#1332: Video Production

I'm pulling on my driveway.

We all know what that means.

It's time for their drive to work.

So one of the things I do on my podcast from time to time

is I talk about some of the things I've done for magic

that weren't game design.

Obviously my major focus has been game design,

but over the years I've done a bunch of different things.

So today I'm gonna talk about my time

as a video producer.

So for those that don't know,

I went to school at Boston University

where I majored in broadcast and film.

I got a B.S. in communications, believe it or not.

So broadcast and film is a fancy way of saying TV movies.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet

when I was in school, but so I studied communications

specifically studying at the time,

the two major mediums, which was TV and film.

And so one of the things I had to do

to major in television film is I had to do video production.

So real quickly, the technology is advanced a lot.

Basically TV in the early days was mostly done on video

which is electronic and film is chemical.

You're shooting an actual film.

Now the digital technology's gotten so good

that a lot of people, I mean some film

isn't actually shot in film anymore

and shot in digital, but back in the day,

we learned how to basically work with both video

and film in school.

And so I did actual classes where I went out

with a little eight millimeter film and shot films,

but I also did video production.

And while I did do some video production out

in the field as they call it,

I did do a lot of video production in the studio.

And in fact, I had a class in video production

and the way it would work is each time

you would do a video production

but you would take a different role.

Maybe you're doing sound, maybe you're doing lights,

maybe you're the talent, meaning you're on camera.

But at one point, you've got to be the director.

And that is, if you've never had a chance

to direct a live production, it is quite heart pumping.

So the idea essentially is there are a bunch

of different cameras, three or four cameras

you're depending on the setup.

And then there is people that are doing graphics

and there's a bunch of people doing things

and you, the director, are calling everything in the moment.

Sometimes this would be for live television.

Sometimes it's shot live, meaning even though it's live

in the moment you tape it and show it later.

Late night shows tended to work that way.

But anyway, I had an opportunity to do video production.

So I actually had some training in video production.

So when I first took my job at Wizards,

I'm like, well, I studied communications.

Maybe some of that would be relevant,

but most of it probably won't be.

And what I learned over the years is almost all of it.

Even my video production ended up becoming valuable.

So that's what we're talking about today

is my time as a video producer while working on magic.

So when I first got to Wizards back in 1995,

Scaf Elias, who was one of the original,

one of the original playtesters,

part of what we call the East Coast playtesters,

design antiquities and ice age and alliances

and fallen empires, Scaf was,

Scaf had an idea that part of getting people

invested in playing magic was to have a high level of play

that people go to Spider-2.

And so he created the protor.

So before I came to Wizards,

one of the things I did was I used to write a puzzle column

in the duelist called Magic the Puzzling.

In order to do the puzzles,

they wanted me to use the latest cards.

Meaning they wanted me to make puzzles

of the latest things that were out.

So in order to do that,

I needed to see the cards ahead of time.

And in order to build a puzzle,

I needed to see all the cards.

I had to build the puzzle.

So I needed to have access to everything

to figure out what I was building.

Anyway, what I meant was I got,

we called Godbooks, but I,

I used to get, they'd mail me all the upcoming set.

And I get a chance to see it for anybody else

got a chance to see it, which was very exciting.

But one of the side effects of that was

I was not allowed to play in sanction play

because I knew the cards.

So what happened was when I lived in

down Los Angeles before I moved up to Seattle,

I used to do a lot,

I used to help run tournaments.

So I was very involved in the running of tournaments.

So when I got to Wizards and Scath was like,

oh, we're planning to do a pro tour,

I was very excited to be involved.

So I volunteered, I ended up being the R&D liaison

to the pro tour.

And I was sort of Scath's right-hand man

and helped him in putting things together.

And I was very, very involved,

especially for the first eight years.

The first eight years of the pro tour,

I went to every pro tour.

A safe one when Rachel was born.

But I went to every pro tour.

And then when my twins were born,

I decided I needed to do less traveling,

so I stopped coming to the pro tour.

But during my time at the pro tour,

so basically the pro tour usually was three days.

It was a Friday Saturday, Sunday usually.

So on Friday and Saturday, I would do the feature matches.

And I've done podcasts on the feature matches.

One of my, one of the things I was most responsible for

at the pro tour.

And so I would pick who is playing who

and I would judge the feature match area.

But on the final day, on Sunday, when the finals happened.

So back in the day, nowadays we stream the whole time.

But back in the day, the only time we have to shout

on camera was on the final day.

We'd have the quarter finals, the semi-finals,

and the finals be top eight.

