Dear Mark,Is everyone in R&D/Play Design doing okay? Because the Assassin's Creed cards are radiating (at least to me, and several of my friends) "severe burnout" vibes. It reminds me of custom sets I used to see floating around on forums, with a hyper-focus on a specific creature type, and a disregard for other formats it might impact.I know you don't like answering overly "negative" posts, but I haven't met anyone, in real life or online, that's actually excited about this set. Everyone's basically waiting for Bloomburrow, and that kind of worries me.

I’ve mostly been getting excitement (the game has a lot of passionate fans), but it’s absolutely fine if this set is something you’d rather pass on. Bloomburrow previews aren’t too far away.I don’t understand what you mean by “severe burnout”. A game called Assassin’s Creed focusing on the creature type Assassin is low hanging fruit, but it’s what matches the video game we’re capturing. Sometimes the correct design choice is the obvious one.

Mark do you ever get Magic burnout? Like, are there ever days when you’re thinking “man, I just don’t wanna see a Magic card today…” ??

Not yet, but I’m only 31 years in (playing Magic). : )

I just read WotC president Cynthia Williams interview with GeekWire and when asked about the overabundance of Magic product she made the same notes about 6 "tentpole" sets answer we've seen from you here, but she also said that within those there have been more SKUs, "Not that we expect someone to buy all the SKUs, but we expect people to buy the SKUs that meet their play style." Is Wizards aware that many Magic players like myself engage with every product to assess if we want to buy it? Every Secret Lair, every "micro-set" (as she called WH40K and Unfinity), everything. The tentpole sets are about purchase volume and I agree have changed little, the increase in OTHER SKUs to assess is fundamentally where the burnout is coming from.

You’re what we refer to as an “omnivore”, that is a player who is interested in every product. Omnivores are a tiny percentage of the playerbase, but are almost exclusively highly invested players, so they have a much higher internet presence. While we do care very much about this group, it’s a much smaller percentage of the playerbase than players in that group assume. Having more options leads to more different players finding the product that they want and increases purchases and play. The side effect is it irritates some of the omnivores who want to keep track of all the options. From a business standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to lower product output simply to make it easier for the omnivore to process what’s available. Doing so would lower sales and play.

Your job is quite demanding, sleep about 6 hours a night, dislike (most) vegetables and fruits, got a wife and kids. Aren't you afraid you could get a burn-out. And if you get one, what would that mean for upcoming sets?

Loving what you do helps significantly with burnout. I figure if twenty plus years in I’m not burned out, I’m going to be okay.Thanks for the concern though.

Where do spells such as Burnout, Gutteral Response, Pyroblast, and Red Elemental Blast fall as far as Red's section of the color pie? Is Red allowed to have countermagic as it applies only to blue instants? Like "I'm gonna do what I want and you can't stop me?" Or are those outdated technologies?

I believe those were mistakes and outdated. Richard in Alpha had this theme that colors could do what their enemies did to fight them, but it is hard to define colors when they do things that they normally don’t do.