I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time to drive to work.

I dropped my daughter off at our college class.

Okay, today is all about symbols.

So one of the things about magic is often we will take a concept and represent it in a symbol form. And so today I'm going to talk about all the symbols of magic.

There are a lot of them. So let's jump in because there's so many talk about.

Okay, so let's start with probably the most famous symbols of magic.

The manna symbols! So that goes back to the very beginning of the game.

In Alpha,

Christopher Rush and Yesper Mirforce.

Yesper was the very first art director,

and Chris Rush did a lot of the early graphic design.

I did a whole podcast on Chris Rush, by the way.

He passed away, sadly, a couple of a year or two ago.

And I did a podcast. You can see that on him.

Anyway, they had to design the mana symbols.

And so the idea was what they wanted was they were circles.

They needed to be the proper color.

But they wanted some symbology to go beyond just the color.

Partly, to give a little extra flavor, and partly we have people who are colorblind who can't

necessarily read between the colors. So what they wanted was a nice, clean, easy symbol that represented

the color, but you could recognize the shape very easily. So blue and red, I think, were the easiest because blue and red have elemental

elements, elemental qualities to them.

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