Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1140: History of the Color Pie

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

I've talked a lot about the color pie over the years. In this episode, I talk about its history and how we've treated it as it has evolved over time.

I'm pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work Okay, so today Is a topic near and dear to my heart the color pie But instead of talking about the color pie, I'm going to talk about the history of the color pie So I'm gonna go all the way back to alpha and sort of talk about the color pie as it evolved over time So this is I like doing history podcasts the way back to alpha and sort of talk about the color pie as it evolved over time. So this is I like doing history podcasts where I sort of talk about how things came to be. I like talking color pie. Why not combine them? So this is your historical color pie

podcast. Dun dun dun. Okay. So let's go back to the very beginning. Richard the Garfield the very beginning. Richard the Garfield creates Magic the Gathering with Alpha. Now the color pie exists for a very important reason. I talk about this a lot but it's important to this particular story. When making a trading card game Richard had what he referred to as the Queen problem and the idea is okay I'm making chess and I'm making different pieces you can choose. Why won't, you know, except for the king you have to have for the winning condition, why not all queens? Why not play with nothing but queens?

Why bother with a pawn or a rook or a knight? Why bother? Why wouldn't you just play with the best cards? And the solution to that was a twofold solution. One was existence of the mana system, so that different cards have different value at different times. A one drop is very powerful in turn one,

but kind of weak late in the game. Where a real expensive card isn't useful early in the game, but can be very powerful late game. The second thing he did is he made the color pie. And the idea of the color pie is, let me take all the different things that you can do and give you them up. So that if I wanna do a certain thing, that's in one color, but one

or another thing is in a different color. And the way the mana system and the color pie work is they put pressures in different directions. The mana system makes you want to play less colors and the color pie makes you want to play more colors. And that tension does a lot of good for the game. So early on, okay, so now another important thing to understand about about magic, early magic is Richard Garfield was not designing magic in the sense that we now know it. In the phenomenon that became no one, no one, no one assumes that their game becomes this Giant thing you he was making a normal game like any other game that would be in the game store

and so his expectations and a lot of the things he was planning for Assumed a nor it was a normal game and what that meant for a couple things first and foremost was The number of cards that existed. So original Magic had just slightly under I think 300 cards, Alpha did. And then the idea was hey maybe this game sells well enough that in two years we put out an expansion. That is how normal games kind of work. That you sell the game and then the game is popular over time and that usually takes a little while to come to fruition, then maybe make a second set. And Richard had the playtefters working on other stuff.

The idea that one day we need expansion was known. The speed by which, you know, magic, the early magic basically was they would make magic and they would sell it on a blink of an eye. So they'd make even more magic and sell it on the blink of an eye and that continued for a while In fact, it wasn't until fallen empires Which was? Over a year later. So magic came out in the summer of 93 Fallen empires came out in the late fall of 94

It wasn't till fallen empires that they were able to print as much as the demand. So a lot of early magic, so I guess the point I'm trying to make here is a lot of the goal of the color pie was a little bit different in the early days. Mostly so the idea when Richard first made the game was, I'm making a game that people are going to buy in the game stores, they're going to take it home, they'll play with their friends, that will be their play group, that is the environment we have to worry about because that's going to be the environment that people play. So there were three big things that Richard really treated differently than they needed

to be treated in the long term. One was the power level, one was the rules, and one was the color pie. The idea when he sort of first made the game, so let's walk through those three things and sort of talk about the mindset. The idea of power level was, look, high variance, like Richard didn't think of this as being a tournament game. The idea was this was a fun game, you're playing at home with your friends, maybe you own 100 or 200 cards

and you're playing with three other people. The idea is the people that you are playing with and the amount of cards that exist in that environment, if you make a card that's very powerful and stuff to recall, let's say, there's only so many, like maybe in your playgroup, maybe, maybe, maybe there's one of them, you know, and probably a lot of playgroups, there's zero of them. So the idea was, yeah, there's high variance, but in the environment that Richard was designing for it didn't matter that much, you know You know know the idea that someone would have a deck full of all the powerful cards

