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

And I drop my daughter off at camp. Okay, so I'm doing, I do this series that I call

Other People's Lessons, where I take a top 10 list about somebody talking about something else, lessons about something else,

and I apply it to Magic Design. So today I am doing 10 life lessons.

People should learn before they turn 30 by Royal Scootery on LifeHack. So I like taking very

offbeat lessons in applying them. So today are life lessons, and I'm going to apply them to magic design.

Let's see how we do.

Okay, number one, money will never solve your real problems.

Okay, so in the life hack version, they're trying to say that people get a little bit too

focused on money, that really the reason you're

happy or unhappy have to do with internal emotional things, that money is never going to

fundamentally solve those problems. Okay, from a magic design standpoint, it talks a little bit

to me, I'm going to talk about costs in general. There's this general idea that when you design something that, oh, well, it can just be costed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, play design will just, they'll cost it whatever. So I can do whatever I want. It'll just

later get costed. And that is not so. That it's not actually the case. One of the things that you are responsible for when you design a magic set is making sure that you are making cards that can be made or can be adjusted by play design.

And the reality is not everything can be.

And that one of the responsibilities of designing a magic set is working with play

design early on so that you understand whether or not your mechanic can or cannot be adapted.

Because not every mechanic... Now, there are a couple of different issues. One is the cost issue,

which I'm talking about here. So my classic example there is the free mechanic. It's a mechanic I made in Erza Saga Block.

The way the mechanic works is you have a spell and then you cast the spell and then

the spell untaps that number, the number of lands equal to the converted manna cost

...