Your article a couple days ago goes through the reasons why you chose specific creature types for each color pair, but you didn't talk about any types you considered, but didn't end up choosing. Can you talk about a couple types that didn't make the cut as being a focus?

The two big ones, meaning the existed in the file for a while, was Badgers for red/green and Weasels for black/red.

At long last, it is time to invoke my birthday trivia! I love your pieces on the color pie and I’m a huge Assassin’s Creed fan, so I’d love if you had any interesting trivia on AC cards that the Council of Colors discussed or tweaked. If nothing comes to mind, I am a massive fan of Boros and Minotaurs; if there’s any trivia about Boros Minotaurs, that would be lovely, or either individually. I get a ton from DtW and Making Magic, keep up the wonderful work!

In Theros block, Minotaurs power and toughness had to add up to a least 5. We made one exception later in the block.Happy Birthday!

Hi Mark!
Yesterday is my birthday. May I get trivia among one of my favorite cards - Worldfire, Wurmcoil Engine, Radiant Performer, Sundial of the Infinite, or Vizzerdrix? Or a random card from MH3 not covered by your previous Making Magic articles?

Vizzerdrix got created as a card for a product called Starter. The reason we made it is we had a series of TV commercials, one of which featured Kezzerdrix from Tempest (it involved mixing a wrestler, a chainsaw, and a bunny in a machine). A different ad in the same campaign used an Orgg. So to tie to those, we made a simpler Orgg and Vizzerdrix, as the original cards were too complicated for a beginner product.Happy Belated Birthday!

FYI, you listed Kindred as a supertype in your article today, but it's a card type

Correct. It’s a type. My mistake.

Your article today mentions Set Design tried putting a straight Recurring Nightmare reprint into Modern, then removed it when it playtested too strong... Recurring Nightmare is on the Reserved List, which your article didn't mention. Did it not come up until after the playtests?

It’s possible they put it in and then remembered they couldn’t. I just know it was in the file for a short blip. Maybe they were getting a sense of it knowing they’d tweak it later.

Hi Mark! This is an odd one but I'm desperately trying to locate a complete form of your Article "Elegance". The polarised responses you show in "An Elegant Response" along with your mentioning it in Drive to Work #44 (I'm a only *a little* behind) have me ravenous to read it. I've found the base 50 words (through the wayback machine) but the hyperlinks don't work and the teaser has only gotten me more excited, do you have any suggestions as to where I might find more of this article?

“Elegance” has been lost to time. It’s a huge amount of work to fix all the links, and is considered not worth the investment of time. I can look at home and see if I can track down the original version on my computer.EDIT: I had it on my work computer. See above.

It looks like your "Making Magic" articles for a new set is made of two parts: vision design (part 1) and set design (part 2). I wonder if there can be "part 3: play design".

I tend to hit the play design highlights in the set design article. A lot of final design choices come from set design and play design talking.

So last week, iirc, you mentioned that today's making magic article explains why energy moved from temur into jeskai. But the article makes no mention of the color shift. Can you explain why it had to move colors?

I believe I said my podcast with Erik Lauer on the topic talks about it. That goes up this Friday. But maybe I misspoke and said my article.I’ll give you the short version. The set had to divvy up the core themes and Eldrazi worked better in green/blue/red as it wanted to have more ramping elements and wanted green more. Energy went into blue/red/white because it had more of an aggro component and played better in those colors.

Happy birthday, Mark. I have ADHD which makes it extremely hard for me to focus on any one task for longer than a minute or two, especially creative projects. The distance between the idea I have in my head and making it a reality is so far, and I come up with new ideas so quickly that it feels like I'll at best see a fraction through to completion.Amateur magic cards are a scene change in my ability to be creative. I can turn an idea into a finished card in as fast as I can say it out loud, and I can collaborate with friends on larger projects at a pace I can maintain without burning myself out. Thank you so much for your articles on the color pie and on Nuts & Bolts.

Glad they’ve been helpful. Thanks for sharing.

Do you still do the "making magic" stormscale posts? I really enjoy reading about the mechanics and how they are to design around and what development thinks about them vs the community

I do.