No. The rules don’t currently allow you to mechanically reference ability wordsIf/when Fix that bug?

If. I’m not sure how easy a bug it is to fix.

I just listened to your episode about designing MKM. Your comments about capturing the aesthetic of the genre crystallized why I don't like mechanics like commit a crime and collect evidence. I like the aesthetic of how Magic cards are written, and these violate that. Normal keywords and ability words still follow magic-ese, but these throw out the normal magic-ese to try and be cheeky, and it breaks my immersion

Can you give me more detail? Embalm or escape doesn’t break immersion, but collect evidence does? I don’t understand.

hey mark! recently people I know have been expressing issues with what I'm calling "vocabulary fatigue". Wizards has been recently utilizing a lot of very flavorful mechanic names and ability words, which is something i myself appreciate, as someone who plays a lot of limited and only needs to focus on a few of them at a time, but a lot of my friends are saying is making their experience with the recent sets worse, because they have to remember what cards do when it isn't super obvious from their actual text. In the past year or so we've had a lot of new "action batching" mechanics (by which i mean vocabulary that references a specific action or kind of action so that cards can more easily care about that action without spelling the action out every time) such as "the ring tempts you", "decend", "commit a crime", "collect evidence", "suspect", and "face a villainous choice" as opposed to older magic sets, which didn't deal with this design space as much. although other mechanics in the same vein exist, like Monsterous, their prolificness in the last year or so feels like complexity creep.Although the names are flavorful and saving on card space as allows for powerful and interesting cards, the volume of new vocabulary for older pretty routine actions (such as making your opponent choose things, permanents entering the graveyard from anywhere, interacting with your opponent or their cards, or exiling cards from your graveyard to pay a cost) can feel incomprehensible and overwhelming at times. There's a reason "whenever you cast a noncreature spell" has bever been erattaed to "whenever you exhibit your prowess"
Thanks for reading! Have a great day.

The reasons for the vocabulary increase in the type of effects you’re talking about is the result of solving a core problem. Commander has become the most played tabletop format. In order to hit a threshold that a theme is playable in Commander, it has to appear on more cards than can possibly fit in a single set. In fact, more that can fit in three sets (so even a return to blocks wouldn’t solve this problem.) The solution is to play into themes that are backwards compatible. At first, we just hit upon themes that Magic has been doing a long time (caring about card types, graveyard, typal, etc.). Eventually, though we start to both exhaust those and start to feel to repetitive. One of our solutions was discovered in Dominaria with historic. What we call batching. If we combo existing things, but in a flavorful combination, we create new backward compatible themes that haven’t yet been the core of decks. Yeah, you’ve made artifact decks and legendary decks, but none with those two effects, plus Sagas, combined. In order for batching to work, we need to give it a flavor to hold it together, and that requires vocabulary. The flavor also helps the mechanic feel organic to the set it’s in. In short, player preferences create new design challenges, and this trend is one of the things design is doing to meet those challenges.

I was noodling around with adding some Domain cards to my cube. When I searched for the word on Gatherer it showed me a bunch of cards that have never had the word "Domain" printed on them, but still counted the number of basic land types. Please give a high-five to whoever decided to put the term in those cards' oracle texts. It makes the database MUCH more useful.

Will do. Domain as an ability word didn’t happen until we brought the mechanic back.