So I was in charge of overseeing the video production.

That's why I was a video producer.

So here was my responsibilities for the eight years

that I did it.

So first and foremost, at the end of the second day,

when we called the top eight, I would get the top eight

after we called them and say, you need to stick by.

So I would then talk to them.

And there's a couple of things we would do.

One is they would fill out a sheet with information.

That information allowed us to know where they're staying,

a contact number.

We had a few incidents where people didn't show up on time.

And I asked a bunch of things about them,

so by a graphing information, they would name their deck.

They would talk about where they're from,

what city, what country.

And I would just ask a few things to just get some flavor

on the next day when we were doing coverage.

And then I would walk through kind of the rules.

Now, I did video coverage a while ago.

So some of the things I talked about, for example,

might not still be true.

Like one of the things that was true back in the day

that it's no longer true now is you couldn't have cards

sleaze on your cards.

The lights, the cameras couldn't handle the light reflections.

You couldn't see the cards.

They would reflect the lights.

And then you couldn't see what.

Basically when we play magic, there is a bunch of cameras

around the room, usually three.

And then there's one camera known as the gym,

which is up above, that shooting the table from up above.

And that was important to showing a match,

because you had to see the match from up above.

So anyway, at the time, you couldn't play with sleaze

because it would reflect the light.

Now, the camera's a lot better.

That's no longer an issue.

But anyway, there's a lot of little things

about how it worked.

This was also the time that we introduced,

or early in the Pro-Tural career, why was there?

We introduced the play mat, the red zone,

and part of what we wanted is we wanted people

to always play in the same area.

So the audience can easily understand what they're watching.

So we put the library and the graveyard

and set places, and when you attack,

you went into the red zone and stuff like that.

And I was very involved in making the mat and stuff like that.

So anyway, I would do a lot of preppin' that I before.

But really, the vast majority of my work

was on the day itself on Sunday.

So I had a bunch of responsibilities.

So first, let me talk a little bit about

the video production of making a Pro-Tural,

filming a Pro-Tural event.

And once again, I'm talking about many years ago.

I think most of what I'm saying is still true.

Some of the technical things are slightly different,

but most of what I'm talking about is still true.

So the idea is you have a director.

Our director, for the eight years that I worked

on the Pro-Tural, our director was named Bruce.

We had the same director.

With one or two exceptions, when we went overseas,

we would have a different person.

The team that we normally had to do the Pro-Tural

did all the domestic Pro-Tords,

but the international Pro-Tords were,

I don't think Bruce might have done some of the later ones.

But anyway, so the thing is,

Bruce was a very good director.

He had done a lot of video productions,

but Bruce did not know magic, especially when he started.

And so my job, well, sorry, sorry.

So Bruce exists, he's the director.

There is people, there are cameramen.

I think there was, there are probably two people

doing the jib, and then I think there were three other cameras.

It might have varied, maybe there was a few as two,

maybe there was maybe four.

My memory is that there were three.

And then there are also, like there's somebody

that's doing, we call the Kairan, or the CGI.

The person who's doing graphics and putting people's names

up and keeping the score, and then there's a few other roles

of there, there's a, video production

has a lot of different component pieces.

There's someone doing audio, for example,

audio is its own thing.

And so the director has to oversee all those things.

There's a lot of stuff going on when you make a video production.

So the thing I would do was I was,

kind of what we would call the technical advisor.

And the issue is, Bruce knew video production,

but he didn't know magic.

And one of the tricky things about shooting a magic game

is that it's not always obvious what is going on.

You can have boards where there's nothing on the board,

but a dramatic moment is happening.

Or you can have boards where there's lots of things on the board,

but nothing really important is happening.

That understanding when something dynamic is going on

can be very difficult if you're not very

glued into how magic functioned, like the specifics

of the game in the cards.

So my job was a couple of things.

First and foremost, I guess, I asked you to mention,

we had to have commentators.

When you do commentating, normally you have two commentators,

what we call a play-by-play, and what we call a color commentator.

A play-by-play means that they're describing what is going on,

and they're making sure the audience understands

just the nature of what's happening.

And then you have a color commentator,

the color commentator, traditionally a summon who, in sports,

used to participate in the sport.

And for us, back in the day, my color commentator

was somebody who had played in that approach

or who did not make the finals.

And in the early days, they used to rotate.

Like, I used to have a different color commentator every time.

And then I started realizing, oh, it's much, much better

to have regular people who learn how to do it

and get better at it.

So I started having actual teams.

