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

So I'm using my time at home to talk to people, past and present about making magic.

So today I have Devin Lowe and we're going to talk about the making of Shards of Alara.

Welcome, Devin.

Hi, Mark, how's it going?

Going great. So I'm excited. I have not talked about Shards of Alar in quite a while, so this is exciting for me.

This is, like, some sets I talk about a lot. This is one of the sense that I haven't talked about as much.

So I'm excited for you and I to dig in deep into the making of Shards of Alara. Yeah, it's definitely a blast of the past. It's been many years since the set came out, but some of the things that it did

could still be felt today.

So in some ways, the shadow of the Shards are still with us.

Right.

So the set came on in October of 2008.

So real quickly, I'll do the setup of what the point of it was.

And you led the development. So I'm going to do a little setup and then we'll talk about development.

By the way, Bill Rose,

who is currently the VP of R&D,

and at time was the VP of R&D,

led the design for the set.

Okay, so the idea of the set was we had done a gold set

with invasion

that was kind of like, play as many colors as you can.

And then we did Ravnikah where we tried to go the opposite direction, which is play two colors.

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