat crazy block plan. In fact—I mean, block plans didn’t exist yet. But the idea that we were going to have ten color pairs, and in the first set, only four of the ten would appear, was considered at the time pretty radical.

But once again, one of the things I was looking at is, how do I make you care about the entire block? Well, if there’s a cohesive whole, and I only give you part of that, I only give you four tenths of it, well, you know what? You want the other six tenths. I knew that if I did a set and there were four guilds, well, humans are pattern completionists.

Like, “Okay, that’s great, that’s cool. What about the other six guilds?” And it’s like, “Okay, well we can pull them out.” And that would be something that’d be cool. That we do something, we give you part of it, and then why do you want to play the rest of the block? Well, we haven’t given you all of it.

And so that was the idea of just the block plan, was the idea that we’d divvy things up. That we’d take it, and then the reason you’d want to go to the next part is because, “Oh, well we haven’t given you everything yet.” That we split it up on purpose.

And really, one of the things that I wanted was, once I knew that I wanted to do guilds, once I wanted to build around guilds, what that meant was, I wanted to figure out things that all the guilds got. And then—like there was a lot of parallel design in the guilds. So that like, every guild got Thing A and Thing B and Thing C and Thing D.

Which meant that if I showed you some of the guilds in the first set, you had some expectations for things to see in the second and third set. But there also was some surprise, because like, “Oh, okay, well each guild has its own mechanic.” I figured out early on that in order to give factions separation and identity, you kind of need to give each one a mechanic. We’ve experimented with not doing that, and obviously Ravnica was the first time we were doing it, that was just the clear and lowest-hanging fruit. So we did the lowest-hanging fruit.

We’ve since gone back and looked, I guess to Khans of Tarkir, I’ll talk about it a little bit because we actually tried it there not to line it up, and it proved to be actually really hard, and it makes it hard for you to identify what the factions are when there’s not a crisp, clear definition.

Anyway, in order to do that, in order to do the parallel that I wanted—because one of the things that people argued is, well maybe what you want to do is put all ten sets in the first set, then all ten in the second set, and all ten in the second set. But what they get—like, they get Thing A and Thing B in the first set, then thing C and D in the second set, then Thing E and F in the third set.

But the reason I was very hesitant for that, the reason that I did not like that plan, was I felt like if I gave you a little bit of all ten guilds, then none of them would stand out. Let’s say you were drafting. Like, none of them would have enough meat to them that you could get a full identity of who they were.

But if I concentrated, if I said, “You know what? I’m only going to do four guilds here. The other six guilds, they get their time later.” By doing that, well, I gave them space so that I actually could give them the room to breathe and for people to see what they were. And so anyway, that was the first block plan. That was Ravnica block.

Okay, next came Time Spiral. So Time Spiral started as a block that was going to be theme-centered. We had a bunch of mechanics, suspend being the major one, but we had a bunch of mechanics that were time-related. And I thought, “Okay, well maybe we could do some sort of time-related block.”

So when I got to the block plan, I was like, “Okay. I want it to be time-related, but there has to be three components to it. Time… three components.” And then it just hit me, it’s like, past, present, future just made a lot of sense.

So if [Ravnica] was the pie model, which was I gave you a unified thing and chopped it into pieces, the next thing was this was a sequential model. It’s like, “Okay, I’m going to take three things that you know in order you know…” When you think of time, time does get chopped up into three components. Past, present, and future.

So I said, “Okay, what we need to do is, to do this, I’ll obviously go in the order you expect them, past, present, future.” And then the idea was to try to find a throughline to connect them. Now, I knew that past, present, future was a nice connector, but it didn’t—I still needed one more thing that bound them together.

And what ended up happening was, while we were working on Time Spiral, it became clear that nostalgia played an important role. That especially when you’re talking about the past, that nostalgia was—a lot of what makes the past the past is remembrance of things. And we had a lot of fun of riffing off the past.

And I’d come up with the Time Spiral sheet, the idea of, “Well, what if the past was seeping into your pack? What if every pack gave you a card from the past, in the past frame, and they weren’t new cards, they were old cards?” And that we ended up with this bonus sheet that had 121 cards, so like every pack had this bonus extra card in it. I mean, it wasn’t—you only got 15 cards. But it—in place of one of the commons you got this card. 

But the thing that was missing was it needed more of a connector. And so once I stumbled on the nostalgia, what I realized was, what makes—okay, nostalgia obviously, the past is defined by nostalgia.

So the interesting thing was, I was trying to figure out how do I make the present and the future work? Well, the present was really tricky, because isn’t every set the present? How do I say, “Hey, I’m the present?”

