9/19/14 Episode 159: Block Plans, Part II

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’m continuing something I did in the last podcast. Which is, I’ve been talking about block plans. And I’m sort of—what I realized was, when I announced the Two-Block Paradigm, the fact that we were ending our blocks being three sets and making them two, I realized that I had made 10 as Head Designer. I had oversaw 10 three-set blocks.

So I thought I would go over the ten of them and talk about what I had done. Now, last time I did the first five. So last time I did Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, Shards of Alara, and Zendikar. But there are five more, and so today I want to talk about those five.

Also, a big shift happened, which I’m going to talk about during this too, which is--this is the shift. The first five were the Fourth Age of Magic design, and the next five were the Fifth Age of Magic design. Well, Fifth Age hasn’t ended yet. But up through the Fifth Age. I don’t know when Sixth Age is happening. It will happen when it happens.

But let me talk about what the difference is between the Fourth Age and the Fifth Age. A lot of people don’t understand it. And it’s worthy of me explaining. And I happen to be doing a podcast. So let me explain.

Okay, so if you look at early design, First Age was just make cards, Second Age was the idea of a block—just of having blocks. Just the mere idea of blocks, mechanics that wove through blocks. The Third Age was about trying to do themes. That started with Invasion. The idea that the block’s just not a collection of mechanics, but it’s about something. The Fourth Age was the start of the block plan, of the idea that we’re going to plot out what we were doing.

Well, the Fifth Age came about—let’s talk about Scars of Mirrodin. I’ll sort of talk about the design of Scars of Mirrodin block and then show how the Fifth Age came out of this.

So when Scars of Mirrodin started, the block originally—the plan of the block was we were going to go to New Phyrexia. In fact, the first set was going to be called “New Phyrexia.” And then, as a surprise twist at the end of the block, you were going to realize that (gasps) “We’ve been here before! It’s Mirrodin!” (dramatic verbal fanfare) Sort of a Planet of the Apes moment where you realize that, “Oh, this place that we think was brand-new actually was a place we knew well.”

And the idea originally was, we were going to do a lot of hints at it, and sort of see if players could slowly figure out that the Phyrexians had taken over Mirrodin. Because when we had originally done original Mirrodin, the plan was to come back to when the Phyrexians were going to take it over, so there actually were seeds planted in Mirrodin.

So seven years later, the fact that we came back and then followed up on that, that is long-range planning. That always excites me when we do stuff like that.

Anyway, so I was really interested in the design of trying to capture the Phyrexians. So I said, “Oh, well the real cool thing about New Phyrexia is, the Phyrexians are back. For those that don’t know, the Phyrexians were major, major villains in early part of Magic. They were part of the Brothers’ War, they were part of the Weatherlight Saga. At the end of the Weatherlight Saga, they were destroyed. But like all good villains, “The end, question mark.” You know. Also, when you can recreate off a drop of oil, it’s tough to wipe out your race.

Anyway, but as we worked on it we found that we were having problems. That the big reveal is not something that we do all particularly well. We kind of have environments and we show you things, and it’s not like in a movie where there’s a moment where we have a reveal. It’s hard to do that.

And then, we also realized that we were kind of skipping over a pretty cool story, which is, how exactly did the Phyrexians take over Mirrodin? That seemed like an interesting story. So what we decided to do was, we rolled back the Phyrexians taking over.

In fact, we came up with an interesting idea. I was talking with Bill about how I wanted to see the Phyrexians and Mirrans have a fight. And then we talked about the idea that maybe the audience doesn’t know what happens. And Bill made a really cool suggestion, which is—well, what if we didn’t tell them the name of the third set? What if there were two possible names, and the outcome of the war dictated what it was going to be?

So it was either going to be New Phyrexia, or be Mirrodin Pure. The Phyrexians take over and turn it into New Phyrexia, or Mirrodin manages to hold off the Phyrexian invasion and it becomes Mirrodin Pure.

And so we did a big thing, like people didn’t know until pretty close before the set came out which it was going to be. We mocked up—we had key art for both and packaging for both. And we really had fun with it.

So the block plan became one of trying to tell this story. And the story was, we meet the bad guy, the Phyrexians, realize that they—we come back to Mirrodin. The first set is kind of like, “Oh, you see what’s going on? Phyrexians are here, but Mirrans haven’t figured it out yet.” And the second set is, “Oh, they’ve figured it out, we’re at war!” And then the third set was outcome of the war. Very clean.

