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

Okay, so today's podcast was sponsored or was inspired, sorry, by a video. So Nate and Sean,

you guys might know them as the duo that did Walking the Plains, and they now do a video series

called Enter the Battlefield.

So recently, at least from my perspective, they did one called Enter the Battlefield Alpha

Playtefters where they interviewed, I think they interviewed three people to talk a little bit

about what was like to Playtest Alpha.

It turns out there's I think 11 playters that I know that went on to at least work

on a set that in some level would end up in Magic. I think there are some other playtesters more

than that. I'm just going to talk about the ones that ended up designing an early Magic set.

And anyway, I wanted to talk about the Alpha Playtefterters. So today is all about a little more in-depth

about the alpha playtifters. So I'll talk a little bit about the system and sort of who they were

and how they did what they did and what sets they impacted on. And we're going to talk through all that

today. So more than if I ever wanted to know about the Alpha Playtifters.

My caveat here is this is all information that I've gleaned over the years.

So I first want to start with the, I believe everything I'm saying is true.

But I've noticed, for example, often when I write an article, or even this year at San Diego Comic-Con, when I gave a speech, one of the people, a guy named Chris Page, will talk about a second, often will write to me and tell me that, oh, you were incorrect about this or that. So I'm doing the best I can to tell you the information, but this is none of this that I experienced firsthand. So all of this is second and third hand information. Okay, so when Richard was making magic, he was working at the university of,

actually he was, he was, was he a graduate student or was he getting his doctorate?

Anyway, he was at the University of Pennsylvania.

At least that's where he did a lot of the playtesting.

He must have been getting his doctorate there, that's my guess. Anyway, what he did is,

in order to test magic, he made use of a group of people that he had met through various

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