I'm pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

Okay, so in the past, I've had podcasts talking about the difference between top-up, top-down design and bottom-up design.

Top-down design is when you start with flavor and then build mechanics, and bottom-up is when you start with mechanics and build flavor.

Now, if we do our job, right, you know, maybe you're not supposed to even know the difference between

the two. It's just sort of technically about how we design it. But anyway, I wanted to talk today

about how to do top-down design. So I was going to walk through all the different things you have to

care about when doing top-down design. So it's a how-to top-down design day.

Okay, so the first thing that you need to do when doing top-down is you want to understand your source material.

So what top-down means, once again, let me explain this real quickly.

Let's say I take a set and I strip all the names and art off the card.

I just call it card one, card two, card three. There's no art. In a bottoms up set, you can look at it and you can sort of,

you can see the structure. You're like, oh, it's a multicolored set. Like, you can, you don't need the names and

flavor text to understand the structure. But in a top-down set, the flavor defines the structure,

meaning if you strip off all the names and flavor text from it, that it would just seem like,

it would seem random. Like, I don't know why these things are together. They don't necessarily

feel like they go together.

And that's top-down because you're using the feel of the things.

The reason it makes sense, the reason it holds together,

the reason it's organized the way it is, is because of that top-down element.

So the first thing you need to do when doing a top-down set is you want to understand your source.

There are two main sources when we talk about sort of top-down.

Number one is sort of a cultural source.

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