And then I came up with the idea of an alternate reality present. Where it’s the present, but not as you know it. That it had been twisted in some way. And once I knew that, then I’m like, “Oh, well nostalgia becomes important.” Because if I’m twisting things, then I have to twist known things.

So the timeshifted sheet for Planar Chaos was all cards that you knew, but color-shifted. In this alternate reality, we had changed the color pie, and so these were cards that you knew but not in the color that you knew them.

And then for the third set, which was Future Sight, the same thing, which is—obviously the timeshifted sheet would be cards from the future, much like the first set, the timeshifted sheet were cards from the past, the second were cards from alternate present.

But it was also important to me that I used nostalgia. And what that meant there is that a lot of what was fun for the future was to do extrapolated future off things that you knew from the past. Now, we had some new things, we had some new mechanics obviously. But we also had a lot of, “Oh, here are morph things that aren’t creatures. Oh, I thought maybe one day they’d do that.”

We took a lot of extrapolation. We took cycling and turned it into wizardcycling. We just took different things that we knew. Poison had existed, but we made poisonous. We sort of riffed off known things and then made things that were future things, but part of what made the future work is that you get to see them.

And I usually talk about my team during Future Sight, that when you see a time-travel movie where a character goes to the future, one of the things they always show you are things you know from present-day, but the futurized version of them.

And the reason they do that is, the future means more if you can see the recognizable things, but in a futuristic context. Whenever you sort of see a time-travel movie, they always put a lens on it, which is, “Here’s the past. Things you know but in the past. Here’s the present, and then here’s the future. Things you know but in the future.”

So Time Spiral, like I said, it started as a time block, and kind of morphed a little bit into a nostalgia block. But it also had a nice cohesiveness, which is the past, the present, and the future all meant something. And they had a cohesive quality to them that—I mean, was self-defined. When you saw the past, you had expectations of what the past meant. But anyway, so that was Time Spiral. Time Spiral very much was trying to have a sequential quality to it.

Okay. So the next one after that was Lorwyn and Shadowmoor. So from a block plan perspective, I thought of this as one block. They are two mini-blocks, you could think of each of them as their own block. But the fact that they interconnect with each other makes me feel like, “Oh, well, really this was one mega-block in which it was made up of two mini-blocks.”

So the impetus for this set started from Bill had wanted to do a fourth set. And two years earlier—because at the time, every other year was a core set, and then every other year we wanted to do something else. And two years earlier it had been Coldsnap.

And so Bill came to me and said, “I’d like to do another fourth set. Do you have any ideas?” And I’m like, “Well, here’s what I’d like to do. Could we build it in so that the fourth set is not external to the block, but part of the block?”

Because with Coldsnap, it had had some problems. And I said to him, “Next time we do this, could you let me incorporate it?” And so Bill’s like, “Okay, you said you wanted to incorporate it. I’m telling you ahead of time, incorporate it.”

And so I was trying to figure out how to have a fourth set. So one of the problems I talk about (???) is the third set problem that we had back when we had blocks of three sets. Because the third set was always problematic. So I knew doing a fourth set really was pushing it. If doing a third set is pushing it, doing a fourth set is really pushing it.

And that’s when I came up with the idea of mini-blocks. Instead of doing… flash to the future! Instead of doing one three-set block, we did two two-set blocks. And—but I knew that I wanted the sets to have a relevance to each other, meaning I wanted each one mechanically to be its own thing and drafted by itself. But there was an overlay where if you played them together they connected. I knew they had to play together in Block Constructed, and obviously in Standard.

And so the idea we came up with was, what if there was some world in which some major change happened to the world? So we saw the world before the change, we saw the world after the change. And that way we could mirror it.

So this block plan is what we call a mirror, where we show you one thing, and then we go through a change and we mirror that thing originally but through the lens of the change. So the idea was, we’re going to show you Lorwyn, then we’re going to show you Shadowmoor. And that Lorwyn did a lot of stuff to set up things that Shadowmoor paid off on, and Lorwyn’s like, “These are the kind of creatures that are here.”

And so one of the things we did was, most of the creatures stayed the same, but we changed them a little bit. We shifted some colors. We shifted sort of the look and feel of them. So the idea is, as Lorwyn shifts into Shadowmoor, you could see traces of Lorwyn, but then also Shadowmoor had its own identity.

And the idea for that block was I wanted to do mechanical things that could overlap with one another. So the idea was, we had walked in with the idea that Lorwyn  would be a tribal block. That was the plan when we started. Well, tribal block is really nice because the next block could give you things for your tribal deck without necessarily needing to have a tribal theme.

