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

Coronavirus edition. Okay. So I've been doing a lot of interviews. This was an interview you guys really

enjoyed, so I brought him back. So Richard Garfield, thanks for joining us. Hi, Mark. It's great to be

back. Okay, so last time you were on my show, we talked about Alpha and the creation of Alpha.

But you've done other magic sets, so we're going to keep going.

So I thought today we would talk Arabian Nights.

So here's the first question I have for you.

Can you set the scene of how in the world did Arabian Nights even happen?

Like, how did it get made?

What's the origin story to it even happening?

Well, that's a really good question, because it isn't straightforward, and I have to really

think about it to get my head in myself back then.

But when Arabian Nights was first conceived of, I thought that magic was going to be a collection of disjoint sets.

So that magic the gathering would come out and then when we finished printing it we would go on to magic ice age and it wouldn't be mixed with magic the gathering it would have been tested separately and so forth and so on and but the demand of it was such that peter came to and said, we really, really want an expansion

that you can shuffle into the base set. And it took some convincing, but I agreed to do it,

provided that players didn't feel obligated to purchase the expansion or obligated to play against it.

Because I was afraid that it would feel like it was strong-arming people into this arms race,

which is sort of inherently a part of the game, but I think we as designers and publishers should sort of minimize because it makes it as accessible as possible for people.

So I think that sets the stage where my head was at when we began talking about Arabian Nights in the first expansion.

So quick question.

I know that magic sold up very quickly, that we, you know, they made enough, they thought

was like six months and it sold out in a week, and then they made beta, and they thought

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