That that was beyond what the game essentially was going to be And Richard did understand like Richard did talk about well look this system breaks down a little bit if the game's wildly Successful, but hey if the game's wildly successful, but hey, if the game's wildly successful, we can solve it then. You know, you can't make a game assuming what happened to magic happened. So power level's like, I'll make powerful cards, but in a play group, maybe your deck has one

really powerful card, the variance is gonna be fine, and there wasn't the turn of structure, there wasn't things that high variance caused problems with. The rules were done very card by card. We want to make each card as flavorful and as cool as it could be. So the rules really like, here's how this card works, here's how that card works. And in Richard's mind, it wasn't that it was important the rules were all sort of, like every card had clean, clear, exact rules.

Richard thought that the combinatorics of the game, that the cards mixing and matching, would make weird things happen. And to Richard, figuring out what the answer is, it wasn't a matter of looking it up. Remember, this is really before the internet was a thing. It was about you and the people you're playing with, figure out what you think happens. Like Richard really thought that a lot of the novelty of the weird interactions was that you the players could have fun sort of discussing what you think happened. Oh well you know and so Richard understood that the rules

were a little loosey-goosey in that, you know, there wasn't the structure, like later a lot more structure we built into it. But early on it started like, look, we'll give you the basic rules and if weird things happen, figure it out. And the cards, they were trying to maximize the cards being cool and vacuum. That this card, so each, the rules were made for individual cards. And so for the first few years of Magic, it was very much when you make rules, it's like, it was a very abandoned approach because like, well, here's how this card works. And so as I'll get to it, it was a little harder to follow the rules in a big way. Finally, the color pie.

Once again, it's a lot more Richard just wanted to separate the cards. He just wanted to make sure that different effects went in different places. And so he clearly thought through like, okay, this color does that thing. But there was a lot of, a lot of it was like, well, I have a card, here's the flavor. Okay, what color most matches that flavor? And it wasn't, there wasn't as much mechanical definitions.

It was more like, I want to separate things just so there's different places. But then you have strengths and weaknesses of colors that wasn't really baked in now There was things like ally and enemy and you had cards that helped your allies and hurt your enemies Especially hurt your enemies that was built into the game And there definitely was like all blues Counterspells and like there was, certain colors did certain things. That was from day one. And the mere essence of the idea of colors,

like before Richard made Magic, he made a game called The Five Colors. So when Richard came up the idea of a trading card game, he didn't make a game from scratch. What he did was he took a game he had made for some other purpose and repurposed it. That game was called Five Colors five colors was based on a book I think he read

And the five cars magic were part of that game the idea like the sort of the precursor to the color pie was baked into that game And the idea that a color said enemies and allies that that was all baked in and The colors the reason that Richard Roy liked him was, look, there was a basic idea of what they were that just stemmed not from magic itself, but from, like if I had to say white magic, what do you expect white magic to be? Hey, a lot of what white magic is, you kind of intuitively get a sense. You know, oh, it's the chivalrous, goody two shoe army, like the things you start getting

for white come to you. And then a lot of the idea of the color choice was playing to things that just thematically were obvious that really were flavor to unto themselves and You know a lot of the color pie was just imbuing things with flavor Okay, so that is early magic the first probably couple years of magic look Like I said magic was struggling to just keep up. Richard, for example, magic did so well that Peter went back to Richard and said, you got to make an expansion. And Richard very, very quickly made a rabie knights. I mean, he made it. I don't know exactly, but in a very short amount of time, he made

a rabie knights. Um, and a lot of early magic was just scrambling to get sets out. So early magic, they weren't thinking big picture. They were just so caught up in the, okay, we just got to make sets. Now eventually what happens is magic starts getting big enough, they can hire more people. And so the sort of second wave of R&D, of magic R&D, was myself, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jockeish. And then about a year later we hired Henry Stern. myself, Bill Rose, Mike Elliott, and William Jocish. And then about a year later, we hire Henry Stern. The five of us were kind of,

