"Why is it so important that players know immediately that an effect can only be used once?" I would dare to say it's just human psychology. If I recall correctly, boast was badly received because "it was a downside" whereas "When this creature attacks, you may pay" has no problem. Escalate and strive were also badly received, but kicker and replicate are beloved or at least okay. It seems people really care a lot about templates "taking away" what the rest of the card does.

We default to “additive” templates when we can, but not everything is templatable that way in a form that’s easily grokable.

Buyback, Replicate, Entwine, Fuse, Exploit, Awaken and Escalate are all really just versions of Kicker. Why not just use Kicker so that these abilities could be backward and forward compatable?

1) We value flavor and excitement of individual sets over keyword continuity. There isn’t that many cards, for example, that care about kicker. As I’ve said many times, one of the big drawbacks of kicker is it’s too broad a mechanic. 2) Not having to keyword it as kicker gives us more flexibility on how individual mechanics work. Not every mechanic you named, for instance, is exactly kicker.

Mark, you might be sick of hearing about player's guides now. I can fully appreciate that people get a lot more in bundles than the guide, and have other interests. Could you escalate a request to be able to purchase guides in a separate product, or perhaps sign permission to create printed card lists / set guides to another company? Your players without constant internet access are losing a fantastic resource with no ready replacement available to purchase.

It’s a tricky product to make as it takes a lot of work to produce, but the majority of players don’t value it enough for us to sell it for much. I will pass along the feedback I’ve been getting from its supporters.

It suprises me Escalate seemed to do poorly. It felt like the mechanic has very fun gameplay and it seeems like there is also a lot of things you could do with it.

It was a classic case of a good mechanic in the wrong set.

Do spells with escalate have more design space than modular spells?

Modular = open-ended spells that don’t dictate what kinds of cards you play it with.Modal = You get a choice of options when using it. Sometimes the choice is of different types of targets.Escalate is a modal mechanic.

In your State of Design article, aren't making too many keywords and having too much change between blocks directly connected? In Shadows over Innistrad Block, for instance, adding Escalate instead of continuing Investigate changed too much and added another mechanic too boot.

They are very much directly connected.

Super disappointed there are no escalate cards in blue or green. I guess they have emerge where red and white do not, but it would have been nice to have an escalate card or two. Especially since black seems to be able to do both.

An important part of the color wheel is that different colors can do different things. Also, for drafting, having a mechanic on a single card in a color can send false signals to drafters.

Isn't Escalate just the same as Entwine? (Yeah, yeah, they're both the same as Kicker, we know this already.)

Entwine only has two modes and you can pay once to join them. Escalate has three modes (there are a few two modes) and let’s you pay for each mode you want to add.