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Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

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One thing I kinda find myself wanting often is an enemy-pair version of the two-color Atog cycle from Odyssey. Could I get a maybe at a future new cycle to parallel these classics?

Maybe. : )

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Priorities

The college professor looked out across the students in his class and raised a jar onto the table in front of him. Without saying a word, he began placing stones in the jar until they reached the opening. “Tell me class,” said the professor, “how many of you think that this jar is full?” A few students raised their hands. The professor then pulled up a bucket of sand and began pouring the sand in the jar between the gaps in the stones until it reached the top. “Now how many of you think this jar is full?” he asked. Again, a few students raised their hands. Then the professor brought out a large jug of water and poured it in to the jar, emptying most of the jug. “Now the jar is full,” said the professor. “You see, much like this jar, many of us believe that our lives are already too full to include any more worthy endeavors, when really all that is necessary is prioritizing the tasks that go in first.” “Hold on,” said one student, standing up. “That’s not why I raised my hand when you asked if the jar was full. The jar was full even before you started putting rocks in it. It was full of air. It’s not like you brought in a sealed vacuum tube or anything.” “And I say it’s STILL not full,” said another student. “At an atomic level, all of the matter in that jar is still mostly empty space. Unless you plan to fill it up with matter from a neutron star, which would probably destroy the whole continent, it’s not ever going to be full.” “And what kind of lesson is this anyway?” asked a third student. “This is a graduate level physics class, not some junior high philosophy elective. What actual college professor would be this dumb and condescending? It’s like a story from a bad email chain letter!” “Look, I’m going to level with you,” said the professor. To the collective horror of the class, he removed his face, revealing scaly green skin and yellow eyes underneath. “I’m not really your professor. I ate him last night. I was sent to your planet to find out if there was anyone with brains worth saving before my people destroy your planet. It looks like you three fit the bill.” Suddenly the alien professor and the three students who spoke up were teleported away. A moment later, an antimatter bomb annihilated Earth. The Moral of the Story: Make it a priority to speak up in class. It just might save you from annihilation.

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The design space needs to work in more formats than Commander and also work more generally than one particular deck type. Giving your opponents more combat phases is not exactly exciting that way.

I'm curious about the CoC debate regarding extra combats in blue. You've done podcasts about/with the individual color reps; could I request one about how these debates work? does Blue naturally argue for the power and Red (e.g.) against it? are there times when one color doesn't want a power and other members argue for it anyways? thanks as always :)

The larger blue issue is that most of blue’s splashier effects (extra turns, stealing things, copying things, etc.) have play balance concerns that limit how many we can make, so we’re looking for more “exciting” space that blue can access.

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I want to speak out against the whole push towards DEI. I feel that ever since you made the push to make identity the forefront of a character it has hurt the stories you tell. Captain Sisay's race was never the focus of her character and she was a complete badass! And I fear if you did it over again Gerrard would be trans, black and disabled just because. It also cheapens the stories of world devastation when characters worry more about their gender than Bolas destroying everything.

The reason I started this blog is so we can have frank conversations about things, so please let’s talk about this.

Imagine if every time you turned on the TV or watched a movie, no one looked like you. For some of us, that’s never happened. We see ourselves constantly, so it’s hard to truly understand what not seeing yourself represented in media is like.

I do have a personal window to this experience. While I am white and male, there’s an area where I am the minority - my religion. Jews are just under two and a half percent of the US population. I have had many experiences where I’ve been in situations where everything is geared towards a group I do not belong to, and zero consideration is given that not everyone at that event is part of the majority.

You just feel invisible and like an outsider. It’s not a great feeling. And I just experience it a tiny portion of time, only things that are geared specifically towards something religious. Most minorities have this feeling all the time, whenever they’re outside their personal community.

Now imagine, after years of not seeing yourself ever, you finally see someone that looks like you, but nothing about the character rings remotely true. They don’t sound like you, they don’t act like you, the facts about their day-to-day life are just wrong. It’s clear whoever wrote the character didn’t truly understand the lived experience of the character, so the character feels fake.

