Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #641: Booster Packs
Episode Date: May 31, 2019In this podcast, I talk all about the history of the booster pack, how it's evolved, and what impact it has on the design of Magic. ...
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I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.
Okay, I had to do a little errand for my wife, but it's time to podcast.
Okay, so today's topic is booster packs.
I'm going to tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the booster pack.
Okay, so let's start. Let's go a little technical to start.
What exactly is a booster pack? How do you make a booster pack?
Now, booster packs predate magic, obviously.
Booster packs are technology that trading cards have always been made with.
So let's talk a little bit about what they are.
Okay, so the way you make a booster is you take the booster material,
which I'll talk a little bit.
Over the years, we've changed a little bit what our booster material is.
But usually, it is something that is...
Usually, it's metallic, not always.
But it's something in which it's firm enough that you can hold stuff inside it.
So the way that it is made is you print flat an image that you print many many times and you chop up and then what you
do is you take it and you wrap it around and you sort of heat seal the end you
crink crinkle it and then you mix a tube so you imagine you print and then you
you cut it out so imagine you took a booster pack and you completely undid
all the seams and laid it flat. That's how it's printed.
Then the first thing they do is they wrap around the sides and they crinkle it.
That's the thing that runs on the back.
And they make a little tube out of it.
And then the way it works is that the cards...
So, Magic, there's different sheets of cards.
There's a common sheet, an uncommon sheet, a rare sheet, a land sheet,
and that each one of those slots in the booster pack
gets their own hopper.
So the idea is, let's say we take the common sheet,
we print the common sheet, we chop it all up.
Usually the sheets are about 11 by 11,
but they vary in size.
You chop them all up, and then you make a hopper of commons.
You would do the same for uncommons. You would do the same for
rares and mythic rares, which are on the same sheet.
You would do the same for land.
I'll get into it later. There's other
sets sometimes that will have other slots.
Then what happens is
you have
this tube and it sort of
moves it along and then it drops
the correct number of slots
into the booster.
I don't know whether or not the slot dropping happens first.
I've not actually physically seen this happen.
My assumption is it drops all the slots first, and then as one bundle of cards, it drops
it into the sleeve.
That's what I think happens.
But anyway, the cards get dropped.
So there's little chutes.
They get dropped together. It makes 15 cards or 16 cards, counting the add card.
And then it slides in and drops into the booster.
But what they do is, I think they crinkle cut the bottom,
then they drop the cards in, then they crinkle cut the top.
And that's done with heat.
That's done at the printer.
Literally, the way you package them is
they make all the component pieces, and then
note that everything I'm talking
about, all the printing is done,
it's not done by hand, it's done by machines.
So essentially what happens is,
so let's say we're making
War of the Sparks, since that's the set that's currently out, if you guys
are listening to this. So, okay,
War of the Spark has
so many commons, so many uncommons, so many rares,
and a land,
and so each of those sheets are printed,
it's chopped up, each of those are put in their own
hopper. A booster pack
has so many cards from each hopper, so
oh, it's ten commons and three
uncommons and one rare mythic rare and one
land, and it comes together.
The boosters are taken,
the heat is used to seal them so they make a tube, then you seal the bottom, then you and it comes together. The boosters are taken.
The heat is used to seal them so they make a tube.
Then you seal the bottom.
Then you dump the cards in.
Then you seal the top.
Oh, and so, actually,
technically what happens is
you make a flat sheet.
You then...
I think what happens is
they actually seal...
I'm not sure what order they do it in.
They chop... you have to chop
up the individual sheets and then you seal them. But anyway, all this is done online, all this is
done mechanically. The reason is, by the way, is this, the printer is capable of making the booster
wrap. So the reason that card sleeves, or the reason that trading
cards are in booster packs is everything can easily be made at the printer. The
printer that makes the cards can print the flow wrap. And all you need is you
need the machine, I mean you need machines to print and you need machines to seal.
