To clarify my earlier question: After you joined Wizards, what was the first premier set that you were not officially on an R&D team for? (I assume you contributed in some way to almost every set.)

Technically, Onslaught, although I was responsible for morph being in the set, cycling returning, and pushing the typal theme. : )

Happy birthday Mark! Magic has been a lot of things to me over the years. I started playing 22 years ago, a few months before Onslaught released, and fell in love with its fascinating mechanics and worlds. I drifted a way after a while, then came back in college to play Commander, where it became a way of regularly spending time with a group of friends. We couldn't keep meeting regularly after graduating, but after getting my current job, I started drafting every week at my LGS, and it quickly became my biggest reason to regularly go somewhere for social reasons rather than just home and work. Thanks for everything you've done for this game!

Thanks for sharing.

Hi Mark, Thanks for continuously answering questions! It has become my daily routine to your blog. I've two questions regarding the Heroes of the Realm card Treizeci, Sun of Serra. What exactly is a retro frame? Can a card from e.g Onslaught be considered a retro frame card, or are only new, unique cards with an old border considered retro framed? How would you define the card type Legends? Creatures w the subtype Legend or any legendary card? Thank you!

I believe they mean legendary creatures and are using the old term for it, back when legendary was a supertype. I believe retro frame means any card in that frame including old cards originally printed in it.

With keywords being remade, old cards that care about them could become obsolete. Why can't those old cards be erratad to batch the new and old parts? It's barely even a functional errata since they'd work identically as before, but with the new keywords included. Four cards from the Onslaught block cared about creatures with morph. They were changed to batch morph and megamorph as "morph abilities" when Tarkir came out. With disguise as remade morph and the implication that it's replacing morph entirely, why not add it to the batch and have cards care about the batch instead the single keyword? Same with discover and cascade, or how you've said a remade modular is more likely than modular returning. If fan favorite keywords are going to be remade and replaced, could they least be done in a way that's backwards compatible with the old support cards?

It’s a slippery slope. When is a mechanic a redone version and when is it just a tweak? What if we try something and then go back? The errata now possibly prevents us from reprinting the card. Functional errata can cause as many problems as it solves, so we have to be very careful with it.In the case of morph, the vast majority of the cards that interact with it say “face down” or “colorless” and don’t need any errata.This isn’t so say we can’t consider it, but it comes with baggage.

Hi Mark, I recently saw a post about splitring the type Beast i to different animals. Will this mean that you proactively errata anything that mentions beast in their card type or rule text? I have always loved the type beast, being the kindred that I loved the most since onslaught (finally made a Gahiji/ Kaheera edh deck a tear or so ago) and I would miss this kindred a lot.

Beast isn’t going away. We’re just using animal creature types more. Note that the majority of creatures with the type Beast aren’t Earth animals.

how likely is that we could get a plane with only odd/less printed creature types? for example: brushwagg; zubera; kavu's ... etc

That’s what I did in Odyssey. It didn’t go well (as we didn’t plan as ahead as we do now and didn’t know Onslaught was going to be typal).I think we like to find spots for new and less used creature types, but as this blog shows there are a lot of existing favorites that need their time in the sun.

I got introduced to Magic with Onslaught and always found the tombstone icon confusing. Even once someone explained that it didn't do anything itself, was just a reminder for a graveyard effect, I didn't really get it since I have to read the card to know the effect anyway so it struck me more as visual nuisance than helpful reminder. I do find newer symbols like DFC icons helpful though. Do you think it would have been better received if tied to a specific mechanic like flashback?

The tombstone went away interestingly for printing reasons and not audience reaction reasons. It didn’t work with the Eighth Edition frame, so we just made it an Odyssey block thing. The original plan was to make it a permanent part of Magic. I don’t think the message of “this works in the graveyard” was fundamentally flawed.

Would you further explain what you mean with today's polls? Which previous sets would qualify?

I’m Onslaught, Lorwyn, and Ixalan are examples.

Do you think one of the difficulties in Morph is if there are not enough pushed cards then everyone just knowing what the card is really undermining the Morph part of the card like Exalted Angel in original Onslaught or Den Protector in Tarkir Block?

That is one of the challenges.

While my start in Onslaught gives me some old frame nostalgia, I've always really hated the look of the original gold frame. Will I be able to get all the new (gold) cards from the commander decks in current frames, or just the face commanders?

The decks themselves are all retro frame. However, you can get modern frame versions with extended-art of the new cards in collector boosters.