And I'll talk about some of them in a second.

In the early days, also, I did play-by-play

in the very early approach, or I then

became clear that there were people better

than me to do play-by-play.

And also, it was hard for me to do play-by-play

and do all my video production stuff,

because part of what's going on is, as we're shooting,

I'm talking with the director, and I'm

filling him in on information.

Oh, well, guess what?

The game's about to end.

Here's what you want to focus on.

Look at this player's hand.

They're about to attack for lethal.

Whatever it is, I'm explaining him what's going on,

so he can understand how he visually wants to film it.

But I need to tell him, oh, this is about to happen.

This is the dramatic moment you need to capture that.

So I would sort of fill Bruce in.

And not only did I pick the commentators,

I also would be the booth with the commentators,

and I would be feeding them information,

meaning if there's something they needed to know,

I would feed them information from the booth or from the floor,

or to the floor in a second.

And also, I had a lot of knowledge about the protors,

because that's what I was doing.

So I also would take a lot of notes

and I'd make little notes I'd pass to my commentator saying,

oh, here's a factoid, or here's little things you may not know.

I would share the sheets they filled up a night before,

so they could look at that night before,

so they could find facts they wanted to do.

As I'll talk about it a little bit,

one of the big things about doing humtour

has to do with making the story, but I'll get to that.

OK, let me finish my setup.

Bruce is in the booth, he's talking to me.

On the floor, they call it a stage manager,

which is somebody who talks to the director,

who's in charge of making sure everybody in the floor

is doing what they need to be doing.

And I had something that I called the spider.

The point of the spider, and the spider

was always a magic person.

Scott Johns did it for a while.

Scott Larby did it for a while.

I had a bunch of them spiders.

The idea of the spider is, I needed somebody on the ground

that understands magic that I can ask questions of.

Because one of the things that I'm determining

as the producer is, I determine where we go when.

Meaning, I'm the one that figures out

what state the games are in and where we want to go.

So normally what would happen is, I would show up in the morning,

we would look at the quarter-final matches,

and I would have a priority order

for the quarter-final matches.

For example, I would always pick the match we would start with,

come like, oh, this is the most exciting match.

People most want to see, we're going to start there.

And then we would move around.

One of my goals is, I'd like to show every match it possible.

In the quarters where there were four matches,

I almost always got to show two.

I most often got to show three.

If I was lucky, I got to show four.

The biggest problem with that is, once the thing

we learned early on is you don't want to leave a game

while a game's in progress.

We experimented early on of like, oh, this is kind of

just all about, let's go to another game.

But the audience pretty much wanted, once you started a game,

you could come in a game mid-game.

But once you started a game, they really

wanted to see the completion of the game.

That like, going away before the game completed,

everyone's in a blue moon, if it was that true,

true stalemate, and nothing was going to happen,

and then there was another game that was going to end quickly.

I'm not saying we never left a game in progress,

but we most often did not leave the game in progress.

So what would happen is once a match finished,

if I didn't get there, then we didn't see them.

But the goal was, I would want to track what was going on.

Part of my spotter was to fill in what's

happening in other games.

There's a judge at each game.

The judge responsible for keeping the score.

So my spotter could go and talk to the judge.

The judge at each table could show them the score.

And then I could sort of check on things that's going on.

The other thing my spotter could do, well, one of the important things

the spotter did is the spotter conveyed

to the Kyron guy, the person doing the online scores,

the scores that are putting up, he would communicate to him.

So whenever the score would change,

he would communicate to him.

The score is changed so it could be updated.

And whenever if there's anything that we were unsure of,

like let's say my commentators were talking about something,

like let's say they wanted to see a hand.

One of my commentators would go, wow,

it would be really great if we could see the hand.

Now, sometimes they say it allowed and Bruce got it.

But the thing is, they can only see what's on camera.

One of the things I can do is I can then go to Bruce

and go, oh, we need to see the hand.

And sometimes they'd be talking about something.

And I understood, oh, he's about to draw something

to go show the hand.

I understand the context a little better than Bruce would.

So my job was, one of my jobs, was as the game was evolving,

I made sure that Bruce was aware of what was happening

in the context of the game.

And then when we were going to move games,

I made it very clear where we were going to go.

And I would use my spotter to help that information.

The spotter also did things like,

let's say I need to see a hand.

And the camera wasn't in his position to show me the hand.

I could say to my spotter,

and my spotter could step away from the table

and whisper so they couldn't hear him.

I could say, okay, look at John's hand.

