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

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the innovation product. So let's start with what's the innovation product?

Well, once a year, starting back in 2009, we made a product that was designed to be played differently, some product that was just not your normal way to play magic.

And the idea is every year we like to put something out that just encourages you play a little bit differently.

As you'll see, the innovation line has had some successes that were so successful.

They went on to become their own products.

But anyway, I wanted

to walk through the history of sort of where the innovation product came from and what spurred us

to make the line and then what all the different things we are were. Okay. So looking at my

history, I think the innovation product goes back to 1997.

So that was when we released something called Vanguard.

So Vanguard, back in the day, before F&M existed, we used to do something called Arena,

which was an organized play system run through the stores.

And one of the things Arena would do is they have different seasons and they would play different formats.

So we decided it would be fun for us to make a format where we gave them some external game component where they could play.

And that ended up being called Vanguard.

Now, I did an entire podcast on Vanguard.

So if you want to hear that in great detail, you can go listen to that.

But in short, the idea of Vanguard was that you would get a card that gave you a special ability,

and it also changed your starting life total and you're starting hand size.

And so the idea was that if it was a good ability, it might lower your starting hand size

or your starting life total.

...