Hi Mark - please settle a question. My opponent has a 1/3 with an enchantment aura giving it 2/2 and flying for a 3/5 flier. On a later turn I make it a 1/1 frog losing all abilities. Is it now a 1/1 without flying or a 3/3 without flying. Thanks for your help, we couldn't find a good internet amswer!

It depends on how the card is making it a 1/1. If it’s changing the base stats, the aura boost would still apply.

Are there design reasons why frog won out over turtle?

We chose Frogs before designing mechanics for them.

How do Bloomburrow animals talk to each other? Do they all understand when a frog croaks or a rabbit squeaks?

My gut is they have a shared language.

Hi there Mark!I know previews for Bloomburrow aren't quite over just yet, but one thing that I've noticed that I'm a bit sad about is how some of the creature types seem to be more favored than others in terms of number and rarity. This seems especially apparent when you look at Frogs vs. Bats.I was REALLY into the aesthetics and world building given to the bats of Bloomburrow, but looking at the spoilers so far, Bats have 50% fewer spoiled cards than Frogs (10 vs. 15), as well as only 2 rare bats revealed thus far compared to Frogs having 5 rares and 2 mythic rares.

The ten main animals are not exact in number, but they are in the ballpark of one another.

I really love animals and how many different species there are. When you started talking about Bloomburrow's mechanics not being directly typal, I was hoping that there'd be a lot of one-off animals. But almost all of the cards revealed so far are one of the main 10 animals, with the main exceptions being the calamity beasts.Was there ever a point in development where the focus was more on showcasing a lot of different animal species rather than selecting a smaller number that act as draft archetype groups?

I talked about this in my first Bloomburrow preview column. Here’s a snippet:“Once it was on the schedule, I did a little advance work on the genre to familiarize myself with it. I realized that there were two ways it’s traditionally done.Take #1 – Animals represent groups of people. These people are mice, those people are badgers, and these people are otters. Each animal type has qualities that are consistent among that group, usually things that feel resonant with the real-world animal. In this version, the setting is usually a biome, and all the animals in it are ones who would live in that biome. The animals are roughly proportional to what they would be in the real world.Take #2 – Animals represent individual people. This person’s jumpy, so she’s a frog. That person’s sneaky, so he’s a fox. This other person rushes into things, so they’re a rhino. Each animal is used to represent personality qualities. In this version, the setting is usually something more human in structure, often a city, and the variety of animals is much larger. The animal selection here is not limited by biome, so you can have animals living together that normally would never see each other in the real world. The animals are loosely related in size (a racoon is smaller than an elephant), but the scope of scale is compressed.Take number one is easier for worldbuilding. There are less unique types of animals, and they’re organized by creature type. Because animals are used to express groups of people, they tend to act more similarly to traditional species creature types, like Elves, Goblins, or Merfolk. This pushes us more toward a factioned typal theme.Take number two is easier for design because the designers have access to a lot more animals and can make more individually cool designs. The twelfth Mouse card, for instance, is a lot harder to make different than the first Giraffe. This approach pushes us more toward mechanics that tie into a larger animal theme. It’s more likely we’d create an environment that was about a lot of different animals working together, putting the focus more on individual top-down card design.Aaron was more interested in doing take number one, while I was more interested in doing take number two. So, we did a bunch of market research. It came back exactly even. Half the people we polled preferred take one, and half preferred take two. In a tie, Aaron’s original vision won out, so we did take one. (Also, I believe more people internally wanted to do take one.) I do want to stress that both takes would have allowed us to make a cool set. They just head down different paths and would have ended up in very different places, mechanically and creatively.”

First of all, LOVE Bloomburrow! Especially the otters, frogs, and rabbits. Re: Gift a tapped fishGift is like Haunt in that the instant/sorcery version and permanent version do different things. The spell gifts the fish before other effects. The permanent gifts when it enters. I see this having similar challenges with Haunt. Also the rules text doesn’t specify a 1/1 blue fish. Reminder text isn’t technically part of the rules. Can I gift my opponent other kinds of fish? I see the “gift a tapped fish” as being potentially “rules-challenging”.

Rules text has meaning beyond what’s on the card. Reminder text is telling you relevant information. That is real information that has rules weight. Reminder text just isn’t written in technical Magic templating.

Hey Mark, so have a question for you from an ecologists perspective here. Why is it that some classes of animals within magic, such as mammals, amphibians, reptiles are broken down into family classes as archetypes (rabbit, wolf, frog, lizard, snake etc) but birds are just birds and not broken down any further? Just an odd one I've noticed for a while haha

We wanted to make bird lords rather than hawk lords.

Frogs hopping is very flavorful, but bouncing/flickering seems a lot more blue than green. Do you think the cards in this archtype are going to adequetly represent both colors?

The archetype needs both move cards to different zones and cards that care about being moved. Blue can do a little more of the former and green the latter.