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And making it negative seems to be pulling in a space the game naturally tends toward anyway. Not a whole lot of decks are exclusively one color because you want effects that are in some other colors. And if you aren't running mono color then you tend away from cards that are color intensive since they're harder for your deck to cast.

Seems like doing "devotion penalties" would disincentivize mono color decks even more and multicolor decks wouldn't feel the pain as much.

Would you consider using devotion as a benefit and penalty of some sort? I.e. deal damage to a creature equal to your devotion, you lose half your devotion in life?

We tend to focus on a resource being positive or negative. If we push too much in different directions, it makes tension that restricts how much people use the resource.

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This seems like something they might allow rarely if the rest of the card needs it to work. But it'd be the result of a novel design. Like I don't think not being able to clone stuff is a weakness of any given color so it could be an acceptable bend under certain circumstances. But there's no reason to let every color do it.

Hey Mark, could you have a clone outside of blue if it could only copy creatures of a certain type or batch of types? Like a green creature that could enter as a copy of an elf, or a rakdos creature that could copy an outlaw.

Red can temporarily copy things, and green (with certain restrictions) can copy its own creatures.

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I believe he's insinuated before that he's asked questions or answered specific asks as they related to discussion R&D was having at the time. The enfranchised fan input was something he could point to to help guide/influence that discussion.

I'm sure there are other reasons but this is an obvious one and it's equally obvious why he couldn't say like "we are doing this specific thing in Tennis; what would you all expect with that?"

Someone asked about ulterior motives for the color-pair poll and you denied any. Can you tell us the last time you had an ulterior motive for something? Can be blog-related or not.

I have ulterior motives all the time, but I'm only allowed to do that because you all don't know when I'm doing it. Giving you a better insight into why and when I do it will only lessen my ability to do it.

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I agree that this is my biggest hangup on these things and leads to more misplays for me than probably anything else currently.

Further I think it being at the front would mean you keep reading the card to find functionality. Almost all other restrictions (costs and timing) are found on the name or type line or at the front of an ability. This is one of the few exceptions that gets buried at the end of the text.

An Issue I've noticed with card templating that I have with the rise of sorcery speed and once per turn restrictions is that the restrictions being at the end of the ability makes it very easy to miss the condition and I find it very difficult to parse those sorts of restrictions easily. I know this would be a major change, but can I ask to have those sorts of restrictions moved to the front of the ability instead of the end? Additionally why is it at the end currently anyway?

The current philosophy is the functionality (what the card does) needs to be easier to find than the limitations.

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No favorite has a larger showing than I expected. Good on us.

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Have you seen the new Jace and Vraska mounting card combo?

I had to run over to tiktok because I had this exact video sitting in my likes because hell yeah I saw the Jace/Vraska mounting combo, and so should everyone else!!!

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The first thing that comes to mind is cards that care about players losing or gaining health and using the words makes it clear that it matters there. Drain obfuscates that.

With the acceptance of "mill" as a printable term on Magic cards, and the desire to shorten text on cards when it makes sense, do you think we'll one day see "(target) loses X life and you gain X life" shortened to "Drain (target) X"?

I think it's important to say "lose" and "gain".

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They also tend to focus on the needs of a set's draft and the standard it will be in. Wider formats can influence where they focus in but usually then they'd also incorporate that into the draft and/or standard if possible.

With creature types being grouped together like with Party and Outlaw, I imagine this trend will continue if received well. Do you think there is a limit on how many creature types could be grouped together at one? For example, if there was a grouping for "Reptiles" you realistically could include Lizard, Salamander, Turtle, Crocodile, Snake, Hyrda, Dinosaur, Basilisk, and Kavu. There might be some others I'm forgetting, but 9 seems like a lot. Do you think that the amount of possible creature types would prevent potential groupings from being made at all, or would some just be left out?

Our default rule is two to five items in a batch. Getting over that gets unwieldy, both to remember and to fit on the card.

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Star Trek UB introduces the replicator mechanic.

Hello Mark, What would you say the chances are of an eventual mechanic similar to Populate but that would instead work for noncreature tokens? Or perhaps even a mechanic that would let you propagate creature tokens AND noncreature tokens. I'm asking because Populate was originally created 12 years ago and there are a lot more noncreature tokens nowadays (i.e. Treasures, Foods, Maps, Clues, Blood) so it would be neat if there was a mechanic that copied or cloned those types of token permanents.

There are always chances.

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I think the way they'd do this is utilizing counters. People in the notes are getting into the nitty gritty about why the rules would have issues with this. Additionally I think they would want to avoid any sort of tracking issues and counters help you remember if it triggered or not.

But it seems like it gets wordy. Something like spelling out the ability and as part of that ability, "Put a [TYPE] counter on CN. This ability cannot trigger if CN has two or more [TYPE] counters on it. Remove all [TYPE] counters from CN at end of turn (or maybe beginning of opponent's upkeep or something)."

Probably there's a better way to word that.

There are triggered abilities now that trigger more than once a turn. They usually use “whenever”. Triggers that happen based on a certain phase/step starting or ending can only trigger once.

