#1328: Nostalgia

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work. OK, so the impetus of today's podcast is there's been a lot of talk online about bringing back blocks. Now, I've done an entire podcast about why I don't think we're bringing back blocks, why blocks basically ended up not working. But it got me onto a different topic that I thought was an interesting topic. So it's inspired me to talk about nostalgia. And so what I'm going to do today is talk about how do we design for nostalgia? What is nostalgia? And what are the pitfalls of designing for nostalgia? So first off, a definition of nostalgia from the dictionary. A wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to, or the return of, some real or romanticized past, period, condition, or setting. And the idea, essentially, of nostalgia is that there is warmness, emotional warmness, positive memories of the past. Now, the important thing, as the definition points out, it's not necessarily the past as it was. It was the past as you remember it. And that's one of the big challenges. Because mostly, I mean, on some level, magic design wants to do two major things on this vector. We want to do new, undiscovered things, things you've never seen before. And we want to bring back things that you love. So some amount of what we do is, look, we make mechanics that are tools. We can do things with them. As we're making new environments, one of the ways to make new environments is to use old tools. And one of the cool things about how magic works is that I can make a new environment with an old tool, but the new constant to the tool changes it. One example, for example, is Polyforate, when we first made it, was made in Scar's Mirrored Block. And that block was all about the Frexians attacking Mirrored in. And so there was a lot of poison. Poison made sort of its big return. There was minus one, minus one counters. There was a set that had a minus one, in fact. And so a lot of the idea of Polyforate in that environment was you were spreading the disease. And you would weaken your opponent. And then you'd Polyforate to further weaken your opponent. Now, Polyforate would come back and war the spark. That was a set all about a giant war between most of the planeswalkers and Nicol Bollison, his zombie army, the Eternals. There, the set had a lot of planeswalkers in it. They had loyalty abilities, some of which didn't even have plus loyalty abilities. So one of the few ways to click up was to do Polyforate. And it had plus and plus encounters. And the mass mechanics, it had a plus one, plus one theme in it. And so the idea was that when you were Polyforating in War of the Spark, you were sort of building your forces. And so even though Polyforate is the same mechanic, how it felt in Skars of Myrton and how it felt in War of the Spark were very different. One was mostly about breaking down. One was mostly about building up. Same mechanic, but just what are you doing with it? How are you interacting with it? And so a lot of sort of making magic is going back and using old things. So another big part of it is we do like to do returns. Like some of the monosets we do are brand new things. Hey, you've never been to this place. You've never had this theme or never this theme exactly like this. But part of what we want to do is revisit things we've done before. We've made really exciting worlds. We have very good world building. Ooh, those worlds are exciting. I want to see that world again. We're coming up on Seekers of Strixhaven. Well, we went to Strixhaven. And Strixhaven was a good example where, hey, there's this fun genre we could tap into with a magical school genre. We want to do our take on it. We liked the idea of a magical college. And we made a faction set out of with enemy factions, built under conflict. We were able to have a set built on instances and sorceries. And we just made a really cool environment that was uniquely that. So it's fun. Now we've done all the work and we made it. It's fun to go back and revisit it. So there's a certain amount of nostalgia that is kind of baked into the system. We are going to reprint cards. We are going to reprint mechanics. We are going to reuse themes. We are going to revisit worlds. There's a certain amount of magic that's just we're going to go back and touch upon things that we've done in the past. So there's definitely a certain amount of nostalgia. Like natively built into the way we make magic. That we do things that work. We want to revisit things that work. And we want to revisit things that were successful in the past. So that's kind of the low hanging fruit as far as nostalgia goes is, OK, we went to Shrickshaven at the time of the best selling set of the time. And we're like, OK, well, people really liked it. We should go back to it. So we're revisiting it. But here's the tricky thing about nostalgia, as I said earlier, is nostalgia isn't necessarily about what was the past. It's about your memory and perception of the past. And that is where nostalgia gets a little bit trickier. Like we definitely can revisit popular things. We can revisit successful things. The way we think of mechanics is they are tools. They are paints for our canvas. And if I'm trying to paint a new picture and there's some old paints that would work well, I'm going to use those old paints. So that stuff comes for free. Revisiting popular things, reusing popular things, reusing successful things, that no problem. But one of the challenges is people will have positive emotions, positive memories of things that the first time around weren't necessarily successful. Probably the two biggest recent examples is Kamagawa and Lorwin. So