I'm not pulling out the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work at home edition. So today we're talking Bloomberg set design. So who better to do that than Ian Duke, the lead set designer. Hey, Ian. Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me on, Mark. Okay, so I did a podcast where I talked to Doug Byer all about vision design.

So at some point, the set got handed off from vision design to set design.

You led set design.

So let's get your first impressions.

What did you think of the set when it was handed off to you?

I loved it.

I mean, from a creative and story standpoint, the set is just a slam dunk in my mind.

I love that it's sort of more lighthearted and just fun in a way that's kind of refreshing

compared to some sets that we've done recently. So I was just really excited to kind of tackle

the project. And the first thing that came to mind for me is that this was definitely going to be a set that is very much about creature types and how can we execute on that in sort of a modern magic way that has learned from all the lessons of past sets that we've done that have involved creature types being a heavy theme. So let's talk a little bit about that. So Magic did its first strong typo theme in

Onslaught, then did another one in Lorwyn, did another strong one in Ixelon. It had a few

sets like Inestrade that kind of did at a lower, a lower sort of frequency. One of the behind-the-scenes things that just we know in R&D is they're really hard to do.

Players love them, but they're very hard to do.

So let's talk a little bit about why.

Why are typo themes so hard?

Yeah, so one of the biggest challenges, especially when you're supporting multiple different

typo themes within one set, is making sure that they each play in a different way.

If you think back to very, very early magic, the very first typal cards were things like Goblin King and Lord of Atlantis for Murfolk, right?

And all they did is give plus one plus one to all of your other goblins or all of your other

Murphoke. And so those decks were pretty much just about get as many copies of one type of

creature onto the battlefield at once and then pump them all up and attack with them. Right. So

fundamentally they didn't play very differently from each other. And as magic went on, we wanted to figure out ways where we can support creature types in those

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