Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #32 - Future Sight - Part 1

Episode Date: May 3, 2013

Mark Rosewater dives into the Time Spiral set Future Sight with Part 1 of a series.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so I ran a while ago for you guys the Rosewater Rumble, where I pitted my 16 sets against themselves. The winner was Indischarad, but I think the set that really sort of was the surprise of the whole thing was Future Sight. Future Sight was responsible for two of the three upsets, and the third upset was Innistrad beating Ravnica, which is almost not really an upset in that when we were picking a one and two, we weren't sure which to put first. So we kind of knew they were going to be the two finalists,

and we weren't honestly sure what was going to win. But Future Sight honestly surprised us. I did not expect Future Sight to do. But Future Sight, honestly, surprised us. I did not expect Future Sight to do as well as it did. But I think I understand why it did as well as it did. So let's talk today. Today is all about Future Sight. Now let me start by saying this. I'm a big fan of Future Sight. I think people think that I don't like Future Sight. No, in fact, as a designer, I'm very proud of it in the sense that it was one of the hardest designs I ever did. In fact, in my mind, it's the second hardest I ever did after Unglued,

which ironically was up against in the first thing. The only reason Unglued to me was a little bit harder than Future Sight was Unglued didn't even know what it was, you know, where I had to sort of give a definition to it. Where FutureSight knew kind of what it wanted to be, and the challenge was, how do you make that happen? So here's what happened. I became head designer in the middle of Kamigawa Block. So Ravnica Block was my first time leading the block.

Time Spiral was my second. So, as I explained in the Time Spiral podcast, we had started with this theme of time, and it kind of quickly became, and nostalgia became a big part of it. And then the block structure I set up was past, present, and future. Past was very clear, like how do you represent the past?

Well, show things from the past, and cards from the past, and things from the past, and, you know, the past was very clear like how do you represent the past well show things from the past and cards from the past and things from the past and you know the past was very easy as I talked about in my Planar Chaos podcast I eventually came up with the idea

of the alternate present of the way things could have been and once I got that hook on it I understood what it was supposed to be now future sight I knew what it wanted to be it was a glimpse in the future. I understood that.

And we had the time-shifted cards. So I knew going in that, okay, it said all about the future, that played into hinting at what the future could be, and then it would have cards from the future, which I remember there was

a comic someone did at the time where they were making fun of it. It's like, there are cards from the Future, which I remember there was a comic someone did at the time where they were making fun of it. It's like, they're cards from the future, but they're in the packs. Aren't they cards from now? But I liked a lot the flavor of Future Sight, the idea of it's a place for us to have this playground to tease where magic was going. Now, normally when you do a set, what you want to do is you want to concentrate.

You want to pick a few want to concentrate, right? You want to pick a few mechanics and do those few mechanics. And all my training is all about saying, okay, don't go wide, you know, go narrow. Take your mechanics, pick a few, really flesh them out, you know, and that the strength of usually making a design work is concentration. But that wasn't what FutureSight wanted. What FutureSight wanted was to go wide. Oh, before we get to that, let me talk about the design team. Because FutureSight had a very interesting design team.

I don't know if I told... So let's walk through the design team. So I was the lead, obviously. Mark Gottlieb was on the team. Devin Lowe, who at the time, I think he was the lead developer, but he was a developer, if not the lead developer, and he was

the development representative on the team. Those were the two normal ones. Those were the people who had done design, had been on design teams before. The rest of the people on my design team had never been on a design team before. Well, that's interesting, Mark. Why would you put three people on my design team had never been on a design team before. Well, that's interesting, Mark. Why would you put three people on your design team that had never done design before?

And the answer was, I was doing Future Sight. I needed to go to, I needed to find things that Magic hadn't done. So I wanted some designers that didn't know, weren't used to doing Magic design, that kind of maybe would be out of the box a little more. So I had three people. Number one, Matt Cavada, who at the time was on the creative team in charge of names and flavor text.

Matt had always wanted to try his hand at design. He had a very different sensibility. Plus, I knew that this was going to be a tricky flavor to match. Because not only were we showing glimpses of mechanical futures, but we were showing glimpses of creative futures. So I wanted a creative person on the team. Matt had interest in designing.

