Splitmoon: "Today we have a very special interview with TimFReilly, host of the custom Magic podcast Beacon of Creation (Links to Apple Podcast and Spotify). But I'll let him fully introduce himself and ask: Who are you?"

Tim: "I'm Tim Reilly. I am a software developer, and I'm the main host and main administrator of the Beacon of Creation podcast, and also the main admin on the Discord server in that community. I didn't create Beacon of Creation; I started jumping in around episode 60. Brad and Adam were the creators, but I've been editing the podcast and working on the podcast—arranging most of the episodes. Now we're up over the 400, so I've done a couple hundred episodes now."

Splitmoon: "Wow, 400 episodes. That is prolific in a sense. Takes a lot of dedication."

Tim: "I think if it wasn't regular, it wouldn't happen; does that make sense? Like if I wasn't doing it every week—if it was just whatever I felt like it—then it gets put to the side. And I think the other kind of strength of Beacon as a podcast these days is that I'm not reliant on myself to come up with all the content. Typically I'm helping frame the show, you know, 'What kind of thing do we wanna talk about?' And then I'm helping figure out how we get a good episode out of that. But I don't have to bring all the heat myself, and I think that's really crucial."

Splitmoon: "So my next question—and then we'll stop asking questions about you personally—How did you get into the hobby of custom Magic design?"

Tim: "So I had first played around Revised, but I got back into Magic around Innistrad. And between playing it originally and coming back to the game, I had also gotten into game design. I used to be big into Warcraft III custom maps of all things. I had made a big adventure that got a million downloads or whatever, and that was like my bag for a while, making designs like that. And I think once you do that for a little while—once you go through the play testing cycle for a couple hundred hours—you now approach every game as though it were a custom game. And so when I came back to Magic, it was less than a year after starting back at Magic that I was designing my own cards."

Splitmoon: "In a sentence or two, what is Beacon of Creation?"

Tim: "Beacon of Creation is a weekly podcast about custom Magic design and also a community that has events in the Discord server."

Splitmoon: "Okay, now I know that you said that you got in at around episode 60, but I'm curious: how did it all start?"

Tim: "So the podcast itself started as sort of a way to build skills for the Great Designer Search. So the Great Designer Search 3 was announced and Brad and Adam—who I think were Twitter friends—said 'Hey, let's do a podcast together. Let's get guests on, let's do drills every week of which cards are in which color pie, which abilities are in which color pie. You know, let's do a lot of practice, let's start designing a set together so that we can get our skills up to maybe win this contest.'"

Splitmoon: "I feel like the answer is obvious, but I have to ask in case you have any insight: what would you feel like most sets the Beacon of Creation Discord server apart from every other custom Magic space?"

Tim: "Well, I guess in some ways it's not too dissimilar from like the Custom Magic server or MSE server. There are project channels, there are channels that talk about new cards and stuff like that. I think one of the things that helps Beacon is that there's a podcast associated with it. So there's always a new thing to talk about, at least one new community thing to talk about every week. And I think that having a podcast also gives a decent amount of prestige to people. Like this is often the first podcast episode that anyone is ever on when they jump on the Beacon. They made a set, they reached out to me, we looked at the set together, we record an episode about it. This is the first time ever recording media about a thing that they made. And I think that that sort of endpoint, or that ability to create something like a secondary sort of record of a thing you worked on besides just the thing itself. That gives people something to aspire to."

Splitmoon: "So speaking on the podcast, what would you say is an episode that's either a favorite or a standout one 

or a recent one that really spoke to you."

Tim: "Yeah, I have a couple if that's okay. So I think one of the biggest hits we've had recently was one of our design challenges; this was such a huge hit for us and super fun to record. The concept was people submitted either 

just a custom card—no restrictions, design whatever card you want—or take an existing Canon Magic card, change the name, change the art, change the creature type and submit it. And we had to decide: is this a real card 

or is this a custom card? And let me tell you, the community rose to this challenge. They came up with so many different ways to trick us. Cause you could just submit a card that's one mana 9/9 or whatever, some completely unrealistic card. And we would know that's not a real card. But there have been many, many weird cards in Magic. And by searching through those weird cards and either using that weird card or making your own riff of that weird card, we're just set up to just step on rakes all day and just hit our face on things. 

A couple of the funny gimmicks there: someone used the art and name of one card and the rules text of another; I don't know why this is really funny for me. Someone added a de-keyword of something. So if you think of a keyword, you spell it all out and then you see it, you know, differently. And you're like, 'if this was really a scavenge card, 

it would just have scavenge on it. So this must be a custom card.' Someone submitted a previous design challenge entry, which is a card that I have read and talked about for 10 minutes, because I did a year ago when they submitted it. So I think it's a real card, but it was actually still a custom one. This was one of the real fun community ones that we've had. 