Now, it’s funny, one of the decisions I made was, I made the conscious decision to shift the creature types some. So that every creature stayed in one color but shifted into a second color. In retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. [NLH—No, it was super cool.] I mean, I was trying to show the shift of the worlds. But the sets would have played nicer together if I hadn’t shifted where the colors were, so maybe that was a mistake. I’m not 100% sure.

Probably what I should have done was not removed a color but just added a color, and then Shadowmoor had things that were in three colors. We kind of backed into that a little bit. The third color definitely showed up a little bit. I think what we did is, it shifted to two colors, but we made some hybrid cards of the remnants from Lorwyn. Probably in retrospect I could have handled that a little better.

And then the idea was, we wanted something else that would matter in the [second block], and that ended up being color. Because Shadowmoor ended up being a hybrid block, and hybrid very much is about color. And so the first [block], hey, the cards all had color. The second [block], hey, the cards all had creature types. We could line them up and make them play across each other.

But the (???) for that block plan, the idea behind Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, was that I wanted to build something up, get you used to it, and then make it go through a shift and make you realize, “Oh, I recognize the things, but they’ve gone through this change.”

One of the big things, one of the tricky things about doing block plans, is change is important. That Ravnica’s kind of the exception to the rule, where really nothing changed, it was just you seeing the whole block. And we were able to chop it all up into pieces, so it took the whole block to see all the pieces. Usually, during a block, there is some kind of change. We’re trying to tell a story. Usually something’s happening with some global scale.

So normally during a block, part of the block plan also is showing whatever the change is. So with Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, obviously, there was this giant shift in the world. That the world literally changed from what I’ll say the day version to the night version.

And the creative team worked really hard, and we worked with them, to make sure that we—one of the things in screenwriting that they explain to you is, wherever you’re going to end your story, you have to figure out how to get your beginning of your story as far away from the end of the story as possible. To give yourself a lot of room to get there.

So for example, if at the end of the story, your character is very generous, beginning of the story, they’re probably not. A Christmas Carol’s a good example, where like at the end, Ebenezer Scrooge has to realize the error of his ways. Well, you’d better start him—he’d better be really, really a penny-pincher in the beginning, to show the change in him. That if you want him to leave being miserly, he has to start really miserly. And obviously, he does. It’s almost a joke how miserly he is when the story begins. But that’s kind of how you need to play it.

So Shadowmoor and Lorwyn is the same thing, which is in order for Shadowmoor to be as dark as we wanted, we needed Lorwyn as light as we wanted. And we wanted it very light in tone. Not just in light, but it was very fairy-tale-ish, and there wasn’t a lot of harm. Like maybe somebody throws a fish at you. It wasn’t—the things that were mean were tricky, but not as vicious as they become when they get to Shadowmoor. And anyway, so that block was very much all about trying to create this parallel structure with the mirroring.

Okay. The next block was Shards of Alara. So Shards of Alara’s interesting. So Bill Rose, who’s the VP of R&D, was the lead designer for Shards. Bill really had a vision for the block. And so I let Bill run with this one.

So Bill really loved the idea of having a set that was all multicolor cards. But Bill realized that you couldn’t just start there. That a large set was going to be too many to function, and having the set in which there were no—starting with just multicolor, you’d be missing some key ingredients that you needed.

But Bill said, “Okay, well what if we built toward a set of all multicolor?” And so Bill’s master plan was to try to create a world in which you could then end up with a set that was all gold. That was the plan. And so what Bill did was, he decided that because it was a multicolor set, and we had done five-color in Invasion and we had done two-color in Ravnica, that he wanted to try three-color.

And so the plan was that we’d start with three-color, then in the second set we’d ramp up and go up to five-color, and in the third set we’d give you all these gold cards and give you the opportunity to draft smaller numbers of colors if you wanted to. You still could play five-color, but he enabled you to probably be able to pull off playing two-color. That you could play two-, three-, four-, or five-color.

And so that was a block plan that was very much—it was building towards something, meaning he had a goal, he wanted that to happen, and so he maneuvered things around it so that the block plan led toward the goal that he wanted. He wanted a finale all-gold set. And so he said, “Well, what do I have to do to make that happen?”

And one of the things I should stress as I talk about the different block plans is, each block plan dictates different things. The Ravnica block plan was about separation of the guilds. And so it was very important to maximize showing off the guilds. Where Time Spiral was trying to show this evolution, and that we were trying to take different themes and then put them through different filters. Where Lorwyn was all about the dichotomy between the two worlds. And Shards was building towards something.

