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

Okay, the last couple podcasts, I've been talking about the design of Theros. So today, I'm going to start

talking about some of the individual cards and some stories about the cards. But before I can do that,

I realize I never introduced my design team.

Bad morrow! Bad morrow!

One of the things I always like to do is talk about the design team.

Part of the point of my podcast is a little historical context.

And, hey, who are the people that made this set?

I do want to talk about that a little bit.

So, first up, Ethan Fleischer.

So Ethan was the winner of the Great Designer 2 search.

And at the time this started, he was an intern.

He hadn't yet been hired full time.

But I wanted him on the set,

and I, in fact, I had given him an assignment, as I talked about previously, to do research,

because research was something he was very good at, and I said, okay, let's do some research on Rican Room Mythology. I wanted some experts. I had one other expert I'll get to in a second.

And Ethan, obviously, the way it works at Wizards is we don't tend to hire people right away.

We tend to give them an internship.

And then we use that internship to sort of give us six months to gauge, you know, how we feel they're doing.

And this allows us to sort of, it gives us time to pick the right people, you know,

that we don't have to, you know, we're not sort of just guessing without knowing that we have

someone who we can actually spend some time with.

...