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

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the rise and fall of the blocks. So I'm going to talk all about

where blocks came from and where blocks went. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning of magic.

So back to 1993. So magic comes out.

Then in the end of 1993, 1993, 1994, we start putting out expansions.

The early expansions were really just individual expansions that did individual things.

There was no really cohesiveness to them per se.

They were just kind of bouncing around doing different things.

So then we put out Ice Age in the summer of 1995.

Ice Age was very popular. People liked Ice Age.

Then we put out Homeland. People did not like Homeland.

Homelands did not go very well. And then there was a gap of time before we put out alliances.

And there was a lot of pressure riding on alliances.

I've had podcasts all about alliances.

There was a lot of pressure.

And so one of the things they were trying to do is figure out,

okay, how can we maximize our chance that alliances will be popular?

That was a big concern because they had seen that Ice Age was popular and that Homelands wasn't.

And that the team that was designing alliances was what we call the East Coast place afters.

Scafellias, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, Chris Page.

And they were the same people that had done Ice Age.

So they were trying to connect, like one of the things they were trying to do with

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