The highest of fives to the card designer, illustrator, flavor text author and everyone responsible for Flubs, the Fool. Probably my all time favorite magic card, Vorthos and Melvin had a child! Please, if there is no lore written on Flubs, keep it that way. He is perfect this way.

High fives to be applied.

Is the flavor text "No two see the same Maro" lore about the Magic creature, or a subtle hint towards the fact that you have hundreds of clones that allow you to do all the things you do?

No comment.

You said Duskmourn started as 70/80s horror, but also said it's a bottom up set. I thought top down/bottom up was the thing that kicked off the initial idea for a set, and I'd think trying to capture the flavor of 70/80s horror would put Duskmourn in the top down camp. Can you explain the distinction and what makes Duskmourn bottom up?

The difference between top down and bottom up is how is the set structured. I’ll use Ravnica and Innistrad as examples. If you took off all the names, art, creature types (replaced with non flavorable words - “Creature Type A”), and flavor text from both sets and showed them to a player. Ravnica would make sense. It’s core structure is mechanical. You might not get all the flavor of the guilds, but you understand how it’s put together.Innistrad, in contrast, will be harder to understand how the component pieces come together. It will feel more random, because the connective tissue to the structure is the flavor.The idea of top-down and bottom-up was much cleaner back in the day, but we’ve gotten so good combing mechanics and flavor, it’s hard to tell.It’s too early to talk about Duskmourn, so I’ll use Bloomburrow as my example. We started with a flavor, anthropomorphic animals, but quickly decided that having ten two-color pairs, each one a different animal was a great core to the set structure. That structure is mechanical, so technically it’s bottom-up.Let me end by stressing that top-down vs. bottom up in a world where we blend mechanics and flavor so much doesn’t have as much meaning as it once did, except if you’re really in to design.

I'd like to voice my dislike of the paring down of some of the creature types, because I feel like differing viewpoints are good in game design and I've not really seen that many statements voiced in opposition to these changes. My view of it is that it strips out a lot of uniqueness of Magic as a setting. Other settings have humanoid lizards, but they don't have Viashino. Other settings have undersea-dwelling peoples, but they don't have Cephalids. Naga becoming Snake was completely understandable, and I think the justifications for it were valid. I do not think Viashino becoming Lizard or Cephalid becoming Octopus were remotely justified. On top of that, it creates some weird points, where you can see clearly crocodilian humanoids (the Viashino from Alara) now labeled as Lizards, which not only are separate types in Magic, they're not even closely related in real life (crocodiles are more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than lizards). I've seen a number of very loud people advocate for trimming all the "unnecessary" types in Magic out, but their proposals usually end up as "there should be about 20 creature types total." This is not only unsatisfactory from a game design standpoint--as it would make tribal decks a bit *too* easy to accomplish--but absolutely catastrophic from a flavor perspective as well. At that point, why not just have typelines be "TYPE1", "TYPE2", and so forth? Flavor and function have to work together, and sacrificing too much of either is a bad thing. Too little function, and the game becomes unplayable. Too little flavor, and the game becomes cold and sterile. This is not to say that trimming on creature types is a bad thing--I think Magic wouldn't be hurt by trimming on a few more creature types if you asked me--but just that I think the choice of creature types being trimmed is odd, to say the least. Why does a regularly printed creature type with new cards that were printed just earlier this year get the boot, and not something like trilobite, which has all of 5 cards, with a 4 year gap between the printing of the most recent one and the one before that? If this is to help tribal decks, why are there still one-off or two-off creature types being printed, like Varmint and Coyote?

We’re not getting rid of Viashino. They will continue to creatively exist. We will still refer to them in titles and flavor text as Viashino. All we’re doing is consolidating the creature types so that we’re consistent in how we use them. Magic has been treating animal humanoids this way (aka using the animal as the creature type) for two plus decades. All we’re doing is going back and fixing the few that got done before we adopted this policy back in the early days of Magic.

Hey Mark, you mentioned in an earlier question that you did a Ziplining draft this last week. I've always been curious at what point in playtesting that the card art and the flavour text starts to roll in. Are the cards you were drafting with just paper and rules text at this point in the process?

Names get tweaked along the way. The more top-down the set, the more the real names happen earlier, especially in Universe Beyond sets. Flavor text doesn’t happen until the tail end of set design, so we don’t play with it often.Art gets started early in set design, but there are usually several waves. Our playtest cards pull art as it exists, so playtests have sketches and eventually full art. Late set design playtests usually have most the art.

Too many words and flavor text doesn’t fit.Doesn’t fit how? You can just decrease the font size.

We have minimum font sizes.

Why couldn’t you just add the unique interaction with meld that I mentioned to Saw in Half while keeping the flavor text?what’s stopping it from having both things?

Doing what you’re asking would take a bunch of words. Too many words and flavor text doesn’t fit.

Not making saw in half have a special interaction with meld to split the card into the ones that make it up is a missed opportunity

There’s always text we can add to a card to add an extra pinch of flavor. Our concern is is that extra text worth the words it takes? How often will it matter? How much confusion does it add? What does the card lose (like flavor text) if we add it?Is the concept cool as an idea? Sure. Would have been worth being on the card? I believe no.

When/if: Dropping the "(As this Saga enters and after your draw step, add a lore counter. Sacrifice after [...])" reminder text from Sagas (e.g., for space to add flavor text, or an applicable existing keyword).

We like cards to tell you what they do as much as we can.

With Viashno no longer in use… are Homarids in danger?

Viashino are still in use. It’s what they are called and will be used in names and flavor text. All that’s changing is it’s not going to be used as a creature type, opting for Lizard instead. I do expect us to change Homarids if we put them in a new set.