And one of the things that I was trying to do was I really wanted the players, when playing the game, to get a feel of the Phyrexians. And this is how we get into Fifth Age of Design. Is it age? Or stage? I think I go back and forth. [NLH—Yes.]

So the idea was, one of the things that’s important to me—I made this realization, I’ve talked about this in one of my podcasts, which is that what are we trying to do as game designers? We are trying to make a fun experience. We want you to mentally challenge yourselves, we want you to enjoy yourselves, we want emotional highs and lows. We want to make an experience that’s overall fun for you.

Well, fun, interestingly, is an emotional response. A lot of times we talk about sets intellectually. Like how will people think about them. And it dawned on me that, well, we want people to think positively about them, but more than just think about them, we want them to feel a certain way.

And so one of the things I got very into, and I still am obviously, is this idea of when you’re designing, what emotion are you evoking out of your audience? And so okay, we were going to meet the Phyrexians. We were going to reintroduce the Phyrexians as a villain. My favorite villains of Magic history.

And the Phyrexians are supposed to be intimidating. They’re supposed to be scary. They come and they infect whatever they’re doing, and they turn everybody into them, and it’s scary. Like, if you know the Phyrexians invaded your world, it’s bad times.

And not only is it bad times, not only is your world going to fall to the Phyrexians, but you—you personally are going to fall to the Phyrexians. You are going to become them. This horrible, horrible thing that you are so scared of is going to become you. And that’s extra-scary. That’s horror-movie scary. That’s pretty scary. And they make a good villain because of that. 

So I was trying to capture that. And so my team spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the feel of that was. And so anyway, when doing a block plan, I really was trying to evoke the sense of each side.

And the Mirrans, because they’re defending their home world, they had a certain feel. We had met the Mirrans before. I was trying to make sure we maintain enough of the feel from Mirrodin. And so it was kind of like, one side of the conflict is Mirrodin as we knew it. With a few tweaks, but Mirrodin as we knew it. And the other side was the Phyrexians.

On some level, I was very successful. One might say a little too successful. I made them very creepy. And scary. And people were like, “They were creepy and scary.” So…

But, like I said, the big thing about Fifth Age of Design is that the design itself is part of the storytelling vehicle. I mean, if you look at the block design, we are not just doing mechanical stuff. Like, Zendikar, if you look at Zendikar, a lot of block plan was more about getting across this land theme.

Now, Mirrodin had an artifact theme. We definitely had an artifact component. But the artifact-ness was not—it wasn’t like, “Here’s  an artifact-matters block,” which was what Mirrodin was. It was, “Here’s a story, we’re telling the story, the components of the design are helping convey the story.”

But it wasn’t about the mechanics, it was about the overall look and feel and tone, and we were trying to tell a story, and the mechanics  were seen as a component to tell that story, to create that feeling. To evoke that emotion.

And that really is how we start getting into the Fifth Age of Design. Is that we’re not just—I wasn’t just trying to build the mechanical shell that Creative could then layer something on top of. I was trying to make the mechanics a component part of the story. That if you played the game of Scars of Mirrodin, if you pay it, that you have a sense—you could feel what it’s like to be the Phyrexians or be the Mirrans. That we are really evoking through gameplay, story. And that is something that was pretty much--with the Fifth Age of Design, something that really came to the forefront.

And the interesting thing about that was, a lot of times the conflict comes in the end. It’s like buildup, buildup, conflict. We actually put the conflict in the middle of this block plan, and then there’s an outcome. Which is very interesting. The idea where the conflict was done so that the third set could be the resolution.

One of the things Magic has not done traditionally well, we’re working on it, is our resolutions are like, “And… what happened?” Like, “The Eldrazi rise from the ground! And… what happened?” And a lot of our conflicts come at the end, and like, well what exactly happened at the end of the conflict?

And the thing I like a lot about Scars of Mirrodin, you know what happens. There was a conflict. Who won? Ninety-nine percent of the player base who was playing at the time could tell you who won that fight. And also the idea of having the war, and first time we did an experience where we—you could pick the side you were rooting for and playing with it at the prerelease. Anyway, so that  was Scars of Mirrodin.