basically what happened was a lot of the people that had been working full time on Magic, Richard, Scaff, Jim, they wanted to do other things. Magic was doing, I mean, Wizards was doing other things. Richard was making other trading card games. And so they hired the five of us to be the people who day in, day out were doing magic. Like for a while, the five of us were every,

every development team was the five of us. Early on, the designs came from outside. Eventually starting in Weatherlight and Tempest, we start internally making them. But before that, there's a lot of teams that Richard or Peter or somebody had talked to that were designing stuff that were turning them in. Like the very first set I worked on was alliances

that was done by the East Coast place afters, Scafolias, Jim Land, Dave Petty, Chris Page, and they designed it externally, we were developing it internally. and they designed it externally we were developing it internally. Okay so once the the the five of us sort of got the thing that we really took really seriously was the idea like okay magic was not designed to be sort of the phenomenon it became and Richard like I said Richard had said well if it's wildly successful, hey,

we'll solve it then. Like he's like, hey, being wildly successful isn't a problem. We'll have more resources. We'll figure it out. Well, we were the people who had to figure it out. And so really the thing that we had to start doing, the big picture thing we had to start doing was there needed to be larger structure. That the idea of making choices on a card by card basis

is fine if you're just making a casual game that people are playing at their kitchen table. But we were not making a game that had sanctioned tournaments. There was a pro tour. There was a lot of structure built into this. And the idea that I would go to the game store and play with somebody I didn't even know, like we needed things to be a little more ironclclad and we were making a lot of cards. Like I said Richard's original

thumbnail was like hey maybe before the game's over I'll make a thousand two thousand cards. We were making that many cards a year you know and so we needed to change structure so that we we allowed ourselves to design things and make things. So like the need of structure is both external for the players to help guide them and internal for us to help us make sets. So like I said, there were three big things that needed to be figured out. One was power level.

And the answer to that was, let's start hiring people solely for their ability to understand power level. On some level, Henry Stern was the first person. We started hiring off the Pro Tour. We started hiring people who had shown they were really good at understanding power level of magic. That to be good as a pro player you need to figure out what the strong things are and play those things. So let's take people with those skills and apply them to magic. So we started working on development by just bringing in people who could focus on that. And we started making heuristics.

We started like, for example, we started grading cards and how powerful we thought cards were. Like we started doing more methodical play testing. Like we did a lot of things over the years to start figuring out like how do we take the system such that we understand and that we have even keel on our power level works that we're not power creeping. We call the Escher staircase the idea that you keep moving around where you raise the power where you lower power other places so there's always something new and powerful every set but the overall power level isn't going up. Anyway, we figured that out. For the rules, really 6th edition rules, spearheaded by Bill Rose and Joel Mech of let's make iron

clad rules, let's figure out how the game works, let's stop making band-aids to the rules and just make a uniform, concise way. And then when we design cards, we design cards to that system. We design cards to follow that. Sixth edition rules majorly overhauled the rules and really got them to a place where, hey, if I know the rules and I read a new card, most of the time I can figure out how the new card will work. I don't need to know every card in the vacuum.

I just need to know the rules as a whole. Okay, which brings us to the color pie. So the first thing that I did, so my background real quickly for those who don't know this, my mom Lynn, I mean she's retired now but was a psychologist and I grew up in, you know, learning about my mom's job and I was always fascinated by psychology. In fact, when I went to school, one of the things in my short list that I said, maybe I want to study was psychology. I really liked psychology.

And if you look at just the history of my artistic creations in college, I talked about a play I did, which is called Lego, My Ego, where it's about a person's emotions arguing about what's going on. The trading card game I made that I've yet to get published is called Mood Swing. it's all about you playing emotions. I'm very, very into psychology.