So each one of those designs—so I talk about this all the time, which is one of the reasons I like to have radically different block plans is that A. I just want things to be different, and B. it enables me as a designer or whoever also is designing, to be able to approach it from a situation that’s different than every other set. That’s why I always like to start my set with some challenge that I’ve not done before. Because if I revisit a challenge I’ve done before, I just tend to solve it in similar ways.

Okay. So the next set is Zendikar. Okay, so Zendikar is interesting. Zendikar started with the following, premise, which was: Bill—we had been concerned about third sets forever. Rightfully so. And so Bill was very concerned about how we would make it work.

So what Bill did was, he said, “Okay. What if this year, we did a block in which it was two sets, and then a block that was one set. That was all by itself.” So as you can see, by the way, it’s funny—as I walk through the block plans, you can see what we do with Shadowmoor, you can see what we do with Zendikar.

The big change, the two-block paradigm that we’re moving toward, it should be clear that like it didn’t come out of nowhere. Almost if you watch what we’ve been messing around with and how we’ve been working with block plans, we’ve been trying to solve the third set problem by shifting how blocks function. And the model that we moved toward, like I said—we literally did it in Lorwyn—I mean, the two blocks were connected moreso than future blocks will be connected.

And even something like Zendikar, the original idea was that the third set was going to be its own world. Now—so the block plan was, originally we were going to do two different worlds with two different themes. And Bill—I think what happened was, I had pitched an idea of a land block. I thought there was a lot of extra mechanics involving land that we could do.

Well, actually, that’s a little unfair. I knew there was a deep design vein of place to explore, and I liked the idea that sometimes our blocks are about top-down, sometimes our blocks are about exploring different things. Sometimes they’re exploring themes. This was during the period where we were more into doing themes.

But I liked the idea, here was an utapped theme that we hadn’t done, that I thought had a lot of potential. And so I convinced—at the time, Randy Buehler was my boss, that we should experiment. That we needed to have exploratory blocks. Here’s a block doing something we’ve never done before, that we needed a block like that.

And Bill was a little skeptical on my “land matters.” So what happened originally was, what we did was, he said, “Okay. You can have two sets, and then we’ll have something different in the third set.” What ended up happening was, the creative team came up with—built a world, and then trapped the Eldrazi inside of it, and they’re like, “Oh, we can do this pretty awesome world where these alien creatures are trapped inside the world. You know what might be cool? What if they got out?”

And then they said, “You know what? We think we can build a third set that would feel different and have different mechanics, it would be a creative that justified different mechanics, but would have a different feel to it.”

And so Rise of the Eldrazi ended up staying in Zendikar. But we’re like, “Oh, well, the rise of the Eldrazi is a different enough thing that we could with a straight face change the mechanics.”

And so what happened was, in that set, the block really was us building up the world kind of going crazy, and then a payoff with Rise of the Eldrazi in which it shifts gears completely. What goes on in Rise of the Eldrazi is like, “Forget everything.” You know, the first two sets is people surviving the world, and then the third set is “Our world? That’s not the problem. Survive that.”

And so the block plan—it’s interesting, because if you lok at how the block plan actually worked, for all intents and purposes mechanically, we really did separate the third set from the first two. And in retrospect, I think the problem was that we sort of connected them as a block but didn’t. And I think that was the problem.

Like, I regret for example not having—we should have had some allies, I mean maybe not with the ally mechanic, but just creature type—ally. Having more allies. Here’s all these people fighting the Eldrazi. Maybe they’re all allies with each other.

And so one of the flaws there was, I did not connect the block as much as I should. And the lesson there was, it has to do with how people perceive what you’re doing. If you stay in the same place, that gets perceived as there’s a connectivity to it. You’re in the same place with the same people and the same things. There needs to be more continuity.

And one of the reasons we moved to the two-block paradigm is the idea that if we want the third and fourth set to feel different, well, don’t stick around. Go somewhere else. If you want it to feel like two different blocks, then act like they’re different blocks.

And for us, block has always been defined by—our mostly been defined by locale. Not always, I guess. And so the idea now is, we go someplace, we go there for two times, and then okay. For the next second half of the year, we go to two other sets in some other place. And that really is the way to feel like we’re doing two unique different blocks.

Okay. So it’s funny, as we’re driving, I’m realizing that I have enough content for two podcasts and not just one. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to continue talking about the first five, and wrap it up, and then next time I will talk about the second five. I’ll talk about sort of where the block plan, it came from them.

So one of the things that’s very interesting, as I go back and look at this. The historian in me sort of can’t not look at the history. If you notice, what’s going on here is—and in some ways it’s a neat divider, because the first five sets were very theme-based. Ravnica started by going, “We’re doing multicolor.” Time Spiral was, “We’re doing time-theme-based mechanics.” Lorwyn started as tribal. Shards of Alara started as multicolor. Zendikar started as a land block.