Next we get to Innistrad. So Innistrad was another set much like Zendikar, where originally the plan was we were going to do two [sets] set in one world, and a third [set] set in a completely different world. Maybe you can see the Two-Block Paradigm slowly trying to seep its way in, although we kept holding off for a little while.

And mostly the reason I think it kept happening is the creative team at the time was not staffed up to do two worlds a year. They have been staffed up. And so it was easier for them to twist the world in which they did some work, but not as much work as building an entirely new world.

So what happened was, originally, for those that listened to my Innistrad podcast, [NLH—Not transcribed] originally, Innistrad , the horror world was going to be a single large set, set in its own place. So Innistrad was going to be the third set. What ended up being Avacyn Restored.

And the first two sets were going to be something else. We never made it. It was the brainchild of Brian Tinsman, I don’t want to go into it, maybe one day. But anyway, what ended up happening is Innistrad got switched because there’s this decision of, “Oh, if we’re going to do horror, why don’t we do horror during Halloween?” And so they switched it.

And then they decided that Innistrad would have two sets and the other would have one set. And then we realized, “Oh, wait a minute, let’s stay on the world,” and the idea of Avacyn getting released would change the world, and so we ended up playing into that.

The block plan of this one, very much once we figured out that we were staying where we were going, was about the plight of the humans. What I did in the first set was that I created—one of the things is I’m a big believer in synergy, in balance, in the aesthetics. And that sometimes, the reason it’s so important is, when you break it it’s very potent.

And so one of the things I did in Innistrad is I weighted things such that white got disconnected. There were cycles that white wasn’t part of. And the idea wasn’t that white was fighting any one thing, it was fighting everything.

And so the idea of the block of Innistrad was the plight of the humans. And so essentially, the story was, “Humans in trouble, humans in more trouble, humans saved.” I’ve mentioned this before, I had a writing teacher that the way they explained story is, “Act one, get your hero up a tree. Act two, throw rocks at them. Act three, get them out of the tree.”

And humans were our protagonists here, so they started in trouble, they get in more trouble, they find their way out. And Innistrad also—like I said, once again we’re in the Fifth Age of Design, I was trying to evoke something.

So the thing that Innistrad was very much trying to do is evoke the feel of a horror film. That I wanted all the different monster types to feel like the monster types. I wanted zombies to act like zombies and vampires to act like vampires and werewolves to act like werewolves. I wanted the play to have a sense of tension to it, and suspense, and dread.

But anyway, very much the block plan of Innistrad was, we are trying to capture Gothic horror. I wanted the entire structure of the set and the story to match that feeling. And I wanted the play to match that feeling.

So you could see, I started shifting away. So like the block plan for Innistrad was very much, capture the look and feel of horror. And that I was trying to, through the design, reinforce that sense. And that’s where the block plan came from, is how do we play up the block sense of the dread that I needed from horror? And right. I needed somebody in plight. And I needed monsters. And all that got built in and it got part of it.

Okay, next. Return to Ravnica. So the interesting thing about Return to Ravnica is, I think there were a lot of pieces going on. And we fell back a little bit—one of the things that I always say is that Return to Ravnica was kind of Fourth Age of Design in a Fifth Age world. It was very beloved. We messed around with the structure of it, meaning instead of 4/4/3 we did 5/5/10, we did a lot of innovative things with the overall mechanics, and the structure of the set.

But if you notice, we didn’t really play up emotion. There’s no emotional response coming out of this set. Return to Ravnica—I mean, each individual guild had a certain feel to it. But one of the things I look back—and like I said, it was very popular, it just—it was not—the one thing that I structurally would have liked to do is, there was nothing tying all the guilds together. All the guilds existed, and they had a relationship to one another, but there was no throughline that like having one thing that all the guilds were interacting with in different ways to sort of show overall context. Anyway.

Like I said, the block structure this way was very structural, which is very different from a lot of the stuff around it. The 5/5/10 of making something where you draft these five, and now you have a chance to explore these guilds. Now draft these five, now you have a chance to explore these guilds. Now bring them all together, and then make a third set that allows you to combine them, that gives you a little bit of everything.

