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

Okay, I've been doing fun interviews and that doesn't stop. So today I have Doug Byer.

Ooh, hello. Okay, so Doug, I'll ask you the question I ask everybody. How did you start playing magic?

I started playing magic in 1994 with about the time of fallen empires.

And how did you first see it?

What was, uh, some friends of mine introduced me to it.

We got together like around when we were all in college.

It was actually Mark Purvis, who was a friend of mine from childhood,

who introduced me to Magic.

And now we work together on Magic in the building of Wizards of the Coast.

So that's kind of a crazy, crazy origin story there.

Okay, so you started, how long did you play Magic before, like, before,

like, when did you start working for Wizards for when you play Magic?

Yeah, so I joined Wizards in 2000. So it was around the time of invasion coming out in the real world. And, uh, and I had been playing since, you know, six years before that or whatever, not quite the... Continuously?

Yeah, continuously. I was basically a fan all the way through that.

And my first job at Wizards was working as a web developer.

I wrote code and worked on HTML on the website.

But I kept kind of trying to angle my career toward magic as much as I could.

No.

I wrote the first iteration of Gatherer, the card database.

And then there was an opportunity to write flavor text from outside R&D to just

pitch in suggestions for flavor text for cards.

...