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

Okay, so I've been doing a series where I've been talking about the totality of magic design.

I'm going from beginning to end, and I'm talking more about the changes in process, not about individual sets per se, more how they play into the big picture.

And last we left, we were up to cons of Tarkir. But I believe, before I could talk about

cons of Tarkir, there's something I didn't bring up last time. So one of the things I talked

about earlier in this series was we started hiring people off the pro tour.

One of the first people that we hired was Randy Bueller, who would go on to be my boss at some point.

Anyway, one of the people that Randy hired was a guy named Eric Lauer, who was,

Randy and him were on a team together in their pro-tore days.

Eric Lauer was known as, what's his name?

The Mad Genius, I think, was his nickname.

He was a really good deck builder.

And he really had a good sense of seeing and understanding how

cards came together. Anyway, we hire Eric. Eric would go on, become lead developer. I think the

first set that I handed off to him, I believe, was Inestrade. And like I said, I think Inestrade is one of the best sets I ever did.

Partly, I think it's the work of my design team, but partly is Eric and his development team

did an amazing job. And Eric really did a lot to refine how development worked, how like the later

part of design worked. There's a lot of tools he built about how we grade things and figure things out,

and there's a lot of just process stuff.

One of the things I like to say is that the early part of design is more art than science,

and the later part of design is more science than art.

And Eric has a very analytical mind and really sort of advanced the science of the later part of the process, a later part of design.

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