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

Okay, so today's topic, a while back, many years ago, I had Ethan Fleischer as my carpool guest,

and we talked all about the great designer search. So today I'm going to go more in detail about the very first great designer search.

I'll be covering a little bit of ground that I talk with Ethan, but mostly I'm going to talk about sort of all the processes, the steps

that we went through. So a little more tactical this time. Last time was kind of an overview,

and I'm going to talk about the tests people had to take to get in, and then the challenges

where they were in, and just really hit sort of the highlights of all the different things that went into the great, the first great designer search.

So this happened back in fall of 2006.

So what happened was, my boss at the time was Randy Bueller of Pro Tour Hall fame, and he said

that we had done a lot of, one of the ways that we often get developers is we hire interns off and off the pro tour, and then if they work out, they'll turn into full-time jobs.

In fact, I believe almost every developer we have started as an intern.

And Randy said to me, you know, we've never had a design intern. So I've

allocated some money for a design intern. And then, you know, he said, look, this is your

intern to use, as a design intern. You can place the design however you want, an intern however

you want. So I went home to think about it. So one of the problems is the pro-ture has been a really

good place for developers to find people with that skill set. That to be a good pro player,

you have to be able to analyze cards and build decks and break things and figure out

medigames and stuff. But those skills don't necessarily apply to being a good designer. And so the question to me was, okay, I thought it was awesome to have a design intern, but how do I find one?

And I was at home, we put the kids to bed, my wife and I were watching TV, and I think we were watching Project Runway.

And I realized that there was a whole genre of reality shows, Project One Way, The Apprentice, Face Off, the Great Baking Show,

The Last Comic Standing.

The idea was that there was some skill you were testing.

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