1/9/15 Episode 190: Life of a Card

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’s topic, about a month or maybe two months ago, I had asked the audience for topics they would like to see on Drive to Work. And today’s was one of those. So the topic suggested was a card from beginning to finish.

But instead of talking about a specific card, I want to walk you through—we want to make a card made. I don’t think the average player understands all the different things that go into getting a card made. So I was going to talk today about taking a card and then walking you through all the processes the card has to go through in order, from it being a blank page to being in your hand. What does that entail? So today, I’m going to kind of walk you through the process of how it gets made.

Hopefully I will remember everything. It’s funny because I deal, and I talk about one aspect of the process, which is at one end. But there’s actually a lot of people come after me. After me and my team are done designing a card, there’s a lot that has to get done. So I’m going to try to walk through that today. Like I said, hopefully I’ll hit it all.

Okay. So we start. There’s a set. That has needs. It wants things. So the design team will make a card. Sometimes the card is made to fill a void, sometimes it’s top-down, sometimes it’s just mechanically something that’s interesting. Sometimes it’s just a neat idea you had for a card that you think maybe will fit. Sometimes it’s something synergistically had to be made. But anyway, all cards start because the design team—or there’s cards that are actually created after design hands off. But we’re going to walk you through cards that start from the beginning all the way through the end.

So the design team decides to make a card to fill some void. How does that happen? There’s a bunch of different ways. Usually the way it will work is either the lead designer will give homework, and then everybody will have to do the homework assigned and bring it in, or sometimes we do cards in meetings where we design them sort of all together.

I do both, when I lead my teams, although I really, really enjoy making cards in meetings, it is a very organic process. Some of my favorite cards from a lot of my sets come from there. Like one of my favorite cards from Theros was [Rescue from] theUnderworld. That came from—and Chained to the Rocks! My two favorite cards both came from meetings. And in Innistrad, one of my favorite cards was Evil Twin, that came from a meeting. Army of the Damned came from a meeting. There’s something fun about sort of figuring out how to make it.

Now, when we make it in meetings, there’s two different ways we tend to do it. One is, we’re trying to hit a specific goal, like we’re making a certain cycle or we’re filling out a certain mechanic. Other times, we’ll do a more top-down-ish stuff, like both Innistrad and Theros, I had the creative team liaison bring in a list of names that would make sense in the set and we would design to the names. Like, Evil Twin started as “There should be a card called Evil Twin. Well, what would an evil twin do?” And then we just design the card to match what we think is a good top-down with the name.

So anyway, design will make a card and put it in a file. And we will playtest, and what happens is, I’ve talked about this before, a lot of design, or most of design is iteration. Which means you spend some time making cards, you playtest those cards, you learn about it, usually you talk about it, then you make changes, and then you play the changes and that keeps happening.

So what happen is, you’ll make a card. Most cards do not make it through the process. For example, if you have how many cards get introduced early in design, that get printed, it’s a tiny, tiny number. We make way, way, way more cards than actually get produced. And on top of that, things just get tweaked a lot. I’m not saying we’ve never had—there’s been cards that come in the file early and then they just last the distance, they never get changed, that does happen. But more often than not, things either get replaced or get tweaked, but there’s a lot of changes that happen in a card.

And that will happen for one of two reasons. Number one is, the card just isn’t working. That’s the most common reason for a card to leave the file. Maybe we got rid of the mechanic that has it. Maybe we changed something about the set, where that thing is no longer needed. Maybe the card itself isn’t fun or isn’t playing well.

The other reason that we’ll change cards is we need to make changes, and then changes will result in other changes. A real common thing is, let’s say we need to change a card from 2R 3/2 to 1R 2/1. Oh, well elsewhere in the file we had a 1R 2/1. But that 1R 2/1 is not as important as the one we just changed, so we’ll change the other 1R 2/1. We want to make sure that it’s not too many cards that are too close to each other and that you fill out your curve.

So sometimes cards change not because that card is a problem, but there’s  another card that is too close to it and it’s harder to change the other card. For example, vanilllas are a good example where the vanilla—we want to have a certain number of vanillas, but no one vanilla usually, barring exceptions, is crucial. And so oh, if this gets too close to vanilla, the vanilla could easily change. In general, the vanillas, the French vanillas, the simpler cards are much, much easier to change. They’re in there more to be simple than necessarily a specific combination of numbers with an ability.

