Hi, Mark!!!Last night I went 3-1-0 in my first ever limited event, the Bloomburrow prerelease, courtesy of a black-red deck built around Valley Rotcaller.Please apply double turbo high-fives to everybody involved in making the set (including yourself); it's awesome and adorable and a ton of fun to play and open!

Will do!

Do you ever encounter issues where a mechanic that you want to be core to a set is too niche in its slice of the color pie? Like, food was a big theme in both Eldraine sets, but it is a mechanic that can only appear WGB, so you were limited somewhat in just how much you could use it compared to something disguise, which is a completely color-pie agnostic mechanic. When designing full custom sets I often have ideas for mechanics that seem to be total slam dunks, but are actually kind of limited in how much I can use them.

It happens from time to time. It’s why vision design checks in with the Council of Colors.

What year and which expansion was the first limited at the World Championships?

The second ever World Championships in 1995, held in Seattle, had a limited component. It was sealed and the players were given a whole bunch of packs. I don’t know the exact mix, but I believe it included a bunch of Fourth Edition in it as Ivan Curina, from Italy, (who made the Top 8) got Channel, Instill Energy, and Colossus of Sardia which allowed him to attack with a 9/9 on turn three.

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.

Based on answers lately, there are a lot of recent movies/TV shows you've seen with your limited free time that you've enjoyed. Are there any that you've just not cared for much, either for not meeting expectations or being just plain bad?

I’d rather talk about stuff I enjoyed. I watch stuff I don’t enjoy.

Hey, Mark! Quick one- I've been noticing a lot of "bite" cards in green (i.e. Hunter's Talent) the last few years, and not as many fight cards. At first, I thought this was "too much", but I quickly realized the hoop for green removal is already pretty daunting, and maybe this is just the direction you're going in.
Am I reading this right?

We have been increasing the number of “bite” spells (deal damage equal to power) to help with green removal in limited.

What was the worst limited environment in modern magic history?

Legends was the most painful limited environment I’ve ever played. (In its defense, it wasn’t build to be played in limited.)

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.”

Hi Mark!
With Karlov Manor and Bloomburrow, we’ve now seen two cycles of common creature cards that can be played with Hybrid mana in sets that otherwise don’t have a major hybrid theme. Does this mean that we’re going to see an increase in the number of hybrid commons in the future?

Common hybrid cards have proven to be a valuable tool in helping to raise as-fan of certain themes for limited, so I do think we’ll see it used again.

Hey mark! Newer magic fan who is absolutely in love with bloomburrow, genuinely my favorite set, and several of my long-time magic player friends favorite set as well. I have to ask though: bloomburrow seems like a perfect set to print the capacity for more fox-tribal support, which doesn't really exist much despite, from my admittedly very limited research, seeming like a thing community members would like. Is there any specific reason as to why fox tribal isn't a thing, and doesn't seem to be on the shortlist for ideas?

There are a lot of animals and only so much space in the set for animals to focus on.