Concerning power creep, there may be a comparison and distinction to be made between distorting a format and adding relevant cards to a format. If a card is relevant, it shows up in decks, right? Maybe even a lot of decks. That's good for a format-relevant product. Otherwise, why even make the product?But then what is the delineating mark between format change (good) and format distortion (bad)?One could argue that Serra Angel is an example of format change. Arguably obsolete, nobody is really objecting to the card's irrelevance in eternal formats.So. What is that dividing line? Is formst chsnge just 'distortion over time'? I would argue that healthful change is oft misperceived as power creep, but it took a lot of cards in Commander before we figured out that '2 MV ramp and repeating value' were the prime culprits in accelerating the casual format beyond its 'battlecruiser Magic' roots.I'm not making a big argument one way or another, just trying to stimulate a brain or two..

For starters you’re not using “power creep” as I use it on this blog, but for the sake of saying the same thing for the tenth time, I understand you mean the increase of cards impacting older environments. You bring up the other thing we haven’t been talking about. Card influx talks in neutral terms. Add N relevant cards and impact the environment a particular amount. The faster you add N, the quicker it changes. The sets designed for older formats aren’t adding in cards neutrally though. They are adding in suites of cards built around particular mechanical themes. Adding in whole suites of cards changes environments more quickly as the threshold to make a deck theme relevant gets hit more quickly. That’s the other big impact of designing for a format. It causes you to impact it faster as you are designing whole swaths of mechanical pieces, not just cards. That’s very relevant to the topic at hand.

May I request some detail about why expend is templated this way? I think it's a very cool mechanic, but it reads like it cares about you doing something four times rather than having done something a fourth time.

It’s not about doing it a fourth time. It’s talking about casting some number of spells with a combined mana value of 4 or greater.

Why hasn't "reveal a card in hand" mechanics such as forecast gone over well? Are you allowed to use the attributes of the revealed cards as a cost (mana value, color) in non-digital?

It both isn’t much of a cost and it undoes hidden information which is important.

Countably infinite does NOT mean finite. If you shuffled an infinite number of Clown tokens into your library, you would never draw another kind of card in that game. Infinity plus however many cards were in your library is still infinity. Imagine if you didn't shuffle. How many cards would be on top of the first real card? Infinite cards are on top, so you'd never draw the card. If you shuffled the deck, that would still be the case. There would be an infinite number of Clown tokens before and after each real card, because the chance of getting a Clown token between any two cards while shuffling is 100%. Not 99%, not 99.999...%, just 100%. Infinity divided by the cards in your library is infinity. You can never draw any real cards, because even if you took off the top card, infinity minus one is still infinity.Grenzo, Dungeon Warden would always hit, since there are an infinite number of Clown creature token cards on the bottom of your library. Since tokens have 0 mana value, you can't cascade into any real cards. You could mill out if you got hit by Tasha's Hideous Laughter. If you chose Land for Abundant Harvest, you would get one if you had a land in your library. However, if you got hit by Cut Your Losses, you would only mill Clown tokens, and no cards from your library. Infinity plus the number of real cards in your library divided in half is infinity, so you'd never get to the first real card, and you'd still have an infinite number of Clown tokens on top. Finally, if you happened to play Braingeyser with X equal to infinity, you would STILL not draw any real cards. Infinity minus infinity is infinity. You would have an infinite number of Clown tokens in your hand, and an infinite number of Clown tokens on top of your library.It's easier if you think of infinity as a description or a quality rather than a number. Treating it like a number infects whatever math you're doing with odd-looking results.

FYI

White is able to return little things from your graveyard to your hand/the battlefield. There are a dozen or so cards (Sun Titan, Court of Ardenvale, Redemption Choir, etc.) that let you return any permanent of N or less MV, and a bunch more that specify creature/artifact/enchantment.My question is, how much of bend/break is it for White to potentially return lands from the graveyard? Is it something you'd rather avoid all together, and cards like Sun Titan et al. are a mistake? Is it permissable at certain costs/requirements? I imagine when you're paying 5+ mana you probably don't want to target a land even if you could. Could a card that just straight up let you play lands from the graveyard be printed in white?

We let white do it when in a large bunch where it is unlikely the thing you will get. It can’t do it where we specifically name land.

If/When: A legal card with higher mana value than Draco

If. We make cards like Erratic Explosion that deal damage to players equal to a card’s mana value, so we want to be careful how expensive we make it.

Why do we see so few cards that reward playing specific basic land types in Standard, such as Blanchwood Armor, Armored Ascension or Flow of Ideas? These seem like a slam dunk for encouraging monocolored decks in Constructed, something that we see less and less of as dual lands are released. Take the Darksteel Affinity for Land Type golems for instance: they solve the high mana value playability issue very well while asking for a meaningful commitment.

Those effects work best in uncommon, especially if that’s all they’re focused on. At uncommon, those cards are draft traps though if the set doesn’t support monocolor play. So, they’re not something we can just drop in most sets.

Hi Mark!
If/when: another new symbol in the mana value, like Phyrexian Mana or Hybrid/Twobrid?

When.

Hey mark! I enjoyed your alphabet podcast, but I might have another one for you. When guilds of Ravnica came out, R&D referred to the nightveil predator cycle of cards as costing CCDD. Does that give you an entry for D?

D moved to N when C moved to M. Now the translated version of that sentence. We used to use C to mean any colored mana, so if we were making a tight cycle (all the cards have the same mana value) where all the costs cost two generic mana and one colored mana, we’d write it as 2C. If we were making a cycle of two-colored multicolor cards, we’d use D for the second color. For example, if it was a tight cycle with two generic mana and one of two different colored mana, we’d write it as 2CD.But then Oath of the Gatewatch came out and we introduced colorless mana in costs. We needed a letter for that, so we used C for colorless. That meant we had to change the old usage of C as it would make a cost of 2C ambiguous. We changed from C to M to mean any colored mana. When we changed it to M, we changed the secondary color to N as N follows M like D followed C.

Enjoyed your podcast running through past mercenary cards. One thing that stood out to me is that the mercenary "recruitment" mechanic of searching for a lower cmc creature and putting it on field doesn't feel like something you'd do today. Is there a general move against searching effects? I guess the closest now would be "look at the top X cards of your library...." style effects

We’ve shifted away from tutor mechanics as they make games play out too similarly. You’re correct, we’re more likely to do “look at top cards of your library” as it both has more variance and encourages having more cards of the theme in your deck.