Hey mark, I haven’t played magic in a few years but I still follow you. I know you get a lot of flack from the community being an outward facing wotc employee. And I was definitely one of those people that gave you a hard time. We appreciate all the hard work you put in.

That’s nice to hear.

What does "won the rare poll" mean?

To get a sense of how good the rares and mythic rares are, we do a poll among Wizards employees, where they note how much they like the designs.

I know it's not your area, but I have no idea who to ask that is responsible for sending digital card art to Scryfall, so I just keep asking WotC employees. The last 2 years of Heroes of the Realm cards don't have digital art, and it really shows. Every single card before that is digital and looks great. Can you ask whoever does that to send them the files please?

I can ask.

Do wizards employees have a special internal card library tool? Something like scryfall or gatherer to use when cross referencing existing cards when making new ones. Does it include cards currently in development or unreleased cards that have been decided to be printed? Bonus q: if no such tool exists, do you guys use gatherer, scryfall, or something else?

We have an internal card database we call Drake.

Hi Mark, are there any Arena devs that are willing to answer questions like you? If so what is the best way to contact them, thanks in advance!

I don’t know of any other Wizards employee answering questions on a regular schedule.

As an employee at a smaller local game store, our whole crew was pretty interested in the play booster announcement. I figured it couldn't hurt to share where we currently sit, since I'm curious if it's about the reaction you expected from smaller shops.On the whole, after reading through the article and discussing it as a store, we definitely like the idea of having less product to order and sell and on average do see play boosters as an improvement as product. That said, we'd already been struggling to fire draft events at the shop, with a few dedicated players always eager to draft but the rest of our Magic players not wanting to buy into a limited event when their budget for magic is already stretched thin by Commander precons and the like. Occasionally we might get a draft to fire, but the biggest factor a lot of players have brought up when saying why they don't want to enter a draft is so they have money for other magic releases. Or they do their drafting on Arena because thats also where they play standard, and its cheaper there. When they come to the shop they'd rather play commander with their new precons, and we can't blame them. But with that in mind, we're likely to stop supporting drafts altogether if it's going to be even more pricy to do so.So while overall I think we are happy about play boosters as vendors, we're seeing it as a sign that draft is going to be even harder to support for us to a point where we're already looking at abandoning it altogether for other events. I figured this was worth sharing as feedback from the LGS level instead of just an individual player, or if there's anything you believe we got wrong that you'd want to clarify.

Thanks for the feedback. It’s good to hear from individual stores. Here’s our hope. One of the thing set boosters did was pull people away from drafting because they were more encouraged to open the exciting booster pack than draft. We know plenty of people purchase set boosters. Since you will now be able to draft the packs you want to buy, we’re hoping we encourage some of the play booster buyers to draft as a means to get their cards since they were buying the packs anyway. If you were already buying three play boosters, you get a free draft.EDIT: I should have clarified the “paying for cards” part is free. In-store events often have an additional cost to cover prizes.

If you work at Wizards of the Coast, does that make you (and the rest of the employees) Wizards?

It does. : )

Do you think we'll see more clown or employee creature types?

With the right worlds, maybe. Clown is more likely than Employee.

Since the names of players are printed in the world championship decks, are they technically exempt from the vanity rule? Would love to see a competitive magic themed secret lair

The vanity rule applies to employees.

If the no vanity card rule only applies to Wizard's employees does that mean we can get more Phelddagrifs? Its not like Richard Garfield doesn't already have a card with his name and face on it.

Vanity cards already printed are grandfathered in, so it wasn’t stopping more Phelddagrifs.