champions of Kamagawa, the idea at the time was, this was the last block that Bill Rose was head designer for. Bill really liked the idea of a top-down block. He goes, we do a lot of blocks built on mechanics. And at the time, most of our blocks started by us figuring out a mechanical core we wanted, and then we figured out flavor from there. But Bill really said, hey, it'd be cool to do a whole block where the flavor comes first. And it was the first time we had done a top-down block. We had done like Arabian Knights, Portals for Kingdoms. And we'd done a little bit of top-down sets based on something that wasn't our own thing. But this was the first time we were kind of doing a whole block like that. And Bill made some choices at the time. And once again, we hadn't done this before. I'm not really trying to criticize Bill. Bill's philosophy at the time was, let's figure out the flavor first and then do the mechanics second. Flavor will be king. We will make every decision based on flavor. And mechanics will be subservient to flavor with kind of the goal. And the problem that we learned, and once again, whenever you do something for the first time, you learn something. And the core thing we learned there was, oh, flavor is way more flexible than mechanics. That when you lock in flavor first and then you try to match with mechanics, it's hard. Mechanics, and so a lot of what happened in Champs-Cama-Gawa was very sort of stilted. Like we sort of crammed thinking, like for example, okay, what does Samurai's do? They're good with the sword. Okay, we'll make a mechanic called Bushido that represents the good with the sword. And then every Samurai has Bushido or every snake person locks things down. Every, like all moon folk bounce something. Like we made this world where the way flavor was definitely done mechanically was so exacting that like every single subset of this thing must function this way with this mechanic. And even where we were successful. So like in Matrezka-Magawa, we did Ninjutsu, which is probably of all the mechanics in Champs-Black the most successful. But even that did this thing where we said, okay, we're gonna do ninjas. There's a lot of cool things about ninjas, but all ninjas instead of necessarily doing different cool things, we'll do this one thing. Okay, they're all sneaky. And sneaky's great, ninjas are sneaky, but there's lots of other elements of ninjas. And because it was one for one, we sort of made ninjas very one note. And that is the most popular thing we did. Like that was the success. That's where we were successful. And we did a lot of other things. The block was known as being very parasitic. What that means is that a lot of the things only worked with other things. Oh, I wanna make a deck full of caring about samurai. Well, guess what? The only set that has samurai ever. So if you wanna keep our samurai, we got samurai. If you wanna splice into our cane, well guess where our cane comes from? This set. And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of just very narrow, kind of it only played with itself and it wasn't backward compatible. But anyway, the point is, we made a lot of decisions cause we were trying to do something we'd never done before. And in many cases, not every case, but in many cases we made the wrong decision. One of the, another example of something that happened at the time was, I actually wasn't on the design team, after any of the three designs, but I was on the development team for Champs de Camigalla. So it's one of the few sets where I wasn't on the design team, but it was on the development team. And one of my through lines on the development team was, the set was really all over the place mechanically. And I kept sort of saying, what is the set about? Like we have to focus. What's the set about? Like mechanically, what is the set about? Obviously creatively, it was topped on Japanese mythology. But mechanically, what's the set about? At one point, the development team said, it's about legends. I said, okay, well it's about legends and we need to be loud about that. And at the time, legends were really only something we did at Rare, Mythic Rare wasn't even a thing yet at the time we did Champs. Yeah, it wasn't, Mythic Rare didn't show up till Shards of Alara. Anyway, so for what we did is we said, okay, here's what we're gonna do. To try to make this as loud as possible, we will make every Rare creature legendary. And we will even have some uncommon legendary creatures. Other than early, early magic. Like early magic had a little bit of uncommon legendary creatures, but we hadn't really done that since early magic. But it turns out that, you know, like, and this kind of a lesson of Asphan, which is, okay, let's say I open a booster pack. How many packs do I have to open before I even understand that all the Rare creatures are legendary? I open one pack. I might not even open a creature. Some, you know, only the creatures are only 50%, maybe they're the Rares, 55% probably. So there's half the time I'm not even gonna open a creature. But let's say I open a creature, okay. I open a creature, it's legendary, okay. I open legendary creatures. How many legendary creatures do you have to open before you start to figure out that, oh, that's abnormal that all my Rare creatures are legendary? And the answer is a lot. You know, four, five, you know, I mean, you have to open up four or five packs of creatures that are legendary. And remember, half the time you don't get creatures, so like, I'm opening up 10 packs? You're like, that's a lot to then figure that out. It's just, you know, the idea of messaging and theme, I used to say if your theme's not a common, it's