Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #972: Unfinity Design, Part 1
Episode Date: September 30, 2022This podcast is part one of a multi-part series on the design of Unfinity. ...
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I'm pulling my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.
Okay, after many years, I finally get to start talking about Infinity, so I'm very excited.
So, Infinity, for those that somehow are not aware, is the fourth unset.
So, way back in 1996, Bill Rose and Joel Mick came to me with an idea.
They said, we had this idea for this set with a different border that's not tournament legal.
See what you can do with that.
And they gave it to me.
And I ended up turning that into the unsets.
The idea, it was something that just, A, had a humoric element to it, that played around in space that normal magic couldn't play around.
And Unglued did a lot of things that have later actually made their way to magic.
It had four land for the first time.
It had token creatures for the first time.
It had multiplayer play for the first time.
It did a lot of things that have gone on to become something that magic does do,
but at the time was a little out there.
And so the unsets have become a place for us to sort of push boundaries and try different things.
So in 19, or no, sorry, 2000, what was it, 2006?
In 2006, I made Unhinged.
And then in 2017, we made Unstable. And then there was a product a few
years later called Unsanctioned that was a box set that we made 15 new Uncards for. So that had
some Uncards in it. And then finally, we came to Infinity. So basically, most unsets have been a struggle to get made in the sense that
the first one, no one quite knew what it was. Unglued, I got to make. No one really got in my
way. I then made a set called Unglued 2 that got put in my head. It got designed, put away,
never made. Unhinged took eight years to get made, and it was a struggle. Unstable took 13 years to
get made, and it was even more of a struggle. But Unstable came out, and it was a struggle. Unstable took 13 years to get made, and it was even more of a struggle.
But Unstable came out,
and it was very popular. It got reprinted
four times. So
getting to make Infinity was one of the
first times ever, at least for a non...
for not the first of the kind.
It was the first time that I
was able to make the set without a major
struggle. Mostly people said,
okay, go ahead, you know, make it,
which was a different experience for me.
So basically what we decided was
we're going to put on Infinity four to five years after Unstable,
and they sort of said to me, what do you want to do?
What do you want to make?
And so it was really up to me to sort of figure out the essence of what I wanted.
Oh, the other important thing to the story, I guess I should mention this, is when we
were making Infinity, I went and talked to Aaron Forsythe, who's my boss, and I said,
Aaron, I would like to do something I've never done before.
I would like to leave this product from the very beginning of the product to the very
end of the product.
I would like to leave design the whole way through. Now, normally this isn't something
we do. We tend to divide into two. One person does the early part of the process. One does
the late part of the process. Obviously, I'm the early part of the process guy. But unglued
and unhinged, I was, well, unglued, I led sort of all the way through. There wasn't
development or anything of it. Unhinged, I kind of led most the way through, although there was
a point at which Randy Bueller was on the team where, you know, I listened to what Randy was
doing. Unstable, I had a handoff, meaning I did the design and then handed off for development.
I went through a couple different people.
Billy Moreno did some.
Dave Humphries did some.
Ben Hayes did some.
So it was a bunch of different people that did the second part.
But anyway, I was really interested in actually seeing the product from the very beginning
to the very end, which, like I said, it's pretty much unsets.
I sort of did elements of this, but not in the official capacity that I wanted to do
this time.
I wanted to do this time.
So I had never done set design, for example.
I've done lots and lots of vision designs, plenty of exploratory designs.
I've never led set design, and I wanted to lead set design for the first time.
Anyway, I got a sign-up from Aaron. He said I could do that.
His only caveat was I needed to have a play designer on the set,
who I listened to very carefully, as he was aware that play design is not my strong suit.
And at the time, it was an unset and no one would ever play it.
Or not no one.
People who like playing unsets would play it.
But in tournament play.
No, it wouldn't be in tournament play.
So the play testing wasn't quite as crucial.
But as you will see, the set ended up having some cards that are going to be outside of just purely casual play.
Okay, so I started by saying, what exactly did I want this to be? So what I did with Unstable was I took a structure that had been very popular in normal Magic, which was the faction structure.
And so I made a
faction set. There were five factions.
They ended up being ally color
factions based on
one of the factions kind of had to be the steampluggers
based on we were bringing back
contraptions, and that kind of
got us to red-green. It just didn't make
sense in red-white or red-blue
or red-black, really.
So, anyway, we ended up doing ally factions.
But it was a faction set in the way we do faction sets.
I mean, it was a little bit different in certain ways.
We didn't give a mechanic for faction.
