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

Okay, so today's podcast was inspired by an article I recently wrote called The Stages of Magic Design.

So when I became head designer back in 2003, two years later in 2005, I wrote my first state of design article.

And in it, I talked about what at the time were the stages of magic design.

There were only four. There were three and we were starting the fourth at the time.

But I haven't really talked about that since then, so I wrote a whole article about it.

So today, I'm going to talk about the so far

seven stages of magic design. Okay, stage number one, alpha through alliances. Okay, so the early

stages are connected to a head designer. The first head designer,

it's sort of a de facto head designer,

which is Richard Garfield, the creator of the game.

So the first stage, let me explain the bit as important.

I've tried for this before, but it's very important for this particular point.

Richard Garfield was not making magic as it ended up being today.

You know, nobody can make, no one planned for the game to be a phenomenon that changes the

essence of gaming, right?

He was just making a normal game that people would play.

And a lot of, a lot of decisions that went into things's like, okay, someone's going to go to the store,

they're going to spend a certain amount of money like you were on a game back in the 90s, like 20, 30 bucks.

And then you'd own those cards, and you'd play with your friends at home. And, you know, your environment was mostly you and your friend. So it was a lot smaller. People less access the cards.

Yeah, there were powerful cards, but hey, maybe in your whole cycle of friends, you know, one friend had an ancestor recall.

And because of anti, remember ante was, when the game was first built, it was built with

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