That each of these sets were very much about trying to play up a theme. And that there definitely were elements built in, and I’m not saying there wasn’t story built in. But not in the same way. When we get—next time, when we see the second five blocks, that’s when we’re doing a lot more to build stuff in.

And there’s actually a big shift. When I talk about the different stages of design, Scars of Mirrodin is where I start the Fifth Age of Design. And so Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Shards, and Zendikar are the Fourth Age of Design.

So interesting as I talk about this, that my tenure as Head Designer over three-set blocks, over ten years, that actually half of them were the first age and half of them were the second age. And I think, hopefully, that stems from the fact that I learned from doing the first five of how better to do the second five.

And that one of the things that’s interesting is, I think each one of these blocks taught us something very important. So let me talk about the lessons of the block as I finish up here to go to work.

The lesson of Ravnica was that you don’t need to give everybody everything. That it’s okay to leave the audience wanting more. It was a very big risk at the time, but it paid off huge. And Ravnica’s probably our—the setting is our popular setting, people just love the Ravnica blocks.

And I think part of it is just really the idea of, we have identity, we have things mean something, they’re relevant to our players, and then we take the space and time to give each the due it needs. And that we don’t need to give you everything at once.

The lesson of Time Spiral was—I think that the importance—well, one of the big lessons is, be careful with your themes that—I think while we found a way to tie them all together, and thematically it fits, we went so broad with our theme. And I like the fact that each set had its own identity. That is cool. But we really, really stretched what was going on.

And I guess I mean at some level, the block plan wasn’t at fault. As much as we were not keeping complexity in check.  But I will say this, that I made a block structure that was so forgiving and so flexible that it allowed us to overstuff it, and on some level, it kind of hid how stuffed it was. Because everything had such a strong theme to it, that when you sort of stood back and looked at it, and it wasn’t until you dug in deep that you realize, “Holy moly, we just crammed this too full.”

Now, I understand if you were a die-hard experienced player that just got it all, it was amazing, because normally we never make sets as dense as we made this block. But for the average player, it was a little too dense.

Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, I mean obviously the big lesson of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor is that we were not tied to Large/Small/Small. That we could break out of that confine. And really, if you look at Lorwyn, like we talk about the two set paradigm, Lorwyn just did it. Where we’re going—now, understand, I designed it as a mega-block, meaning the two mini-blocks were connected. Where moving forward that’s not quite the case. Each block will be its own block, like now blocks are the normal blocks.

But it did set that set up. It did change—it did challenge the idea of what could be where. And that the idea that a large block could be in the spring. Or that you could do a block that’s just two blocks. Or that you could put two blocks in a year. There’s a lot of things that we would later obviously come back to that really—this was the block plan that sort of opened up that idea.

Shards of Alara was just exploring the idea that if you’re going to lead towards something, that you need the payoff to get there. And the idea that if you want to do something cool, you have to do the setup to get there. And that a lot of times, we sort of would back into things, and then not quite have all our ducks in a row. And that really, the lesson of Shards of Alara is, you need to prepare. That if you want to do cool things, if you’re going to create payoff, you need to lay the foundation for payoff.

That if you look at a story, like a movie or something, that when someone does the jaw-dropping moment, it’s important that you look back and everything in the movie supported that moment. That it wasn’t like, “Huh?” It’s like, “Ohh, how did I not see that?”

Zendikar—the lesson of Zendikar was—in some ways, I think the lesson of Zendikar block was you need to be cohesive in your blocks. In that even if you’re going to do crazy things and change things, that if something is set in the same world, the expectation is that there is some cohesiveness between it. And that as much as Rise of the Eldrazi  was trying to be its own thing, the lack of cohesion with the rest of Zendikar felt wrong. And I believe it was a mistake.

And so the big lesson there is, when you’re doing a block plan, there’s a certain amount of distance you can get within the block plan, but you still need to have—if the audience perceives it as a single block, that you need to make sure that there’s some connectors. Even if you’re going to make some space with the mechanics. And I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong. I just look back at like Rise of the Eldrazi and like, “Oh, there’s more continuity we could have created.” The lack of continuity was a problem.

Okay. So, as I explained, that was the first five blocks of the block plans of my time—not my time, my time’s not up. But of the ten three-set blocks that I did.

So next time, on Drive to Work, I will talk about the second five ones. And these are the five that introduced the Fifth Age of Design. And I’ll talk about that. But, I’ve just parked my car. So that means it’s time for me to be making Magic.