#1328: Nostalgia
Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast
Wizards of the Coast
4.7 • 801 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
This podcast is all about how Magic design interacts with nostalgia.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm pulling on my driveway. |
| 0:02.2 | We all know what that means. |
| 0:03.9 | It's time for their drive to work. |
| 0:07.0 | Okay, so the impetus of today's podcast is there's been a lot of talk online about bringing back blocks. |
| 0:17.8 | Now, I've done an entire podcast about why I don't think we're bringing back blocks, |
| 0:22.9 | why blocks basically ended up not working, but it got me onto a different topic that I thought |
| 0:30.3 | was an interesting topic. |
| 0:31.3 | So it's inspired me to talk about nostalgia. |
| 0:35.5 | And so what I'm going to do today is talk about how do we design for nostalgia. |
| 0:40.3 | What is nostalgia? And what are the pitfalls of designing for nostalgia? |
| 0:47.3 | So first off, a definition of nostalgia from the dictionary. A wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real |
| 0:57.7 | or romanticized past period, condition, or setting. And the idea essentially of nostalgia is |
| 1:04.3 | that there is warmness, emotional warmness, positive memories of the past. |
| 1:11.9 | Now, the important thing, as the definition points out, it's not necessarily the past as it was. |
| 1:18.0 | It was the past as you remember it. |
| 1:21.5 | And that's one of the big challenges. |
| 1:23.5 | Because mostly, I mean, on some level, magic design wants to do sort of two major things on this vector. |
| 1:34.3 | We want to do new undiscovered things, things you've never seen before, and we want to bring back things that you love. |
| 1:42.2 | So some amount of what we do is, look, we make mechanics, their tools, |
| 1:47.0 | we can do things with them. As we're making new environments, one of the ways to make new environments |
| 1:53.0 | is to use old tools. And one of the cool things about how magic works is that I can make a new |
| 1:59.0 | environment with an old tool, but the new, the new constant |
... |
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