Matt definitely has a very different aesthetic I thought would be good. So, Matt Cavato was on the team. Next, a guy named Ryan Miller. Ryan Miller currently is the equivalent of me on another product we make, another trading card game we make called Kaijudo. He's the head designer for Kaijudo. At the time, Ryan was doing a lot

of different designs. Ryan's a very good designer, but Ryan had never done a magic design before. And one of the problems in general I've learned when you bring established designers into magic that aren't familiar with magic is they spend a lot of time sort of hitting areas you've hit before. Usually what happens is you want people that are very well versed in magic because they've learned the lessons of magic. And designers that are well experienced but don't know magic well tend to rediscover a lot of that stuff.

but don't know magic well tend to rediscover a lot of that stuff. And so, Ryan was brought in because I knew he didn't know magic well, but also I was trying to use that as a plus in that he might go places we had closed off or hadn't thought about because we determined somehow we can't do it. And I wanted

somebody who had that sort of maybe could go areas that we had sort of self-censored. So I brought Ryan on. And the last person was an intern at the time, somebody who would later go on to be in the Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame. I guess. Actually, there's only two people who fit that description.

One is Pat Chapin, but he's not the person. Zvi Mosiewicz was the sixth member of our design team. And as you will see in a minute, I'll talk about one of the mechanics. Zvi was very instrumental in one of them. Okay, so what happened was, okay, we're trying to glimpse the future. Now, Brian Tinsman did Time Spiral. Bill Rose did Planar Chaos. I took Future Sight, mostly because I understood what we were trying to do

and show off the future. And I'm like, this is a hard set. I knew it was a hard set. And here's the biggest thing. So for example, the time shifter cards were from the future. So every single time shifter card had to do something we've never done before. You know what I'm saying? Like, I can't just show you something from the future that is something we've already done. You're like, well, I'm glad the future looks pretty boring. You're doing that again. You can't repeat what you've done. Now, a lot of what we did is riffing.

Like, a lot of the future we showed you were things that made sense that we could do. You know, a lot of it was like, oh, I hope they one day do this, and we did some of that. So we tried to show you some stuff you'd never seen before. We had mechanics you'd never seen before. But at the same time, we also wanted to go down some avenues and explore some things that was kind of obvious

maybe we could do one day and show what we did. There's a lot of extrapolated design. Also, be aware that I went down avenues that I never planned to actually go down. One of the ones I'll give as an example is we had an enchantment that tapped. I don't want to do enchantments that tapped, but I felt like when I was exploring all these potential futures, I had to throw a few things in that I thought were like, you know, futures that people might have thought we would do, just

because it is very, very hard to come up with stuff we've never done. And so I felt like, okay, I'm not going to, even stuff that's normally off limits, I'm willing in this set to sort of goof around and tease at things. And part of the fun was, the whole idea of the set was, we're showing you potential futures. Now, be aware. I had, at the time, a six-year plan, I think.

So, I mean, I had some idea where we were going. You know, I knew clearly the next year, the year after that, and the year after that. And then I had some ideas of where we were going. So what happened was, a lot of the designs were us teasing in directions I thought one day we would go. For example, um, Arbor Dryad, Dryad Arbor, Dryad Arbor, Arbor Dryad Arbor, I think it's Dryad Arbor. It's a land that's a creature and a land. Well, I knew we were doing a land block. I knew we were going to do Zendikar.

I didn't know what we were doing with lands, so I played around with the kind of things we can do with lands. Now, it turns out, when we went to Zendikar, we didn't actually do that. But that was me kind of teasing you and showing you that we're going to mess around with lands. Likewise, there was the mirror. What what's the Myr's name? There was a Myr that was an artifact

creature. It was a blue frame, but also an artifact creature. And at the time, we were sort of teasing, especially with the creative, we were teasing that we were going to go back to Myrden, and that the Phyrexians had invaded. And so that was a little

clue there about that. But it turns out we ended up using the colored artifacts in Alara, Shards of Alara block. So when we got to return to Mirrodin, we didn't do that. So a lot of times, a lot of future sites was us sort of knowing areas we're going and playing with it. Now, a few of them we knew for sure. We definitely planted some stuff for the very next set, or, you know, the next year's worth of sets. If you notice, all four sets,

Lorwyn, Morning Tide, Shadowmourn, Even Tide, all had a card. You know, we planted the stuff that's near, and then we've always sort of, whenever we do a set, we look and see. And I happen to know for a fact that there's a couple of Future Sighted cards scheduled right now to come in future sets. Now, I mean, they haven't happened yet. But, I mean, they're currently in sets right now.