Okay. So a card gets made, goes into design, design iterates. It somehow survives the design process, which is quite impressive. Okay, so next it goes to development. Now be aware, in design, the name in design is made up by design, it’s a made-up name. We usually put them in brackets, which says that it’s not a real name.

The creature type, the card type is defined, and any creature type—the way it works is creature types are normally the domain of the creative team, but if mechanically we need a particular creature type, “Oh no, this card has to be a goblin,” we put an exclamation point after it, and that means to the creative people, “No, we mean this. It needs to be this.”

Creature types are this weird hybrid between concerns of design and development and concerns of creative. And so the default is, it’s a creative decision, but unless there’s mechanical ramifications, and then if creative has an issue with the mechanical stuff, like you want to have a 4/4 goblin, and they go “Ughh, 4/4 goblin, that’s not really a goblin,” they’ll come and talk to you. But the exclamation point says, mechanically we need this. Don’t change it without discussing it with us.

Okay, so it gets to development. Now, while cards are in design, we do what we call a flat power level. Which means the goal in design is not about determining the environment, meaning cards aren’t balanced yet. They haven’t got to development. So we’re not worrying about what’s the set’s top power level cards.

Everything is priced by the development representative on the design team, so that it’s playable. When you are playing in a design playtest, the goal is not to play the best cards. In development, you are trying to figure out, “Ooh, what’s the best thing I can play?” because you’re stress-testing the system. In design we’re not doing that yet. We’re just trying to see what are the fun cards, what’s interesting? And if we had made—normally in Magic, they have what they call A, B, and Cs of development, of, As are more powerful, Bs are less, Cs are weaker. And you most always play your As, you usually play Bs, sometimes you fill out with Cs.

If the cards were A, B, C, that just means some number of the cards wouldn’t get playtested. Or would get playtested with much less frequency. So we even all the power levels out so we can play with them all. That doesn’t actually lead to good Magic, but it leads to a good testing environment so we can figure out what is working and what is not.

Okay. Once it gets to development, development then has to start giving realistic numbers to things. So they have to figure out—I mean, they’ll play with our file, the design file for a while, but at some point they’re like, Okay, do we like this card? Not like this card? Should it be strong? Should it be weak? Is this a Constructed card? Is it just a Limited card? So they start balancing the cards and trying to make them fit what they need to fit. So that’s when creature stats and creature mana costs and activation costs, all that gets seriously looked at, and it gets adjusted to figure out where development wants to fit it.

Now, development also goes through an iterative process, which is they are playtesting with the cards. And the early part of development is mostly about figuring out the set. Usually they tackle Limited first because Limited has—just more cards are affected, it more affects the commons and uncommons. It just, as I’ve talked about before, whenever you’re trying to fix something, you always want to put your attention on the thing that’s hardest to do first. Because any fix will limit what other cards can do, so you want to work on your hardest problem first. Limited in draft is pretty complex and requires a lot of the common cards, so usually the early part of development is spent sometimes figuring out that.

Now, at the same time they want to figure out Constructed and are thinking about it, and they’re definitely pushing cards. And what will happen is, at some point during development they will start doing playtesting, and usually early playtesting is either Limited playtesting or it’s where you build decks within just the set you’re playing with. You’re just kind of testing those cards out.

At some point they then bring it in to what we call the Future Future League. So real quickly, for those that have never heard of the Future Future League, development needs to test cards ahead of time to get a sense of what Standard is going to be like.

So originally, development made what was called the “Future League,” which was six months ahead. The problem was, it was enough time to figure out there were problems, but not enough time to change anything to stop the problems. So it was kind of the absolute worst place.

So they then decided to move it forward by six months, so it would be a year ahead, and so they changed it from the Future League to the Future Future League. So it is called the FFL for short, that name has just stuck, so we—no one really calls it the Future Future League, it’s just called the FFL. But that is what is referred to. And there are teams dedicated to different seasons of the FFL. So there’s people that are specifically working on making sure they understand that environment.

Now, be aware that if we are able to completely understand the environment with the small pool of people we have, the millions of Magic players would crack it in a day. So what development is trying to do is create something that’s bigger than what they can solve, but they try to get a handle on places they think players will go.