In fact, after I started R&D, I'm the one that made the psychographics. Timmy Tammy, Johnny Jenny, Spike, meaning, okay, I came into a place where most people making magic cards were mathematicians, and I was like a word person and a psychology person, And I was like a word person and a psychology person. And I'm like, you know, I want to think about how, how people play.

Like the whole idea behind the psychographics is what makes players like a card? What are they looking for? And the idea that there's different kinds of players that want different kinds of things, that different players have different psychological reasons for playing, that, you know, I really was a big champion of that idea.

And because I was a word person, I really wanted to start generating words. So we'll get to that in a second. So one of the big things I did was we realized that for a while, we just did things in the color that they had been done. That if alpha or early magic did something in the color, that's where it was. And eventually we're like, okay, the color pie is not perfectly balanced. Certain colors were high, certain colors were low. And so we redistributed things a little bit. For example, we made green the center of artifact destruction rather than white or red. We moved like temporary theft into red. Like we we shifted some stuff around to figure out, partly it was a matter of balancing things, but also I

really I took a great interest in the color pie. I was it was the thing that most fascinated me about the game. And so just like Bill sort of took the rules under his wing I took the car apply under my wing and so I I spent a lot of time and energy like I wanted to understand the psychology like what does it mean to be white what does white care about you know what is blue what is black what is red was green what are all the philosophies mean and then I looked at why do the colors that are allies like each other why are the colors that enemies hate each other like what what is that I spent a lot of time talking on the alliances and the the conflicts and I spent a lot of time trying to understand that and because I was a

word guy I started inventing words I started using words to shape the idea of of the color pie as being a thing of importance and now early on I was somewhat alone meaning There are a lot of people that were more like we got to fix up the rules. I was kind of like hey we have to fix up the color pie and People's attitudes were fine

like, hey, we have to fix up the color pie. And people's attitude were fine. You do that mark. That was sort of, you know, but then we'd be in meetings where we would want to do something that I thought was like out of pie. So talking about vocabulary. So I came up with two terms that we still use to this day's break bends and breaks. And the idea was that the color pie is this important resource that I, I mean, to this day believe it, I think it's the underlying system of everything. The mechanics are built off the color pie, the flavor is built off the color pie. It is the thing that's most unique to Magic. It is the most, anyway, like you ever heard me talk about like the golden tray factor, the three great ideas that Richard had, the genius ideas,

the idea of a trading card game, the idea of the mana system and the idea of the color pie. And the color pie was something that I was just enamored with. So the idea of a break and a bend, for those that haven't heard this terminology, was the idea that, look, we're gonna make new sets, we're gonna push in directions we haven't pushed before,

and different sets are gonna to have different themes. This is a graveyard set, this is an artifact set, this is an enchantment set. We're going to push in different directions and that, at the time, not every color did things in, like if we made a graveyard set, okay, well green and black do a lot in the graveyard, but what about blue or red? And so we started sort of figuring out, okay, you know, part of figuring out the color pie was figuring out what did things wear and really sort of figuring that out. So the idea of a bend is sometimes you have to do something that's not core to the color, but you're trying

to fit into the theme of the set. And so that color pushes a little bit into areas that are close to what it does, but not exactly what it does. That is a bend. And the farther you push, the bigger the bend it is. The big ideas on bends in general is you need to bend for a reason. You shouldn't bend for no reason. You shouldn't just randomly bend.

You should bend because this set needs it and you're pushing toward a theme in the set. And two, you only get so many bends. You can't, even if each card individually is fine as a bend, there is a point where you have too many get so many bends. You know, you can't, even if each card individually is fine as a bend, there is a point where you have too many cards that are bends. And so part of understanding bends is, when do you best use them and how over, when are you stretching too much?

