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

I dropped my son off a camp. Okay, so today is another in my series, Lessons Learned. So these are podcasts where I talk about a set that I either led or co-led and talk about all the lessons I learned from designing the set.

So we are up to Ixelon.

So Ixelon is one of the sets I co-led.

I co-led it with Ken Nagel.

So this is back under the old design paradigm where we worked on it for a year.

So for the first six months, I led the design.

And the second six months, Ken led the design. We were both on the team, or

Ken was on the team the whole time. I was on the team most of the time. Right near the very end,

I got pulled away because we were switching over how we were doing things, and we had to start

Dominaria Vision. Anyway, so let me, Xelon, a lot to us learn from Xelon.

So for starters, just a little setup on how Xelon, this is the key part of the story,

is we plan ahead, we work ahead to figure out what we're doing and that when we

work ahead, we plot out a whole bunch of years and then basically what I'm responsible for

is getting the general sense of where we're going. So the creative has a, you know, a good working

idea of what they think the world is like and I have a sense of what the mechanical identity of the set is.

This is before we sort of worked it all out,

but it's just sort of carving out space to make sure we have an idea of what we want.

So the Auxelon started because Jenna Helen, one of the creative team,

came up with an interesting world idea.

And the world idea was, what if there was a world that kind of had a new world in an old

world and that the old world sent conquistadors, but vampire conquistadors.

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