But not all faction sets have a mechanic for faction.
Anyway, we made a faction set.
That's what we did.
So, it was sort of like, okay, we're doing a brand new unset.
What do I want to do with this unset that is something we know that has been successful,
but we've never done in an unset. And so the idea that I want, I mean, the thing that came to mind real quickly was to do what we call a top-down set. A good example of a top-down set
might be Innistrad or Throne of Eldraine, or Pharos.
You know, you take something that is a known quantity, Gothic horror, fairy tales, Greek mythology,
and sort of do magic's take on it.
And so, Dawn Mirren had been my art director for Unstable, and we worked really well together.
She really enjoyed it.
I enjoyed it.
We liked to work with each other.
And so it's pretty clear.
I mean, Dawn, as soon as there was another unset set up, Dawn signed up to do it.
And Dawn was very excited.
So I went to Dawn and I said, Dawn, here's my idea.
I really would like to do a top-down set.
But I want to pick something that we just don't think we're going to do in normal magic.
So something that sort of pushes boundaries a little bit.
And so we went off,
and basically what I said to Dawn is,
okay, let's take a little time.
You think of what you want to do.
I'll think of what I want to do,
and we'll come back.
So when we came back,
Dawn said that she was interested in pushing into
other genre space
because that's something that Magic, at the time, really hadn't done.
So just so people are aware of the timeline of this,
we started, as soon as Unstable came out and was successful,
we started doing preliminary work on it.
We didn't,
the preliminary work lasted a while. We didn't get into the main design for a little bit, but
when I'm talking about me talking to Dawn, this is super early. So I don't even know if Universe
is Beyond was a concept yet. Or maybe it was in its early talking, maybe. But anyway, we really,
at the time, was like, okay, you anyway, we really at the time
was like, okay, you know, it'd be
fun to sort of push another genre space.
And
I think Dawn was really intrigued
not just by
the genre space itself, but
sort of a particular take on it.
And she was infatuated by the idea of
retro science fiction. So for those
that are unaware,
in the 1950s, 50s, 60s,
there was this push of people trying to imagine the future.
But it was a really, it was a very stylized look of the future that was very endemic of the way the 1950s captured the future.
And Dawn was really interested in creating a set
that had that sort of,
the future through the eyes of the past
might be the best way to describe it.
It was a very stylized look
that came from a particular time period.
And so she was very interested in the idea
of doing retro science fiction.
Meanwhile, I had always really wanted to do something with circuses.
In fact, in the third Great Designer Search, we did a top-down design, and I sort of said,
man, I want to do circuses forever.
I guess I don't think we're going to do them.
And I gave a challenge with a circus theme. If you guys remember Greatest Dinosaur 3. So I was really interested
in sort of, I loved the idea of taking a genre space
that people knew well and circuses are something
that both they exist and, I mean in real life
they exist and they show up a lot in
pop culture. There's a lot of circus archetypes that are pop culture circus
archetypes. I then realized that circus was probably not enough.
We need to fill up a whole set. So we expanded from circus to amusement
park to carnival. Those all kind of blend together.
And so I went to Don with this idea of this
Circus Plus. And what we realized is and so I went to Don with this idea of this circus plus.
And what we realized is Don's idea and my idea,
while they were very different ideas,
had some ability to blend together.
What if we did a circus slash amusement park slash carnival
that was done through the lens of retro science fiction?
And that's when we came up with the idea of the Astratorium.
It's a Meyer of the Magnificence Intergalactic Astratorium of Fun, I think is the official
name of it.
So the Astratorium, the idea was, it's a bus of spaceships that are the park that can travel
from world to world.
And so the idea is, it's a traveling sort of space carnival, if you will.
The center of it is a big top, so there's a circus there.
But it's an amusement park.
There's rides.
There's games.
It sort of had everything.
And the nice thing that excited me about Circus Amusement Park Carnival
is there are lots and lots of trope space to play in.
There are a lot of cars that Magic had really never touched upon.
Magic had, by the way, dipped its toe a little tiny bit into circus with Rakdos.
That Rakdos on Ravnica were performers,
and there's a little bit of a really dark circus that they performed.
One of the things that we want to do,
and this is just the nature of unsets in general,
was we want to do, and this is just the nature of unsets in general, was we want to be fun and light.
Like, one of the things, so the philosophy for unsets have been since the very beginning.
There's a spectrum.
There's a spectrum from very serious magic to very sort of lighthearted magic.