A break, the idea of a break is, look, colors have strengths and have weaknesses. And that one of the reasons that you wanna go to other colors is, if I play a monocolor deck, there are weaknesses that I have. There are things maybe that I can't destroy or certain types of things that I have problems with. And so, and the nice thing about it is we want,

I mean, strengths and weaknesses just reinforcing what Richard had done, you know. A lot of the way Richard had worked, when you don't have a lot of cards, the idea that if I want to do something, only this color does it, okay, that's a weakness. As you start making more cards, like you really have to sort of fine tune

and figure out what colors can't do. Because if you're not clear, like one of the problems we've run into with green was, it took a while really understanding what green was. And that green more so than any other color has just caught cards, it has more breaks. So when you play an eternal format, it's a lot easier to overcome green's weakness. There's just more cards we made that we shouldn't have made. And that just came from, you know, certain colors. Green was always the trickiest color philosophically. It's the color that

people kind of least understand. It's the most Eastern philosophy of the colors and it took me a long time to wrap my brain around it, but there are a lot of breaks that happen. So anyway, so there's a period of time where I'm kind of the sole champion of the color pie. So I invent vocabulary and I'm trying to at least do what I can to educate R&D and I'm having a lot of conversations. Like there's a very famous one where we were doing fifth edition and there's a card called Desert Twister that destroys any permanent and it was in Arabian Nights.

But Green's weakness, one of Green's weaknesses is it's overaligned some creatures and that when dealing with other creatures, it needs to have creatures. So the idea of a spell that just destroys creatures is really a break for green. So I understood that Desert Twister was a break for green. And I fought really hard to keep it from the fifth edition. Now it turns out fifth edition was really big. We didn't have a lot of things to choose from

and ended up going in. But at least I got concessions of like, we understand that this normally shouldn't be here. And little by little, I started getting R&D warmed to the idea that there are things that we shouldn't do. And so the next phase basically of this was I started writing about it. So I had obviously I mean I'd written in the dualists and then when I started up the website the Magic website in 2002 I made myself a columnist, making magic. And the only column that still runs from 2002, making magic.

So in my column, I try to spend a lot of time and energy explaining all the facets of magic. The whole philosophy behind the column was the better players understand how we make the game, the more they enjoy the game. They can appreciate what we do. I felt the color was a big part of that. So I spent a lot of time and energy walking through what the colors were, what their philosophy was, why colors like each other, why colors hate each other.

I even made the mechanical color pie where I show you and break down, here's what colors do what. Oh, and once again with terminology, I invented the terminology primary, secondary, tertiary to the idea that colors do something, but certain colors are better at something that yes, this color does it, but this color is better at it and trying to get that mindset in.

So there's a lot of me inventing vocabulary. There's a lot of me sharing the vocabulary with the world and writing about it. So what happens is as time goes along, I'm, along, the way the system works is I'm supposed to check sets to make sure we don't do color vibrates. But in 2002, I started writing my column. 2003, I become a head designer. So I'm busy, I'm making sets, I'm doing a lot of things and I'm really really focused on the Premiere sets. So I'm making sure the Premiere sets aren't breaking things, but I'm not as focused on the supplemental sets.

And that's where we start having things that start breaking things, stuff like chaos warp and things that aren't supposed to be, you know, we start making color pie breaks. And so I come up with an idea. So one of the, one of the important things, so I spent a lot of time writing about magic, both writing about in my column, doing podcasts on it. And what I started doing is I started educating the audience about the color pie to make more people aware. Eventually, we start to hire new people.

And these are new people that come in through magic. And they've read my articles and listen to my podcast. And the idea of understanding the color pie is something baked into them as players. So when they get hired, of course the color pie is important. So I get, I started getting some allies, luckily of my own creations since it's people who get educated from the stuff I was writing about. But I realized I have enough people in R&D that are interested in the color pie. So I came up with the idea that we call the council of colors. I go, what if much like there's a team that cares about balance,

there's a team that cares about rules, there should be a team that cares about color. And I'm just, I just don't have the bandwidth to, you know, I'm doing a lot of stuff. So the idea of the council of colors, we may, I've done podcasts on this, is each color got a representative. We had a training position that we use for colorless.

