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

So I've been doing some interviews with past and present R&D folk about sets we worked on together.

And so today I have Brian Tinsman. And we're going to talk about Champions of Kamagawa. So, hey, Brian.

Hey, everybody. Hey, Mark.

So this is a weird set in which you led the design team, and I wasn't on the design team.

I was on the development team. So I did work on the set. I definitely contributed to it,

but I was not on the design team. So it'll be interesting. I'll be telling development stories today. You can tell the set. I definitely contributed to it, but I was not on the design team. So it'll be interesting. I'll be telling

development stories today. You can tell the design stories. Yeah, a lot of people touch this set

throughout its journey through R&D. It occupied kind of a weird spot because it was in between O.G. Mirrodin and O.G. Ratnika.

And it had this mandate to be like a really flavorful top-down design.

And, you know, my memory is that people in R&D didn't really use the terms top-down bottom-up before

Kamagawa came along.

I remember being in meetings and having people talk about, okay, a top-down set is where

you're starting with the story, the characters, the world, the theme, the flavor, and that

is going to inform the mechanics.

And people in the meeting going, oh, yeah, okay, like nodding like it was a new thing that they were getting

used to. So, you know, maybe it's the first time that that really became an idea in R&D. I'm not

sure if you remember that. Well, so what is your memory of how Champs of Comic Gala came to be?

Like, what made it happen?

Why did we do in the first place?

What is your memory of that?

I think we had been doing a number of kind of really mechanic-related sets that had started with, you know, we're going to do another artifact set.

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