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

drive to work. Okay. So today is a history day. I'm going to talk all about how

standard began. In fact, I'm going to talk about early, early magic and talk kind of how

formats began. So today goes way, way, way back. Today is an ancient history lesson.

Ancient history as magic goes. Okay, so let's start by going back to 1993. So in July of 1993,

magic got released for the very first time.

So when Magic began, one of the things to keep in mind is, if you ever have read the

Alpha Rule Book, which is online, you can go read it.

By the way, the Alpha Rule Book is a hoot.

One of the things that's really neat about it is, first off, Richard, Richard Garfield

wrote a short story that shows up in the very

beginning between two plainswalkers battling. And then, it really is novel to see the early

rule book because the early rule book was, like one of the ideas when they first made the game

was that a lot of figuring out what would happen would be part of what

the players would do. That, you know, the rule set when it was first made wasn't as ironclad

as it later became. And it's like, well, if you have conflicts, hey, just figure it amongst

yourselves. Clearly, when magic was first made, it wasn't, I mean, this is leading in today's

theme here. It wasn't really thought of as

being a tournament thing. It was, you know, it was something that was fun that people would

play at each other's houses. I mean, it wasn't, magic was really thought of as a casual game that you

would just play with friends. And the idea that you would sit down and get strangers to play wasn't really in the mindset of the game.

Like I said, the rule book originally is like, hey, if you have conflicts, well, you know, figure it out amongst yourself what you think will happen.

...