If huntsmaster of the felts style cards never existed and instead werevolves were always done using day/night from the start, do you think that mechanic would be more accepted then.

I believe the Werewolves not linking up is a problem. Also, Day/Night, with hindsight, should have stopped progressing if no cards cared about it. I doubt we’d start over with day/night as the choice.

Hey, I'm excited for MH3 but am really bummed out that there are no new werewolves. Is there a chance we'll more in the future (without day/night bound hopefully)?

There is a chance.

Would a Day/Night errata that removes the need to track it whenever there are no Daybound/Nightbound permanents in play be feasible?

It was then original intent for Day/Night, but it added a bunch of words and didn’t matter a huge amount of the time.

"It varies mechanic to mechanic, but they don’t score any lower as a group against other mechanics. Some, like Monarch, are quite popular."People are criticizing the helper card mechanics because they are very complex, require specific varied tracking and they are virtually impossible to play with unless you constantly refer to helper card (compared to most cards that you can understand by simply reading its oracle text or reminder text).The Monarch doesn't have any of those issues. It's an elegant and masterfully designed mechanic.

The Monarch is very simple and straightforward, so much so that the oracle text from The Monarch token could fit as reminder text on several monarch cards. That can't be said about Day/Night, The Initiative, Venture in the Dungeon, Rad counters or Tempted by the Ring.

I've probably looked at the double sided Tempted by the Ring helper token over 100 times and I can't confidently tell someone exactly how the mechanic works if I don't have the helper token to read from. It's an extremely complex and multifaceted mechanic. I would say more complicated and wordy than 98% of other Magic mechanics. Can you please make more "outside of the game" helper card style mechanics that are easy to comprehend and intuitive?The Monarch and Ascend are examples of mechanics like this. More of that please!

The more complex mechanics that create outside of the game elements are intimidating (i.e. Venture into the Dungeon, Tempted by the Ring, The Initiative, Day/Night) and in my experience, they slow down the game because players can't understand them easily.Lastly, I'm offering this feedback as a major Magic enthusiast and long time veteran player who also plays with experienced players regularly. I can't even begin to imagine how daunting these types of mechanics must feel for novice players!

I talk a lot about how different players enjoy different aspects of the game. What I talk far less about is different players struggle with different aspects. Some can’t handle excessive processing; some have issues with sequencing; some don’t understand the nuances of the rules; some aren’t good with memory. My best guess with you is you internalize (aka work from memory) card abilities most of the time, so cards which exceed your ability to memorize cause you issues.Because players see the game through the lens of their own experience, the feedback they tend to give is “stop doing thing X” because thing X is the element that they personally struggle with. The challenge is there are players that don’t struggle with that element of the game and thus enjoy thing X. For example, my biggest note on this blog about dungeons isn’t they’re too hard to process, but there aren’t enough of them. So, it’s a balance. We need to understand the ways in which people struggle and help accordingly where we can. I agree that we need to be cautious how complex and wordy we are on elements off the card. And we have to be careful how often we use that tool. Now there is a threshold where enough players struggle, that we have to question if a particular aspect is worth it. I don’t think we’re there yet with external game pieces, but I do loudly hear the note that we have to be better with as-fan of the helper cards showing up. The note that we need to auto-include more helper cards in the prerelease kits is also a strong one.So yes, I’m aware that outside game pieces come at a real cost for a certain type of player, and it is something we have to keep in mind when designing them. I personally think we could have simplified Tempted by the Ring a bit, for example, but I do think it was right to include in the product. Thanks for your feedback.

Ignoring the logistics of tracking day/night for the rest of the game, which transformation mechanic for werewolves was more liked, the original one or the day/night one? What if you do account for the logistics?

The loudest voice from Werewolf players is they want all Werewolves working the same, which I am sympathetic with. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish we had stuck with building Werewolf states into the definition of day/night (aka Werewolves enter as Werewolves at night).

Can we get a maybe on old werewolves errata to daybound with the release of Innistrad Remastered next year?

I tried so hard when Midnight Hunt came out with no luck. I can try again.

Now that it's been around for a while, any further reflections on Daybound/Nightbound?

I wish we made Werewolf/Human transformation built in to it and made it stop progressing when no card on the battlefield cared about it.

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.

It feels like every other release lately we've been getting a macro game mechanic to add to black border (dungeon, undercity, attractions, day/night, ring bearer, etc.) The complexity creep feels bad to me as a player but I'm also wondering if it's setting off the same player acquisition alarm bells that prompted new world order way back in Lorwyn

It’s something we watch out for, but we have to balance it with wanting to explore new design space thirty years in.

Has there been any more consideration on errataing the old Werewolf cards to support Daybound/Nightbound mechanic? I enjoy playing the theme kitchen-table, but the divide in their design feels like it discourages co-mingling the old and the new cards.

It was my intention that they be lined up when we made day/night, but I have so far been unsuccessful in that quest.