For me, the historic batch is the best as it ties together different kinds of permanents in a cohesive way, which blows my mind. Outlaw was great in limited, but seems less impressive.

Batching is a tool that we can use in different ways. That’s the value of a good design tool.

Also, Commander is the most popular played format in tabletop. I believe Standard is still the most popular format played on digital.

That might play into it, but I assume the main reason is the desire for fast, competitive, one-on-one play.

I know you can't refer to batches mechanically, but if you needed to, could you write out "Historic creatures you control get . The same is true for outlaws, creatures in your party..."?

We not only can, we have. For example:

"Formats that use all thirty years worth of cards are more prone to shine a light on that issue" (color breaks and bends) Is this an issue to be fixed in the future or a permanent flaw in the game?

It’s hard to fix mistakes of the past with new cards.

What's the maximum number of different things you're willing to include in a single batch? (Like how historic has three things)

Four or five.

Did people have the same flavour complaints about thopters and gnomes being historic during Dominaria, as people do about some stuff being or not being crimes?

Players always have complaints. : )

Im just gonna say I know my community is beyond sick of all these new keywords and actions and whatever you wanna call them. Like all excitement for Thunder Junction was sucked out the window when we read the phrase "commit a crime". Because we knew it was gonna grind another dozen games to a halt as we were going to have to look up the exact phrasing, because somebody was going to make some weird play. The same as its been with discover, and historic, and reconfigure. I've even had to stop and explain surveil. Even playing a precon took way longer because I had to essentially keep one card in my hand to make sure I was doing disguise right. And keep explaining it. And while I am it, ward. We had to reiterate all weekend what ward did, so people knew "cant be countered" got around it. And these are tournament players Mr. Rosewater. Some of us have been playing since 93. You cannot get more ingrained than our community. And we are so ingrained we know nothing can change for years. We know how design works. But we are begging you. Soon, please. Stop with the keywords. Just put the text on the card. None of us like having to pull out our phones to add more text to the effects.

The text for all non-evergreen mechanics *is* on the card, with the sole exception of a few high rarity cards where the reminder text doesn’t fit. And that’s been true for decades.

hey mark! recently people I know have been expressing issues with what I'm calling "vocabulary fatigue". Wizards has been recently utilizing a lot of very flavorful mechanic names and ability words, which is something i myself appreciate, as someone who plays a lot of limited and only needs to focus on a few of them at a time, but a lot of my friends are saying is making their experience with the recent sets worse, because they have to remember what cards do when it isn't super obvious from their actual text. In the past year or so we've had a lot of new "action batching" mechanics (by which i mean vocabulary that references a specific action or kind of action so that cards can more easily care about that action without spelling the action out every time) such as "the ring tempts you", "decend", "commit a crime", "collect evidence", "suspect", and "face a villainous choice" as opposed to older magic sets, which didn't deal with this design space as much. although other mechanics in the same vein exist, like Monsterous, their prolificness in the last year or so feels like complexity creep.Although the names are flavorful and saving on card space as allows for powerful and interesting cards, the volume of new vocabulary for older pretty routine actions (such as making your opponent choose things, permanents entering the graveyard from anywhere, interacting with your opponent or their cards, or exiling cards from your graveyard to pay a cost) can feel incomprehensible and overwhelming at times. There's a reason "whenever you cast a noncreature spell" has bever been erattaed to "whenever you exhibit your prowess"
Thanks for reading! Have a great day.

The reasons for the vocabulary increase in the type of effects you’re talking about is the result of solving a core problem. Commander has become the most played tabletop format. In order to hit a threshold that a theme is playable in Commander, it has to appear on more cards than can possibly fit in a single set. In fact, more that can fit in three sets (so even a return to blocks wouldn’t solve this problem.) The solution is to play into themes that are backwards compatible. At first, we just hit upon themes that Magic has been doing a long time (caring about card types, graveyard, typal, etc.). Eventually, though we start to both exhaust those and start to feel to repetitive. One of our solutions was discovered in Dominaria with historic. What we call batching. If we combo existing things, but in a flavorful combination, we create new backward compatible themes that haven’t yet been the core of decks. Yeah, you’ve made artifact decks and legendary decks, but none with those two effects, plus Sagas, combined. In order for batching to work, we need to give it a flavor to hold it together, and that requires vocabulary. The flavor also helps the mechanic feel organic to the set it’s in. In short, player preferences create new design challenges, and this trend is one of the things design is doing to meet those challenges.

Midweek magic on arena gave us a temporary historic pauper queue. I wanted to try out a classic dimir control deck but could not find something crucial to control decks, namely, a boardwipe. What is holding design back to print weird weak boardwipes like Taste of Death or Aetherize at common?

One of our rules about common cards is we try not to make 2 for 1’s.

Did WotC ever consider somewhat seriously errataing prowess to something like "Prowess - noncreature" and making the spelled out prowess clones into other kinds of prowess(eg "Prowess - Historic", Prowess -Artifacts)?

We haven’t seriously considered it.