But because trading cards are a pretty popular thing, that's the machine that
they have.
And that you then, everything we're talking about is all being done at one single printer.
Sometimes when we have more components, what happens in larger products is sometimes some
components are made somewhere and then shipped somewhere else and they're all put together
sometimes somewhere else. That can happen. But the thing about booster packs is the only thing is the cards and the booster app,
and that can all be done together.
Okay, I talked about War of the Sparks,
so I guess I should bring this up,
is once upon a time,
the way technology worked was,
it was very simple.
You have so many slots.
Every slot is its own sheet,
and that's the way it was.
You know, that, oh, like when Magic first started, when Alpha started,
there were 15 cards per pack.
There were, I believe it was 11 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare.
Mythic Rare wasn't a thing yet.
Lands at the time weren't their own slot.
Lands were just common, uncommon, and rare sheets had land intermixed with them.
So yes, you could actually get an, I guess, island was on the rare sheet.
You could get a rare island in your slot.
Like your rare for the pack could be an island.
That happened in Alpha.
Later on, we eventually realized that putting land on its own sheet allowed us more flexibility
of controlling wind and how you got to land.
So eventually we started making land sheets.
When that happened,
we printed one less common and one more land.
At some point, we started doing the mythic rarity.
The mythic rarity was done.
That didn't really change slots.
It just, on the rare sheet,
it depended how many times you printed something.
Printing it twice is a rare
and printing it one time is a mythic rare. But those are all on the rare sheet. It depends how many times you printed something. Printing it twice is a rare and printing it one time is a mythic rare. But those are all on the same sheet. But the new thing,
the thing that we'll see in War of the Spark is we now have the technology to be a little fancier
with how we do collation. So the example is War of the Spark has a planeswalker in every pack.
And what that means is that there's a guaranteed Planeswalker,
and then whatever rarity that Planeswalker is,
the machine is smart enough to match that rarity.
So here's how I think it works.
This is my best guess.
So normally we have hoppers.
I think the way this works is that there's a hopper for
commons, uncommons, rare, slash mythic, rare, and land,
none of which have planeswalkers.
By the way, there's a whole separate thing,
which is premiums and foils.
I'll get to that in a second.
Anyway, I think the way they do that,
I'm not 100%, but I think the way they do this is
they print a hopper of uncommon planeswalkers
and they print a hopper of rare and mythic rare planeswalkers.
And then the machine has a recipe, if you will.
And so what the machine is instructed to do is
in every pack put an uncommon planeswalker,
except every once in a while put a mythic rare planeswalker.
Much like how, well, the mythic rares and rares are a little bit different.
For those that know how it works,
about every eighth pack, instead of a rare, is a mythic rare.
But the math for that is not done in the sorting.
It's done on the sheet. What that
means is that the sheet of rares and mythic rares, mythic rares just show up at the one to eight rate
on the sheet itself. So when you chop it up, you just put it in as it appears on the sheet and that
matches the rarity correctly. But the planeswalker, to do one planeswalker per pack, what you have to
do is you have to teach the dropper to say,
okay, you're going to do so many uncommon planeswalkers, like every end packs is an uncommon,
and then one in every, I don't know the numbers, I'm not saying them, but one in every, whatever the number is,
instead of dropping an uncommon, you drop a rare, or mythic rare.
Once again, I assume those are on the same sheet.
Then, and this is the new technology, the computer is smart enough to say, if I dropped an uncommon planeswalker,
I drop one less uncommon. If I dropped a rare planeswalker, I don't drop the rare mythic rare.
So essentially what happens is, nowadays we have recipes, so it sort of says, here's what you need
to do. And the reason the drop rates are so important is we have rarities,
and we want the cards to show up at a certain rarity.
And so when we have cards like we have a separate set of Planeswalkers,
some of which are uncommon, we want the uncommon showing up at an uncommon rate.