Does he have, you know, disenchant in his hand,

whatever it was, it mattered.

And they can go, yes, he does.

No, he does it, you know, and I could see that,

I could write notes and feed it to my, I could feed it.

Because for most of the time, we were in a booth,

a sound booth, early magic, we actually,

we did different things over the years.

There was a period we were in front of the audience,

but anyway, so we were mostly in the sound,

a soundproof booth.

And so I would pass notes and they could talk to the audience,

the audience's reaction couldn't be seen by the players.

And so we could let the players,

we could let the audience in on things

that the players didn't know.

Because the players couldn't hear the commentators

and the players couldn't hear the audience.

There's some famous examples, et cetera,

but for the most part, that was true.

Okay, so I would show up, I'd figure out,

I'd get everybody in position

and make sure people understood all the rules

of what they needed to do.

I would talk to Bruce and make sure he understood the play,

the order of play we wanted.

Usually I would pick an order

that we would go by default.

This is our number one, this is our number two.

And what that meant is if barring other circumstances,

two is the one I most likely want to go to.

But maybe two is dragging out game one

and three is already in game two.

So I may go, oh, okay, let's go to back three

because if I wait, it might be over before we get there.

And then I would work with the commentators in the booth

to make sure that they had all the information they needed

and that any conduit that had to go

between the booth and us or the floor and us,

I was the person who did that.

Okay, so let's get to kind of,

how to make a cool podcast.

So the thing that was important,

A, having the right people was really important.

Like I said in the early days,

I would jump around a bit,

but I eventually learned was what you really want to do

is just get a play by play and a color

that know their stuff that are good,

they get practice at it and they just get better.

The more you do it, the more practice you get

and the more you learn the nature of how things work.

So my two favorite pairings that I had

while I was running things,

my early pairings that I enjoyed most

was Brian Weisman on play by play and Chris Bakula on color.

And then the later one that I had in my reign

was Randy Buehlor on play by play

and Brian David Marshall on play by play

and Randy Buehlor on color.

And both of those teams were really good.

There's been lots of other good teams.

I'm just talking about when I did it,

people I worked with specifically.

Oh, so the idea of having a good,

what you want to have is you want to be,

you want to have what we call a narrative.

And what that means is people respond to stories.

And so what is this match about?

Obviously they want to advance to the next thing

and there always is that.

There always is, okay, part of it is,

the winner gets to go forward in the tournament

and the finals, the winner wins the tournament.

So there always is that.

And part of the story is will they win this tournament?

And there are a little sub stories about that,

but the cool thing is in any one match,

what is this match about?

Not necessarily just the winner advances, that's important.

But and there was a couple of different ways

to build the narrative.

One way was to build the narrative off the players.

Maybe for example, these are two players that have a history.

Maybe they had met before in another famous match.

Maybe they're on the same team.

Maybe they interest me, don't like each other.

Whatever it is, maybe there's something

about the personalities of it.

Maybe one of them's quiet and one of them's loud.

Like maybe they represent different styles.

Maybe they're from different countries.

Whatever it is, you're finding something

that you can sort of angle your story around.

The other big thing you can angle the story around

was their decks.

Oh, well maybe this is about, you know,

these are the two most prominent decks

and they're facing off against each other

or this is control versus aggro.

Like you could, you also could take the decks

and sort of talk about like the decks represent something.

So I like people, whenever we go ahead,

having our narrative be about the people

with the most compelling to me,

people respond the best to people.

But sometimes there just wasn't a really compelling

sort of person narrative.

And then you could do deck narratives.

Sometimes by the way, there were larger narratives

that were kind of bigger than the people.

Maybe there are representatives of two teams, you know,

maybe the representatives of two countries, you know,

so there's different things you could do.

So you could kind of go in personal,

you could pull back about the person's role

in a larger sort of context or you could talk about the deck.

So those are the most common.

And every once in a while, you would get a different kind.

I can remember, so in 2000 at Brussels,

World Championship in Brussels, Belgium,

I forget whether there's a quarter final or semi-final,

but John Finkel is playing Darwin Castle.

And I wanted to say it was the quarters,

but it could have been the semi.

Anyway, what we realize is that these people

are the two people in the front spot

for the player of the year award.

The player of the year is based on a full year magic,

but it ends at the World Championship.

So what we realized is whoever won this match

was gonna win pro player of the year.

Yes, they would also advance.

So yes, that was part of it.

It wasn't like, they still wanted to win the tournament.

But all of a sudden, the match was about

who wins pro player of the year.

