Bloomburrow birds made me think if from now on White will have more cards with "Give flying to a creature without flying"

We’ll have to see how that theme goes over.

Maro, Bloomburrow looks amazing, but I have one problem. I am a kitchen table player and I love creature type decks. Some decks (like my knights) regularly get new cards, but others (like my kithkin) might see a new card once a decade. For Bloomburrow, I know that rats, squirrels, and birds are likely to show up I. The future and have a ton of past cards to use, but for the types like rabbits or raccoons, I imagine they will not be supported long term. Why should I make a deck for those types?

Bloomburrow existing will make us create them more than we would of had it not existed. If volume of creature types is a core issue to you (and I get why it would be), yeah, I’d stick to the creature types that have more history with the game. But there are a lot of players who will have a lot of fun using Rabbits or Raccoons even if they have to stretch a bit (and probably play changelings).

the simic guild symbol sticker from the Return to Ravnica prerelease guild kit has been on my family's sliding glass door for over a decade now, serving as a way to make it obvious whether it is open or closed to birds and humans alikei just though maybe you'd get a kick out of hearing that : )

I do.

White has both Bats and Birds in Bloomburrow. How do you make sure that limited will not be dominated with flyers?

Let’s talk more after previews.

Any chance of a “rodent” batch for Rats, Mice and Squirrels? Feels weird to have a type for each of them when all Birds get one.

There’s a chance.

If/when birds all changed to Dinosaurs

If. Is an eagle a Dinosaur?

I'd like to voice my dislike of the paring down of some of the creature types, because I feel like differing viewpoints are good in game design and I've not really seen that many statements voiced in opposition to these changes. My view of it is that it strips out a lot of uniqueness of Magic as a setting. Other settings have humanoid lizards, but they don't have Viashino. Other settings have undersea-dwelling peoples, but they don't have Cephalids. Naga becoming Snake was completely understandable, and I think the justifications for it were valid. I do not think Viashino becoming Lizard or Cephalid becoming Octopus were remotely justified. On top of that, it creates some weird points, where you can see clearly crocodilian humanoids (the Viashino from Alara) now labeled as Lizards, which not only are separate types in Magic, they're not even closely related in real life (crocodiles are more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than lizards). I've seen a number of very loud people advocate for trimming all the "unnecessary" types in Magic out, but their proposals usually end up as "there should be about 20 creature types total." This is not only unsatisfactory from a game design standpoint--as it would make tribal decks a bit *too* easy to accomplish--but absolutely catastrophic from a flavor perspective as well. At that point, why not just have typelines be "TYPE1", "TYPE2", and so forth? Flavor and function have to work together, and sacrificing too much of either is a bad thing. Too little function, and the game becomes unplayable. Too little flavor, and the game becomes cold and sterile. This is not to say that trimming on creature types is a bad thing--I think Magic wouldn't be hurt by trimming on a few more creature types if you asked me--but just that I think the choice of creature types being trimmed is odd, to say the least. Why does a regularly printed creature type with new cards that were printed just earlier this year get the boot, and not something like trilobite, which has all of 5 cards, with a 4 year gap between the printing of the most recent one and the one before that? If this is to help tribal decks, why are there still one-off or two-off creature types being printed, like Varmint and Coyote?

We’re not getting rid of Viashino. They will continue to creatively exist. We will still refer to them in titles and flavor text as Viashino. All we’re doing is consolidating the creature types so that we’re consistent in how we use them. Magic has been treating animal humanoids this way (aka using the animal as the creature type) for two plus decades. All we’re doing is going back and fixing the few that got done before we adopted this policy back in the early days of Magic.

If/when: Bird Tokens without flying?

If. It would have to be something iconic like a bunch of Penguins in a set where that made sense.

Hey Mark, just want to say how incredibly disappointed I am that Wizards is errataing Cephalid to Octopus. As far as I can tell nobody was calling for it, and I think it’s a flavor loss. I never once think ‘octopus’ when I see Cephalids, it feels like a change made just for the sake of change, and with batching its just aggravating

A few years in, we stopped using made up creature names for creature types. Leonin were Cat and Aven were Bird. All we’re doing is applying how Magic has done flavor types for twenty-five years and applying it backwards.

I have a solution to the penguin problem: Make it a bird that normally couldn't fly, but then give it a jetpack. Just like that, you're accurate to penguins, you don't confuse the creature type by having a bird that can't fly, AND you made the game that much radder thanks to increasing the amount of jetpacks in it. Perfect!

: )