Now, it's fine that if you want to be very serious about it and compete and, like, we
have an entire pro tour and world
championship and and sanctioned events like if you want to go play magic and see if you're the best
and play really seriously you can't that exists that's something magic has access to but the other
end of the spectrum the idea of i can just hang out with my friends and have fun and i can just
it can be a social experience it can be something where know, it's not that you don't try to win.
It's not that winning isn't something that you don't aim for maybe.
But it's all about sort of I'm enjoying the time with my friends.
And I really wanted to make sure that magic had expressions for all those different aspects.
And at the time I made Unglued, we were launching the pro tour
and there's all this stuff pushed towards series play
that I really wanted something
that pushed toward casual play.
And the unsets have always been
that other end of the spectrum.
Like one of the things, for example, with unsets is
I love the idea as a designer,
well, what can I do that's normally off limits
but not necessarily here?
A great example is there's a lot of space in the rules where the audience will understand it.
It's not complicated.
You know, I can explain the rule to you and you can play it correctly,
but the rules technically have a problem with it.
Last Strike is a great example that showed up in, actually,
yeah, Last Strike showed up in...
Originally in Unstable.
We do have a card with Triple Strike in Unfinity.
Anyway, the Last Strike is one of those things where
it's not hard to explain to people Last Strike.
The idea is the opposite of First Strike.
That if I have Last Strike,
it happens after a sort of normal strike, if you will.
But the problem is making it work in the rules is very complicated
and would cause a lot of problems for rewriting the rules.
Now, if last strike was something we think we'd do on lots and lots of cards,
maybe we'd be willing to rewrite the rules.
To stick on a handful of cards, not worth it.
But it's something people can understand.
And that there's a lot of stuff that falls in that space that it's fun, you know,
or even messing around with verbal
components, dexterity components, outside assistance. There's a lot of fun things that are fun
that, like, in a tournament might be problematic, but, you know, sitting around with your friends
is not problematic. So that's another thing is that there's just a lot of open space and things
that we can do. And on top of that, unsets have always been us pushing boundaries and trying to
do things that are
a little farther than the normal set
that we can push things a little more
okay so I know
that we're going to do a retro science fiction
space carnival amusement park
I know that before exploratory begins
Dawn and I both say
okay that sounds like a cool idea
the one other idea that I had before
design even began was we had done, we do what we
call a hackathon.
So a hackathon is when we stop doing magic for a week, our normal magic, and we work
on a project.
We divide into teams and work on a project for a week.
We did, for example, a hackathon on supplemental sets and both Modern Horizons and Jumpstart came out of that hackathon.
We did a hackathon on future design space and keyword counters and some of the punch-out technology.
Anyway, there's a whole bunch of things that came out.
So we do hackathons.
We explore stuff.
Things come out of them.
So one of the hackathons, I think for the supplemental set one, we looked at, so there's a series of games called legacy games, where you play a game and then they're usually existing
games that already exist. But there's a version now that when you play the game, you modify the
cards as you're playing. And then in future playing, those cards are forever changed.
That you might, you know,
like you'll put stickers on a card.
So that card,
let's say in game two you sticker a card,
then in game three,
and game four and game five,
all future games,
that sticker card is just what the card does now.
Meaning things can change,
that the game can change over time.
And usually a legacy game you play it a certain amount
of times. Like, it's an experience.
It's meant to be played ten times
and, you know, the first
game this change happens, second game that change happens
and it's an experience that things change
over time. And so
there was a team exploring the idea of
Magic Legacy. And so
they were playing around with stickers.
And then there was a different hackathon
where we played around with stickers in a different way.
But anyway, and I was on that team.
The first team, I saw their work, but I wasn't on the team.
And the second team, I was on the team.
So, and there was a product, D&D did a product, I believe,
or one of the D&D board a product, I believe,
or one of the D&D board games, anyway, it came with stickers.
So I learned that our production team had made stickers. I had had a chance in multiple hackathons to see sort of that stickers
really opened up this interesting space. And so
I was intrigued by the idea of, was there something we could do
with stickers?
So I went and talked to our production people
and what I said to them
is here was my goal. This is what I wanted
out of stickers.
I wanted stickers that you
could put on cards that would peel
off the cards, that wouldn't harm the cards
so that if you were sticking it, it wasn't permanent.
It wasn't like, in the legacy
version we were forever changing the cards.
Once you stickered it, there was no intent the sticker came off.
But I'm like, could we do a lighter glue?
I wanted to do a sticker that went on the card,
but then would come off the card,
and it wouldn't harm the card.
And the idea was that you could put it on multiple times.