not your theme. Later we realized if your theme's not at the right as fan, it's not your theme. There's ways to do this, not a common, but it does need to be something that's large. We would later do like dedicated slot pushers and stuff. But anyway, the point is, the set is trying to do a bunch of things for the very first time and we make mistakes. Lorwin is a different animal. Lorwin was more of us pushing boundaries a little faster than the audience was ready for boundaries to be pushed. Magic had a very tone. Its audience was a little narrower and so we were trying to broaden out like magic tones, kind of what we were trying to do. Like magic normally has this tone, but does it always have to have that tone? You know, we used to refer to it as bad ass, you know, it's what a brand used to call it. And we're like, you know, but there's lots of people that might enjoy softer things. It doesn't always have to be hard edged, you know. And I think Lorwin was kind of ahead of its time. So the interesting thing is in its day, those two sets, Lorwin and Chathamore, not Chathamore, Lorwin and Kakao were the two worst received blocks we had ever had. And by worst received, I don't just mean they sold poorly, but they did. Market research was bad. Just overall player sentiment, engagement, play, like we measure a lot of metrics. Like one of the things that we have to do for our job is, okay, we want players to be happy. Well, how do we tell if players are happy? And there's a whole bunch of metrics that we have. We can look at how things sell, we can look at how much people play things, we can look at how much digital play there is, we can talk about talk online. Anyway, there's a lot of different metrics we can measure. And champions in Lorwin on those metrics. And once again, I got stressed. Everybody I talk, where I mentioned sales, they all they care about sales. It's not all we care about. I mean, we do care about sales, we're business. I mean, not like we don't care about sales, but there are a lot of other things we also care about. And the reality was, even in market research, where we ask people, what do you think about the world? Champions of the Common God was the worst rated world of every world we've rated within the context of us doing a rating. So some of the early worlds didn't necessarily get these ratings because we didn't do it at that point. But ever since we, and we've been, since champions forward, I mean, maybe a little before champions, we've done research on the worlds. Lowest rated world. Lorwin, I think it was the lowest selling, even worse than champions. So anyway, the idea is those sets in their day did a lot wrong and did a lot of things that people did not like. That's another thing about nostalgia. So I'm not gonna name the name, but I remember there was a pro player that came up to you. So back in time, I used to work at the pro tour. I did, I recently did a podcast all about me working on the pro tour. And one of my jobs was I was sort of the liaison with all the pro players. I did all the feature matches, I got to know everybody. And I got, you know, if I was the one that would talk to them and if they had feedback, I would communicate the feedback of the players, Tarn D and stuff. But anyway, so I had a good relationship. I mean, this is back when I was there all the time with the pro players. So one of the pro players coming up to me and he goes, why don't you make cards like necropotants anymore? And I say to him, I go, can we flash back five years, you know, back when necropotants was the thing? I go, you were one of the most outspoken haters of necropotants. You used to come and talk to me all the time about how much you hated necropotants. Why did we print necropotants? And then we put it again in fifth edition, you're like, how in the world would you reprint necropotants? So the point is five years ago, there was no greater critic to necropotants than you. And now, five years later, you're like, what happened to necropotants? And he said to me, he goes, maybe I was a bit harsh back then. That was his life to me. And so that is the tricky part of nostalgia, that a lot of what people are saying is not even, that thing exactly that you did is the thing I loved. Now, I should stress, just because something's unlike, when it first appeared, doesn't mean it was an unlikable thing. Lorwin is a really good example. We were ahead of our time. We were pushing in ways that the audience wasn't ready for yet. That doesn't mean a future audience wouldn't be ready. And I think a lot of people that look back at Lorwin, I mean, Lorwin now seems pretty quaint with all the stuff we've done with magic. It's boundary pushing of mood and tone seems, like we've done a lot of other worlds that have, that are softer in tone. Bloomberg, Eldrain, we've done other worlds like that, that are not quite as hard edge as some of the earlier magic worlds. So you look back at Lorwin and it seems like this cool world. So that's a good example where some of the dislike had to do with the differential from the time. But as people look back on it, they can see some fondness there, they'd appreciate. Kamagawa is a slightly different thing. The mistake we made of making all the rare legends, which at the time was a mistake, turns out to be not a mistake in history. And the reason for that is, after we made Kamagawa a couple years after, the Elder Dragon Highland, who later become Commander, would get created. And they were desperately looking for legendary creatures, especially weird legendary creatures. Well, it turns out when every single card you make is legendary, some of them are the weird cards because some rare cards