I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work, coronavirus edition.

So I've been doing lots of fun interviews, and today I got a blast from the past. So I want to welcome Brian Tinsman.

Hi, Mark. Hi, everyone, in Mark's podcast land.

Okay, so Brian worked on matchup for quite a while, so we're going to go back,

let's go back to the very beginning, which I've been asking everybody, which is, how did you get into magic?

I was on a date with my soon-to-be wife, and we went to a game store, and a clerk at the game store showed us and I had

kind of been avoiding it because I had fun to play and I knew that I'd probably get sucked in

and didn't really want to spend the money but you know I was I was with my girl and wanted to show

off so I pulled out the wallet. Ah. I don't know if it earned me any

points or not, but we had fun playing. And eventually she became a brand manager of magic

anyway, so I guess it worked out. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about you and working at

Wizards, because you have an interesting path to get to R&D.

You do not have a traditional path.

So how did you start working at Wizards?

All right.

I was in business school getting an MBA, and I kind of have a mind that's always turning on something and it had been turning on magic cards for more than a year.

And I had in mind, I was at the University of Washington and I had in mind, oh my God, Wizards is in the area.

I must target them.

I must find some inroads there and ended up getting into marketing research there.

This was around the time when they had acquired a Pokemon CCG and they went from something

like zero to a billion dollars in sales in like 18 months or something like that.

It's like 98, 99, I think.

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