I sort of compared it to Post-it Note.
Turns out the glue in the actual product
is a little stronger than, I mean,
it comes off your card. It's a little bit stronger
than post-it note, it turned out.
But it's something that can
go on and off multiple times, and it
doesn't harm the card.
So I went to
Tom Wanderstrand, who you might know as
an artist of magic, oversees
our production.
There's a whole team that sort of figures out
card stock, and like the
actual, the act of printing things and making things.
So what I learned from stickers was we could do stickers.
And the way stickers worked is that you put stickers on kind of like a card sheet.
And then you sort of, there's a device that punched, made an imprint.
Because with stickers, you want to peel them off and you want sort of them to be cut around the sticker.
And so what I learned was, the way stickers would work is,
we would have a grid of space that for magic cards, I think was 6x8, so 48 cards.
And then each card individually, it's not that you have individual die line. You have a die
line for all the cards together. That makes sense. I mean, you print them as a six by eight thing.
And then every card is in the exact same place every time you print it. And you make one giant
die cut, if you will. So what that means is that you're going to print them on a sheet. And there's
a sticker stock. So you have to print them on a sticker stock,
and then this die cut comes,
and it cuts it so that now they peel off.
It cuts around the shape, if that makes sense.
So anyway, I talked with Tom.
I got a sense of what we could do,
and we could put four color on the stickers,
meaning they could be in full color.
Sorry.
When you print, you want to print know how many colors you can print in.
We had access to full color printing.
Like I said, they had made stickers before.
Wizards had made stickers before in a different product.
So we had some expertise with stickers.
Not in a magic booster.
There were challenges to making a sticker sheet on a magic card, sort of. Or at least something that was the size of a magic booster. And there were challenges to making a sticker sheet
on a magic card, sort of.
Or at least something that was the size of a magic card.
So there were challenges.
And I wanted it to be glue that came off
and went back on again.
So that was a little bit different.
But anyway, I talked with Tom.
He and I figured out the parameters of what we could do.
The other thing that was really important for me
with stickers was that I want,
I want, whenever I make an unset, to have high variance.
I want the stickers to be, or sorry, not stickers.
One of the things about casual play, so another real quick thing,
is variance is something that tends to be a lot of fun.
And what I mean by variance is just
something can happen,
but there's a range of things that can happen.
And the way I like to think about it is,
let's say you play with a deck.
You make a deck and you play 10 games with it.
How different will those games be?
The lower the variance,
the more exactly the games will play out.
The games will have a low variance game.
They play out exactly the same.
High variance, they play out very differently.
Normally, in sort of traditional tournament magic,
we want to keep variance to a certain level.
Not no variance. We get some variance.
And shuffling cards is obviously variance as well.
But we try to keep our variance to a certain level
because we want skill to matter
in high-end tournament play. We want someone to win the game because they're the more skilled
opponent and not because, oh, somebody got lucky, right? We don't want like the world championship
coming down to somebody flipping a coin or something, right? We want it to be something
in which skill wins the day. But one of the things we know
from game design is that
variance is a lot of fun.
It's a lot of fun.
Like, ooh, what's going to happen?
And so what we,
one of my maxims for unsets
has always been,
just as it's the spectrum
of the highest amount of social play,
I always want it to be
the highest amount of variance.
Because variance is tons of fun.
It's a lot of fun not to know what's going to happen.
And there's a lot of exciting moments of variance.
And once we get away from the competitive play part of it, like this product is designed
specifically not to be in competitive play, I'm like, I'm going to up the variance.
I want variance to be high.
So one of the ways whenever you make variants high is you want a lot of
possibilities for different things to happen. So when Tom Wanderstrand told me that we were
going to have 48 different sticker sheets, I knew from then and there I didn't want to repeat
things. I wanted the stickers to be all different. That was my plan. And we knew from looking at a
sticker sheet that you could get a bunch of stickers on it
and so
the big thing that I was trying to figure out was
okay, I knew I could get a whole bunch of stickers
on it, I knew we could be in full color
I knew we had lots of printing
we could do, I knew that we could
make them, or
Tom had every belief that he could make them restickable
we had to prove it, there was testing to do
but Tom was very confident he could do that
mostly because it has to do with what Tom was very confident he could do that.
Mostly because it has to do with what they call the tackiness of the glue,
which is how sticky is the glue, essentially.
And glue is one of the things you can control.
So it was just a matter of how tacky did we want the glue.
Anyway, so we went into exploratory design. And what I said to the team is,
look, I don't know what we're doing with the stickers.
