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Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

#1298: 30 Years, Part 2

Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast

Wizards of the Coast

Duels Of The Planeswalkers, Magic The Gathering, Games, Mark Rosewater, Ccg, Leisure, Mtg, Game Design

4.7801 Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This podcast is part two of a four-part series talking about 30 big design evolutions since I started working at Wizards of the Coast in October 1995. This is based on a three-part series I did in my Making Magic column.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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

0:06.0

Okay, so last time, I started, there's a column I did, a series that I did in my column, where I called 30 Years,

0:16.0

where I looked at the 30 biggest design innovations since I started working at Wizards in October of 1995.

0:25.4

So in the first part, I talked about six things. So I'm up to number seven, which is frame

0:32.4

design as a mechanical component. So we go to unglued in August of 1998.

0:40.9

So unglued was this project.

0:43.0

So basically Bill Rose and Joel Mick came up with this idea of,

0:49.2

what if we made a product that wasn't legal in tournaments?

0:53.6

And we could do whatever we wanted.

0:55.1

We weren't constrained by things.

0:58.3

And they weren't sure quite what to do with it,

1:00.2

but they liked the idea.

1:01.8

And they brought it to me,

1:02.9

because I guess I seemed like the most out-of-the-box thinker, I guess.

1:07.0

And so I ended up making the onset,

1:09.6

or the first onset.

1:10.4

There's a bunch of unsets.

1:12.2

And really, I leaned into the idea of both doing more humor, because magically at the time

1:17.2

didn't do a lot of humor, and just exploring unexplored space.

1:22.3

So one of the things I did in exploring unexplored space is I went to different sections

1:26.3

of the company and said to

1:27.9

them, hey, are there things we can do that we never thought about? So one of the people I went to

...

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