I would just like to express great love for the way the cards Stroke of Midnight and Glass Casket provide context for the characters of Ash Party Crasher and Neva Plagued by Nightmares without needing a secondary source like the Meet the Legends articles! Very in favor of this approach going forward!

I’ll pass along the compliment to the creative team.

With so much mechanical overlap between enchantments and artifacts, why is it still important that red is able to destroy one but not the other? It'd odd that monored can free its creatures from a Glass Casket but not an Oblivion Ring.

Colors have strengths and weaknesses is core to the color pie doing it’s job.

I wonder if the Glass Casket issue is much like deathtouch + fight. It takes two things (colored artifacts and artifacts that don't tap) that are fine individually, but feel weird and identity-breaking when combined. It isn't undermining a weakness per-se like pie breaks do, but it does undermine what had hithertho been a major distinction in card types. It's sort of like why you don't print really overcosted color pie breaks, since they still undermine identity even if unplayable.

Let’s talk about the card type pie and how it differs from the color pie. The color pie was created by Richard Garfield as a way to ensure variety in gameplay. How do you keep every deck from being the same? Take the different abilities and spread them through a lens tied to the key resource of the game. Then to further differentiate the gameplay, weave in strengths and weaknesses into the colors. The card type pie was created by Richard with a different task. Help reinforce game functionality. Certain game pieces work differently and you want a clean way to differentiate them. These type of cards stay on the battlefield. These cards can be cast at these certain times. These cards have additional qualities such as power and toughness that matter in gameplay. Richard also realized this was a chance to add additional flavor.As more and more cards were designed, it started to become clear that abilities could spread across card types in a way they couldn’t across colors. A creature could have an “enter the battlefield” effect that was the same as a sorcery, but we couldn’t just change what colors could do that effect.We recognized early on that artifacts and enchantments were very narrowly divided, but they had good flavor and the fact that colors cared about what card types things were for purposes of dealing with them mattered gameplaywise.What this all means is the color pie rigidity is necessary for the well being of the game structurally. The card type rigidity is more of a flavor issue and less a game wellness issue. Are certain things disorienting? Yes, but that’s mostly a byproduct of experience. Whenever the game shifts, there is a little discomfort, but as something becomes the new norm, it slowly stops feeling weird.For example, artifacts used to shut off when tapped. When we first took the rule away, players complained it felt odd, but after a number of years of that no longer being true, it stopped feeling odd that it didn’t work that way. We are shifting how we are handling artifacts and moving towards a world where they are more ingrained with color. For players used to the colorlessness of artifacts, this will take some time getting used to, but it doesn’t have any ill impact on gameplay. In fact, Glass Casket isn’t even the first artifact to have that ability, just the first white one.So, the two are very different in the sense that one has a rigidity necessary to structurally hold the game together and the other doesn’t.

Was Glass Casket and the ledgendary Artifacts expected to be Standard Playable? Because even if was not dominant I think that even then, they were overshadowed by the static abilities on the War of the Spark planeswalkers.

Card optimization (making sure you always have the best possible card for a slot) is more the area of the serious, competitive player. A lot of players, the vast majority, play cards over another because a) they own them, or b) they personally like it better (for a host of reasons).

I have a question regarding the alternate casting cost Glass Casket had at one point: was twobrid considered at any point ? It seems perfect for colored artifacts, especially since the (5 or 1WW) mana cost that was chosen seems very similar to 1{2/W}{2/W}.

The reason we didn’t do two-brid, was twofold:1) It locked us into a much coarser costing system which would make balancing the cards more difficult.2) It’s harder to parse.

I'm not particularly convinced that flavor should be a relevant factor on whenever red or black gets to destroy a permanent or is powerless to stop it.

You are conflating two things. The way we differentiate artifacts from enchantments from a card concept standpoint leans heavily on a flavor component. As I’ve been saying quite a bit lately, artifacts and enchantments are mechanically very similar. But it’s not as if we make a card and let the creative team decide whether or not it’s an artifact or enchantment. There’s a slot and the design decides what card type it is. If a particular card is an artifact, say Glass Casket, it’s because we, the designers, chose for it to be an artifact. We made it, consciously aware that it will work with artifact synergies and be vulnerable to artifact answers.So, your fear isn’t grounded in any reality. That’s not how we decide what card type something is.

Flavorfully, why is Glass Casket an artifact while Trapped in the Tower is an enchantment?

Glass Casket represents a physical object while Trapped in a Castle represents a non-physical state.

The biggest mechanical distinction between artifacts and enchantments, now that colored artifacts are evergreen, is that artifacts can have tap abilities. Flavor alone doesn't satisfy us enchantment fans, as having colored artifacts without tap abilities just feels like you're eroding away enchantments' place in the game. Midnight Clock is ok because it taps, Embercleave is ok because it's an equipment, Glass Casket is not ok because there's no reason it couldn't be an enchantment instead.

That statement would carry more weight if Magic hadn’t been making artifacts with continuous effects for twenty-six years. Interestingly, back in original Mirrodin, Tyler Bielman and I made a bold proposal where we made a very firm delineation between what artifacts and enchantments could do, but it meant that we couldn’t ever reprint things like Howling Mine and R&D shot down the plan.Essentially, this is a fight I once tried to have, but I lost that fight sixteen years ago. The delineation that you seem to think exists, never really has, except in mana cost, and as I’ve explained, for the good of the game, Magic needs to adapt in this area.

I understand your point about Glass Casket and what you're trying to do with flavor to keep enchantments and artifacts separate, but Casket is a miss for me. If it was in an artifacts matter set it would have been incredibly cool to me though.

So we should do the glass casket in an artifact matters set and not the top-down fairy tale set?

Glass Casket has me concerned. It feels like, ever since colored artifacts became an every-set thing, there just aren't that many mechanical niches for enchantments anymore. Artifacts get to also be creatures, cost generic mana, have tap abilities... the list goes on. The only thing enchantments can do that artifacts can't is attach to objects other than creatures you control.

Artifacts have had global effects since the game began back in Alpha (Ankh of Mishra, Black Lotus, Copper Tablet, Dingus Egg, Gauntlet of Might, Howling Mine, Kormus Bell, Meekstone, Sunglasses of Urza, and Winter Orb). The change is we’re allowing artifacts to have colored mana costs (and even this we’ve done for over ten years - just not at the current levels). This means the overlap between artifacts and enchantments, which has always been there, is a little more noticeable.The color pie is determined by the mana cost of the card, so if white can do something as an enchantment, it means it can do it as an artifact, The result of this is we have to lean a little more on the flavor to help make them feel different from one another.