Hey, Mark, I'm not to make another UB-related request. This isn't coming from an anti-UB place, and it's just one Goose's opinion, but I'm sure there are others who feel this way.Can we get rid of flavor words, please? I haven't seen a single upside to them presented, just downsides:

• For decades, one of MtG's biggest strengths was capturing the ludonarrative. Having to spell it out makes it seem like you all have lost confidence in your ability to make card design that makes sense with the captured flavor.
• If a design is intended to be funny (the Street Fighter cards come to mind), it feels like you're pointing at the "joke" and saying "See? Please laugh." As a person who has a comedy background, I'm sure you understand why killing the frog is bad.
• Death of the epithet: The most minor of the criticisms, but I really think "Ian Chester, Science Teacher" reads better than "Ian Chester" and then calling his ability "science teacher." (I may be mixing up the WHO teachers, but this applies to both, luckily.) Epithets also make it easier to depict multiple "moments" of a character without giving a card up as the "definitive" version of that character.
• It feels like you don't trust players to get why the card text is what it is. Telling your audience you don't expect them to be smart (or rather, literate) enough to "get" it doesn't really help. I've seen people say they add flavor to the cards, but the flavor isn't diminished by removing the flavor words (flavor is when things are fleshed out and living, not when things are spelled out). If it's for fans of the IP, then they already get it (Oh, the activated ability that grants flying is referencing this character's rocket propulsion). Non-fans of the IP aren't benefited either, as they will sus out said character has rocket propulsion or be left completely in the dark (see Cult of Skaro: These words do nothing to tell me about the ability. If you were to leave them out, I'd still be able to sus out that each ability corresponds to one of the four Daleks depicted).
• Lastly, they make cards harder to read. When trying to grok a card, there should be as few words as possible I'm supposed to ignore.

Flavor words can do some things that we can’t replicate elsewhere. I agree they can be overused, and are not always used optimally, but I don’t think we want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Hello! Saturday, 18 May is my birthday and I'm requesting a(n early) spot of birthday trivia about any Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, please. It could be about a card from CLB or AFR, or something on the D&D side like the Strixhaven sourcebook. Many thanks!

This is the first Dungeons & Dragons themed Magic card we made. It was designed for Unstable, but first appeared in a special box at Hascon. When I designed the card, it rolled three six-sided dice, but the D&D team asked if we could change it to a twenty-sided die as that was more iconic for D&D.Happy Birthday!

First, I want to say I really like Thunder Junction more than I thought I would. It could end up being my favorite set this year. Great job to you and the team! Second, back in AFR, the commander precons had a humanoid adventurer face commander and a monster alt commander. I thought that was really cool because I'm a big fan of monsters and weird creatures and love building decks with them as the commander. Magic has some really great monsterous creature types that are underrepresented as legendary creatures. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I'd love for one humanoid and one beast/monster commander to be the norm for precon design. The Grand Larceny, Desert Bloon, and Quick Draw precons are great examples of this. Having Yuma, Gonti, and Stella Lee as the humanoid face commanders and Kirri Talented Sprout, Felix Five Boots, and Eris Roar of the Storm as the more monstrous alt commanders.
I bring this up because I was really hoping for something a little more monsterous for the Most Wanted precon alt commander. Like a Skeleton or Nightmare or Horror or Minotaur, or Bird. Something along those lines would be really interesting with one of the outlaw creature types. Instead, we got a Dwarf. Vihaan Goldwaker is a great card, don't get me wrong. I just wish that every precon could have alt commanders that are a little more "out there" in terms of creature type usage instead of another human or dwarf or elf, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

My thoughts are there’s some one out there who loves Dwarves who’s super happy because we made a Dwarf card for them. I hear you that you’d like more non-humanoid legendary creatures, and that is something we’re dedicated to doing, as evidenced by the decks you did enjoy, but there’s a lot of player desires to meet, which means we need to spread the love a bit.

You said you are cutting back on common mana fixing to avoid splashing multple play booster bombs. What does this mean for Treasure themes like in AFR? Will you experiment with Treasure that only makes mana of one color? Thanks for answering our questions sir.

There will still be Treasure. I think we’re being a bit more restrictive with it for play design reasons, not play booster reasons. I tried making one color Treasure in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, and it wasn’t internally well received as it adds a lot of tracking issues.

Can you give another example besides LCI of a set vision design handed over that ended up radically different once set design was done?

Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance changed a lot from the mechanics handed off from vision design. Adventures in the Forgotten Realms also went through a lot of changes in set design.

Re: werewolves, having had a Tovolar EDH deck since he came out, I've always found their day/night mechanic more a hindrance for playing them than a reason to. WOE featured werefoxes both in flavor and art as well as cards that didn't flip, and AFR featured a non-flipping werewolf. I personally don't think their previous mechanical identity needs to prevent them from appearing elsewhere or branching out in how their cards work, especially when they clearly have a fandom going.

My gut is we’ll find a world where they make sense and we’ll probably make them single-faced. Once we do that, we can give them another mechanical focus which will help us making one-ofs.

If you can tell us, will there be planeswalkers in Tales of Middle Earth? I know for Adventures in the Forgotten Realms the planeswalkers were "characters of tremendous power whose influence extends across many worlds of the D&D Multiverse." Are there any lotr characters the design team considered for planeswalker card status?

There are no planeswalkers in The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth.

Hey Mark, I wanted to add my 2 cents about Unfinity and why I bought none of it compared to the three boxes of Unstable (which is still one of my favorite sets to draft); the lack of replayability of many cards due to the sticker mechanic (self explanatory) and the black of silver borders.Additionally, the removal of silver borders really turned me off from the set. Not only is it a mechanical change it really blurs the lines between un-sets and other magic cards. Most importantly to me (as someone with a cube) this really causes the cards to have less incentive for me to add them to my cube, as I have cards that care aboutso my question: what drove the team to not have silver borders on cards?

The impetus was die rolling getting added to Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. It seemed wrong that a card printed in an Un-set wasn’t legal in Commander, but the exact same card with the exact same text would be legal if printed in a non-Un set.

Listening to your Top Down podcast, could I request a little less on the Conflict angle? I liked how AFR was just "slice of life adventures" and stuff, rather then "apocalyptic planeswalkers saving the world" stories. It really helps you learn more of the people and feel of the plane when the set is zoomed out a bit more.

The game is literally about conflict.

Is there a reason cards like Celebr-8000 don't use the results table formatting that Adventures in the Forgotten Realms introduced?

Yes, that product mimicked the D&D layout. Non-D&D sets don’t use that.