On this, my most birthiest of days, I invoke the holy right of trivia! Specifically, about Bant (the mini-plane, not WUG).

The Bant mini-design team was led by Brian Tinsman and included Ken Nagle and myself. When Brian first pitched exalted, I was very skeptical. I said it seemed like too small a hoop to jump through. We playteested and it played great, so I went to Brian and said, “I was wrong. Exalted is great.” I think Bant was the first team to settle on its keyword.Happy Birthday!

"Hi Mark, in mana costs, for mixing hybrid mana and non hybrid (and mixing different hybrid mana symbols too like Leyline of the Guildpact) is there an official order that you guys go by?"ft
As far as I can tell, it just follows the normal mana color order, with the hybrid mana symbols placed in-between their respective colors to "connect" them, like in compleated Tamiyo the phyrexian hybrid mana was in-between its two colors.So like, as an example, if there were a hypothetical bant card with one of each color and then a hybrid White/Blue and a hybrid Green/White, it would be templated as G g/w W w/b B

That sounds correct.

In the Bant Doctor Who deck I saw that there was a Blue Doctor's Companion but no Selesnya Doctor. Was there any consideration for a Selesnya Doctor in the Bant deck?

The designers matched each Doctor based on flavor. They didn’t look to match all the color combinations.

If/when return to Alara? It's one of my favorite planes, where my interest really picked up in magic, and I'd love a birthday fact about it! :)

If, but I hope when. It was the only design team to have five distinct mini teams (one per share). Each mini team was made up of three people. I led the Esper mini team, and was on the Bant and Naya mini teams.Happy Birthday!

Green-White-Blue has been my favorite color combination since before it was called "Bant", so your podcast on that topic was delightful. I think you found a good way to handle the three-color podcasts, going over how each color works as the center. That's going to be extra interesting when you talk about wedges, since you used non-center colors as the the focus in Khans. Reviewing how each internal pair works was also a great thing to include. Looking forward to the episode about my second favorite color combination, White-Black-Red!

I put off doing them for so long because I didn’t have a good structure. I was happy with the idea of looking at it with each color as the center.

Wondering if I could get some birthday trivia on my favorite mechanic, exalted. It's the first mechanic I built a deck around and I recently tore it up to make 2 commander decks.

I had a bad first reaction to exalted when Brian Tinsman first pitched it in our Bant mini-team for Shards of Alara. I thought it was too narrow of a hoop. But after the first playtest, I apologized to Brian. I said, “I was wrong. This mechanic is great.”The important lesson. Always playtest your ideas. Theorycrafting (what we call trying to think through an idea by just talking about it) only gets you so far.Happy Birthday!

Hey Mark, what are Moana's colors? I'm thinking Bant.

That’s my initial thought too.

Hi Mark, since Streets of New Capenna and the Alara block are both bottom-up designs based on a tri-color shard mechanic, would it have been possible, in theory, to have designed a Return to Alara set that assigned the SNC faction mechanics instead to their corresponding shard (Bant gets shield, Grixis gets casualty etc.)?

When we return to a world with factions, we try to synergize the different incarnations, so they play well together. This means we wouldn’t use the Streets of New Capenna takes on the arcs in an Alara set.

Hey Mark! I noticed something that got me curious... I'm used to the WUBRG color sequence in Magic, and thought every card followed this pattern, but I noticed that's not true! Speaking about the 3-color cards, Grixis, Esper, Jund, Temur and Abzan cards follow the WUBRG sequence in its mana cost, but Jeskai, Naya, Mardu, Sultai and Bant cards do not, and I have to ask... why?

All ten three-color pairs do actually follow a WUBRG pattern. The central color, the one with two allies in arcs and two enemies in wedges, is in the middle. Then the colors follow the two-color order. For example, we use WU and GW, so the arc mana is GWU. Likewise, we use WB and RW so that order is RWB.

You said that W/U/G gets creatures that untap in response to certain game actions. Does that make thermo-alchemist and goblin sharpshooter bends/breaks?

Those are bends, but doable in the right circumstances.