I don't know how the stickers are going to tie into this retro science,
you know, the retro science fiction carnival amusement park circus.
Like, I didn't know how it was all going to tie together.
But I said exploratory, I'm really, I'm intrigued by stickers.
I think stickers are a cool component,
and kind of what we want to do in Unsets is push in space we've never pushed before,
do something we've never done before. And I know stickers is a little bit out there,
but on some level, I feel the Unsets aren't doing something you go, what? Like, then Unsets aren't being Unsets, right? I have to do something where you're a little taken away, that we're pushing
things a little in new space that we haven't pushed before.
And so I knew that we wanted to do that.
And so what I did is I started an exploratory design.
I just said to my team, okay, you can do whatever you want with the stickers.
No holds barred.
All I'm telling you is there's a sticker sheet.
Okay.
I said the following.
There's going to be one of, instead of a card, we're going to have a sticker sheet that's going to be on a card,
but have stickers on it. There can be multiple stickers on it. They can be however big you want
them to be within the confines of fitting on a card. They're multi, you know, they can be
multicolored. They can be colored. What do you want to do with it? What can we do? And so a lot of exploratory was just blue sky design, as we call it, for stickers.
So one of the things that's really interesting is the team really, like,
obviously the low-hanging fruit of stickers is you sticker cards.
But the team wasn't restricted to that.
Like, for example, Annie was the first one that just said,
what if I just sticker objects?
That's how animate object came about.
What if I just sticker an object?
I think it was hand sanitizer.
And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to turn my hand sanitizer
into a token creature and attack you.
And that was just sort of really out sort of like really out of the box thinking
that was very exciting for us.
We talked about stickers going on players,
maybe much like curses or something.
Maybe you could put it on a player
and it signifies something about the player.
We use stickers to attach cards.
Maybe, you know, you sticker two cards together
and now these cards are attached in some way.
We explored a lot of really outer-bounds cool stuff,
and a few little things like animated objects stuck around.
But the space that we were most intrigued by,
which, like I said, a lot of times,
when we call something the low-hanging fruit,
being obvious doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
So we looked a lot about, okay, if I can stick around cards,
what do I want to stick around cards?
And essentially there were a couple major categories.
The first big thing we could do was we could add things to cards, right?
We could, well, we could either change things on cards
or we could add things to cards.
Those are the two biggest things we could do.
We could also remove things from cards
either by covering them up or by, like,
for a while we just had blank things
and all you did is just, like,
we played this mechanic we tried at one point
where you were taking out words.
The problem we found with the taking out words thing,
by the way, was every once in a while
there was something cool you could do with it
that you can remove a word but a lot of times
it just you didn't know what happened
it's like the rule system
is not so robust that I can
just take out a word from any card and just go
well clearly there's an answer to what happens here
but anyway mostly replacing
like things being replacing or additive
were the two things that were the most
showed the most potential.
Right. Like I could add something to the card that wasn't there before, or I could take something on the card and change it.
So what we did basically is we said, OK, what is everything on a magic card?
What could I replace? What could I add? And we sort of wrote down all the different aspects of the card.
to add. And we sort of wrote down all the different aspects of the card. And pretty much, I mean,
essentially what we found is there was the name, there was the mana cost, there was the art,
there was the card type line, there was the rules text, there was the flavor text,
there was the power of the toughness, and there was a few minor things like collector number or, you know, artist credit. In the end, what we found was anything that was too minor like collector number,
it wouldn't come up enough.
So let me walk through what happened.
Names we found to be interesting.
And one of the things we're always looking for is
what are effects that we can do.
Like, remember, when we first started making the set,
it was an
unset in the sense that no card
we played ever in any tournament format.
So when we started inventing
this and we were working early on,
we had no idea the eternal path of what happened
later on. We didn't know that yet.
So,
we,
names were something that we could care about
that normal, you know, normal magic can't.
One of the rules about sort of the normal rules is that all cards must be equivalent to their English version.
And so all cards with the same name are equivalent to the English version.
And what that meant is if I have Grizzly Bear, it doesn't matter what set Grizzly Bear is from.
Grizzly Bear might be reprinted lots of times.
So anything that might be different between different printings of Grizzly Bear,
or any card that might have multiple printings, can't be something we mechanically care about.
Well, cards will have different art and artists.
Cards can have different expansion symbols.
Cards can have different watermarks.
They're just things that
aren't the same between cards. So
magic normally can't care about
rarity, can't care about watermarks.
Also,
we need to treat all
cards the same regardless of language
and all of them function
the same as the English language card.