I think he’s talking about something like “this ability only triggers twice each turn”, where it still has a limit, that limit just isn’t once

I don’t think you can trigger twice. Triggers trigger once per event that trigger it. You can double the effects if you want.

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ok i posted this on twitter so i might as well post it here too

THE THING IS, HALF-GORGONS ALREADY EXIST ON RAVNICA. There is art that depicts half-human and half-elf gorgons. Note the skin + ears!

If Jace & Vraska are struggling with infertility / unable to get pregnant, it's not because a human and a gorgon can't make a baby.

Full-blooded gorgons like Vraska and the Sisters of Stone Death have green skin + do not have external ears.

ALSO INTERESTING though is the fact that Vraska's mother was Ludmilla of the Sisters of Stone death. Vraska is a full-blooded Gorgon with a mother, but no father. Perhaps they're able to reproduce through parthenogenesis? But they can also hybridize with other species, as demonstrated.

Personally, it's always been my headcanon that Ravnican gorgons are similar to the Asari from Mass Effect: a monosex species that can reproduce both sexually and asexually. And like the Asari, Ravnican Gorgons are not all women and aren't quite "biologically female" in the human understanding of the term. I've always been struck by the line in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica D&D book saying gorgons "appear superficially similar to human women".

I think Ravnican Gorgons have a very different view of sex and gender than humans do. The are monosex; their experience of gender identity is completely separate from their bodies. Their reproductive parts are irrelevant because they all have the same thing. Ravnican Gorgons can be any gender, but I think they mostly identify as women due to millennia of cultural influence- the surrounding cultures (humans and elves) perceive them as women.

Jace and/or Vraska are infertile. Though I think the most probable reason is Phyresis / their recovery from Phyresis having side effects, as the #1 champion of trans man Jace, I think it's also because Jace has either had bottom surgery and his junk can't get Vraska pregnant, OR he hasn't had bottom surgery and he can't get pregnant by Vraska because his HRT stopped his periods.

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Animal seems like a really bad word for a batch to me. Is any given fantasy creature an animal? In addition to humans, what about various sentient humanoid creatures in Magic? Like Leonin or Rhox? Is an artifact made to look like a a cat an animal? What if comes from a plane where those creatures are naturally made of metal/mechanical? Is a spirit or horror or illusion of a bear an animal?

In short I think batches should be as short and concise as possible. Mostly they should be listed on the card that cares about them.

Can the shorthand for what a batch includes rely upon real world knowledge? For instance if you had decided to batch “animals”. I feel like most people would be able to identify whether a particular creature type refers to an animal, with maybe a couple debatable ones that might need information not on the card. (eg Whether a Hippogriff is an animal.)

Batches are chosen because the items feel connected. This helps players remember them.

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I hunted down the original post and it ends up reading more like a (unintentional) hit job on this artist than anything else. I'm not going to reblog that post because it has basically no traction or audience and I think it's best it stays that way. But yeah all the "evidence" of AI art is baseless speculation.

The other card they focus on is Anguished Unmaking from the Breaking News bonus sheet. And their "evidence" is how the middle person holding the casket isn't really holding it and various problems they feel the clothing has. Asymmetrical hats are one of the reasons they offer.

You can check out these cards and make your own inferences. But there's nothing here worth trying to spread a smear campaign against an artist with a particular style. Mostly just my estimation is that the accuser misunderstands these stylistic choices. And unfortunately a good chunk of people sharing that post are all too willing to indulge baseless suspicion.

ai art detectives have entirely fucking lost it at this point. idk or care if this art is AI or not but its called 'stylization' amiguitas

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ai art detectives have entirely fucking lost it at this point. idk or care if this art is AI or not but its called 'stylization' amiguitas

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Call-out post for Magic R&D

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Yo what was the deal with MOM Aftermath? Did you add those packs to draft or anything?

Because if not that seems like a missed opportunity. Like make small 3-card packs that cost a buck and geared to augment the draft. You add $3 to the cost of the draft to toss these into each round and switch things up. Maybe even they can include conspiracies or silver border cards.

I guess more generally you could make a "set" of these with broader mechanical targets so that they could be tossed on with any draft to provide a twist.

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The nature of the game is that eternal formats have power creep. There's no way yo avoid that short of saying "here are cards we've done that are best at an effect and we'll never print a better version." And that still wouldn't work since they regularly do new effects that cause older things to need to be reevaluated. For instance Eggs Combo hasn't just always existed. And it made formerly irrelevant cards relevant.

Wizards has consistently used power creep to refer to not making Standard increasingly powerful. The pendulum swings in Standard. By definition it can't swing in formats that never rotate. Even looking back a few years we can recall a dominant green in the tourney scene as compared to recent asks to Mark about why green is so weak currently. They've shifted power levels is the reason so that green doesn't just creep ever upward. And now they can start to introduce some power to it again and it feels fresh and new.

When do we admit there's a power creep issue in today's Magic? You're telling me with a straight face that we're getting Colossal Dreadmaw for 4 mana, and that's not a problem?

Power creep means that the overall power level of a set is, on average, more powerful than the sets leading up to it, and then continually trending upwards. That isn’t the case.

Note that individual card effects will rise and lower in power level over time as the pendulum swings.