101 Comments

Well, thank god a content creator, a voice in the hobby, someone louder than me has articulated what it feels with the glut of cross IP content.

I have mostly been an omni tcg player. I love it when IPs find their place in the tcg market with their own game rules, where mechanisms are interesting and tied closely to the theme.

I like mtg, I love its lore, and I enjoy it when someone at the table does something weird and almost nonsensical. But I've been playing against hobbits and the brotherhood of steel and they just take me out of the game this time. And I hate the feeling because I love lotr and fallout. I just don't want to play them in the same multiverse, they could (or are) so much more as different card games.

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But you don't spend the 💰💰so they don't care 😘

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There's one argument he's missing here. UB has organically become a point of emphasis as products are selling orders of magnitude better because it's what The People ™️ (outside of the most concentrated fan communities like Reddit, X, Discord, w/e) actually want. Players want to screech and point fingers at "shareholders" and "investors" and "infinite growth fallacies" but it's not about them. It's a company responding to the actual wants of their customers who are voting with their wallets. The call is coming from inside the house; it's not corporate vs. the players, it's the desires of the silent supermajority vs. the loud longtime enfranchised players. I'm sorry it's not what you wanted, but you've been outvoted. Not by a guy in a suit, but from the guy across the table from you at your next pre-release.

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I absolutely loathe the phrase "voting with their wallets." It implies some degree of equity across customers, when that simply does not exist. One person who is extremely interested in a specific set outweighs dozens who aren't. Would you characterize one person, buying a ton of LOTR booster packs on the off chance that he opens the One of One Ring so he can sell it to Post Malone, as "voting" in favor of the LOTR UB set? Does that one person's "vote" have the same weight as the vote of a person who was unhappy with LOTR UB and didn't buy into it at all? No, of course not.

You simply cannot point to revenue and say "this shows that this is what the playerbase as a whole wants." It doesn't prove anything like that. That kind of argument does not even attempt to consider WHO is buying a given set. You seem to think that success of UB is driven by people who you'll find sitting at the prerelease across the table from you; I do not believe that. The increased sales of these sets are not driven by Magic's fans, they're driven by fans of the things that have been shoved into Magic, who are only tangentially interested in Magic, and who very well may not stick around. I mean, what reason do they have to do so? What interest does a LOTR fan, who picked up LOTR magic booster packs, have in playing against characters from Fallout? Why should they? Those two settings are as tonally distinct from each other as they are from the rest of MTG.

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This isn't "what the people want" it's what Wizards wants. They want to print money by tricking unsuspecting folks into buying into this "cool crossover!" when the game used to have a soul.

The books, the lore, even the flavor text painted a larger universe that you were seeing glimpses of in packs and regular play. I wanted to know what the deal with Urza was, and what was ahead for Gerard and his crew. Slivers were a wild concept and I wanted to discover how they were created and how they beached, sometimes finding dramatic irony in following along, due to the disjointed nature of the piecemeal stories.

Why not have the Simpsons involved? Why not soccer players? They really want to expand who the game appeals to and they'll surely be more interested when their favorite *non-MTG* element is finally added. They're already stripping away the metaphorical magic of the game, why not go hog wild. Get the LEGO crossover conversation started, why not? Why not have an entire series of LEGO-based expansions to explore their universe further, because they sure don't care about the MTG universe. The brand is already sullying itself, why not just cover everything? The Kitchen Nightmares crossover might at least provide an interesting concept. Why not get Olympians to have their own cards? Shoot, bring in Greek Olympians too, because why build your own universe when you can just use everyone else's?

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LotR UB only sold as well as it did because it was a god damn slot machine for a 1 of 1 card. We can talk about metrics all day but we can't pretend they're representative of a healthy game.

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Collectors box just hit all time highs and the 1:1 has already been pulled......

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Oct 26·edited Oct 26

That must be why Bloomburrow sold better than any of the UB stuff, and why outside a few of these sets there haven't been reports of them outselling Standard Sets. Kind of sounds like the core Magic IP is much stronger when they aren't constantly shackled with cheap, kitschy gimmicks for sets and are allowed to actually develop their ideas!

