I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay. So today, I'm going to talk about part of design. I wrote an article about this, but I haven't

talked about it in my podcast, or not too much, is what we call exploratory design, aka pre-design, aka advanced design.

So today I'm going to talk about how it came to be, and what it means is actually

evolves and how we use it.

So, okay, so in the beginning, so we had had way, way back when my boss was Randy Bueller at the time, he was the equivalent

to what Aaron Forthais is now, director of Magic R&D, and Randy, and Randy came to me and said,

Mark, I've budgeted for you to have a design intern.

And I was like, oh, okay, how do I get a design intern? And that's when I said to him,

can I get it any way I want? And he said, well, how do you want to get it? And I said, have you ever

watched The Apprentice? And that's how the great designer search came to be, is me trying to find a

design intern. So we had this big contest, essentially.

I mean, it was actually a hiring thing, but it was kind of part hiring, part reality show called

The Great Designer Search.

We ended up, the winner got a internship, a design internship.

That was the prize.

Alexis Jansen won the first one.

Ken Nagel came in second. It also got an internship. That was the prize. Alexis Jansen won the first one. Ken Nagel came in second and also got an internship. Graham Hopkins came in third. It got a different internship at Wizards that would turn into a full-time job. Mark Globus came in fourth. He would also get a job out of this. So a bunch of people ended up getting jobs of Wizards. Actually, top four all ended up getting jobs long term.

So, four years later, we did a second grade designer search.

The winner of that was a guy named Ethan Fleischer.

The guy who came in second is a guy named Sean Main.

Guy who came in third is a guy named Scott Van Essen.

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