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

Okay, so one of the things, one of my meta plans with my podcast is I want to do a podcast about every magic expansion ever.

I've done a lot of them, but from time to time I want to do one of the ones I haven't done.

So today I'm going

to talk all about fallen empires. So fallen empires came out in November of 1994. So this is one of the

few sets that's before I was at Wizards. I started in Wizards in October of 95. And the first set that I worked on when I got to Wizards in October of 95.

And the first set that I worked on when I got to Wizards was Alliances.

So anything before alliances, with the one exception of Homeland, I had a team that did external playtesting.

So when you get before Homelands, I was not remotely involved with that in any way, which includes fallen empires.

So to understand fallen empires, I need to give you a little history lesson and just sort of

get you in the state of mind of November 1994. Okay, so Magic the Gathering comes out in August

of 1993, first showing up at GenCon.

Wizards of the Coast produces what they think is like six months' worth of cards.

It sells out in three weeks.

They then rush to put together another thing, which becomes beta. Alpha was the original.

And beta, once again,

they think they have like six months. Even more. Now, this time they're shorted six months

and ourselves in like a week. So it was clear from very, very early on that they had to hit

on their hands. So much so that in August, when everything sells out, the original plan had been, Richard thought that

they'd sell magic for a while, and then maybe a year in, two years, and three years in,

they'd put out a new version of it. Ice Age was the original planned one. So instead of being called

Magic the Gathering, it would be Magic Ice Age.

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