So the training position is person who looks over colors, which is more about rate per se. But, and I oversee, Mark Gottlieb helps me. We also have an admin, Sarah's the admin right now. So if someone that's helped do all the organizing, set up meetings and stuff, and taking notes and things, there's a lot's a lot of organizational stuff. But anyway, we started doing the Council of Colors. And the Council of Colors is now a whole team

that does a whole bunch of things. One, we look at every set, so we evaluate, and most sets get looked at twice. But the idea is any card that's going to be printed, we take a look at it, and we have a whole system for like, must change, strongly reconsider, take take a look at it and we have a whole system for like must change, strongly reconsider, take a second look. We have a system by which how strongly we care about something.

It also is the team that if there are a problem, like for example, a couple years ago, Play Design came to us and said, look, we're having a problem with blue. Blue does not have enough things that are combat oriented. And so we sort of said, OK, we looked at that. Would vigilance help? We think we could put vigilance in blue. You know, blue has the ability to untap its own creatures. That's not that far away from vigilance. You know, like the way blue.

I mean, we like to have things work differently just to separate the colors and feel. But we're like, look, it's not that vigilance is fundamentally against blue. Blue can untap its creature. So, and we put vigilance in blue. Or at one point, I remember Eric Lauer came to us, it was problematic that black had two different things it couldn't destroy. It couldn't destroy artifacts, it couldn't destroy enchantments.

And it really was offsetting some things. So we said, okay, look, we only have two things that destroy enchantments, which is green and white, two colors, and artifacts have three things. So like, you know what, let's have a third color. We chose black. We said it's going to be, you know, secondary, tertiary in enchantment destruction. It's not supposed to do it nearly as well as green or white, but it has access to it. So we're the ones that figure out when we need to change things. Also, another big thing that happened was commander as the format came out. And Commander as a format really pushes and stresses things.

For example, a lot of the strength of red and white were in its speed. Was about I'm going to beat you quickly. Which in two player game makes sense. But in a four player game or multiplayer game where you have multiple people you have to defeat and they start at 40 life not at 20 life. Just the idea that I'm going to quickly beat you before I run out of resources just didn't make sense. So we had to take a look and as commander got bigger we had to find more ways to you

know okay red and white need access to some sort of card advantage. How do we do that in red? We came up with impulsive draw. How do we do that in red? We came up with impulsive draw. How do we do it in white? We started coming with the restrictions of, okay, white can follow rules and get a card, but doesn't get a lot of cards in a turn. So it gets it slowly over time.

So we found ways to make sure the colors can do things that they need to do, but in a way that made sense for that color. That it wasn't just stealing something straight up for another color, it had its own way to do something. And so we've spent a lot, the Council of Colors spends a lot of time sort of looking through that and that's the point we're at now where the color pie has really become, I mean, I think it's always been the cornerstone, but I think there was a point in time where I

was the one who believed that, or I and a few others believed that. And now it's like the company line. It's like everybody in R&D agrees to that and understands that. And that there's a whole system now. If I'm gonna make a card and I don't understand, am I allowed to do this?

Is this something this color can do? I can go talk to the counselor of that color. And there's a whole team that we you know we can run ideas by and so when when when topics come up that are all Controversial we have you know we have a thread where we talk about things and we can hammer through cards and the other thing That's really nice is Having a whole team means the more different ideas you have and the more people that approach it The more rounded you get like one person keeping it like I would do my best means the more different ideas you have and the more people that approach it the more rounded you get like one person keeping it like I would do my best but I might you know I have my biases as any person does and so it was nice having a

whole team that you know you come to a consensus and you tend to make I think better systems when a whole consensus is coming to it. But anyway, the interesting thing for me is that the color pie has always been a cornerstone of the game. It's always been something that was important. But kind of understanding that importance, labeling it, giving vocabulary to it, and then institutionalizing it, making it something that we have a whole team working on. That evolution took time.