are weird. And normally we hadn't made the weird cards legendary because we were trying to play up the characters and so we were doing more top down to match the character. And so just the weird, like the weird build around cards often weren't legendary. So when the commander first started, before we were making things with commander in mind, the place to find the weird legendary build around creatures was in this one set where we happened to make every creature rare, every rare creature legendary. And so Kamagawa kind of got the second appreciation because something we had kind of done accidentally turned out to be super useful. And another thing, I think champions like Lorwyn was a little bit ahead of its time. One of the challenges at the time for champions was we leaned very hard on Japanese mythology, but not a lot of our audience knew Japanese mythology. And so it came across more as just weird, more so than something that was resonant to people. Now over time, Japanese culture has gotten more and more exposure, especially through pop culture. And so there's a more awareness of it. So what, at the time, less people sort of clicked and understood it, more do now. So there's a little bit of that, there's a little bit of things that didn't make sense at the time with time can do that. But the real challenge in Kamagawa is a perfect example. We went back and looked at Kamagawa and said, okay, we're gonna, if we're gonna revisit Kamagawa and we wanna kind of mechanically represent Kamagawa, how do we do that? And we looked at all the mechanics of Kamagawa and like I said, we didn't do a great job. Okay, we had ninjutsu. And even then ninjutsu had a problem of, it was like one for one tied with ninjas. And we're like, well, maybe we wanna do ninjas and do other things and other cool stuff. And so we didn't even sure we were gonna do ninjutsu. That's one of the successful mechanics. Like we brought back channel, and not that channel's successful, it just was like, well, we do channel, we don't call it channel, but we could call it. Like if we're trying to be remniscent of a time, we could bring it back. There's nothing mechanically wrong with channel. It's just that when we do all the time, that we don't really give a name to. But there's just all these mechanics that we look at, like, well, we don't really like how this plays and that plays. And like we really had to come back and revisit Kamagawa, but in a way that wasn't really mechanically doing when Kamagawa did. Now, one of the things that we learned is there's different places you can lean on nostalgia. We couldn't mechanically very easily lean on nostalgia. We did it in a few cases, we did it through channel, whatever. But we did a lot more leaning on individual cards. Here are cards, like once again, because of Commander and all the legendary rares. There are cards that people had fondness for. A lot of people built a certain deck with this Commander. Kiki Jiki also, the cards also ended up being bigger players in larger formats. And we could tie into some of that. So a lot of what we were doing when we did nostalgia in Nian Dynasty was trying to look for individual things people liked. And again, it wasn't that we had to recreate it exactly, it was sort of like, well, what do people remember this for being? And a lot of that was us saying, okay, we're gonna sort of figure out how to capture that essence, but in a way that is a more modern take. Lorwin Eclipse was a little bit differently. The one thing that went on with Lorwin Eclipse is, A, we were borrowing from a set that mechanically had did a little bit better. That a lot of Lorwin's problems, I mean, it had some mechanical problems. The biggest mechanical problem of Lorwin Block was the thing that led to New World Order. It was too interconnected and it was too much on rails. So the draft meaning in limited formats, once you picked a creature type, you were locked in that creature type. In constructed formats, there was a lot of synergy that was a little much. But there was a lot of, I mean, there was a lot of popular memories people have of playing certain kinds of things. And because there were four sets we were representing, being played in one set, we luckily, I mean, Champs-Gonagawa had the same issue. We had three sets in one. They're just even looking at three sets, there wasn't a lot of salvage. Lorwin Block had a lot more to salvage. A lot more mechanics that were like, oh, maybe we in fact want to do this mechanic again. Strixhaven was in a similar place. A lot of the structural components we definitely wanted to keep. And there's a lot of things we did mechanically that really worked. So like, Champions is kind of the one where we had the least mechanically to do. Lorwin was kind of the middle. Strixhaven was on. We had a lot that we could keep and use. And even then, we found new things. Not, you know, part of doing a return, part of nostalgia is not just nostalgia, but kind of reinventing things and bringing back things people love, but with a modern sensibility. And that's another really important part of nostalgia is we are not trying to bring back exactly what was, but we are trying to bring back something that evokes what was was. The other thing that's really tricky is nostalgia is not the same for people. Like one of the things you talk about is what was your favorite time in magic? What was magic's best period of time, if you ask somebody that? And the thing people will point out usually is the point where emotionally it was their favorite time playing magic. Because whatever was going on in the cards, they have such strong emotions and connections to it. And that, you know, there's a lot