So for that reason
we sort of can't care about names or at least we can care about whether it's
name A or not and whether it's you know is it named blah that that we can care
about. Oh if blah is in place something happens. You can care about it as a whole
entity. What you can't care about is are there two words in it? Does it start with
a certain letter? Qualities of the name you can't care about.
So one of the things that when we're looking at stickers,
one of the things about name stickers was, hey, names is something
that we can care about mechanically,
so that's kind of cool, because
changing names could
mechanically matter, because we'll
care about names. So names seem good.
Mana value, the problem
with mana value is
mana value wouldn't mean anything
unless you could sticker people's
cards in their hand.
And
mana is sort of,
you know, there's a certain amount of safety valve
to mana. Mana is a means to make
sure that things don't break. So messing
with mana, both the cards,
you'd have to mess with things in your hand
and we like to keep information
secret. But like if you're going to sticker something,
you kind of have to know what they're stickering and stuff.
So mana presented
a bunch of problems.
Both in sort of execution
and in balance, you know, play
design issues. So we decided not to
do mana value. Art
seemed flavorful and cool,
and much like names,
we can care about art in unsets
in a way that you just can't care about in normal sets.
The other problem with art is
there's some subjectivity, and
rules for tournament purposes
do not like subjectivity. But when it's
fun casual play,
is that a hat? Is it not a hat?
Some of those conversations can be fun in a more casual play. You know, is that a hat? Is it not a hat? You know, some of those conversations can be fun in a more casual setting.
And also, we knew that if you're going to make stickers,
one of the funnest things to do with stickers is art stickers.
Like, we understood how compelling art stickers are, right?
It's just a lot of fun to put stickers on things.
So art seemed cool.
Card type was one of those things that it just
didn't matter enough.
Changing the card type
wasn't super relevant
and again caused some
rules issues we had to explain.
Like yeah, I mean, oh, the other thing
we decided I think super
super early on, in fact this might have been
when we started exploratory design,
was this idea early on, this might have been when we started Exploratory Design was this idea
early on. I'm not sure when we officially
decided this. But we decided that we didn't want you
stickering other people's cards.
That even though we were going to make it safe
to sticker, other people might feel
uncomfortable. We didn't want you
messing with other people's cards if they
didn't feel comfortable about it. We didn't
think that was okay.
So we said you can't sticker other people's cards.
So when you started getting into card types,
you can change your own card types.
What does that mean?
And if you turn your creature into not a creature,
then it can't attack.
What's the value to that?
So card types, and you couldn't do your opponent. the most valuable thing is I turned your creature into an artifact
so now it can't attack. But if I can't sticker
your cards, then it didn't mean anything. So,
card type just didn't have enough function
to it. And
card
subtype,
we just didn't have enough cards that mattered.
Like, yeah, you could change creature
type, but there wasn't a lot of cards that you, like,
the set didn't care about creature type too much.
I mean, a little bit on individual cards,
but not enough that, you know,
it just didn't make enough sense.
And we wanted these,
we wanted the stickers to matter most of the time.
Rules text, yeah,
there's a lot of things you can do with rules text.
That made a lot of sense.
It was cool things.
You could add abilities and stuff.
Flavor text,
we talked about it.
That it might be fun to make flavor text
that you put on cards. But it was sort of like
changing
flavor text didn't mean much. Like, we can
care about flavor text. There are cards in the set
that care about flavor text. But
it wasn't like changing flavor text did
all that much. So, we did
talk about having flavor text for a while.
It just didn't seem like it was relevant enough.
And also changing flavor text while it might be, I guess, in a vacuum fun.
It proved to be something that just didn't have the impact a lot of other choices had.
And then the last thing was power toughness.
Yeah, that had a huge impact.
So when the dust settled, we realized there were four things that were relevant,
which was name, art, ability stickers, and power toughness.
Anyway, guys, so one of the things definitely about Infinity is going to be
I have a lot of depth of information, and I know a lot about it.
So there will be a bunch of different podcasts.
In fact, this is part one, and I'm at work,
and I barely got through stickers.
So there will be a lot of podcasts on Unfinity
just because I have a great amount of detail on it.
But anyway, guys, I'm literally not part of the work.
So we're going to wrap up our story right now.
We get to the point of figuring out what the four stickers are
for the sticker sheets, and we'll stop our story right here.
But I will pick up and tell lots more
Unfinity stories, and I will continue telling
the story of its design in future
podcasts. But anyway, guys, I'm now
parked, 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.