I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school.

We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work.

Okay, so recently I did what's called a nuts and bolts column.

It's something I write in for my column, making magic. I do it once a year.

And the idea was it's a column dedicated to people trying

to make their own magic sets. Now, for those that don't make their own magic sets, it's a lot of

behind, it's like a lot of technical behind the scenes information. And so every year I talk about

different aspects. I've been doing it for 17 years, I think. So if you want to

make your own magic set, there's this resource I've made. I spent a lot of years sort of walking

step by step, and now I'm sort of going back and hitting wider areas I hadn't hit before.

So this year's topic, which I thought was I ended up doing two articles on, was finding your mechanics.

This is something that I get a lot of questions from people who are doing their own sets.

And so anyway, today I'm going to sort of go over a lot of the stuff I covered in the column and maybe hit some new things.

One I think about the doing it on the podcast is I have a little more time, so sometimes I can hit some things that I don't hit in the article itself.

So, okay, so where do you find your mechanics?

That's the basic essence.

And I think there are a couple basic ways.

So we're going to walk through how you can find

mechanics. So number one is the idea that you find the mechanics first. That I'm usually the way

you find mechanics is you're just playing a game of magic and something that you want to happen

isn't happening. My example for that is when Magic first came out, way back in 1993, I bought a whole bunch of cards.

I bought a little bit of alpha.

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