Because if you drop too little of them, then even though they're in the uncommon slot,
they have the rarity of a rare or mythic rare. Or if if we drop them too little, or reverse, if we drop them too
often, then they can be as common as a common, which we don't want.
So anyway, that is new technology we did not have long ago.
The other technology, and not even all our printers can do this yet, but some of them
can, we've seen in BattleBond, which is the technology that says, oh, I would
like card A and card B, when they appear in packs, to appear together.
There was the, what was it, partner with?
There was a mechanic in Battlebond that said, these two creatures, when you get one, you
get the other.
So they showed up in booster packs together, so that you would get them together.
And that technology is relatively new.
For example, in original Innistrad,
the way we were going to do the double-faced cards originally
was we'd have a card that was a normal-backed magic card
that you put in your deck that said,
oh, go get this double-sided kind of token thing.
Go get it.
So the idea was the one-sided card would go in your pack, and the double-sided card, you would go get this double-sided kind of token thing. You know, go get it. So the idea was,
the one-sided card would go in your pack,
and the double-sided card,
you would go get it
when you cast the one-sided card.
The problem was, at the time,
they couldn't guarantee
those two being together all the time.
I think they could guarantee like 90%.
But that wasn't good enough.
We didn't want to say,
oh, hey, you got the card
that cast this really cool creature,
but oh, you didn't get the creature.
Or oh, you got this really cool creature,
but you didn't get the card
to cast the creature.
So we changed it
and ended up doing double-faced cards.
We didn't have the single side.
We ended up doing checklist cards
for those that didn't have sleeves.
But the technology didn't exist.
Like something we had wanted to do
and weren't able to do.
And that technology...
So that's one of the things that is interesting in booster packs,
is as technology changes.
So let's go way back.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the history of the booster pack.
And as you'll see as I go along,
we keep finding new technology, which helps us.
So when Alpha first started back in 1993, it's Magic
first started in Alpha,
the product was sold in booster packs
and starter decks. Starter
decks were little tiny boxes.
It held
60 cards.
Later on,
originally when starters came out, they had two rares,
like 13 uncommons
and the rest were commons, I think.
And later on, the two rares become three rares.
And then eventually we started calling them turn-and-packs.
And instead of having 60 cards, they had 75 cards.
The idea of it was that you could play it out of the box.
In Alpha, while I mean technically true, it was pretty loosely done.
And it'd be hard sometimes
to play stuff
because you just didn't have
the colors
and it was loosely playable
but it wasn't
later on
with the tournament packs
you were a little bit better
about making sure
for example
that you got
an even amount of lands
and things
early on
you might get
a lot of red cards
and a lot of mountains
that would happen
in early starter decks
oh real quickly
just because it's cool trivia, it's not
technically booster pack related, but it is packaging related.
A lot of people
ask why the back of the magic card
looks like the back of the magic card. What's going on?
Why is that the back of the magic card?
And the answer to that is the original
starter deck box.
So, the original starter deck
box, they thought it would be really
cool if it looked like
a magical tome.
Um, and so the front of the box was the, was the magic back, which looks like a magical
tome.
That's what it's supposed to look like.
And then the back of the box had the back of the tome and the side of the box had the
pages of the tome with a bookmark on top.
Um, and that is where that came from.
Um, but anyway, we're talking booster packs.
So the original booster pack was very simple.
In the early days, they did not use metallic.
And one of the problems with super, super early magic was actually if you push real
hard, you could see through them, which caused issues.
And so very quickly, as soon as we realized that was an issue, we switched over and started doing metallic so that you can't look
through it. The other thing that we did not do back in Alpha is it was very plain. I mean,
it was full color, but it was mostly just, it said magic. It had a logo on it. And the early booster
packs, um, were mostly just logos. Um, in fact, I think some of the early booster packs were kind of
like a light version of the card back, but in different colors, depending on what the set was.
Um, and then eventually we started using images on the booster packs. Um, it was Ice Age.