Now, the hard part is, they don’t want it to be a solvable format, so they’re taking their best stab at where they think things will be. It is very, very hard to predict the future in a way where it’s not prescriptive. I mean, obviously you can make it so it can only go one way, but that’s not how development wants to make sets because the players will just figure it out too easily. So development makes a dynamic system that can go multiple ways, they playtest to get a sense of where they think it’s going, but there is room for error built into the system.

Okay. So meanwhile, a little bit into development, not that far into development, the creative team has to start getting the art ready for the cards. So in order to do that, they have to make what’s called a “card concept.” And what a card concept is, is they have to tell the artist what they’re drawing. What is this card? What is it?

Let’s say for example it’s a card that does four damage to a creature or player. Okay, it’ a direct damage card, but what is it? Is it lightning? Is it fire? Is it earth? Are you throwing rocks at them and it’s some sonic attack? What is it? Are you throwing lava at them? What are you doing? There’s a lot of different ways.

So someone on the creative team has to make what’s called a creative concept, which is, “What is the card? What does it represent?” And then, they write an art description for the artists. So what will happen is, a member of the creative team—now the creative team is broken up into two different sections.  There is the story team and there is the art team. The story team does the words, the art team does the pictures.

Normally the story team is the one that will do card concepting, and the reason is, the story ones are the ones that make all the background in figuring out like, let’s say we’re building a new world. Oh, well who’s on this world? What kind of people, and what are the cities? And what are… and they figure out the world. So the reason they do the card concepts is, they’re the ones that do all the different things that represent the world. And then, once the card concepter is done, he then shows it to the art director.

Now, we have a bunch of art directors right now, so different sets will have different art directors, but whoever the art director is for that project, they are shown the art descriptions. They might tweak them some. Usually when they tweak them it’s to try to make sure they get a stronger visual image. Because what happens sometimes is, the card concepter has a neat idea for what the card represents, but maybe isn’t presenting it in a way that ends up with the best picture.

Now, the goal of card concepting is not to tie the hands of the illustrator. In fact, just the opposite. What the card concepter wants to do is say to the artist, “Here’s the thing, here’s what you need to know.” Now, there is a thing made called a world guide.

Whenever we do a new block, the creative team has some freelance people come from outside, artists, and they spend three to four weeks figuring out what everything looks like. They then make what’s called a world guide, which is a sample of, what do the different inhabitants look like? And the clothing? And the weapons? And the locations? And the maybe artifacts if artifacts matter. So that when you go to artists, they send the artists this world guide, and they might say, “Oh, well he’s holding a spear. Look at page 72. One of those spears.”

And so what the card concepter wants to do is wants to present for the artist everything the artist needs to know without giving them anymore than they have to, to give artists freedom to try to make the coolest image they can.

So what happens is, in order for development to make sure that the card concepting can be done, we tend to do art in two waves. So I’m not sure the percentage, it may not quite be a half, but the developer, the lead developer on the set has to early on figure out the first half of their set that they can start having card concepted.

So what they need to do is figure out what are the stuff that we are pretty sure is going to stay, and/or things we know we’re going to have a card representing even if the card changes some. For example, basic lands tend to get done in the first wave. Legendary creatures tend to get done in the first wave. Things in which we just know we’re going to have that thing. Usually story-related things that we know we’re going to do. Sometimes even there’s a little bit of work done where we’re not quite sure where the picture’s going to end up, but we know we’re going to have a card with that picture on it.

For example let’s say in Khans of Tarkir we knew that the bones of Ugin were going to be important, and that we were going to make a card to represent that. Ehh, what exactly it did mechanically is still being worked out, but we knew that image was going to be there so we did that early.

Okay. So the card concepting gets handed over to the art director. Art director sends it out. So the way art works is, we have freelance artists. And so in order to have something done, the art director will get freelance artists, assign them some number of paintings, and then send them the art descriptions. And the artists will draw them.

So the way it works for the artist is, they have roughly seven weeks, something around there, and what happens is, at some point, not doing art, I don't know what the timetable is, but at some point they turn in a sketch. And the sketch is a check-in to make sure that everybody’s happy on the creative team, everybody’s happy with what’s going on.

So normally what happens is, both the art director and the card concepter will take a look at the sketch to make sure that the sketch is A. looking like it will lead to a good picture, and B., representing the things it’s supposed to represent.