??? I like the general structure. I like the idea of, “Here’s five guilds, draft them, here’s the other five guilds, draft them.” It gave every guild a chance to shine in the sun, it gave every guild a chance to be drafted. One of the problems with original Ravnica is, the first four guilds that were in Ravnica, so Boros, Golgari, Dimir, and Selesnya, you could draft those. But as soon as we started mixing the things, the mix of the cards, you never had a chance to just draft Orzhov or just draft Azorius. You always had to have a third color, pretty much, in the way the draft worked.

And the nice thing about this block is, whatever your guild was, there was a moment it had in the sun where you could draft that guild. Now, that didn’t mean you couldn’t draft three colors, there was other shenanigans going on. But it gave every guild the true chance in draft to allow people to play it. Which I liked a lot.

And like I said, the guilds were so popular that a lot of what was going on was, when you go back—one of the things about returning to a world is, you have to figure out what was the popular thing, why did people like it the time before, and say, “What part must I bring back? What part don’t I have to bring back?”

And some of it is exact. Sometimes specifically you bring certain things back. I mean, in Ravnica we made sure to bring back hybrid and split cards. But other things—like the individual mechanics changed. That all the guilds got new mechanics. Although the feel of the guilds stayed the same. And so a lot of that block plan, we were just making sure we keep that.

Next! Theros. Okay, so Theros, we were trying top-down again. So Theros, by the time we started, it pretty much was about, “Okay….” Much like we took Gothic horror, could we do the same treatment with Greek mythology. Could we get a look and feel out of Greek mythology. Could we get a set.

And so the thing that was tricky about Theros was, it was a three-set block. A traditional large-small-small three-set block. And if you look back a little bit, Return to Ravnica—that wasn’t a normal block. Innistrad, nope, that wasn’t a normal large-small-small block. Scars of MIrrodin—well, we made New Phyrexia a little bigger than normal. So it was the closest. But even that wasn’t quite a traditional large-small-small. Before that, Zendikar. That wasn’t large-small-small.

Get back to Shards of Alara is the last time we did large-small-small, and that had a major gimmick in the third set. All gold, that’s a major gimmick. And so the last time we did something that didn’t have this major gimmick in the third set was back to Time Spiral, which was a crazy—I mean, that was crazy. So like we were doing something  in which we had to make sense of something that we really hadn’t done in a long, long time.

And I think, by the way, if you talk about how we got to the Two-Block Paradigm, how we decided to just get rid of the third set, I think Theros was the nail in the coffin. Because we went back, we said, “Okay. We haven’t done this for a while, we’ve learned so much, we have all this new technology, let’s make a third set work.”

And the answer was, “It’s still really, really hard.” And basically what I said in my State of Design was, I think we made the third set working by taking stuff from the second set. And what ended up happening was, I think the third set was pretty successful, but at the sake of the second set not being as exciting as it could have been.

And this is one way to go about it, saying, “Well, we’ll make our third set better by making our second set a little worse.” But the real lesson there is, you know how you don’t have the third set problem? Don’t have a third set.

But anyway, Theros was an interesting challenge. I was trying really hard to both evoke the sense of Greek mythology and build something that allowed us to get to the third set, where the third set meant something.

So the block plan behind Theros was the idea of, can I hold back a component that will completely change how you look at everything. Because what I wanted was, you played with the first set, you played with the second set, you mostly just added new things, but it wasn’t changing the scope of how you looked at it. And then the third set came out, and man, it changed everything. That was what I was trying for.

And I knew that people wanted  “enchantment matters,” and I knew that as soon as you had—once “enchantment matters” is in the mix, all of a sudden you can start making enchantment-heavy decks. Before that’s true, ehh, there’s not a reason to do it.

And so what we did is, we said, “Okay, we’ll put a lot of things that have enchantments in it, so that early on, look, you can play enchantments, enchantments are important, but then the third set  comes out, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Okay, you want to just play enchantments, now you  can.” And we opened up a whole new option for how people could play with their cards.

Now, on paper, on paper, on paper it sounded awesome. It’s one of those things—one of the problems I’ve found was, I picked something a little too important. We had never really done enchantment matters, we’d done a little bit in Urza’s Saga but no one actually considers that, other than me, an enchantment block.

