Not sure if you're the person to ask, but

If or When - 8ed frame return in any form?

I started right before the switch to m15 frame and have been pretty bummed out seeing retro frame every couple sets, would love to see some strong cards and staples from after the switch like arcane signet, sheoldred, fatal push, etc in that frame. I'd definitely purchase any secret lair with any cards no matter how weak if they were in 8ed frame, though I'm probably in the minority there.

I’m not sure how many retro frames we can support.

Mark, I was understanding but disappointed that Fungusaur, last seen in 8ed, wasn't included in Caverns. Have you ever done a Drives to Work about why the relevant reams choose to include or not include on-theme reprints in a set?

There are a lot of moving pieces in designing a set. Yes, we look for in-flavor reprints, but with 27,000+ cards, there’s simply no way to reprint everything that could potentially fit. The reprint has to fit many criteria, the biggest of which is synergy with other elements.

I second the request for the Planar Chaos frames, those are my favorite by a long shot.

They were designed to be halfway between the original frames and the Eighth Edition frames.

The preview of the release promo Water Gun Balloon Game has an oval stamp and a black border. Will that promo be actually printed with an acorn stamp? As printed, it technically legalizes the original silver-bordered printing of Water Gun Balloon Game in the Eternal formats, which calls back to why The Cheese Stands Alone couldn't be reprinted in Eighth Edition.

The original card image in the article (which I think has been fixed) was in error. The printed card will have an acorn security stamp.

About the question on white boarder Was the "first in black all reprints In white" abandoned when it was decided to put reprints in non core set expansions? I can't assume a set with mixed borders would be at all possible.

No, the decision was made in Eighth Edition, I believe. It was basically “the cards just look so much better in black border and it’s what the audience prefers”.

"I tried very hard to get Booster Tutor into Eighth Edition as part of the “a card from every set” promotion." Except that Booster Tutor is from Unhinged, which is post-Eighth Edition. I thought the Un-card you tried to get into Eighth Edition was The Cheese Stands Alone. (Also, Zur's Weirding is from Ice Age.)

You are correct. It was the Cheese Stands Alone.

I can't remember but with your market research did the new take on slivers get viewed as a positive or negative, mechanically I mean, I don't care about the art, but a big fan of the change, wish they were all like the new cards.

Mechanically, players preferred the change. I’ll tell a story to hit this point. Many years ago, we ran a promotion called “Selecting Eighth Edition” where we let the audience vote on which of two cards to include in the next core set (Eighth Edition obviously). One of our biggest votes was Crusade vs. Glorious Anthem. Crusade is a card from Alpha that costs WW and it grants all white creatures +1/+1. Glorious Anthem is a card from Urza’s Saga that costs 1WW and it grants all your creatures +1/+1.Crusade had been out of the Standard for a while and the card is pretty powerful, but development had decided it was okay to bring it back. Rather than just put it in the set, we decided to let the public vote it in. We put it up against a card that was similar but powerwise weaker. We were shocked when Glorious Anthem defeated Crusade. We did a little research and started finding more evidence that many players didn’t like it when their cards helped the opponent’s creatures. And when we dug deeper, we also discovered that less experienced players weren’t even aware that your cards could help the opponent’s creatures. Why would your card do that?So we decided that we needed to shift how we thought of lords. Slivers got changed later because the first time they came back after the shift was Time Spiral block and we felt that it would be wrong in a block all about nostalgia to change them then, so we decided that the next time we brought them back we’d make the change.As I mentioned in another post, the original plan was to give them a new creature type, but we ran some internal playlets with people outside of R&D and we kept getting the same comment. “Why aren’t these Slivers?” So we changed them to Slivers.

I think you're misremembering something re: black-bordered Booster Tutor. Unhinged came out after 8th Edition, so how would you have tried to reprint it? When you told this story before I think it was The Cheese Stands Alone.

You’re correct. It was the Cheese Stands Alone. I did try to get Booster Tutor into a core set but not Eighth Edition.

You mentioned the cheese stands alone, a silver bordered card that became black border. Are there any more silver border cards that you want to get to black border but haven't quite managed yet?

I tried very hard to get Booster Tutor as Unglued’s representative in Eighth Edition but it turns out we can’t print a card in both silver and black borders.

Hey Mark! Hope your weekend goes splendiforously. I was wondering if you could list the core sets you worked on?

Fifth Edition
Eighth Edition
Magic 2010