You bring up Sisay. Michael Ryan and I didn’t technically create Sisay (she played a small role in the Mirage story), but we did do a lot to flesh out her character as the creators of the Weatherlight Saga. We turned her from a minor character into a major one.

And while I’m proud, in general, of our work on the Weatherlight Saga, I don’t think we did justice to Sisay as a character. Neither Michael nor I have any knowledge of what it’s like to be a black woman. Nor did we ever talk to someone who did.

And if you’re someone like us that has no knowledge of that experience, you probably didn’t notice. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

Imagine if we made a movie about your life, and we just made everything up. We invented people you never knew, we gave you a job you never had, and we had you say things you’d never say. The movie might even be a good movie, but your response would be, but that’s not my life - that’s not me.

Now imagine we put the movie out, and people that never met you assumed that was what you were like. When people met you for the first time, they assumed things, because, you know, they’d seen the movie.

That’s what misrepresenting people does. It not only makes them feel not seen, it falsely represents them, spreading lies, often stereotypes, making people believe things about them that aren’t true.

Our move towards diversity is just us trying to better reflect the world and the people in it. We’re trying to do to everyone else what a certain portion of people get every day without ever having to think about it.

But why are we “making it the forefront of their character”? We’re not. We’re making it a part of their character. But in a world where you’re not used to ever seeing it, it feels louder than it is. Things that are a natural part of the world that you’re used to feel like the background of the story because you understand the context to it.

If a man kisses his wife before going off to a battle, that’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing a husband might do to his wife when he leaves. It’s not the forefront of his character. It’s just part of his life. But you’ve seen it hundreds of times, so it feels normal.

When someone does something that isn’t your lived experience it pulls focus. It seems like a big deal, but only because it’s new to you. It’s just as mundane a thing to that character as the man kissing his wife is to him.

Even the turn “pushing” implies that it’s unnaturally here, that we’re forcing something that naturally shouldn’t be. But why? That thing exists naturally in the real world, and it doesn’t make the real world any less. Maybe you’re less aware of it, but is making you aware of how others live their life “pushing” something on you?

How you live your life is represented constantly, everywhere. Why isn’t over-representing your experience at the expense of everyone else’s “pushing” it? Why is media only being the experience of those in power the “proper way”?

Having more depth and variety doesn’t lessen stories. It makes them deeper, more rich, more nuanced. In short, it makes them better stories. In my former life, I was a professional writer. I took a lot of writing classes. One of the truism of writing is “speaking truth leads to better stories”.

There’s another famous quote: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” You’re used to being over-represented, so being a little less over-represented feels like something has been taken from you. But really it hasn’t. Having a better sense of the rest of the world comes with a lot of benefits.

I’ll use food as an example. Let’s say all you were ever exposed to was the food of your heritage. Yeah, that food is really good, but sometimes isn’t it nice to eat foods of other nationalities? Isn’t your life better that you have a choice? Isn’t your exposure and access to the food of other nationalities a positive in your life?

Exposure to variety is a positive. It allows you to learn about things you didn’t know, experience things things you’ve never experienced, and get a better sense of understanding of your friends and neighbors.

Our actions are not to harm anyone, and if you think that’s what we’re doing, please take a minute to actually absorb what I’m saying. You’ve spent your whole life metaphorically eating one type of food, and we’re just trying to show you how much you’ve missed out on.

And while this might not impact you directly, we’re making a whole bunch of people felt seen. We’re bringing joy. Think of it this way. We make a lot of cards. Not every card is for you. But if it makes someone else happy, if they get to include it in a deck, and it makes Magic better for them, how is it harming you that we include it? You have so many cards that you can play.

To this poster or people that share their viewpoint, the narrative that a gain for someone else is an attack on you is just not true. As I just pointed out above, you play a game all about personal choice, about players getting to choose how they play and enjoy the game. Why should life be any different than Magic?

Thanks for reading.

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I love free advertisements of people to block! Thanks, OP!