So it's something we constantly look for. And it's one of the things I thought would be fun about Future Sight was we'd have this sort of game that would go on for a long time. It would both tease our future and have us sort of have fun sort of recognizing it. long time. It'll both tease our future and have us sort of have fun sort of recognizing it. One of the ones we've run into is a lot of times the creative and mechanical, we would guess a mechanical future and creative will guess a creative future and they don't always line up. That's been the biggest problem where, oh, we do want to do this car, but that's not a creative we'd use. And I mean, the premise we always gave was these are from potential future, so some would come to pass, some wouldn't come to pass. Now, so the time shifted sheet, we'll talk about that first, because that is one of the major elements.

Okay, so the rule I set for the time shifted sheet said anything on the sheet had to be something we haven't yet done but could do. And some of the could do might be, well, I don't think we're going to do that, but it's teasing at different things. Now, the one thing that I should point out is the frame real quick. So each time, we had a time shift sheet

and we used a different frame. The first set had the old frame. The second set had an alternate frame where magic could have been, which was kind of a reworking, a combination of the old frame and the new frame in a different way. I love the Planar Chaos frames, by the way. I think I mentioned that in the

Planar Chaos podcast. The future chaos frames were, we had actually toyed with changing magic's frame. I mean, we did change magic's frame, but we had explored it with a much more radical way to change magic's frame. So the had explored it with a much more radical way to change Magic's frame. So the future site was actually a peek into that frame.

When we were planning to redo the frame in Mirrodin, the 8th edition frames, as people call them, we toyed with a lot more radical ideas, like having the mana cost on the left side, because we thought that way when you spread your cards, you can see them. We had little symbols to represent the kind of cards. All this technology that we were thinking of doing, when we went to the future, we ended up using that. We had done a lot of work to make those frames. There were a few additional

things we did, and it's funny. The symbols for the different card types, I think Magic Online later used those. So it is funny that little things we did ended up getting used. So the other thing that we did with the future shifted stuff is A, we wanted to show you things we might actually do and we have mechanics and things from the future. B, we, some of them,

there were a couple of things that we thought were funny. Let me talk about a few individual ones. So Tarmogoyf was made originally because I wanted the following joke, which was, these are the card types of magic, and it would list card types that didn't exist. Now, when I first came up with that joke, I planned to just list whatever, some card types that were just, sounded interesting.

Oh my God, what's that? But, because I made time pretty early on in the process, but in the middle of that, Matt Cavada came to me with the idea of doing Planeswalkers. Now, Matt and I, Matt was my guest for a whole Planeswalker podcast, if you ever listened to that, and I liked the idea. We ended up doing them. We tried to do them in FutureSight, but we couldn't quite, we were close enough that we knew we had something really cool, but

not close enough that we were confident putting them in. So, in fact, the story about Tower of Mogoif, if I haven't told this, I might tell the story a lot, so I apologize if I told it already. I made Tower of Mogoif. Then, when the Planeswalkers were going to be in the set, we were going to have three Planeswalkers in Future Sight, one of which was green,

we removed Tower of Mogoif to put in the Planeswalker. going to have three Planeswalkers in Future Sight, one of which was green. We removed Tarmogoyf to put in the Planeswalker. So instead of the joke mentioning the card type, we just show you a new card type was the idea. But then when the Planeswalkers weren't ready,

we pulled them out and Mike put Tarmogoyf back in. And it's funny, literally Tarmogoyf was made because I thought it was hilarious to have Reminder Text to show you other cards.

And then, once we figured out that we weren't going to do Planeswalkers, it's like, oh, this is awesome, I can show you a card that, in fact, is going to exist in the near future. And that was even better. Like, I actually, it's an actual, I'm actually showing you in the future.

And at that time, we'd also figured out that in order to make the thing we were trying to do in Lorwyn, which was the next set of work, we were going to need the Tribal. So we ended up putting Tribal on it, too, because, okay, here's two new card types that are going to show up Lorwyn, which was the next set of work, we were going to need the tribal. So we ended up putting tribal on it too because, okay, here's two new card types that are going to show up next set, which was pretty damn cool.

And the reason, what happened was I had a long list of things I could do and one of my things was Lurgoy variant, question mark, and the other was card that shows reminder text of card types and then one day my brain's like, hmm, hmm, interesting. And then brain's like, hmm, hmm, interesting. And then I'm like, okay, well, you know, Lurgoif cares about things in the graveyard.

Card types are something I could care about. Boom, and I put them together. When I made the card, by the way, I believe it was 2G for a star star. It might have even been 3G for a star star. Either 2G or 3G. The reason it was star stars is I hate StarPlus One. I hate it. Like, whatever, just make it nice and simple and easy to grok. I don't think you need a StarPlus One. Like, whatever.