And this is the point where we’ll get notes. So people ask all the time, does the artist see the card mechanic? The answer is no. Mostly because most artists don’t even play the game of Magic, but also because the mechanics itself could change. So there are some key things that matter, for example, one of the rules we have is if you are a flying creature, you must look like you fly in the art. And so we will always say to the artist whether or not a thing’s supposed to be flying.

And there also will be some instruction based on—there’s some general instruction for doing Magic, when you first learn to be a Magic artist, and then there’s the world instructions depending on that world.

But anyway, the sketch will come in, if they like the sketch, then they’ll go ahead and they’ll make the painting. If there’s a problem, they give them notes, then the artist might correct the notes and send another sketch in to show the correction. And then once that gets signed off on, then the artist (???) finish their painting.

So a lot of people ask these days, once upon a time, almost all art was done on canvas or on some physical medium where you would literally mail in the picture. And we used to have a wall where all the pictures would be up, or actually they’d rotate through.

So once the art comes in, by the way, the art has to get scanned in. So we have a whole team that has to get art and that once you scan it in, there is just an art processing you have to do to it. Oftentimes you have to figure out the crop because the dimensions that is drawn by the artist is not always 100% the dimensions of the card. So sometimes there’s cropping that goes on. Every once in a while there’s some color correcting that happens. But anyway, there is a whole imaging team that has to take the art in.

So art used to be done in physical form. It has changed a lot over time. A lot of art now is done digitally, which means—digital art, by the way, for people who think that someone somehow sits at a computer, the way that a lot of digital art works is, you have the same tools that you have to paint a picture, except it’s being tracked digitally rather than being tracked using actual paint. They’re using brushes and things on a… usually it’s a big board that can represent the stuff. So you can paint, and it can feel the brushstrokes and things. So digital stuff is a lot closer than you think to original, as far as how it’s done.

Anyway, a lot of—not all of it, there’s a few that still gets sent in. But a lot more these days are digital. That means our wall doesn’t have as many things sitting up on it. Sometimes if they really want to see something they’ll print it out so that we can see some stuff. Like, there’s a set coming up, I can’t tell you which set or what’s going on, but a very important part of an upcoming set, and so they put all the pictures of the key elements up so we could see them, and it was really breathtaking. Like, you guys, I can’t even talk about what it’s for, but I’ll talk about it in the future, you’ll be really excited about something that’s visually stunning.

So anyway. So meanwhile, the development is still plugging along. Figuring out what they need to do. So lots of change happens during development. Whole cards come out, sometimes mechanics come out. Things will change. So development is plugging away at that. They start doing their FFL testing.

So at some point, once the cards get closer to their finalized form, then it’s time for names and flavor text to start getting involved. And names and flavor text aren’t just in charge of doing names and flavor text. They’re in charge of all naming in general. Which also means they have to name the keywords as well. The keywords are named by the same people that do naming and flavor text.

So what happens is, they have a team of freelance writers that do names and flavor text. They’ll send out cards. Those writers actually see the cards, because when you’re trying to name cards and do flavor text, it’s important to understand the mechanics. So they will break people into groups, not every group sees every card.

And then multiple people see every card, though different people see a different mix. So any one writer is seeing a unique mix of cards, although every card is seen by more than one writer. And then people turn in a whole bunch of suggestions. So “Here’s a card,” and you go, “Oh, here’s five possible names for that card. Here’s three possible flavor texts for that card.”

And then the person in charge of names and flavor text—just as the card concepter will rotate, so will the name and flavor text person rotate. And that person will look through and figure out what’s working, and name conventions, and you have to make sure that like cycles get connected, and there’s lots of work that has to get done. That gets done pretty late in the process.

By the way, as development starts doing its thing, and art starts coming in, development gets its hands tied more, because it has to do with—for example, once an art is commissioned, that’s the art. So if they want to change a card now, they’re married to a certain art that they have to not contradict. That might dictate the size. It’ll dictate things about it.

Now, sometimes we can swap art around. Sometimes, like, oh, well, how about we put art on this card, that will make sense, and then we haven’t commissioned this yet, and you can do that. So there’s a bunch of different things they’ll do. But development gets their hands tied more and more as the set goes along, because more exterior things are happening.

Okay. Meanwhile, while development is going on, or usually during design, we have a check-in with the rules manager to make sure that we are doing things that will work. Then during development, templating starts to happen.