of love for that. Case in point, the retro frames. So magic did certain frames, and then, when did we change the frames at Mirrored Inn, or was it right before Mirrored Inn? I think the course was right before Mirrored Inn. We changed the frames to the old frames and probably had with the old frames. Well, we've actually changed frames a few times. But the thing with the old frames was they were not optimized for, what's the right word, for function. For example, the titles were hard to read. And the frames had, there was texturing, there was kind of cool on a vacuum, but didn't necessarily communicate a lot of the stuff we were trying to do. We wanted the art to be bigger. We wanted to redo the frame and make it more functional. And so we did, and it is, you know, you have more room for art. It's easier to write rules texts. It's, you know, we just clean things up. It's easier to read the cards from across the table. But whenever you change something, there's people that have fondness for what was. You know, I think magic art technically has improved a lot since the early days of magic. But people have fondness for the nostalgia the early days of art. I think the frame has a lot of improvements, but people have fondness for early frames. So we started doing the retro frames, which is us just taking modern cards and putting them in something that approximates the old frames, not 100% the old frame. And we were found as a really interesting thing. Some of the audience adored the retro frames. They think they're amazing. They constantly say more, more, make more retro frames, make retro frames of every card I own. And other players are like, oh, can you stop doing this? These are so ugly. And what we found is it just has to matter with does the frame emotionally mean something to you? And mostly what that meant is do you have cards with that frame that you played with? You know, does that frame bring back positive memories for you? And the answer is yes, the frame is amazing. It taps into this time that you loved and it brings you back. But if that's not a time period we were from, if what you know of magic is the more modern frame, they just seem like this weird, like it is not a positive experience. And that's one of the reasons why we do them in small mounds is, look, the audience that enjoys them is a smaller audience. They really enjoy them. We will make them. But for most players, like I said, it's a nostalgia thing. Meaning the reason of joy that you're gonna get comes from this emotional connection that if you don't have, it's not gonna be nostalgic for you. Now, I mean, there are some people who weren't playing then who are collectors, who collected a lot of old cards and the old cards are in that frame. And maybe they represent the older cards. I mean, there's reasons you might like the retro frames even if you didn't play with them. But our market research shows the vast majority of people like retro frames are because they have memories of the retro frames. And like I said, that is one of the biggest challenges. I mean, I talk about this all the time. I'm not designing for one audience. I'm designing for many audiences. Well, nostalgia hinges upon your emotional touchpoints. And they're not the same for everybody. Now, part of doing that is, let's say we go back to Kamagawa or Lorwin or Strix Savin or whatever, we're trying to get a modern sensibility. We're trying to do cool things that I hope, even if you have zero memories of Kamagawa, Niant dynasty was a fun set. If you have zero memories of Lorwin, that Lorwin Eclipse was a fun set. Like we're trying to make things that, hey, if you don't know anything, this is fun magic. So you should enjoy it. And there's something about the original that people love that we're trying to tap back into that even if you don't know it, hey, it's a cool thing. Why do people like it the first time around? Or why do people like it in memory? Cause there's something fun about it and we can tap into that. But that is one of the tricky things about nostalgia is it is a moving target. Meaning if I do something that's very nostalgic of alpha, okay, what percentage of our audience even knows alpha? And people that played alpha, like myself, are a small group. People that know of alpha, a little bit bigger, but even then, like one of the things when I do this podcast or my articles or my blog or whatever is, I try to always explain things because things that some people just know, a lot of people don't know. Like a lot of magic terminology, for example, is just named after the first card that did something. But if you don't know that card, sometimes vocabulary seems random. Before we made a keyword out of mill, if you don't know that millstone is the thing that, mills cards, well, why milling? Milling is like crushing wheat into bread. It's a form of crushing things. Well, why is crushing things, losing cards off the top of your library? And remember millstone, it's sort of like, oh, this millstone, the sound of the millstone drove people crazy. And what's losing cards at your library is going crazy, not milling, not the act of crushing, it was the sound of the millstone. Anyway, and that's one of the through lines to remember as we do nostalgia is that we need to have a balance between things making sense if you have the emotional underpinning of what it's tapping into, versus it's just being cool because you don't know anything. And that's one of the tricky things of trying to do a Kamagawa or a Lorwin, is we have less to lean on that is successful. And once again, Lorwin had much more than Kamagawa did. And so it's kind of like, one of the fun things for us is, okay, if we were gonna