Were there ever any anti-typal cards in Bloomburrow? It would have been interesting to see how an otter interacts with rabbits, or how bats interact with raccoons, etc.

Making typal work was hard enough without adding cards to discourage it.

There doesn't seem to be any dogs in Bloomburrow. I'm sad.

In my first preview column for Bloomburrow, I talked about the two takes we could do for the anthropomorphic animal genre. Take #1 involved working around a biome, so it was limited to creatures of that biome. Take #2 allowed any animals we wanted as it wasn’t built around a biome. We obviously went with Take #1 which greatly shaped the animal selection options. Had we done Take #2, there probably would have been Dogs, but probably very little typal.

Wazzzaaaaap, Mark da Shark,Just wanted to send kudos and share my excitement about so much of Bloomburrow! It's gonna be my first prerelease in a long while, since M20, I think, as well as there's so many things to love about it. I've been a big fan of Doug Beyer since Kaladesh, glad he was the lead designer on this set. Also super pumped to be getting both a revisit to the Heroic mechanic in Valiant, one of my favorite mechanics from Theros, and the amount of rabbit typal support. My Cadira commander deck is gonna go through a major redesign when the set is properly out. Hope you have a lovely day!

I’m glad you’re so excited. I can’t wait to hear all the prerelease stories.

I’m very excited for Duskmourn, but I wish that Bloomburrow had received a second set to further develop its setting. It’s clear that the set was so packed that things were left out. For example, it would have been nice if the types received explicit support at common in both of its colors rather than just the one. I do get that part of the point was to have a looser typal structure for greater flexibility, and I definitely love that choice compared to say XLN. I suppose 1/4 of all commons (20/86) referring to a particular type would have been too much?

If a setting is successful, we can return. It’s risky to stay on an untested world for two sets.

To clarify my earlier question: After you joined Wizards, what was the first premier set that you were not officially on an R&D team for? (I assume you contributed in some way to almost every set.)

Technically, Onslaught, although I was responsible for morph being in the set, cycling returning, and pushing the typal theme. : )

Was there any discussion on having a light Elemental typal theme to support playing multiple Calamity Beasts?

Not that I’m aware of, but the adding of Elemental happened in set design.

Hi Mark! Just wanna give shout out to awesome sets you have planned for the Dragonstorm arc: Bloomburrow for the high fantasy traditionalists and typal lovers, Duskmourn for the modern horror fans and a different take on an Enchantment matters set, The Death Race as a fun exploration of the Omenpaths and finally a set centered around Vehicles (I mean it's not confirmed but…c'mon), and a long-awaited Return to Tarkir set for Magic veterans and those who waited for a wedge faction set! I am absolutely stoked for all of these sets, and I am glad that Magic embraces variety enough to take risks for modern, novel aesthetics while still preserving old, familiar aesthetics!

I’m excited you’re excited.

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.”

Scales to ShaleIt would have been cool to read “Affinity for Lizards”. I enjoy seeing Affinity care about non-artifact things.

We were careful about how much typal scaling we did.

In regards to the winter basic lands not being Snow type: I like to think that it’s just regular snow, not *magic* snow. Does snow mechanically fall under the same umbrella as kindred? Where is you started using it everywhere it would get out of hand?

Yes. Showing snow in the art shouldn’t automatically mean the card has the snow supertype.