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Bloomburrow was so radically different from anything else in Magic to date it's all but a UB product. I don't say that as a bad thing. Yeah, WotC has had some in-universe banger sets; Kamigawa and Bloomburrow for sure. But what do both of those have in common? Very, VERY strong resonance with out-of-universe IPs (Redwall, all-of-anime). Even the sets that DO pop off are popular because they hook into appeals that exist outside of their IP's walls. Plus, for every set that sells incredibly well, there's a New Capenna / Karlov Manor. Again, this is the design team responding to what the players want, and what they don't.

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Your argument is incoherent. Every Magic set has "resonance" with other IPs. OTJ relates to westerns. MKM is murder mysery. New Capenna is noir. Dominaria is Tolkien.

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Oct 26·edited Oct 26

No, it really wasn't - Lorwyn exists. Anthropomorphised animals is a fresh step for a plane, but it still uses resonant themes and aesthetics that still largely stays in the playground of Magic's confines, and even has a few nods to the wider universe without dragging in every face that could be plastered on marketing material in a manner that would cheapen the experience(hi Karlov Manor and Thunder Junction).

Why does holding some resemblance to other IPs in the same way that Lorwyn holds resemblances to folklore and mythmaking from the British Isles make it "Universes beyond" when it takes the basic concept and runs with it in a manner that's both evocative of classics like the Wind and the Willows or Narnia while having its own spin on things? Your argument betrays your position here, and completely disregards any of the actual substantive qualities of what makes these sets so strongly regarded beyond the surface aesthetics.

Karlov Manor sold badly because it actually was what you described Bloomburrow as - UB in all but name. It took established in-universe concepts and totally flanderized every character involved while watering down the setting with deeply unserious allusions to pop culturally accessible references - all while not being terribly fun to play.

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Also, Kamigawa has fox-people, rat-people, and snake-people. Cat-people are a staple of multiple planes. Magic's had anthropomorphized animals as part of its toolkit since, what, Hurloon Minotaur? Bloomburrow is really not far removed from things Magic's done many times in the past.

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Same old tired anti-UB argument as always. You're basically mad at anything that doesn't fit into a high fantasy box for Magic and then you make up sales statistics as evidence (Bloomburrow outsold LotR? What the hell are you talking about?)

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It was the bestselling set of the last few years from what I'd been lead to believe. If I'm wrong, then fair enough.

On the other hand, if the only UB set to outsell Bloomburrow was the single largest and most enduring landmark in modern fantasy literature then I'm not really sure what that means for the faddish licences they're peddling.

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Oct 26·edited Oct 26

It is 100% about shareholders and the need to constantly make record profits each years "or else". That is and has been the core driver of Wizard's decisons for years now as that is how publicly traded companies function and survive. If you think the constant need to make record profits does not impact their every decision you are nothing short of delusional. Just because alot of people buy the product doesn't mean it's becauae they overwhelmingly enjoy seeing or want these IPs in magic. Often people want a specific chase card, want to play limited, or simply engage with the newest set despite the fact the would prefer that UB set was actually a in-universe set. Bloomburrow is a great example of that fact. And the low sales of many UB sets show that the direction UB is taking is overwhelming unpopular to the core fanbase of magic.

And you compeltely invalidated your own argument when talking about bloomburroe and Kamigawa. You literally gave examples of how magic is at its most popular, flavorful, and succesful when it creates IN UNIVERSE planes inspired by out of universe IPs. You are throwing out so many fallacies and justifications in your original post and subsequent response you are practically tripping over them at this point.

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And which customers would those be exactly? Because I don't consider resale scalpers, #investmentbros, or LGS's to be Magic PLAYERS. For the health of the game, and yes, to preserve the future value proposition of the Magic player audience to said sellers markets, the game must be designed for players first. A long-term, less spiky sales graph, is the only responsible option. There are no customers if Magic players abandon the game.

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Now comes in a new question, how do you keep the guy across the table invested in Magic?

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I think you're mostly right with one critical distinction. It's not the silent supermajority vs the loud longtime enfranchised players; it's the potential players vs the existing players. WotC has been open about how UB is a vehicle for creating new players. The Spongebob UB takes Spongebob fans, find the subset of potential MtG players, and adds them into the playerbase.