Uh, I think Ice Age was the first, I think Ice Age was the first booster pack to have images on the booster packs. Was Ice Age... I think Ice Age was the first...
I think Ice Age was the first booster pack to have images on it.
Not 100% on that.
This is me from memory, but I believe so.
And the idea was
that we wanted to get stuff that was in the booster pack.
Stuff that we thought...
We wanted to...
And so what happened was
the earliest versions of the art on the boosters was just art from the set. So one of the things we do, I'm not sure if
we, not sure if this is what the process back in Ice Age, but what we do now is after the set is
all done, after all the art is in, the art director for the set goes through and handpicks what they think is the most iconic art of the set.
I mean, art that they think is just, A, very pretty, really good art,
and B, really it plays into what the set's about.
You know, really sort of what are the pieces that sort of communicate what the set is.
And they pick a certain number of them to be what we call the marketing images. And what that means is these are the images we think that will have the best impact in sort of selling the set.
When marketing, you know, try to err toward using these marketing images.
And usually the booster pack is used on marketing images.
There have been some exceptions
and some of the early magic, actually.
I don't know if booster marketing images
was even a thing yet.
But early magic,
all the images were pulled directly off the cards.
Actually, it's funny.
One of the things that is interesting is
in early magic,
they just got the images wherever they could.
I don't know if
we had marketing images early on. There's a famous case on, I think it was Ice Age, where one of the
pictures on the booster pack was this female soldier. A really cool picture. But no one could
figure out where it was from. And it turns out that there's a Yeti in Ice Age. And on the card, the Yeti is the main
focal picture. And the woman's
in the back.
And so she's not the main
focus point. Or maybe she's in the foreground.
But she's not the main focal point of the picture.
Because it's a Yeti. You're looking at the Yeti.
I think actually she's in the foreground
and the Yeti's behind her. And she doesn't even realize the Yeti's
behind her.
And they use this image, but it wasn't the main image
and we're like,
where's this image coming from?
It's a new image.
And they're like,
no, no, it's this little
tiny image on this card.
Nowadays,
so what do they look for
in images?
So when you're putting images
on a booster pack,
I mean, A,
you want it to look good
but also,
you want something
that has sort of
clean vertical space.
You think of it, booster packs are long and thin,
and so you want something that pulls people in that is tall and thin.
Usually you want something living, creatures of some kind or planeswalkers.
What we found with doing a lot of testing is
seeing creatures tends to pull people more
than seeing something, like putting a building or something.
This usually isn't as, people are more drawn to living things.
And so we tend to put characters and stuff on the Booster Pack.
Usually, nowadays, we tend to lean toward putting
legendary creatures in planeswalkers.
Sometimes if there's a really good creature,
I will sometimes use those as well.
But the trick is,
there's a combination of wanting something
that usually is one of the marketing images
and something that fits the constraints
of what the booster pack is.
Because it is vertical, like magic cards are made to fit in the magic box.
So other than planeswalkers, planeswalkers are, if you've ever seen a planeswalker,
the image is made for the entire card, and then someone's covered up.
But the planeswalker image is a full vertical image.
That's one of the reasons that planeswalkers tend to show up a lot in packaging.
They're a vertical image. But anyway, they have to that Planeswalkers tend to show up a lot in packaging. They're a vertical image.
But anyway, they have to
find the right image, and they'll do that.
One of the things you'll find recently, by the way, is
they don't always
use the images off the cards.
So, for example, in Guilds of Ravnica,
they were
trying to figure out what booster pack images they want,
and they...
One sec, I have to sneeze.
And...
Good night to me.
And we were making these...
In stores, we made these banners.
And the banners represented the five guilds and guilds of Ravnica.
And they wanted a representative of each guild.
And there wasn't a clean example for,
I think it was Dimir.
Like, just none of the existing cards
quite had what they wanted.
