I would like to invoke the power of birthday trivia! I am turning 30 this year and would like to know if you remember any trivia about Ghave, Guru of Spores from the first official commander precons!

Or alternatively, of my favorite pair of Magic characters, Gisa and Geralf.

Thanks, and have a great summer!
Give the story team high fives from me.

When we originally designed Innistrad, we were tickled by the idea that blue and black created different kinds of Zombies. Blue built them out of parts, ala Frankenstein, where black was more about necromancy. To capture this distinction, we made two characters, brother and sister, that represent each type of Zombie making, and made their core conflict about which is better.Happy 30th Birthday!

Hi mark, I'm now SO keen for Strixhaven and as an artist I feel so seen with Prismari. My question for today if it's something you may know, can I still take some extra curricular lessons in necromancy over at Witherbloom?

Just like any university, you can take classes at other colleges. The students at that college just have priority to the classes.

What’s the color pie reasoning behind zombies being blue?

Blue zombies are Frankenstein-like experiments created by combining dead body parts together and bringing it to “life”. This is in contrast to the necromancy of black.

In a previous ask you said Necromancy was a global enchantment, but it's not. I'm curious what it was you originally had meant to say about the cycle of enchantments in that block?

I was being a bit technical. It’s a global enchantment that turns into a local one (aka an aura).

Am I remembering right that reaction to Liliana of the Dark Realms is what helped WOTC realize that they needed to keep planeswalkers in a narrow theme of their color pie? If so, is "Swamps Matter" still Liliana or open to another black planeswalker?

Liliana is all about necromancy and “swamps matter” can be done by a different planeswalker of black magic.

Is Liliana moving away from reanimation? Her new + kills things, her - gets things to your hand, and her ultimate makes tokens.

Her thing is necromancy. Making zombies flavorwise is similar to reanimation.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding both colors, but if green is concerned with the natural order and black relies heavily on necromancy and undead things, both of which flout that natural order, wouldn't those two colors be opposed to each other, too?

Black and Green are opposed to one another.

Could a monoBlack mage object to or dislike necromancy?

Sure.

I'm a big fan of Liliana. I love necromancers. Which part of Liliana of the Drak Realms was her necromancy or was this something different in her personality we haven't seen before?

Liliana if the Dark Realms is considered a mistake because it doesn’t match her powers as a character. It was that card that got us to map out the flavor and connected mechanics of each planeswalker to prevent a repeat of that mistake.

I have always liked the way the flavor of Animate Dead (and its cousins like Necromancy) played out: you could kill the creature again, but also destroy the enchantment to break the spell. For a long time this ability has been on sorceries instead. I assume this is because of rules and issues, the same reason Animate Dead has such terrible Oracle text. Is there any way the flavor of the old enchantments could return without a rules or wording nightmare?

“Enchant dead thing” just has a lot of rules baggage. For what it’s worth I love Animate Dead.