Fine, nothing to your graveyard, you can't play it. It's not that big a loss. Wait until you have something to your graveyard. But what happened was when Mike Turian was the lead developer, when Mike took out Tarmogoyf to put in the Planeswalker and then had to put it back, he did it from memory.

And because Lurgoyfs are star, star plus one, he just assumed it was star, star plus one. And then he also lowered it to 1G. So, well, I made Tarmogoyf. Mike kind of made Tarmogoyf, if you will. So, okay. So, the other, what else did we do?

Oh, so, the other thing we thought would be funny was to make some, a few cards that were kind of just jokes. So, one of the cards I made, I forget what it did, but it, like, when you blog a blorg and splig a splorg or something, and, you know, it just was made up words. Or I think, I think, no, what it was, was

it made up a creature type that sounded silly, and, like, all blorgs get plus two, plus two and something, you know. And Aaron liked where I was going, where I was just making up something that we didn't really plan to support, but he thought we didn't push it far enough. So Aaron took it and tweaked it and turned it into an early version of Steamflugger Boss. And his Steamflugger Boss, it was whenever you erect a monument, whenever, whatever, a rigger erects a monument,

you said to erect two monuments. And then in development, someone decided that we probably shouldn't be erecting things and I don't know, it sounded bad anyway, we changed it to assembling a contraption and the idea was it would be this card that kind of hinted at this future, who knows what's going on

that was kind of funny and it was our intent that we were just joking but then Aaron goes and tells people in this column that it's a joke and I'm like, but Aaron, that joke is funny when you don't tell people it's a joke. And then once Aaron said it's a joke that we had no intention of making assembling contraptions and stuff, then of course, what is the, like, for example, I did this thing where I asked my, uh, Tumblr audience, what are the top 10 things they wanted?

Well, I didn't ask top 10. I asked them what are the things they most wanted to see? Uh, and like in the top five was contraptions. Like, contraptions have become this giant thing because we sort of threw the gauntlet down. And then Aaron's like, oh, we can never do this. And so I, I, I. And the problem was we didn't make it easy for us. So the contraptions are on my short list of, like, if one day I can solve contraptions, I should make contraptions.

But there's a whole, yeah, yeah. it is, people go read the rules about it. Like, you, the player, don't assemble contraptions. Sometimes the creatures assemble contraptions. So what does that mean? Why are they assembling them? And it's an artifact subtype. Anyway, it has become one of the things that people bug me about most. Which means that I've spent some time thinking about it. It is very tricky.

It is very tricky. But I promise you this, the day I figure out how to do them, I will look for a place to put them. Oh, also, here's another funny story about the time-shifted sheet. So normally when development makes holes, what they do is we have hole-filling. There's people in R&D and outside of R&D that they'll go to to fill holes. And so normally, once I hand over a set, I'm not very involved in hole-filling. Usually they come to me when they're having real trouble filling it, and then I'll try to help them.

But normally, normal hole- hole filling can usually fill holes. The problem was the normal hole filling team was really bad at filling time shifted holes because it has to be something you've never done, but something that you maybe could do. And that's just, that's really, really hard. I mean, when I talk about this set being so hard to design, trying to wrap your brain around, like, things that you could do but haven't done, I mean, it's very hard to make. They were very, very hard to make. So what Mike Turian would do is when he had to have holes, he would just come to me. I would just fill the holes. He didn't even go to the whole filling team. He tried a couple times, and it just proved fruitless

for the whole filling team. It just was a little bit too hard, required a little bit too much kind of intimate knowledge of sort of what's coming up and what could be done. And I'd spent the whole time working on the set, so I was in that mindset. So, Mike would come to me, and so right before the set was going to go to print,

he came to me and said, okay, Mark, I need two cards. I need a blue card and a black card. And I made those cards and I sat down in one session, I made those two cards. I need a blue card and a black card. And I made those cards I sat down in one session, I made those two cards they were the very, very last things to go on the set, and they were

Narcomiba and Bridge from Below. Which are both going on to be pretty good cards. One of the things about Future Sight, A, Mike Turin was known as a developer that definitely pushed boundaries, power level things about Future Sight, I mean, A, my training was known as a developer that definitely pushed boundaries power level-wise,

but also, I think the reason Future Sight ended up being very powerful is development, it is hard to understand something you've never

played with before. And normally in a set, you know, I will throw one or two curveballs at the developers. You know, I have one new mechanic they've never dealt with.

