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

Okay, so today I'm talking about mana curves. Now, before I have done a podcast on the mana system,

I've done a podcast on mana costs, I've done podcasts on manna values. So one of the joys of doing a podcast

for the long as I have is you get to finally slice something. So today it's all about the

mana curves. And talking about the manor curves, I will talk a little bit about all these other

things, all these other manor-related things. But if you want more detail, I have whole podcast on them.

So let's start a little bit with a mana system to get into what mana curves are and why they

matter.

I guess let me define mana curves real quickly before I get into that.

So a mana curve has to do with having a selection of mana costs that allow you to go up over time.

So what does that mean? So when Richard first created the game of magic, there was a core problem to solve, which was he was making a trading card game. And he had what we

call the queen problem, which is if you were picking your pieces in chess, why wouldn't you just

play with 15 queens and a king? You need a king because that's the wing condition. Why wouldn't you

play with 15 queens? Why play with a pawn? Why play with, like, why play with a knight?

Why play with any other pieces?

I mean, a queen's just more efficient than them.

Why wouldn't you just play with the best cards?

And there are two solutions to that problem.

One was the color pie, meaning he chopped up the different abilities in different colors,

and the mana system.

Now, the mana system did a couple things,

one of which is it separates out the colors,

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