In a previous answer you said: "For far too long, fantasy, as a genre, was used as a way to reflect the worldview of [...] how the privileged wished the world was. Modern fantasy is more reflective of the actual world". Isn't "fantasy" explicitly supposed to be a wish for how the world could be and not reality? Wizards of the Coast is an entertainment company and should genuinely stay away from "educating" it's audience. We're grown up people who just want to be happy in our daydreams.

Fictional worlds all make commentary on the real world. Some just do it more subtly than others.

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Get 'em, Mark.

Hi Mark, you have been so long with wizards, have you ever thought of leaving, and giving your mantle to younger minds.

if you do, please do not give it to a woke mind.

You do understand that "woke" just means thinks and cares about others. I sincerely hope my predecessor is "woke". I want them to think about how their design decisions affects everyone.

That said, I have no current plans of retiring, but sure one day. There are many talented designers I can hand off my mantle to.

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@lumine-sm They did post a video of them, they do this every time and people still gripe about it.

Join me at patreon.com/CardboardCrack for extra comics, looks behind the scenes, and more!

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It's humorous to note that many people on this very blog have suggested a multi-in-one set like this a few times, so I'd say your initial thesis is overly generalized.

Is a multi Plane set like Aetherdrift the solution to faster return to popular Planes?

It's a way to revisit more worlds.

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It always was assigned by the attacker, just also with the ordering. There's no longer ordering blockers, which means a single target combat trick no longer can save two blockers.

I think the new combat change is a very good one, and anyways I think the times ordering the blockers for me has mattered has been very little. It’s much more intuitive.

It’s why we changed it.

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i'm not a lesbian as far as i know and i already have a wife but thanks tumblr

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In that case...yeah, I'd be okay with more time screwy-ness. Chrono Cross-style parallel timelines influencing each other?

Hey Mark! I was just curious about something very near and dear to my heart, as a Scion of the Ur-Dragon EDH player. will we see any major returns in the future for say, a Tarkir re-boot?

also I HAVE to both Thank and Curse your team for the coin flip goblin archetype. it is so so silly and has been a strong archetype for so long

The set codenamed Ultimate is a return to Tarkir.

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That's not how their codenames work. Note that the set after Ultimate is Volleyball and the one prior is Tennis.

Hey Mark! I was just curious about something very near and dear to my heart, as a Scion of the Ur-Dragon EDH player. will we see any major returns in the future for say, a Tarkir re-boot?

also I HAVE to both Thank and Curse your team for the coin flip goblin archetype. it is so so silly and has been a strong archetype for so long

The set codenamed Ultimate is a return to Tarkir.

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Rex does get counters. The relevant rule is 702.11g, just like the asker quoted.

CR 702.1c states that "the same is true for" effects apply to each of a keyword's variants separately. 702.11g states that "hexproof from each <characteristic>" is shorthand for one variant of hexproof per possible quality of that characteristic. This means in non-Un games, discarding Breaker of Creation (which has hexproof from each color) to Indominus Rex, Alpha gives five counters and thus draws five cards. How many cards do you draw in an Un game? (In particular, does every eye color count?)

In Un-games, when counting colors, you count the five normal colors plus any color of permanents you have. You have the gold Dragon token from Sword of Dungeons & Dragons, you're now at six. You also have a brown Avatar of Me, you're now at seven. You have a pink Teddy bear counter from Gift Shop, you're now at eight.

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Happy birthday, Mark! No inspiring story from me, just happy that your (and the rest of the team's!) work on Magic has helped give me a way to get out of the house even on days where I think I don't feel up to socializing. I can always find people who are more than glad to keep the conversation on the games and let me have some respite from even the most mundane of troubles if I need. On the flip side, it's just as easy to find people to play with while shooting the breeze when I want that camaraderie! It's great to share this planet with someone like you.

: )

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This is perfect. You get THE KISS, then a minute or so of said undivided attention, then the credits start rolling but the scene continues all the way through the credits, right before the final blue ratings scroll at the literal end of the film.

I want to see a RomCom about a protagonist with ADHD, and their dramatic act of love at the climax of the film is managing to give the love interest their full, truly undivided attention for ten minutes.