The reason the discourse is annoyance is because the discourse is existing players and not people who don't play. They don't want to see the franchise they enjoy get watered down to expand the playerbase. In fact, you can loosely interpret it as a microcosm of the classic immigration debate. People are open to growing their population but only if the newcomers assimilate. They fear that they'll lose the culture they grew up with and love. Of course, in the real world, no country is going to do the equivalent of what WotC did by turning half the sets to UB and delaying in-universe sets.

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Oh look it’s Rosewater’s burner

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It's not what people wanted. It's what gets pushed in their face.

Ofcourse it opens up a new demographic. But you could have reached them otherwise - invest in good quality storytelling and worldbuilding - then a netflix show, use high quality social media to tell the stories behind the cards, use influencer marketing to bring newcomers in, etc. The marketing strategies are almost infinite.

The decision to water down their own universe by spending money on licensing other franchises is just the easy risk-averse way.

Not the way a legacy game like MGT should have went - and needed to go. They could have done well (enough) on their own.

But greedy corporate capitalism got ahold of it...

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Going to go with a hard NOPE on this one. The company has NO idea what the players want and you can see that in Hasbros year to year growth. If the company was actually responding to the wants of the consumer, they would be putting forward growth statistics not loss statics. We haven't been outvoted and the company will continue to pay the price for their greed and disconnection. The true reality is, only Magic players will keep buying into MAGIC. The Dr.Who fan who bought into the Dr.Who set ISN'T buying the Warhammer set, the Anime fangirl set or showing up to the next prerelease because the next prerelease ISN'T their jam, it was the magic players jam. Hasbo is pissing into the wind and trying to collect as much money as they can before burning the whole house down.

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Sad thing is, you're right too. This is a popularity contest, and universes beyond won it hard.

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and it never should have been. Yes, it’s more profitable, but the pursuit of profit will always outweigh any artistic merit if it’s pushed too far. Again, it’s incredibly frustrating as someone who likes UB and magic as it’s own IP, to see the signs of them kicking those original characters further and further from the spotlight, I’m completely torn because of these decisions they’ve announced.

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Wow, did you just discover that Magic is a business?

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Well it’s a good thing businesses don’t have to worry about Brand Identity, Public Reputation, or Customer Loyalty.

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A business can stay true to it's core. Especially if you already have a strong core. For MTG there was no need to go this way. It's just corporate greed that led to those decisions, not a need for it.

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I agree, but to add even more to what you have added, I also think that considering only the vast majority isn't always the safest. To use a slightly exaggerated example, let's say wizards has two options in front of them.

Option one is to release a new magic set. One that 40% of the fan base wants, 40% would be indifferent and 20% would be frustrated.

Option two is to release a new UB set that would make 60% of the fan base happy, 5% would be indifferent, and 35% would be frustrated.

It seems like wizards argument these days is that they will always choose whatever is the popular vote, even if that vote has the additional fact of having more angry players.

Personally I don't know if it's worth chasing that metric at the expense of the players it frustrates.

Ultimately I'm indifferent. I think it's exciting, but I would also be just as excited for new normal magic stuff.

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It’s not even that. It’s closer to products that 10% want, 85% don’t want, and 5% will leave the game over. It’s a net win until the ‘don’t want’s stop putting up with it.

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I've come to accept that this game is likely no longer for me as a new wave of players enter the game thanks to UB.

For all the shouting and complaining we do online and as loud as our voice is when these announcements are made, we appear to be the minority now when it comes to the profit that Hasbro and WOTC can make.

Simply saying "I want Magic the Gathering to be Magic the Gathering, not a pop culture pool of what's popular from other IPs" invokes responses of ridicule and contempt for "Ruining the fun of others." "Just let people enjoy things!" "The game still plays the same, so what's the problem?"

Why has it become so wrong to say that I do not want other brands planting their flags down and staking a claim in my own hobby?

I feel this current perception among many players who love UB that MTG is simply a rule set and design philosophy centered around the color pie that can be applied to anything if you want, completely overlooks everything about the game previously. MTG has its own history, its own universe, its own characters, its own style, its own feel to the cards, its own way of playing. All of the parts that made something a true part of the Magic the Gathering world.