And so people really had expectations for the first time we do a “____ matters,” that there’s a certain amount of cards that just make them matter. And I knew they wanted that. I knew it was something people wanted. So I withheld them because I was trying so hard for the block to really give an identity to the third set.

Which I did, and on some level I was successful, I made the third set more popular than normal, as well as the entire design team of Journey into Nyx, Ethan Fleischer being the lead designer, but it came at a cost. And it—the block didn’t quite play out exactly the way I was hoping. There was a few other things going on there.

The other big thing is, if you look at like devotion and how I was trying to use the mechanics to tell the story, look, they’re very devoted, things are going a little weird, uh-oh, the people are losing faith in their gods. There was stuff like that.

I am happy that I managed to convey the sense of accomplishment and achievement I wanted from Greek mythology. And that all the different strategies were building up and starting small, building to a giant hero or monster, or a god, that it had that sense to it. And so Theros block really much—I had lofty goals when I set out to do the block plan, I think I accomplished a decent amount of it, but it’s definitely something where everything didn’t play out as much as I hoped.

Finally, we get to Khans of Tarkir. So interestingly—so I’ve explained this, but let me answer the question that people keep asking me, okay. I said, “We’re going to start with a crazy block draft.” So people were like, “Why? Why that?” And the answer was, I knew that it would create a structure that would require us to answer a question. Which is, “Why is this this way? Why does it do this?”

And I knew that those questions would lead us down a nice path because it would force us—I always talk about restrictions breed creativity. And what I like to do as a designer is I put restrictions on myself. I like to say, “Here’s some restrictions that are cool, that I’ve never had it before.”

And I know when I have restrictions that are new, that I’ve never had before, it will force me to find answers I’ve never had before. It will force me to places I’ve never gone before. And I thought this block structure was a neat block structure.

And also, on some level I could read the writing on the wall. I knew that the three-set blocks were looking like they might be on their way out. And so I think that on some level I knew it was a chance to do this.

Now, I don't know if I consciously knew it, because at the time I made it, that wasn’t a known thing yet. But I like to think in the back of my head, that I kind of knew that this was my last chance. So at least that’s what I want to believe.

And what it did was, the structure said, “Okay. You have to make sense of why the first set goes with the second set, and the third set goes with the second set, but the first set doesn’t go with the third set.” It also meant that in order to—the draft strategy said, the second set had to do something very unique. Which is, it had to mean one thing with the first set, and a different thing with the second set. But the cards don’t get to change.

And one of the reasons I put Ken Nagle on it, who after me is my most seasoned designer, is that was a challenge. Trying to make a set in which it both means something to the first set and means something different to the second set.  I mean, I don’t want to get too into that because we’re not there yet. But I’ll hint at things to come.

But anyway, this block plan was, “Let’s make sense of this.” And I got the exploratory design team, I got Shawn and Ethan. Basically what happened was, they had just won the GDS. Ethan won, Shawn came in second. We hired them. We had them for 6 months and we had to judge them to figure out whether we wanted to keep them on.  All internships at R&D basically are, “You have 6 months, show us what you can do.” And then at the end of 6 months we’re like, “Oh, did this work out, do we want to hire this person full-time?”

And so what happened was, I really wanted to put Ethan and Shawn through their paces. We were looking for more vision world-building kinds of skills. And so we said okay, we had a year before design started, so we had plenty of time, and I’m like, “Okay. Let’s experiment. Here are my goals. Here’s what we need. First set and second set go together. Third set and second set go together. First and third set don’t go together. How do you make that work?”

And they came up with all sorts of different ideas. There were a lot of different ideas. A and C were different places, and B was a means to get from A to C. So B was the boat between two continents or something. Something in which it explained why B had a relationship with A, and B had a relationship with C, but A and C didn’t ever get together. We came up with all sorts of different ideas. But in the end… I think Ethan came up with this, is the idea of a time-travel story.

Now, I’m not at liberty—even though the set has come out, we’re early enough in the block, even though I’m doing this way ahead of time—I can’t explain quite the details of it. But I can explain this. We came up with a time travel story that explained the nature of the block. And then, we  used that as the template for how to make the block work.

So the point is, the draft structure was just a beginning to get me to a structure that I liked. And then, that structure dictated how everything was designed. And like I said, this one’s a little trickier to talk about since you guys don’t know all the pieces. But very much—I mean, the part I can say is, in order to make our story work we needed a world in turmoil. We needed a world where the main character got to come to it, or in this case come back to it, and say, “Wow. This is pretty messed up. This is a messed up world.”