Like, there was something on stake immediately

for this event, for this match.

This match is about who becomes pro player of the year.

And that's really cool because the story

we're telling resolves right here.

Now, you don't always get that.

You know, that is, it's very,

it's awesome when that happens

when things land up like that.

You don't always get that lucky.

A lot of times, you know, you're working

to build your narrative.

Like, sometimes the narrative is given to you

on a silver platter.

I talked about this during Kai's podcast,

but Kai Buddha and John Finkel

run it, end up in a, I think it's a semi-final match

in one of the pro-torture Kaigos.

I think it's the second one that,

I think it's the second one that Kai won.

But anyway, they had never met in a top eight match before.

And many, you know, consider Kai and John to be

the two greatest magic, pro match players of all time.

So the excitement for that match was just palpable,

you know what I'm saying?

So I don't, I mean, and that's one of the few matches

where I said, we're gonna start this match,

we're gonna watch this match,

we're not leaving till this match is over.

We might not see other matches, that is okay.

And the reason is, this is what everybody wants to see,

this is what we're going to show them.

And that's the kind of thing we're like,

you can't, you can't script that.

You know, the, I mean, we didn't know

it's the one and only, but if the one and only time,

the best two magic players of all time

face off each other in a top eight final.

Okay, you know, that, that writes itself.

And sometimes you're working hard and figuring it out,

but one of my jobs is, as a producer,

is I would work with my commentators

to sort of help figure out what our narrative was.

And I had a lot of information,

so like I would, because I knew the matches the night before,

I would spend time at night,

sort of walking through like what the possible angles are,

and I would talk through with my people the next day

to say, you know, here's different angles we can take,

what do you like, what narrative do you enjoy?

But the more you can make the match about something.

So I'm going to give an example of my favorite,

my favorite, commentating match moment of all time,

just because it was a really exciting moment.

And my commentators, I was Brian Weissman and Chris Papula.

So this was at US Nationals.

I'm blinking on the year of US Nationals.

It was, 96, 97, 98, not 96.

It must have been 98 is my guess.

My guess is there was 98.

I might be off by year.

So anyway, Mike Long, who many people might know

as the bad boy of the pro-tor,

somebody who was up to no good

and was probably the number one villain of the pro-tor.

And so he goes undefeated,

or he's going undefeated in the Swiss at US Nationals.

And in the final match, there's a card on the floor

and a judge gets called over who, by the way, was me.

And so we end up giving him game loss.

A lot of players thought he was up to something,

and they won and kicked out of the tournament,

you know, following the rules of the time.

We did, he did get a game loss,

which was a pretty severe penalty,

but it did not warrant kicking out of the tournament.

But anyway, he goes in the top eight.

Nobody likes, nobody wants Mike Long to win,

other than Mike Long, nobody, and Mike Long's friends.

Nobody wants Mike to win, right?

He's the villain.

And so everybody is there to sort of root against him.

So it gets down to the finals,

and he's playing out a kid named Matt Lindy.

Matt Lindy at the time was like 16 or 17.

Matt Lindy would go on to be a good pro player

or he had other top eights, you know.

But this was his first kind of thing.

So even though that he was known to some of the players,

if he wasn't out of the blue,

but he was young, this was his first top eight.

And so the narrative is, okay,

who's going to win the US National Championship?

The brand new, you know, the rookie,

Matt Lindy, the kid, or Mike Long.

And, you know, people didn't know what Mike Long

was the US National Champion.

So there's this really palpable thing.

And so one of the things that happens,

and I don't remember this is game four or five,

but there's a point in which Mike Long

is going to win the game and the tournament.

The game, the match and the tournament.

Mike Long is playing a deck called Prosper's Bloom,

which is a combo deck.

And so Mike needs to get the pieces together,

and once he gets together, he's going to win the game.

So Mike gets the pieces together,

but he has to let his guard down to one turn.

Like he doesn't have what he can do to go off.

So he has to let Matt Lindy take a turn.

And the issue is that Matt Lindy,

if he has a particular card in deck,

which was called a Bands,

if Matt Lindy has a Bands and is able to cast a Bands,

and he knows to cast it at this turn,

he would stop Mike and he would keep Mike from winning.

So there's just this moment on which, oh no.

Everything's at stake.

The game is about to end.

Mike Long has the pieces.

He's going to win the game, but wait, there's one chance.

If Matt Lindy is able to have this card

and know to play it at this moment, he stops Mike.

And one of the things that Brian and Chris had done

is all of them, they understood the nature

of what's happening.