So they ended up commissioning a unique piece for that.
I think all the banners were unique new pieces,
but most of them were other versions
of characters in the set.
Like, some of them were the Planeswalkers, some of them were guild champions and stuff.
But the Dimir piece was separate and it wasn't on a card.
So they ended up using that for the Dimir piece because they decided...
So over the years we've had different numbers of art.
In the early days, we had
one or three. We've gone up to five,
but I think with War of the Spark, we're going back down to
three. We keep bouncing
around about how many is the right number.
I think most of us
have done one, three, or five. Some of the odd numbers
is good. We did five in Guilds of Ravnica
because we were doing the five guilds.
And they ended up using the Dimir piece
that was from the banner,
but not from a card.
And everybody was like,
where's this guy?
Where's he from?
He was from the banner,
not from a card.
I joke that he was just Lazav
because Lazav's a shapeshifter.
Okay.
In the early days,
when Magic...
So Alpha, when it first started,
was 15 cards.
Then Arabian Nights came out.
That was the first expansion.
Now, Arabian Nights only had 78 cards in it.
So they decided to just put 8 cards for booster
because they didn't want you getting the whole set
in too small a number of boosters.
And so they ended up putting in 8 cards.
So early on in Magic, the large sets had 15 cards.
The small set had eight cards.
And then we experimented.
Alliances, I think, had 12 cards.
Unglued had 10 cards.
We have made specialty boosters for Mass Market that I think have five cards.
I think we've done five and six, I think.
for mass market that I think have five cards.
I think we've done five and six, I think.
But anyway, at some point we realized that we liked what 15 was doing.
The interesting thing, by the way,
for those that wonder why there are 15 cards
in a booster pack,
I think when we first started making cards,
we went by the default of Card of Monday was the printer, the first printer we used,
and that they made trading cards. So I think they had a default size they used for trading cards.
And because we didn't want to make an extra die cut. So whenever, something you don't think about,
whenever you make a booster pack, if you don't stick exactly the right number. So a normal booster pack can hold
16 cards. So Magic has 15 cards plus the add card. That's all it can hold. It can't hold a 17th card.
We've actually talked about can we get another card and no. And what happens is the booster
packs, the size that it is, you can get 36 of them. So 12 by 12 by 12, three stacks of 12 high in a booster
box.
That is the size of a booster box.
If you change the pack out, you have to change the box.
And so one of the reasons I think we did 15 early on was, you know, we were a young company,
it was a brand new game.
Making new die lines and stuff can be expensive.
Now, yeah, once you get big enough, and Magic is big enough now that making new die lines is stuff can be expensive. Now, once you get big enough, and
Magic is big enough now, that making new die lines is not nearly the thing it once was.
But when you're starting out, and this is the first time you're making a game, and you're
trying to do it as cheap as you can, because you're a brand new company, or a new company,
changing die lines doesn't make a lot of sense. It just costs money. And so I think they just
printed off existing die lines, and that the kind of standard trading card game size was 15 cards.
Now my guess is that Richard liked it just because he wanted this to feel like trading cards
and was like, okay, well, yeah, we should stay with the existing trading card.
When we first started out, the early playtesters did goof around with some limited environments,
but Magic was not designed early on with limited in mind.
In fact, it wasn't until Mirage, really,
that we even developed
the set, thinking that they'd be played limited.
Magic did get played and limited
earlier. For example,
I played limited with
Ice Age. I played limited with Legends, too.
Both Legends and Ice Age. Legends is
horrible in Limited. Ice Age
is okay, but
the problem with Ice Age is there wasn't
a lot of flying in it, because these cosplay testers
don't like flying all that much. There's not a lot of
flying in it, so the invasion is small, and there's just
the creature, like, you
can get packouts where you just
don't get enough creatures to be able to win with. Like, I
I've opened up
my boosters from
Ice Age and had, oh, I have six creatures.
You know, I guess I'm playing all those colors.