So what templating is, is there’s a lead editor for every set. There’s a whole editing team in R&D. Each set has a lead editor. The lead editor, the rules manager, which sometimes is the lead editor. And the lead development get together. And try to figure out how the cards have to read.

Now, some cards use existing templates, because they’re doing things we already do, those cards are very easy to template. But every set, we always have new mechanics. And we just do new things we’ve never done before. And so the templating team has to spend a lot of time and energy making sure that the cards read correctly and that players will understand them.

It also involves writing reminder text. Reminder text is not as technically tight, so sometimes we can use the reminder text to help people get the gist of what’s going on without having to get sort of super, super specific technically.

So development is going along, at some point art comes in, at some point names and flavor text get done. At some point templating gets done. And then development hands off the file. Actually, development hands off the file before art is done, before names and flavor text is done, and before templating’s usually done.

So they hand in the file. Now, development has some amount of time after the file’s handed in to do playtesting, where they’re allowed to change minor things. Minor things could be numbers, which for development is very important. Numbers are the easiest thing to change because it doesn’t change any of the creative—you have to make sure it doesn’t change any creative elements, but assuming you’re not changing creative elements.

Especially mana costs is the easiest thing to change. So if the card costs four and a red or five and a red, there’s no real difference to the rest of the card. It doesn’t take any more space up. If you’re trying to change it to more colored mana, that could matter, depending on the title, remember that the title and the mana costs have to stay on the same line. If the title’s really long, the mana cost has to be shorter. If the mana cost is really long, the mana cost may have to be shorter. Also, the title cares about the rules text because sometimes the rules text is really busy, it needs a shorter name to fit in the rules text box.

So anyway, development gets their hands off and it goes to editing. Now, it’s editing’s job to make sure the art comes in and the names and flavor text get done. They might give notes on various things. They might give notes back on templating, they might give notes back to development. But at some point, all the cards have to finally get settled.

So once that is done, once all the components are in, then editing sends the cards off to get laid out by CAPS. Matt and I talked about CAPS not too long ago. Creative and Professional Services, I think? They are the ones that physically lay out the cards.

Now, be aware, all the way back in design or early development, if we believe there’s going to be a new card frame, that’s something that CAPS has to know about and that the creative team has to know about. Oftentimes we’ll do something that requires a new frame. Or if it requires a watermark or some kind of symbol. All that has to be figured out early, so that once we get to this point those things are done.

So editing gets all the component pieces, gets it off to CAPS, CAPS has to physically lay out the card. And then editing checks the card to make sure all the components are put together correctly. Including the frame, which is why CAPS is laying it out. Because a card might have the wrong watermark or have the wrong frame. Something about it might be wrong, so editing is the final thing that has to make sure that everything is correct.

And the editing team, just so you’re aware, the editing team is constantly monitoring the file as it goes along. They start editing it usually at some point during development. And even in design sometimes they’ll take light notes on getting general wordings just so we’re playing with something that’s representative of—you want to know how wordy the mechanics are, so sometimes they’ll do passes on it early, so we get a sense of what it will realistically look like.

Okay. So CAPS lays it out, editing does the checks. So once CAPS is done with the layout, and editing signs off on it, now it has to physically get made into a card. So once they’re signed off—now, be aware that I talk about before, CAPS is doing imaging to get the pictures. They have to lay out the card.

They have to—if there’s color adjustment, sometimes there’s print tests. If we’re trying to do something we haven’t done before. Or let’s say we’re doing a supplemental product that has a new type of foiling or something. They have to do tests and make sure that’s all right.

So once it all comes together, and everything is signed off on the R&D thing, now CAPS has to put it all together. Now, there’s something called collation, which R&D helps with, is figuring out what cards go where on the sheet. And so there often is—once CAPS will put together cards, after they put individual cards, that’s one by one, editing looks at them like one at a time on a sheet. Then they have to make actual sheets. And the sheets are, okay, there’s 121, or 110, or whatever, different printing presses print in different numbers. You have to get them on the sheet and then you have to make sure that they’re organized correctly.

So collation, what collation does, and this is often done by a member of R&D, is all the cards are evaluated for how good they are, and in collation you want to make sure there’s a good mix so that every booster pack, roughly in the ballpark, there’s a range, but we don’t want cards that are completely oh my God amazing bonkers, and cards that are completely worthless. We don’t want them too far apart.