And, the thing that we needed to do was, we created factions, we very much knew we wanted sort of to play up the warlords, and there’s a lot of stuff we did that you will see when the whole block comes out. In some level—I mean, Khans of Tarkir is probably the most structured block I’ve ever done. Or at least at the time was the most structured block I’ve ever done.

I mean, there’s a lot of nuance. I will do a podcast after everything is out where I can walk you through and talk exactly the actual things we did. I know it’s a little frustrating when I’m like, talking in vague terms and you guys don’t know enough for me to explain everything.

But, the nature of this block plan was, have an impetus that creates a question, answer the question, with that answer, created the structure I needed to build my set around. My block around. And that’s what we built it around.

Okay. So now we get to recap. I’m close to work. So Scars of Mirrodin, the evolution of Scars of Mirrodin, was really the Fifth Age of Design. Was the idea of invoking the emotion into the design. That’s really what Scars did.

It also was the first set that really, really was telling the story through gameplay in a way—a little more concrete than we had been. You were watching the Phyrexians invade, well you were being the Phyrexians invading. You were watching the Mirrans defend themselves. You were the Mirrans defending yourself! You really got that sense and that feel.

Innistrad came along, and Innistrad was us reclaiming top-down. We had tried to do it with Champions of Kamigawa block, and there were some successes. I know my blog loves to talk about how awesome Kamigawa was. There were a lot of failures, but there were some successes.

But I feel like this was us saying, “Okay, okay, let’s try this again. Let’s just see if we can do top-down correctly.” And I feel like what Innistrad did is, Innistrad just blew the roof off the hinges. Innistrad’s like, “No no no. We can do this.” And Innistrad—in my mind, Innistrad’s probably the best design I’ve ever done. Well, Khans is pretty good too. But anyway.

But Innistrad was definitely something where it really showed us what we could do with top-down design, and how we could incorporate it such that the gameplay itself was part of that feel. That what things were got seeped all the way down through gameplay itself. That the act of gameplay made you feel like people in a horror movie. Whether you’re playing monsters or playing the victims. You got to feel what the people in the horror movie felt.

Okay. Next is Return to Ravnica. That’s a good example of us learning about structure, and about how a block plan—there’s a lot you can do with structure. While there’s things I would have liked to do with that block, I’m not unhappy with all the things we learned about structure.

And it really was—on some level, Scars of Mirrodin really was—us returning to Mirrodin was really—although technically we were, it was not us recreating Mirrodin. Where Ravnica was really us going back to the same world we were before. We weren’t radically changing the world, no one’s invading it. It was a world as you knew it. And the chance to sort of reinvent yourself, when you’re going back to the same place, was interesting. And a lot of the structural things we did. We also cleaned a lot of the things up.

Theros, like I said, was us trying to prove that Innistrad wasn’t a fluke. I feel that we did a pretty good job with the top-down design part. Some of the structural block things, I mean I was trying to salvage large-small-small. In the end, the funny thing is, I think the lessons in the end of Theros was “Get rid of large-small-small.” Not redeem it. I mean, we sort of like—in trying to redeem it, I figured out that it didn’t—it wasn’t—we finally saw the flaws and figured out that we needed to change it.

Khans of Tarkir… it’s tricky. Khans of Tarkir is me learning about archetypes in stories, and how to use archetypes as a tool of design. Not really a topic for this podcast, because—well, mostly because I can’t talk much about most of the details. But I will. I will talk about that in the future.

But anyway, so Scars of Mirrodin, Innistrad, Return to Ravnica, Theros, and Khans of Tarkir were the second five blocks. And so last time I talked about Ravnica, Time Spiral, Lorwyn, Shards of Alara, and Zendikar. So in two podcasts, I walked through all ten of my three-set block block plans.

Hopefully, I hope that you enjoyed these two podcasts, that you got a sense of sort of all the different things that go into actually making the block plan itself. I talk all the time about set design, but this is about block design. Which is a different animal.

But I have now parked my car. Which means it’s time for me to be making Magic. And an end to my Drive to Work. Thank you guys for joining me, talk to you next time.