Hi Mark. I love Bloomburrow's design from veteran perspective! It's such a novel way to do a 10 color pair faction set. However, from a new player's perspective, I hope it won't be too overwhelming since the mechanics so far spoiled include Landfall, Storm, Flashback, Threshold, Gift, Offspring, Expend, Prowess, Forage, Food/Treasure, Valiant, 10 Typal themes, Pawprints, and Classes. Was there concern about complexity creep or do you think the 10 typal motif will facilitate learning the mechanics in the set (I'm not sure what you would call this phenomenon where, counterintuitively, adding more complexity simplifies cognitive processing, like adding hyphens to phone numbers)?

Most of the mechanics are put into a specific animal two-color pair, so you don’t end up playing the majority of these mechanics together. They are also on the simpler end of the spectrum.

To the Johnny who says best-in-slot commanders make deck building too easy: If you still want that challenge, try building your deck in the wrong colors. Mono-white landfall, boros graveyard, gruul artifacts, and such are all very fun and challenging to build, and they have more potential than one would expect in the hands of an experienced player.

A fine piece of advice.

Is changing an Ability Word to a Keyword considered functional errata? Like if you changed "Landfall - Whenever a land enters the battlefield..." to "Whenever you landfall...."

It is functional errata.

Mark, I'm not sure how sold I am on Committing a Crime being an interesting mechanical condition. With the high amount of activated abilities on old cards, and the amount of triggered abilities on newer cards, triggering these types of cards seems like a foregone conclusion rather than a true condition. If everything ends up being balanced well, I guess that's all well and good, but I guess I don't find a condition that's "free" most of the time particularly compelling gameplay.

Are you a fan of landfall?We have found many players enjoy getting rewarded for things they would already be doing. The more advanced players can figure out how to optimize it.

Not a rules manager, but a “fix” for mechanically referencing ability words would be:Step 1) create a keyword that technically does nothing with the same name as the ability word.Step 2) retroactively add the keyword to all cards with the ability word. So instead of “Landfall<\i> - When a land enters draw a card” you’d have “Landfall. When a land enters draw a card”. It would work on a mechanical level. It would create a huuuuge amount of confusion sometime in the future.