I'm pulling away from the curb because I dropped my son off at school. We all know what that means.

It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today's topic, I've talked about before that when we make a magic set,

there are some number of mechanics in the set. Usually, you know, three to six mechanics, maybe named mechanics. Maybe there's a couple

more unnamed mechanics. But there's only so many mechanics that actually end up in the printed

set. We make a lot more mechanics. I don't know the exact number, but for every mechanic we make,

we probably try five to ten, maybe more than that, depending on the the set but we try a lot of things that we

don't put so today the topic is why do mechanics not make it all these mechanics that we try

how come they don't get in the set what happens to those mechanics why why didn't they make it

that's today's topic why didn't they make it? That's today's topic. Why didn't they

make it? That's the topic. Okay, so let me go back a little bit to exploratory design. There's

the concept that I use in exploratory design that will be my framework today. So when we do

exploratory design, the idea for those, I've done a whole podcast on exploratory design, but for those that have not listened to those podcasts, the short version of exploratory design, the idea for those, I've done a whole podcast on exploratory design,

but for those that have not listened to those podcasts, the short version of exploratory design

is we are going wide, not deep, the idea is we are exploring space and we are trying to sort

of figure out what potential exists for whatever theme or whatever game design focus we have.

And we have what we call the three buckets, which I like to call the good, the bad, and the ugly.

So whenever we're doing a mechanic, after we play it, it goes into one of three buckets.

The first bucket, the good, that is a good mechanic. Vision design should

consider that mechanic. We vetted it. It's good. The bad is, this is a bad mechanic. Let's not

waste anybody's time. You can ignore this. This is not something you want to explore. And the

ugly. And most of what this means is there's potential there, but it's not quite there yet.

That there's something about it that we, it's not a good mechanic.

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