Anyway, Mirage was the first time we really played that.
Once we started designing for Limited, we realized that 15 actually is a really good number.
It allows you to draft three booster packs, and that was the right number to play with.
So we kind of backed into 15 as the size of the booster pack,
but it's turned out to be something quite, quite useful for us. And so a while back, we'd say,
you know what, all backs are 15. I'm with rare exceptions, but the normal magic standard legal
normal, even most of the supplemental sets are 15. It allows us to make use of what we understand, to use the die lines we know,
and there's a familiarity with what we like.
Like, we like the idea that the players
know what they're getting,
and we don't have to re-educate them every time.
Because when there's different size cards in a pack,
that means cards are, like,
people kind of know what to expect.
And so we've definitely, many, many years ago,
said, okay, we make 15 card packs.
We also moved away from doing small sets, so, many years ago, said, okay, we make 15-card packs.
We also moved away from doing small sets.
So our sets are large now.
And that also tied into that.
The other thing that has gone on as the technology has improved with booster packs is we have started experimenting more with, like, using that extra card, the sort of add card for other things.
Amonkhet, for example, had a punch out card in that spot.
Um, you know, we obviously have used the back of the add card for tokens.
Sometimes we've used for rules.
Um, a little trivia for you.
Um, the first booster pack to have a 16th card, here's a trivia question. What was the first booster pack to have a 16th card, here's a trivia question,
what was the first magic
that had a 16th card?
And the answer to that
wasn't the add cards.
It was Legends.
Legends had a rules card
inserted into it
because there was confusion
and worry that people
wouldn't understand the rules.
So it came with
its own rules card.
The starter deck
sometimes would come with,
in the early days,
would come with a rule book in the early days, would come with a rule book
in the early days, and then
a 10% story book, and there's other things we've done.
But those are not boosters. Those are
starter decks.
The other thing about
boosters, just a little for you to think about,
is most
of the time, I'm sure you're very much looking
at the front of the booster.
The front of the booster does not have a lot of information on it.
Mostly, we like to have
the name of the set,
Magic's logo,
the name of the set,
a pretty picture,
and there's a few things,
like it has to say my cards.
There's a few legal things
that have to sort of spell
some stuff out in the front.
Most of what's going on
that we have to put on
is actually snuck on the back.
If you've ever taken a look
at the back of a booster,
there's a lot of tiny print
on the back of a booster.
One of the things about trading cards
is there's just some legal things
that have to be done.
One is we have to tell you
sort of your chances of getting things
because there's some randomization.
We have to... There's some copyright information. One of the things because there's some randomization. We have to, there's a copyright information.
One of the things that's interesting is
there's certain requirements in certain places
about what has to be on the packaging.
And in English specifically,
because we sell English boosters
pretty much around the world.
I mean, we're printed in 11 languages, so there's lots of other languages.
But in English specifically, we print everything in English
that needs to go to any market, I believe.
So, for example, you'll notice on the back, I think there's a line of French,
which is something that every booster sold in France has to say on it.
And I think both the French and English say it on it
so that we can sell French boosters and English boosters in France.
But if you look back,
there's a lot of little tiny things.
I know a lot of people don't actually look at the back
because of the flap or the way it's seated.
The flap comes down, you have to sort of rip it up.
But anyway, if you ever have a chance to look at the back,
there's a lot of text
that I think most people don't even ever take a glance at
sitting in the back, which I think is kind of cool.
The final thing, I'm almost to work.
How are we doing on time?
Oh, we're doing pretty good.
I did not have a lot of traffic today.
The other interesting thing about the booster pack is,
oh, well, a couple things.
One is, during the time period
where we would be drafting
different boosters together,
there was a conscious effort
to try to make the boosters look
unique enough that you didn't confuse them.
We had some times where we'd make them
and they were patterned so similarly
that people would draft the wrong booster.