They'd recognize that Mike was about to go off.

They'd recognize that Matt needed to have a Bands.

And so they're setting this all up.

They do an excellent job of explaining to the audience,

here's the dynamic of what's going on.

Mike is about to win, but Mike has to let his guard down

for one turn.

And in that turn, there is a card in Matt Lindy's deck

that if Matt Lindy has in his hand

and knows to play, he will stop Mike.

And once again, so I'm in the producer,

I'm like, okay, Matt Lindy's about to draw a card.

What's his card is matters.

You need to show him draws his card.

And so when he drew it and it was the Bands,

so this was a point in time where the commentators

weren't in front of the audience.

Later, we'd be in the soundproof booth,

but this is earlier magic's history.

So we're in front of the audience.

And there's a huge audience and everybody's there.

Mike Long and Matt Lindy, the production

was at the opposite end of the hall,

which is like three football fields away.

So just to get the helpful of this situation,

when Matt Lindy draws the advance,

you could hear the audience screaming.

Like Mike realized he had the advance

because they were so loud that they heard him

three football fields away.

Now it turns out Mike knowing it didn't change anything.

And the real big question was,

did Matt know that right now we needed to play the card.

Now it turns out he did, that's a very good player.

And so he drew it, he understood he needed to do it,

he did it, he stopped Mike,

he goes on to win the tournament.

And it was everything that I like in a good broadcast,

which was there was something interesting going on,

the commentators did a good job of making sure

everybody was aboard and understood.

There was a cool narrative happening.

And then there was this dramatic moment,

like there's a sort of climax moment,

where something comes in and it was,

there's been a lot of really fun magic.

So most of our finals are, you can go watch them,

they exist, not everything, we're missing one or two things,

but most things are there.

And it's really, watching live magic is super fun.

I mean, obviously you can stream

now and watch the post-orders and that's great.

But it was, like one of the things in my mind

that I always enjoyed as a video producer was,

I'm putting on a show.

Much like when I'm a lead designer on a set,

I'm trying to make a set that makes,

I'm trying to make the most exciting set possible.

I'm trying to use all the tools available

to make an exciting magic set.

Video production is the same thing.

I'm trying to use all the tools available

to make the most exciting video match.

And obviously I'm working with a lot of people.

It is not a solo endeavor.

I have Bruce, the director, and I have all the crew people.

And there's a lot of people on the crew.

I have my commentators, I have my spotter.

There's a lot of people that are working

to make that happen.

It is not remotely a solo endeavor.

But it's really fun.

I really enjoyed, like I said, that one of the neat things

about my time on magic is that I've got a chance

to design magic cards and leave magic sets and do all that.

But there's other things I've gotten a chance to do.

And that's one of the cool things

of my experience at Wizards is, like,

I actually had a chance to be a video producer.

And I did it for quite a while, and it was super fun.

We even shot some stuff for, we were on ESPN 2

in the early years.

And there are some times where I got to go into the booth.

We'd flag in New York, and we'd edit a show.

And I was the cultural advisor, because the main person

who was doing it didn't know magic that well.

So I was there to make sure that the magic part was what

we needed to do.

And we'd bring in, I use it at the time, Brian and Chris

to do commentary.

There was live commentary, then we'd

be accursed up after the fact, because sometimes

we needed them to say specific things or throw in

and throw in some stuff.

But anyway, I was trying to think of something to talk about

today.

Like I said, when you're a 1,300 podcast

in, just try and find stuff you have not talked about.

And I realized that I had talked about my feature matches.

So if you wanted to talk about me running feature matches,

or how feature matches started, my very first picture

of the idea to them being an ongoing thing,

I've done a whole podcast on that.

In fact, I might have done two podcasts on that.

But I never realized I'd never done a video production before.

So it was a lot of fun.

Oh, also, another related video is after the first pro tour,

they made a video.

And then they asked me to direct it after the fact,

which is not how I suppose to direct a video.

And that is a true story of chaos.

So that's also a podcast you can listen to about PT1.

So anyway, and I have infinite, not infinite.

I have a bunch of pro tour podcasts.

If you want to hear more about different stories

at the pro tour, I have some fun stories

where just different things have happened

and different things that I did.

And some of those stories involve me in my role

of running the feature matches or being

the video producer.

So all those exist.

If you want to hear more about the pro tour,

I've talked much about the pro tour.

But I am now at work.

So we all know what that means.

It means it's my end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make a magic.

Hope you enjoyed today's podcast, and I'll see you next time.