Hi Mark, I'm a big fan of Bloomburrow's Planeswalkers' Guide. It was great to get so much info about the plane and its inhabitants!I loved one part of it so much, I made this Tumblr account so I could ask this question: May I please request a card for Lily of Valley, the mousefolk who saved Valley from the Calamity Beasts in the distant past?

I’ll pass the request along.

Hi Mark, in one of your Lessons Learnt Podcasts (I think on Dragon’s Maze) you talked about how you learned not to build up wrong expectations among players. Now the whole Bloomburrow narrative (first image shared, trailer, the red season mythic) suggested that there would be a huge, red, wolf-like Calamity Beast in the set - and now there is no mythic calamity beast in red at all! What happened?

Creatures appearing in art are not a promise that a corresponding card will exist.

I really love animals and how many different species there are. When you started talking about Bloomburrow's mechanics not being directly typal, I was hoping that there'd be a lot of one-off animals. But almost all of the cards revealed so far are one of the main 10 animals, with the main exceptions being the calamity beasts.Was there ever a point in development where the focus was more on showcasing a lot of different animal species rather than selecting a smaller number that act as draft archetype groups?

I talked about this in my first Bloomburrow preview column. Here’s a snippet:“Once it was on the schedule, I did a little advance work on the genre to familiarize myself with it. I realized that there were two ways it’s traditionally done.Take #1 – Animals represent groups of people. These people are mice, those people are badgers, and these people are otters. Each animal type has qualities that are consistent among that group, usually things that feel resonant with the real-world animal. In this version, the setting is usually a biome, and all the animals in it are ones who would live in that biome. The animals are roughly proportional to what they would be in the real world.Take #2 – Animals represent individual people. This person’s jumpy, so she’s a frog. That person’s sneaky, so he’s a fox. This other person rushes into things, so they’re a rhino. Each animal is used to represent personality qualities. In this version, the setting is usually something more human in structure, often a city, and the variety of animals is much larger. The animal selection here is not limited by biome, so you can have animals living together that normally would never see each other in the real world. The animals are loosely related in size (a racoon is smaller than an elephant), but the scope of scale is compressed.Take number one is easier for worldbuilding. There are less unique types of animals, and they’re organized by creature type. Because animals are used to express groups of people, they tend to act more similarly to traditional species creature types, like Elves, Goblins, or Merfolk. This pushes us more toward a factioned typal theme.Take number two is easier for design because the designers have access to a lot more animals and can make more individually cool designs. The twelfth Mouse card, for instance, is a lot harder to make different than the first Giraffe. This approach pushes us more toward mechanics that tie into a larger animal theme. It’s more likely we’d create an environment that was about a lot of different animals working together, putting the focus more on individual top-down card design.Aaron was more interested in doing take number one, while I was more interested in doing take number two. So, we did a bunch of market research. It came back exactly even. Half the people we polled preferred take one, and half preferred take two. In a tie, Aaron’s original vision won out, so we did take one. (Also, I believe more people internally wanted to do take one.) I do want to stress that both takes would have allowed us to make a cool set. They just head down different paths and would have ended up in very different places, mechanically and creatively.”

Hey, I just wanted to say, I am very excited for upcoming sets. OTJ looks really interesting (praying for an Angrath return), Assassin's Creed looks amazing and interesting and I love the idea, much better than Aftermath, Modern Horizons 3 looks expensive but really good, and Bloomburrow has been looking interesting more since the preview. I'm quite excited for a new typal set and I think the calamity beasts look sick. Duskmourne also looks really freaking good :)

Glad you’re excited.

You've compared the Planeswalkers to the X-Men. When the classic X-men (Wolverine, Storm, etc.) were introduced, the original X-men (Beast, Iceman, etc.) were still around. This was well loved by the audience, mostly. What was different for Magic?

Nicol Bolas, Karn, the Phyrexians… we haven’t given up on all the old characters. Just a lot of time has passed so it’s not plausable that thousands of years later that all of the characters are still alive.