Now obviously, there are packs that are better than other packs. The uncommons and the rares and the mythic rares are disconnected, meaning we don’t control which—commons are on a sheet, so certain commons have possibilities of being with other commons at some rate. There’s different sheets and we cut from different places to mix it up to make it very hard to tell. And so there’s a lot of variety of how commons come together. Commons will clump near other commons more often than other rarities because how uncommons are dropped, the common sheets are not connected. So certain uncommons don’t come with certain commons.

Anyway, collation has to be done, and then CAPS has to physically make the sheet. So once the sheet is made, then it used to be there were actual files made. Because it was done with cameras. Now it’s all done digitally. So now they have to get the correct digital files and get them off to the printers.

Once upon a time, all our cards were printed at Cartamundi in Belgium. But since way back then, we are now—I don't know how many we’re at, four, five, six, we made a lot of cards so we have a lot of printers all around the world. And different printers have different requirements, so one of the job of CAPS is making sure that all—we need to print all Magic cards to a singular standard. That if you open up a Magic card, it doesn’t matter where it got printed, it should seem the same.  And we have dealt with a number of different places that like weren’t able to actually meet our standards and so we weren’t able to use them. We have very high standards when it comes to our printing.

And so anyway, so what happens is, CAPS will get the file to the printer. The printer will print them. Then we get logistics. Then somebody has to make sure that the finished printed cards get to—the printer will print the card and then get them into booster wrap.

Sometimes, if things are complex, every once in a while a card has to be made at one printer and then shipped to another printer, and then packaged at that other printer. If we’re doing something special. That’s not normal expansions, but supplemental products sometimes have special things we’re doing. But anyway, that has to get made in a booster pack, or into products, whatever we’re making. And then logistics has to come in and logistics has to get them to where they need to go.

Meanwhile, we have a sales team, and the sales team is making sure that people want to buy the card. We sell to distributors. And the distributors sell to different stores. So there’s a whole sales team that’s working with them to make sure that everybody gets the allocation that they need, and there’s all sorts of stuff that goes on with sales.

Meanwhile, logistics is makings sure that the cards get done, that they get delivered where they need to be at the right time, there’s warehouses and we have to make sure that we have the product, and at the right time it’s shipped so that all the distributors get stuff so they get it into the stores.

Meanwhile, I didn’t even get into Brand. So Brand is in charge of overviewing everything. They’re the ones that have to figure out print sizes, which happens much much earlier in the process, so they’re figuring out how many we’re going to make of something, they’re figuring out when we reprint things.

They’re also in charge of marketing. Which is, if the set’s going to come out, well, we want people to buy that set, so we have to make sure people know about it. And there’s a lot of different marketing we do. We do marketing through the website. We do marketing through—we do a lot of web marketing. The Pro Tour is considered marketing. It’s paid through our marketing budget.

And I’m not even going to get into OP. There’s all sorts of things. When we have a new product, Organized Play has to take a look at it, because they have to make things that tie into it. Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers has to look at it because the product we’re doing is affecting stuff they’re doing. R&D has an entire digital team to integrate. So I didn’t even talk about that, that like early on in the process, digital’s going to take a look at it because they have to incorporate it for the digital thing.

As you can see, when we’re making a card, it’s not just design and development, it’s the creative team, it’s the editing team, it is the CAPS team, it’s logistics, it’s marketing, it’s sales. And there’s lots of other teams that support the stuff we’re doing. I’m not even getting into the HR team, the human resources team, or the legal team, or even the people who clean the office so every day we come in and it’s nice. There’s a lot of different people all working together to make that happen.

A Magic card, or a Magic set, goes through many, many, many hands and lots and lots of people touch it. I know I talk a lot about design and development just because that’s where I work, but I’m hoping what today can make you realize is, there are so many different people that go into making a Magic card. That it is not like, oh, I design something, and development looks at it and we’re done. Design and development are just part of a much, much larger process.

And I didn’t—like, editing for example has to worry about collector number and the legal text line, and there’s all sorts of stuff that goes on. I didn’t even get into the nooks and crannies. But hopefully I gave you a slight overview of just the number of things that have to happen in order for a card to go from something you go, “Ooh, I have an idea” to you open it up and it’s printed in your pack.

But, I have now just parked my car. So we all know what that means, it means this is the end of my drive to work. And it’s time for me to be making Magic. Talk to you guys next time.