I think another kind of episode that I'm proud about is when we look at something from regular Magic, but then just think of 'what's the custom space within it,' right? Like what—rather than being like a hundred percent custom—is just 10% custom? And one of the episodes I did recently was on Rise of the Eldrazi, the set from maybe about 15 years ago. And I brought on a friend of mine that I know who is an expert on that format. And we broke down the format and we looked at like the strengths and weaknesses, the appeal of the format, why it's considered to be such a novel draft format. And then we also spent a quarter of the episode saying 'well, so we know these archetypes are all strong. What extra cards could you insert into this set that could make this format even more interesting; make more decks possible? Let's not dilute anything that's cool about it, but let's just add a couple extra little things.' And I think that that's the kind of episode that someone who hasn't done a lot of custom design could listen to, learn a lot about an old set, and then also start to open their mind on what they would change if they were doing their own version. I guess I always like there to be some sort of design element to it, not just report the history of a particular set 

or go through every common in a set and give our feedback."

Splitmoon: "So when it comes to the Beacon of Creation community, what would you say is something that has surprised you?"

Tim: "I guess the thing that I'm not necessarily surprised about, but I just didn't know if it would work, is that we started to try to get people into that constructive criticism mode rather than just evaluating whether a card is good or not. One of the things that we try to do on design challenges or in our critique channels is if someone submits a card—and this is flagrantly not a well-formatted card: its rules are too long, it has some other problems—when you look at it, your just natural brain is to say like 'that's wrong, come back when you write that correctly.' That's sort of knee-jerk reaction 

that a lot of people have, which is just fine. We spend so much time trying to get our knowledge up about this game that when a card is written incorrectly, it just stands out immediately. But the thing that we try to do on the podcast 

that the community has really embraced is that when you look at that card, don't worry about that stuff. That's stuff that's just skill, that's just practice. What is the nugget of that card that is actually interesting technology, that could be shaped into a really cool, fun card? And let's focus on that and lead with that rather than leading with the criticism. And once you get some of that feedback, then you realize 'hey, that's a good way of doing things. Let me bring that to other people as well.' So I guess that the server has maintained that vibe that kind of friendliness. And when people are jerks, we try to correct them. And if they're jerks for too long, we might have to kick them out. But getting to that vibe of embracing and improving rather than just criticizing, that's something that I just didn't really think was possible on the internet, I guess."

Splitmoon: "So I want to ask a bit of a more open-ended question: is there anything about Beacon Creation—whether it's the podcast or the community—that you'd really like more people to know?"

Tim: "That if people want things out of Beacon or out of the server, or they want episodes, they can just reach out. The way that I got on Beacon was that I just cold emailed Adam and said 'hey, I have a custom set I'd like to talk about on your podcast.' and he was fully up for it. He wanted to give me that shot. And I want to give other people a shot 

and maybe it feels like there's a barrier like 'Hey, I shouldn't bug Tim, I shouldn't bug Juliet or the other admins.'

But if you have an idea for an episode, or you want to be on an episode—even if you don't have an idea; you just want to be on an episode—people can know that they can just reach out and that we can make something happen. Or if they have an event they want to run that they can work with me on that. I can absolutely help people shape that kind of stuff."

Splitmoon: "All right, so I have one more question baked in here. What does the future have in store?"

Tim: "So I guess the thing with Beacon—or I guess the limitation of being podcast-centric—is that podcasts themselves don't have a lot of discoverability. If you're going to find out about a podcast, it's because someone else tells you about it, right? Or maybe you find it in a Google search. So the thing that I'd like to do next is basically get episodes up in places where people can find things. We're about to start up a Bluesky account. And I think that Bluesky account is not necessarily going to be about the podcast, it's going to be about custom Magic, promoting things from the community, all that kind of stuff. One-off stuff that's fun to read on your phone, but gives people a way to find out about Beacon through, engagement on that platform.

And then the other thing is getting Beacon up on YouTube. I've done some YouTube videos, but making a video every week is like 10 hours a week. I don't quite have that bandwidth, but I would at least like to get the audio up on YouTube so that people can find the podcast through YouTube, listen to it through the YouTube music app if they just want the audio, and then maybe have really basic visuals. So I think those are the next steps for me personally for Beacon."

Splitmoon: "Thank you for taking the time to anwser these questions. Before we wrap up, is there anything you'd like to get off your chest or send out into the world?"

Tim: "I guess when you see a playtest draft go by—even if you don't know anyone involved—the custom playtest drafts are very newbie friendly. Just hop in there, draft some cards, get out of there. Whether it's on Beacon or it's on one of the other servers, we're always trying to get that seventh or eighth person and we just need your time for 20 minutes. So that's the plug that I've got."