Part of Vision Design is pushing the boundaries of Magic (I believe). Sometimes, that means brainstorming wild successes like double faced cards or morph , but other times there are mechanics like the Animal batch or LCI’s gem resources that get killed by set or play design. Does vision design have limits on what they can propose? how do you foster outside-the-box creativity while keeping unfeasable ideas in check?

Part of pushing boundaries is doing things that end up being too far, but you don’t know the line if you never test it.

FYI on May 16th I asked that given how disguise reworks morph and the dev issues with heroic, what would you consider changing to rework heroic. You replied “there is an upcoming set that answers that very question”. I presumed you were referring to a Marvel set, but qanadhar left a comment certain it was Bloomburrow. Just some of the fun foreshadowing of Blogatog. :)(I presume there’s an article or podcast that explains the rework soon?)

Next week’s article talks about the mechanics. Short version: heroic looked into allowing abilities, but there existed things you could repeatedly activate for 0, so we left it off. Valiant added abilities back in to help it trigger more, and used the once a turn restriction to deal with the problem interactions.

Much like how disguise reworked morph to help solve the 2/2 for 3 issue, if you could rework heroic, what would you do differently? What’s R&D’s thoughts on the play/design issues that have come to light as the game has developed as a whole?

There is a set upcoming that examines that very question.

Oh, Hi Mark, continuing my quest to identify the 2% of rules that could not be reverse engineered from cards, while I'm sure the stack could be figured out (counterspells don't work without it and split second referencesit specifically) what about special actions? I feel like morph (and all other face down mechanics) would be assumed to use the stack.

The key to finding the 2% is figuring out what rules are never stated or implied on cards. We don’t ever talk about layers, so it’s a hard thing to intuit.

"With disguise taking over for morph, I think the return of any version of morph is low. And megamorph (at least with that name) was already pretty low." It will never happen, but I think that the name Megadisguise is hilarious.

We’re going to probably need another Un-set for that.

Can we get a batch storm scale rating for morph, manifest, disguise, and cloak?

Facedown mechanics are a 4. We, and the players, like them.

Hi Mark! We've seen a lot of mechanics in the recent times sort of "replace" other older mechanics; Morph -> Disguise, Cascade -> Discover, even further back with Chroma -> Devotion or Fear -> Intimidate -> Menace.How often does R&D like/want to do this, and whenever one of these "replacement" mechanics is designed and confirmed, how does that impact the status of the older mechanic and its future in the game? Does the older mechanic just go away forever, like with Chroma and Fear/Intimidate, or are those exceptions and not the norm?

When we upgrade a mechanic, we seldom return to the original version.

For your top 20 (non-evergreen) mechanics I noticed none were from this decade. What would you say is the best new mechanic from this decade so far?

Note that I would pick the mechanic that started a trend. Foretell is an awesome more recent mechanic, but Morph is the first to use face down as a resource, so I chose that for the talk.Amass, while not technically from this decade, is only five years old. Mechanics I really like from this decade include: alliance, backup, collect evidence, connive, corrupted, decayed, enlist, escape, foretell, incubate, learn/lesson, magecraft, mutate (although it has its complexity issues), party, prototype, reconfigure, role tokens, and shield counters.

Just wanted to put this out there! casual magic player, I like to make typical type commander decks, example: every set I collect the 1-2 skeleton cards released in it, but I have a problem with cards with morph/disguise, when they are on a card, they take over the card, the skeleton card becomes the morph/disguise card instead and I don't add it to any of my decks that are not morph/disguise themed.

Thanks for sharing. The morph/disguise creatures have to be something, but if they don’t work for you, I agree to not use them.

Hi Mark, I have a question about morph vs disguise. The disguise mechanic is very flavourful, while the morph mechanic seems to be flavour neutral, or even negative. was this a focus point in designing a new facedown mechanic?

Once we knew we had to rename it, we used the opportunity to add more flavor.