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

Okay, so today I have a guest from way back in early magic, Joel Mick.

Hey, Joel.

Hey, Mark.

Okay, so Joel, I think you have, you are the only person I believe that did the following three things,

which was you were an original playtifter, you were head designer, and you were brand manager of magic.

I don't think anybody else has done those three things.

I mean, together, individually, obviously.

Okay, so let's...

That's probably true.

But, you know, everybody in the world has some unique combination of things that they've done.

It happens to be mine. Okay. So we'll start from the very beginning. What is your first memory? How did you first get involved with magic?

I was playing bridge at the University of Pennsylvania Bridge Club while I was in law school.

And Richard played bridge at the Bridge Club as well, and so did Barry Wright, who you interviewed a few weeks back.

And I started playing bridge there, and Barry was my bridge partner.

And Richard was enlisting people to playtest and the bridge club

players made good playtesters. And so I got roped in. Okay. So what, give me your first impressions.

When you first saw magic, what were you thinking? What was your very first sort of impression of it? Well, it was extremely addictive in the sense that after you played a game or two games,

you would immediately start trying to figure out how to optimize your deck

and which cards your opponent had in their deck that were good,

and you'd wonder what other cards existed.

And as you learned more and more about what cards did exist,

...