Before UB, if someone presented a Spongebob or Captain America MTG card, we would all acknowledge that it it might be unique or have fitting mechanics that flavorfully represent the character, but that it had no place in the game. It was missing that fundamental piece of flavor that's so hard to describe, but that made it a true Magic the Gathering card, even if mechanically, it was no different from any other card. But now that flavor is lost. These UB cards are no different than the custom cards of those characters that our own community would make as a joke so many years ago.

Now here we are. Our game has been sold out to the highest bidder and become something unrecognizable, converted into a cheap pillar meant to prop up a dying company with mindless product consumption until the people at the top have prepared their golden parachutes and jumped off to the next thing they can ruin. My own local community is completely devastated these days as the older players, some of which who had been playing for 20+ years, have silently quit or retreated into personal playgroups that let them preserve the game they loved.

Perhaps it is finally time to join them.

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Oct 26·edited Oct 26

There's no promise WotC will make that won't be broken in a couple years.

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except the reserve list

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That one took 30 instead.

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well, there is the reserved list.

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Magic is dead. Long live Magic™️!

The analogy of Magic to Funko Pops was perfect. It’s such a shame that a game with such a rich history, and basis in incredible art has been sold at the auction block to the cheapest buyer.

I don’t know how anyone can defend the management at WOTC anymore, these people don’t care about the brand. It’s the cult of personality and they’ve all drank the “we’re the best” kool-aid. Im truly curious if anyone on the inside even challenges these ideas.

It seems I’m beset by rampant corporate greed with whatever nerd hobby I indulge in, but at least when I play 40K I don’t have to play against the collaboration Mario army. Somehow they manage to continually invest in their brand and not against it.

I don’t see Magic completely dying off, but I do see its relevancy and impact diminishing heavily in the coming years. Maybe that’s a good thing.

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I’ve had to accept that this isn’t the game I fell in love with anymore. I actually like UB stuff, that’s the sad thing, but having no way to escape it, having it in every single format and now half of all releases puts me into a place where I have no faith in the game anymore.

I want to love the story of magic, I want to care about its characters, and all I’m seeing is reason to fear there won’t be any soon. My best guess? They’ll wipe all the planes away with a story, push UB till the world doesn’t care about that novelty, then reboot the story like comics do. But am I willing to stay through it all? I don’t know.

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Frankly, I've given up on the story long ago. I got into the game around Time Spiral and the story and worldbuilding quality was mostly great until Innistrad. But by mid 2010s everything started completely revolving around the same crew of planeswalkers saving the multiverse from the Existential Threat of the Week. Previously unstoppable Eldrazi were defeated with the power of friendship and lasers, Phyrexians showed remarkable strategic genius by attacking all planes at once, planeswalkers came back from the dead... There's no stakes anymore, and every "Return to X" set is mostly meh.

Since Wizards dropped the block structure and cranked release frequency to 11, there's no space for a story to evolve, it's all one endless spoiler season, as though they're afraid we'll forget the game if they stop the printer for a minute.

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You could say it’s a self fulfilling prophecy, to get more money they changed from blocks to a wider set of planes, leading to people becoming detached from the characters, which led to their gimmick of UB becoming their crutch. Funny thing about a crutch though, it can save your life, but become dependent on it for too long and it will make you weaker.

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Thank you for voicing my opinions.

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welp, i’ve been looking to get into cube making for a while and this announcement seems to be a pretty good motivator to start. any good resources out there you’d recommend?

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I'd recommend the catalog of the (now defunct) 540 podcast, as well as Ryan Overturf's SCG articles

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Heya, been keeping an eye on cube for the last 4-5 years. First and foremost, check out cubecobra.com, it's the list-sharing site & also directs you to other resources such as podcasts and articles. Solely Singleton is excellent (though crass) for getting your feet in the water. They are the most basic cube podcast imo. Check out their starter/miser cube episodes, the rest are relatively disregard-able.

Lucky Paper Radio is the premier podcast for cube, they attempt to highlight cube (in stark contrast to solely singleton) as more than just a set of 360 or 450 cards, but rather utilizing the game pieces/engine to create your own radical experience.

