I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work.

Okay, so today I'm going to talk Synergy. So one of the things I do sometimes in the morning

when I'm getting ready to plan out what I'm talking about in my podcast, I'll go back and look at

previous Drive to Work to make sure that I haven't done the topic because

I'm over a thousand podcasts now, so a lot of times I'll come up with an idea. I'm like, oh,

that's a good idea. Yeah, I did that two years ago. So anyway, when I first came up the idea of

doing a podcast on Synergy, my response was, I have to have done a podcast on Synergy, but I have not. At least the best of my knowledge, I have not.

So Synergy is a very, very important of trading card game design.

I guess it's important in other games too, but specifically in trading card games.

So let me explain.

What is Synergy?

What does Synergy mean?

Basically, the idea is that the totality of the set is greater than the sum of its parts.

And what that means is that you want things in the set that interact with other things in the set

in such a way that they're stronger through their interaction. Now, magic is a trading card game

that means we make a lot of

pieces and you, the audience, pick and choose what pieces you play with. Well, one of the cool things

about that is what we call combinatorics, the idea that you can mix and match lots of different

things and that one of the fun things about a trading card game is finding the

combinations, finding the synergies, figuring out what cards go well together. And so some synergies,

so I will say there are what I call more plan synergies and they're like some of the what we do is we make

what we call open-ended design meaning I'm going to make a card for example I could specifically

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