But usually the other mechanics are things that are similar and they have some idea. But this set, I was just throwing curveball after curveball after curveball. This one works in the graveyard, but I didn't play. And this one does this. And this one, holy moly. Every card was a curveball, especially the time-shifter sheets. every card was a curveball, especially the time-shifter sheets. And so they were like, I think one of the things was,

it was hard to figure out and gauge the power level, you know? And that's why Futures, I think, has a higher power level than most, in that there's just so many weird cards that do weird things. It's like, well, in the right circumstances, this could be good, but is it normally good, you know? And I think that's part of why it ended up the way it did. Okay, another big part of the set is what I called mix and match. So mix and match was inspired by Mark Gottlieb. In Unhinged, Mark Gottlieb made two cards.

One was called Blast from the Past, and one was called Old Foggy. Blast from the Past was a burn spell that used every spell mechanic Mark could come up with, and Old Foggy was a creature that used a lot of creature mechanics. Now, Old Foggy was a little more jokey than Blast from the Past. Blast from the Past was more straightforward, like, hey, here's a burn spell with five mechanics, where Old Foggy definitely had some more jokey keywords. But both of them were kind of like,

I'm using a lot of keywords from the past and putting them together. In fact, when I wrote the FAQ for Unhinged, for each of them, I'm like, here's the mechanic. A with B works this way. B with C works this way. C with D works this way. And I sort of walked through what happens when you combine mechanics. And what I found was

like with Blast from the Past, I mean, there were a few duds, but most of the mechanics actually worked kind of interestingly. You know, that you could, you know, do this and then do that. You know, you could kick it, and then you could buy it back. And so you have a large effect, but you still get to keep it, you know, or you can kick it and flash it and stuff like that. It was kind of neat. Although it turns out that buyback and flashback, even though they share the back, don't work together. So I liked that idea,

and I felt like how often we're going to be in a place where we could do a mix and match. It's like, you know, normally there's an environment that has that many things where we can mix and match them together. And we made this decision that, you know, we were going to explore mechanics from the past. And so, you know, we were going to, like, explore mechanics from the past, and so, you know, the first set, Time Spiral, I think, had 12 returning mechanics and two new ones, I believe is what happened, and then along comes the next set, and that adds a couple, and

anyway, I said, okay, let's do mix and match, and so I put Zvi Marcewicz, what I said to Zvi is, okay, here's all the mechanics I'm willing to bring back, and it was a pretty lengthy list, and I said, okay, you, for each one of them, rank them from one to five. One means, or five means awesome. This is an awesome, awesome combo.

This is really cool. You'll feel clever. Two means, or sorry, four means that it's good, but you're not great. Three means it's okay. Two means it sucks. One means it doesn't even work. It's a non-mo, as we call it, or a bombo.

And so he went through, and he took all of them, and he ranked them from one to five. And then what I did is I made sure to put all the fives in. I think I got all the fours in, and I got, I think, most of the threes in. I mean, I got all the threes. I got all the fours and fives in. And so we just mixed and matched, and that was the kind of fun of it, is like, what happens when this mechanic and that mechanic? Because normally what I explained at the time was, look, you know, the only way to get mechanics together is if they're on the same set. And while we do bring back mechanics, A, we don't pretend to bring back too many mechanics at the same time, and B, you know, at best there's two mechanics that can merge for a card.

And so I was very excited about mix and match being something that we could give a very distinct feel. And it felt a lot like the future to me, which is, well, in the future, that's where you see things we've done, but put together in different ways. In some ways, that spoke to me of what the future was. It's taking what magic has already done, but mixing and matching them in different ways. And so I thought these cards would be something that really sort of had that future feel to it. It's one of the big things, by the way, I'm big on feel was,

I wanted the future side to have the sense of, you know, you're exploring the future that is different. And I looked for mechanics and things that had that sense. For example, I saved Scry for future site because Scry to me was a mechanic all about seeing the future. I mean, literally, it's called Scry, which means to look into the future. Also, we had the packs, which were... Interesting story. Paul Sotisanti, who was on the design team for Planar Chaos, was inspired by a card in Unhinged called Turbo Power Slug.

What's it called? Turbo Power Slug. That's not the name. It is Super Turbo Slug. Okay, so this problem is driving the car. It was a card from Unhinged. It was a little slug that had super the name. It is Super Turbo Slug. Okay, so this problem is driving the car. It was a car from Unhinged. It was a little slug that had Super Haste. And I can't remember its name.