If you just want general draft pointers, which might help highlight play patterns you enjoy, Lords of Limited release a weekly, standard draft-focused podcast.

gl;hf!

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I googled lots of different things to try and figure out what to do. I picked 10 multicolour supporting archtypes and stuck in my favourite cards to support it. Honestly? Just pick something that sounds cool and try building around it.

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It is indeed the serpent eating its own tail. Just look at how Magic started and what Rhystic Studies itself described in the video about flavor text. TLDR Magic had to stop using quotations from literature as flavor text because it had to establish its own identity. Today the literature as flavor text has become IP's as full on sets of cards. Early Magic had to grow its own identity. Now Magic's identity is getting swallowed by its own growth (the certain six letter c word comes to mind).

Perhaps that is just inevitability. If so I think its time that Magic R&D stands up against it. Before it all snaps, that is.

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I don't think Magic will ever die die, at least not anytime soon, but spiritually I think it's dead. Probably has been for a while, really. I've been out of the game for a little while now but with outside IP now encroaching on the previously sacred Standard card pool (and by extension, my favorite format Pioneer) I don't see myself ever coming back in earnest. Aside from cubing, cube is the best, and you should all get into it.

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Great article! I truly do love magic and the world it has created. I have been a vorthos for years and year but they seem determined to take away the part of magic that was special to me.

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Nothing feels off the table. The only reason why I can't see a hot wheels crossover in the death race set is because they're owned by a direct competitor. Richard Garfield but it's Garfield the cat is a possibility. The Cthulhu set feels like an inevitability.

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Oddly, because much of Lovecraft's stories are already public domain (and I think the rest are plausibly in the public domain too), Wizards could just make a Cthulhu set without having to "collaborate" with anyone. Though it would be hard to come up with an artistic rendition of Cthulhu that doesn't rub up against art owned by Chaosium.

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I find this difficult to respond to concisely, but I feel compelled to respond nonetheless. The difficulty is that I sympathize with all of the feelings that Magic players have. Ultimately I feel the issue isn't the invasion of the brand, but the corruption of it. The invasion of it is what brought me into this game, and I wonder if it ever could have been possible for invasion without corruption. At the moment I feel the answer is no. I legitimately wonder- what are any of us to do? At this point in time, even a dramatic, successful, and let's face it, purely hypothetical protest would never serve to stop the corruption. As mentioned, it has already happened. If the arm is cut off at this point, the whole body would likely die. Again, hypothetical. This is the reality of business. Integrity only matters as far as it will take you. WotC and Hasbro have bought all the good faith they feel they need. And we want to play Magic still. So again, what do we the new, and we the old do? Has our fate been sealed?

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What a repulsive last line. I can't stand the puppeteering of the idea of a person to support an opinion that they may or may not agree with. Either find somewhere he's shared his opinion, or he's chosen to stay out of it and you should leave it that way.

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author

You're right, and I apologize. It was unfair and in bad taste.

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For someone that sells himself with an image of "smartness".. how much of a dolt do you have to be to put yourself in the position of "relentlessly defending R&D’s stewardship of Magic"?? I find this both sad and hilarious. When one's love for a franchise managed by a company is SO high that it blinds them completely from the start of the warning signs.

One has to be really deluded and inexperienced to fall into such a trap, haha. Good riddance! And welcome to the show.

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I haven't really played the game in a little while at this point. Like a lot of people, it was a phase I went through, then intermittently kept up with. People are talking a lot about the game's "identity," but to me the issue was always the price. Magic is a really expensive game, especially for kids, especially especially if you want to be able to play at tournaments.

I honestly don't have much of a problem with UB, beyond knowing that its going to send prices into the stratosphere. Magic is fundamentally less fun when cards cost more. Decks are harder to build, you can't afford to have as many current decks, and now WOTC is adding whales to that equation.

It just sucks. Knowing that kids these days are gonna need to drop big cash for a Spiderman card, then even more cash to keep the deck competitive. It feels like Wizards is pricing out kids, which is heartbreaking to me, because so many of my great memories of this game are of playing it as a kid

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