My feeling on leaks has not changed. I believe leaks result in worse previews and actively hurt influencers that depend upon previews. But can’t the creators who do reactions to the previews just do so to the leaks instead.

Previews (meaning new previews when you’re the one doing the actual previewing) drive a lot of traffic and are a huge deal to the people that get them.

"I have you officially run my teaser by internal people, and right now they’re saying “no teaser”. How do others feel?" Can you please poll your question marks about this? I find it difficult to believe there would be a significant number of people who wouldn't want a teaser, even if someone looked at all of the leaks I don't know why they still would explicitly not want a teaser to be created.

One of the key functions of the teaser is to create online conversation. If every tease is just followed by “It’s blah”, it loses a lot of its impact.

Hi Mark,Really excited for MH3 around the corner, when does your teaser come out for it?

I’m not sure I’m doing a teaser. The leaks make it hard to do it in a way that will lead to the effect I aim for when making the teaser.

Hello, I always try and avoid leaks because I look forward to spoiler season, but I noticed there have been so many MH3 leaks that y'all put up an article about it today, but when I go to click it it says file 404 not found - is this an error or did yall decide to take it down?

The link has been fixed.

The Modern Horizons 3 Leaks, Nulldrifters, and You

Can you please do something about unofficial leaks? They ruin the anticipation and hype of the actual preview season which dampen the appeal of future sets and they are virtually impossible to avoid for those of us who actively follow and spend time in Magic related social media communities.

Unofficial, by definition, means it’s outside of our control. Trust me, if I had the power up shut down unofficial leaks, I’d do it on a heartbeat. As regular readers know, I am not a fan of them.

With all of the different outlets for spoilers during spoiler season, do you keep track of what cards have been spoiled by date in case someone were to ask about a card that has been leaked but not officially spoiled? It seems like it could be hard to catch with everything going on sometimes.

I have a rough idea, but don’t know every card’s preview date.

I may be unfair to complain, coming from a time where we wouldn't know what cards we would open on a booster when the set was released. Even so, I gotta be vocal about having a spoiler season promised to us at a very late date and then having it postponed again. And I don't see how giving info on the set having an extra mechanic is any helpful. So please, when the full set from a shop in Spain like they always do, don't come public to complain on how you hate leaks. Sorry I have to be vocal.

I honestly feel your pain. This whole Pandemic is stress inducing, and that’s from someone living at ground zero (King County) here in the U.S. I’m sorry I wrote down the wrong date and it got printed in my article. We corrected in just a few hours, but I get that news travels fast. Had this been business as normal this last week and not a chaotic transition to work at home, I’m pretty confident the mistake would have been caught and fixed.Preview seasons take a long time to put together and there’s a huge amount of coordination as there’s tons of moving pieces. It’s just not something that’s easy to move. In fact, it’s a pretty monumental task in normal times, and this is far from that. I get a lot of messages from the public. I truly sense that everyone is eager for things to take their minds off the scariness that is today’s news. And we’re doing our best to help with that, but people wanting something quicker does not magically make it any easier on our end to make it quicker. Like everyone, we’re doing the best we can to adapt to a pretty fast moving reality. I promise you we’ve put together an awesome set, and it won’t be that long before you can all start talking all about it. And when that day comes, I promise I have tons to share with you all. Thanks.

Does wizards have any market data that suggests leaks adversely affect sales or are they frowned upon simply for being illegal?

Yes, we have data that they adversely affect sales, the larger the gap between them happening and the set releasing, the bigger the impact. Also, it messes up our carefully planned preview plan which we believe lessens the experience for the player when learning the new set.

Felt I should share that normally I'm someone who read card leaks without hesitation, but War of the Spark is the first set I've actively avoided doing so. The narrative structure of the reveals added a compelling element that wasn't there before. So hats off to you all! It's really been something special.

I’m glad you’re enjoying it.

How about a ticked off Maro podcast? R-Rated as previously suggested. You could rant on the Weatherlight story, leaks, mistakes you’ve made on the podcast previously, color pie breaks, bananas, all the worst things.

Ooh, a Maro rants podcast has potential.