Super Turbo Charged. Anyway, that car. You know what car I'm talking about. But he, during Planar Chaos, he came up with the idea of the packs, which are these cards in which you paid for it in the future. You paid for it next turn. But I say, wait, wait, Paul, that's a future site

mechanic, right? I get to do a spell now when I pay for it in the future? And so I stole it and put it into future site. Because, I mean, it was a neat idea, but I mean, it was perfect for future site. Now, a lot of people, by the way, there was a big debate about the whole lose the game thing. And the reason I did that,

why did I lose the game rather than some other negative is, I felt like if I gave you another negative, and we tried this, what you ended up doing was just building a deck to play around the negative. But that wasn't the point. The point of the cards were, I get a card now that I pay for next turn. And so I needed to do something to ensure you paid for it next turn. I wasn't trying to make a super giant card that you built around the negative. So I'm like, okay, how do I make you pay?

Well, if you don't, you lose. That'll make you pay. I mean, PAX had a little bit of a problem of people forgetting and losing, which wasn't really the point. And obviously, that's the biggest downside of PAX. But I do enjoy the idea of you've got to pay now, or you've got to pay

later, you've got to pay for what you get now. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. And I enjoyed them. The packs were one of my favorite cycles in the sense of, I love the gameplay of them. The idea that, you know, I get my resource now, but now I'm indebted to pay for it later. Anything else about the mix and match cards?

Sprout Storm for well, I think that was a cool card. I think Convoke and Buyback were well together. It was a mistake that ended up being in common. Um, you know, I don't think in playtesting we realized, obviously development didn't realize the power. You know, it kind of floated under the radar a little bit of how powerful it was.

Um, and I know in Unlimited it's one of the big frustrating things about Future Sight. I mean, obviously, like I said, it's more development than design, but if we had been a little more on the ball, maybe... I don't know. I like the mix and match of the card. I guess the rarity was wrong. So here's

something else that for you to think about. About the complexity of the set, which was, before the set, if you looked at the set as of Planar Chaos, how many mechanics existed in Magic? How many did Magic have, if you went to the comp rules? And I believe there were 56.

So there were 56 keywords that existed before Future Sight came out. Okay, how many keyword mechanics were in FutureSight? Now, it introduced a whole bunch, but how many were in FutureSight? And the answer is 48. By the way, design turned over 51. Gottlieb ended up pulling, as rules manager, pulled a few out during development. But think about that.

There were 56 in existence. There were 48 in FutureSight. You know, I mean, for people that want to sort of say, oh, Future Sight, it's not that complicated. No, baloney, baloney, baloney. It's insanely, insanely, insanely complicated. Now, I understand. I understand that there are people who enjoy that.

And obviously, I think the reason that Future Sight did so well in the Rosewater Rumble is I was on Twitter. This is my dedicated in-franchise following, right? You know, these are people who are like, I want to follow Mark on Twitter. These are people who have been playing Magic for a while, a lot of them. And I mean, I always talked about Future Sight

being my arthouse film, which means it got critical raves, people loved it who saw it and got it. But it had a bad opening weekend. Future Sight did not do well. And the reason was there were 48 keywords. Let's imagine you were new to Magic.

We normally, normally in a set, we'll put four or five mechanics, maybe six if we want to push it. But that's about it. And if we're doing five or six, like, they're simple, right? We're making sure not to do anything too complex, you know? And I mean, I understand, of the 48, some of them were the evergreen keywords. But let's take those away. There were still, like, 30 keywords, you know?

And some of them were very complex, but we'd never done them before. They're from the future. You know, plus, we had mechanics that were just on one card or on a couple cards. It was... It was a lot. Like I said, I'm not disappointed that we did it, and I think that FutureSight

had a lot of fun to it. But anyway, as I'm looking at my sheet, I realize I have a lot more to say about FutureSight. In fact, I haven't talked about a single mechanic. And there are 48 of them! So I'm going to come back next week, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about a lot of the individual...

I think I'm going to talk about mechanics next week, mostly. Because there's 48 mechanics to get through. 30 minutes, 48 mechanics, can I do it? So next week, I will talk about sort of a little bit more about Future Sight. And hopefully you guys enjoyed today's, uh, part one. And, uh, next week will be more Future Sight. But I'm now at work. I parked in the parking spot.

So it's time for me to go in. So I guess it's time for me to make the magic.