do this all over, if we were making it now, what would we do? And that is another interesting part of nostalgia is to try to say, how much of the old thing do I need to make the new thing feel like the old thing? And the answer is not a lot, that's the secret answer. A dash of nostalgia goes a long way. And then a lot of what we try to do is, I mean, one of the things about magic is there's many different layers that we can do things. We can make nods mechanically, we can make nods in art, we can make nods in names, nods in flavor. Like there's a lot of ways for us to make a subtle nod to things. And a lot of what we do is make nods that if you don't know, you don't know it's still a fun card and vacuum, you don't need to know it to appreciate the nod. But if you get it, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, isn't that fun. And I talk a lot about lenticular design and the idea of sometimes you design something where you hide the complexity. Well, you can also hide the reference, if you will. That a lot of fun nostalgic designs are about, the thing makes sense even if you don't understand the nostalgic design, but there's this extra layer if you do. And that is a lot fun. And the idea of lenticular stuff so that we can make nods, but one of the important thing is this card can't only make sense if you know the reference. TimesPiral made that mistake, where TimesPiral just made too many cards that if you didn't understand what we were referencing, it just was like, what? What's going on? Like we would throw two cards together and mash them together and like, oh, get it? It's this card and that card. And if you got it, even then, I don't know if the joke was good enough, but if you got it, at least you understand what we were doing. If you didn't, it just looked like random craziness. And we've learned a lot that the key to nostalgia is using the right amount in the right dosage, structured in a way that it is there to see for the people who need to see it, but it's not in the way of the people that don't know it. And that lenticular quality nostalgia is very important. So anyway, guys, I have now, I'm now at work. I like doing these podcasts from time to time where I'm more, just there's a topic at hand, and I sort of want to think about it like just to capstone. I understand the current sort of desire for blocks in the sense of magic keeps changing, and there's a lot of disorientation to change. And magic has gone through a lot of changes. The changes came about because there were things that there was an audience that was really hungry and excited for, but especially players that have been playing for a longer time. Look, the change of pace is disorienting, and that I understand wanting to harken back to a simpler time to when things weren't quite so fast and didn't change quite so much. And I understand the emotional attractiveness of blocks. I understand that the story could evolve slower and have your little three-act structure to it. And you had time to get used to the world. And there's a lot of things that I get the nostalgia of it. I get the warmth of it. I get the harkening back to it. The problem and the challenge is the actual three-act structure, it had lots of problems. And I did a whole podcast on why it had lots of problems. So the real question is, how do we harken back and capture some of that old timeliness that people are wanting? I believe the rationale behind the desire for blocks, there's a lot of actual yearning that we need to figure out how to address. I don't think blocks is the answer, because blocks even back then functionally really didn't work and didn't do what we needed them to do. And we tried for a long time to make them work. But I acknowledge and understand that there is a yearning for something that is important. And we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out, how do we? And part of it is we're going back to Kamagawa. We're going back to Lorwin. I don't think that those kind of revisits to worlds that didn't work the first time were something we would do in a world where we weren't trying to find places to have that nostalgia. And so I do believe that there's things we're doing that I think are making the nostalgia fans happy, partly as a response to trying to find those touchstones to the past. We will continue to do stuff. We're always looking. Kind of what I'm saying today is I hear the desire for what people are asking for when they ask over the turn of blocks. I hear the problem at hand. And as I said in my GDC talk, players are really good at identifying problems and aren't the best at solving them. Most of us, it's not your job to solve them. You don't know all the moving pieces. And it's kind of our job to solve them. But you identified a problem. There's a desire and a need for nostalgia. And there's a time to harken back to the past. Can we do that in a way that helps meet some of this need? And like I said, us going back to Lorwin is part of us trying to capture this. So we are working in this direction. But anyway, I do hear people. I honestly got it. I'm not trying to dismiss people who are asking for something. Mostly what I'm saying is I hear it. I think I understand the core of what you want. The solution you're providing is not a viable solution. But you are presenting a problem that we need to spend time to think on. I just want to acknowledge that we hear that. We're thinking about it. I don't want to dismiss the audiences identified or some of the audiences identified a problem. It is our job to figure out how to address that problem. I hear you. But anyway, guys, I am now at work. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.