Hi, Mark. It's my birthday and I was wondering if you could pass along a piece of trivia about my favorite plane, Rath. I know it's awful high on the Rabia Scale and may be irreverseibly merged with some other plane, but it was the current thing when I started playing and I'll never forget it.

The name for Rath came from the, then playtest, name of Death Pits of Rath. As soon as the name for the plane was agreed upon by Michael Ryan and myself (we wrote the initial Weatherlight Saga) I created Apes of Rath. Happy Birthday!

You mentioned that you were sad that we can't go back to Rath; being partially sad because you designed it... So, can we get some trivia about Rath?

The name Rath came from the design name for Death Pits of Rath (which made it to print). When Michael Ryan and I were trying to name the plane, we thought back to that card, which had a name we really liked, and said, “Why don’t we just call it Rath?” Two seconds later, I followed up with, “We have to make a card called Apes of Rath.” Volrath, the villain of the Tempest story, by the way, got his name because he was Vuel (his birth name) of Rath.