I'm pulling out of the parking lot.

We all know what that means.

It's time for the drive to work and drop my son off at camp.

Okay, so today I'm going to talk about the six ages of magic design.

This is something I've talked about on my column a bit, but I don't think I've done a full podcast on it.

And I've recently updated to add the sixth age.

I think I finally figured out when and where and what it means.

So today I'm going to talk about all six ages.

So in some levels, this is a history of magic design podcast, sort of talking about the different

innovations of magic design and sort of how things have changed.

So if you love magic design, which hopefully you do, you listen to this podcast,

and you're interested in history, which also hopefully you care some about it since you listen

in this podcast, today will be an interesting day for you.

Okay, so the first age, the golden age of magic, was from Alpha through Alliances. So the first age of magic, obviously,

Richard was mostly in charge in the early part of it. And really what happened in the early

days was there was a lot of focus on individual cards.

The design on the first days, which is very, very much about sort of just capturing the flavor

and the resonance on a card-by-card basis. And a lot of early design was done was just maximizing

making each card as cool as it could be in a vacuum.

And there was a lot of flavorful stuff that went on.

I mean, the first age was sort of, we'll put magic on the map.

I think a lot of what made magic a thing that really sort of made magic what it was,

...