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

Okay, so in my article, Making Magic, I'm doing a three-part series about the history of tokens.

So what I'm going to be doing in this podcast is I'm not, so what I do in my article is I go set by set and talk about every innovation I can see where I think how tokens have evolved as a design tool.

And I get pretty granular.

I'm sure I miss a few tiny things, but I'm pretty good about talking about when we do something we haven't done before.

And early on in the article, it talks a lot about individual card design. And by the end, I'm talking like mechanic design.

So my goal of today is this is a supplemental podcast that goes along with the three-part series.

So there'll be a little bit of overlap, meaning that there's some material I will cover in both.

But the idea is the article is a little more are run through of what happened.

And today's podcast is a little more of analysis.

So really what I want to talk about is tokens as a design tool.

They have become a very, very big design.

I mean, as three weeks, the fact that I can write three weeks of articles about it should demonstrate that there's a lot going on.

So I want to talk a little bit about why tokens, why do they exist, why do they start, and

how they've evolved over time. That's today's topic. Okay, so, tokens begin back at the very

beginning of magic, in Alpha. So one of the things I think Richard was really interested in when he made Alpha was he really

wanted to sort of test some boundaries of what the game could do.

So there are a lot of cards in Alpha, like single cards that do something that end up

becoming a whole swath of area of design that Richard just did one card.

And a lot of what I can tell is, you know, when you sort of make a card game like magic,

there's a lot of possibilities. And part of what Alpha was showing was the, just the range that

the game could be, you could be and Richard really enjoyed

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