Is the Ubiquitous Token of a plane something we should expect from visit to visit? Like, how Capenna has its gw citizens, Innistrad has black decayed zombies, LTR had orc armies [applicable to some silmarillion-based visit, I guess]I was looking at the Fish tokens in Bloomburrow and Mercenaries in otj and wondering if those were also more Worldbuilding statements or not.

It’s a mechanical tool that adds flavor, and something we definitely use when shaping a set.

For your top 20 (non-evergreen) mechanics I noticed none were from this decade. What would you say is the best new mechanic from this decade so far?

Note that I would pick the mechanic that started a trend. Foretell is an awesome more recent mechanic, but Morph is the first to use face down as a resource, so I chose that for the talk.Amass, while not technically from this decade, is only five years old. Mechanics I really like from this decade include: alliance, backup, collect evidence, connive, corrupted, decayed, enlist, escape, foretell, incubate, learn/lesson, magecraft, mutate (although it has its complexity issues), party, prototype, reconfigure, role tokens, and shield counters.

Why do so many token creatures from recent sets cannot block? Eldraine has rat tokens, all will be one had mites, and midnight hunt had decayed. I want my tokens to interact with my opponent attacks

Both the Zombies from Midnight Hunt and Rats from Wilds of Eldraine want to be swarming aggressive creatures. If we allow them to block, that style of play doesn’t happen, as they’re more efficiently used to chump block. It would also mean we have to charge more for them and make less of them which also leads to less aggressive swarming.

I've noticed you've used "this creature cannot block" on a lot of tokens recently, presumably this is for the same issues around gumming up the board you talked about with decayed zombies and midnight hunt? If so, was there any thought of reusing decayed (or an equivalent effect with different flavor)?

It’s come up. I assume we’ll use it (although maybe renamed) again.

Can I get a "maybe" that "a new creature token with an ability not seen before on a card" is a return of decayed? Or are you saying that it's never been mentioned on a card, regardless of whether the card actually has the ability or not?

It’s new rules text.

The last 2 Innistrad Blocks have not been my favorite magic sets but I have to say I have really enjoyed Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow! The theming of the Harvesttide Festival and the Vampire Weddings have both been vary enjoyable and the mechanics and themes have been amazing too! My favorite has to be Decayed. It really captures the feel of zombie hordes really well and creates interesting game play. But Blood and The unification of the Day Night flipping has been great as well. I couldn’t have asked more from these sets and just wanted to say thank you for the experiences.

Glad we finally did an Innistrad set you enjoyed. : )

Were all the tapped zombie tokens in Commander Legends a part of the design process of decayed?

They were different solutions for the same issue.

How much value do you give blood tokens when putting together a cards cost, as compared to clues, etc? I remember you saying in your pod about MID that decayed allowed for more tokens by giving them a drawback, were blood tokens similar?

Blood tokens were made to have a slightly lower power level, so we could make more and players would be more willing to feed them to their Vampires.

Can I get a storm scale rating for decayed tokens and for decayed on regular cards?

I’d called decayed a 5. I think we’ll see it again.

"when Innistrad: Midnight Hunt took the decayed Zombie creature tokens from Innistrad: Crimson Vow, they traded them the Spirit mechanic." Did Spirit have a tribal mechanic besides Disturb at some point (or on cards we haven't seen yet)? This idea of trading mechanics seems odd if both sets were using Disturb, just in different ways.

The original version of the Spirit mechanic for Midnight Hunt was double-faced creature cards that died into auras that granted a similar ability, sort of a re-done haunt using double-faced card technology. Set design ended up turning that into disturb (meaning there was a cost to pay to “cast” the backside) and then realized they could do two versions and it made sense to do the creature/creature version first.