I'm Puanamai driveway. We all know what that means. It's time from the drive to work.

Okay. So today, every once in a while, I like to talk a little bit about vocabulary from R&D

and discuss sort of the rationale behind it. So today is something we refer to as the elephant in the boots

problem. Now it's normally the case. Normally our terminology comes from somewhere. And so this

expression comes from a natural problem that came up once upon a time.

This was a number of years ago.

We were making a pair of boots.

I believe I think it was equipment.

And the question came up about who should wear the boots.

In the picture, the boots clearly looked like, you know, they were for a humanoid.

You know, they were for, like, a human could wear them, maybe a goblin or an elf could wear them.

But it was clear that some creatures, like, say an elephant, wouldn't possibly be able to

put the boots on.

And so the question came up, should we restrict who can wear the boots?

That was the question at hand.

Now, it turns out that the answer of that question is a very complex answer,

which is why I'm going to

spend 30 minutes talking about it today. So at the crux of this issue, the crux of the

elephant in boots problem is flavor. So let's start by talking about why does Magic the Gathering

have flavor? What role does flavor play? Now, I should

stress from the very beginning, when Richard Garfield first envisioned what it was, it came,

there was a trapping of flavor that Richard had from the very beginning. The idea of it being magical spells was baked in from the very, very beginning.

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