Now that we don't draft
multiple sets together,
that's less of an issue,
and so we're less concerned about that
but that was for example
I mean there's a lot of
like one of the things is
my job is not making the booster pack
there's people who
their job is making the booster pack
and I'm sure I'm missing
scores of important information
of things we have to do
worrying about the size
and how big the images are
and there's lots and lots of things
you have to worry about
plus you want the booster pack to itself be a and lots of things you have to worry about. Plus, you want the
booster packs to itself be a selling point that
makes people want to buy the booster pack.
There's a lot of work that goes into that.
Also, you want to tie the booster packs into the
box so that there's a cohesiveness
between the box and the booster pack. There's a lot
of work and there's a whole team
that spends...
Actually, there's multiple teams. There's a graphic design
team that does all the images and the, you know, making,
like there's a team that makes sure
that everything looks good, the graphic design team,
and like what's the logo and how does it work
and how do things tie together
and is there a cohesive element.
Normally we make products that tie together.
So, you know, any one set,
like we made Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiances,
but there were the deck products that go with them.
And everything has to sort of want to be from one product family.
And so all of that has to be designed together.
And then, so that's the graphic design part of it.
And then there's the printing part of it that we have to make it.
Now, the one thing about our standard legal sets is the stuff that we do all the time,
we've gotten pretty good at it.
You know, we've gotten, we're in a routine of how to make it.
Now, sometimes we make new products and those require new, you know, new designs.
And the interesting thing is whenever we're working,
like one of the things that I don't think people realize so much is
that a lot of design decisions have been made by the restrictions of the printing and of the booster.
Like, for example,
if you ever heard my saying, if your theme's not common, it's not your theme. That actually came about because back in the day, if you wanted to do something at high enough volume that it was
noticeable, like one of the things I always talk about is, if someone can't open up three booster
packs of your set and be able to tell you what is going on your your theme is not being communicated well enough now in the early
days the only way to guarantee that was having your theme at common that's the only way to guarantee
in random packs that you could you could guarantee the audience would see what's going on
but with new technology for example we now have the ability to guarantee something in the pack
so for example if I have something
splashy like a Planeswalker, and every
pack's going to have a Planeswalker, and that's not
something you're used to seeing, you
are not going to miss that every pack has a
Planeswalker. That's a pretty, that's a
noticeable thing. And so,
even though we don't have Planeswalkers in common,
the fact that we have Planeswalkers in every pack means
when you open three booster packs, you're going to
say, hey, here's something out of the ordinary.
All three of them had a planeswalker.
And, oh, look, there's signature cards that mention
the planeswalkers. Those are common.
And there's a lot of things we do so that you get the idea
of, oh, planeswalkers matter.
And what I'm saying is
that freedom of printing
and that freedom of what the booster pack
can do has really opened up
some of the ability of what we can do as designers so even though when you when i started today you're saying
oh he's talking about booster packs that's got nothing to do with design in fact actually has
a lot to do with design um for example right now the size of how many commons and uncommons and
rares mythic birds we have is mostly decided by sheet math of printing you know
a lot of the the a lot of choices we used to make or some of them we still make but a lot of choices
we make are defined by elements of how we make it and as technology gets better as booster technology
gets better it starts opening us for us to be able to do what we want to do and start making
decisions based not on the limitation of the printing but on what best serves the set um and so one of the cool things about the future
of the booster pack is the future is very open um i mean as i talked about today we've made a lot of
evolutions along the way i mean booster packs have definitely changed over the ways uh just how they
look how they feel um you know just making them in such a way that we've even made them slightly easier to open
over the years. But it is
something in which,
you know, the technology has evolved,
but it has continued to evolve, and it's
going to impact. Like, more and more
of what we'll be able to do as designers is
going to be based on what the booster pack is capable
of doing, and how they're able to
put it together. So the booster
pack is a core part of magic.
So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed my little jaunt through the history of the booster pack.
But I'm 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.