Okay, pulling on my driveway.

So we all know that means it's a time for another drive to work.

Okay, so for today, I've been trying to figure out different ways to mix up this podcast.

And so I decided that I'm going to talk today about a card type, something I haven't done yet.

So today we're going to talk about artifacts.

And I thought I'd talk a little bit about where artifacts came from and kind of some of the challenges of designing artifacts.

And I don't know, some of the lessons that we've learned along the way.

Okay, so let's start at the beginning,

because as a singing nun says, that's the best place to start.

Why did Richard Garfield make artifacts?

And I think the answer is, if you look at Alpha,

a lot of what Richard did is he took the concept of a magical duel and then just extrapolated.

He said, okay, well, I'm fighting with magic.

What would I expect to see?

What are the tropes of fantasy that I would expect?

And one of the big ones is the idea of powerful objects.

Something that's, I mean, very much tied into, you know, go read any fantasy story, you know,

and, you know, Lord of the Rings, there's the Rings, it's in the title.

You know, the Harry Potter have their wands and all sorts of things.

So the thing is, there is, the idea of having totems and objects and things of power,

very endemic and core to the idea of fantasy.

So Richard is like, okay, you know, if I'm going to do this, well, I should have objects.

...