And one of the things that's really funny is, as someone who lived through the earlier times, it's sort of like my family foster animals. And one of the things is sometimes you'll get a pet like a dog. And when you give them food, they don't leave the bowl. They eat all the food out of the bowl. And the idea is, hey, that animal at some point had food insecurity and they weren't being fed properly. And so they definitely learned some habits of,

okay, I see food, I'm gonna eat it. I definitely noticed in myself that living through the hard times, if you will, there's definitely like, I am very sensitive to what I call the slippery slope, right? Of the idea that once you, like, there's a lot of times in the past where I would say, okay, we can do one thing, but don't make a habit out of it. And then it started becoming precedent and that it's very easy to do one thing and then people to copy the one thing. And before you know

it, it becomes just a thing we do that eroding the color pie. It's not hard to happen that if you're not very careful with it, it's something that can happen naturally. And that I lived in a time where there was a lot of erosion, where there was a lot of, because not everybody was quite as on board. Now we've gotten to a point now where there is a whole team, there is a whole process. Designers do check and like I said, it is part of it, but I still, I'm a little dog that has my food set to do that I, I can tell sometimes that I'm extra worried, even though there are more systems in place than there used to be.

So, um, but anyway, I, it's, it's one of the things that's nice for me. The reason that I like doing these podcasts is, um, a lot of history for magic for me is I lived with the history I was there I mean there's some very very early parts of magic I was not there for but most of stories I get to tell you I was there I was a witness this particular story hits really close to heart right this is not something where I was there sort of observing I I was the one who's doing a lot of this work and so it really means a lot to me like sometimes I'll sit in a doing a lot of this work. And so it really means a lot to me.

Sometimes I'll sit in a meeting, a Council of Colors meeting, and I'll look around and I see all these people passionately arguing about the color pie, and it brings such warmth to my heart. It really does. And that it's so nice to me to see what I always believed was magic's greatest strength,

the core essence of what magic is and seeing everybody else embrace it so much um I don't know it brings a warmth to my heart so anyway guys uh that today is uh like I said oh by the way if you enjoy the color pie or me talking about it, it encourage you. I did an article. So last year, I believe it was, I put up a new version of the mechanical color pie. So this is a resource that you can go online

and you can search for magic mechanical color pie. There's an article I wrote where I take every ability or every ability I could come up with. And I say what colors it's in, and whether it's primary, secondary, or tertiary. And it's, so if you ever want to make your own cards or just understand the color pie, there's a whole document where I broke it down.

I did the first one like four years ago and I rewrote it last year. Also, right around that time, I think I made an article called, Let's Talk Color Pie, where what I did is I made a link to every article or podcast where I talked about the color pie, and there are a lot of them. So if you really want to ever

learn more about the color pie, I have made those resources for you. If you enjoy listening to podcasts like this one, I have numerous, numerous podcasts. In fact, one of my favorites is I did a series of five podcasts where I recorded the podcast as if I were the color. And so I talked about the philosophy of the color, but from the point of view of the color, like in the most sort of positive light I could, I'm the color. Here's what I think about it. Here's what I think of my allies and enemies. And just, I thought it was really cool to get, get like a mind's eye. How does the color think about itself and just I thought it was really cool to get get like a mind's eye How does the color think about itself? I thought that was really cool But anyway, I have articles on and podcasts on two color pairs on three color pairs or three color triplets So anyway, there's a lot of resources there if if you want to learn more about the color pie

You've come to the right place But anyway guys, I'm approaching my building right now. So this was fun. I do like looking back and just thinking about how far the color pie has come, as far as the management of the color pie has come. But anyway guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time. Bye bye.