When I first saw Apex Devastator, I remember seeing the card say Cascade, Cascade, Cascade, Cascade, thinking that had a very clean yet Mythic feeling. When developing a new ability or using an ability in a new way, how do you determine when it's correct to write out the keyword four times versus saying "Cascade four times". In a similar way, how do you decide, for instance, in the case of Gitaxian Spellstalker, whether it should be prowess, prowess, as opposed something like Prowess 2?

Templating has an emotional impact component. While clarity is usually the driving factor, excitement is also important.

Why do Narset, Enlightened Exile and Bria, Riptide Rogue have different wordings for the same effect of giving all your creatures prowess?

Bria is our normal template. My guess is Narset didn’t have the text space to do the normal template, so it did the shorter one.

Was there ever thought of a tweak to Prowess as an ability word "Whenever you cast a noncreature spell... Blank" I feel that has a bit broader design space than the hard keyword

We can still write those words. I’m not sure we do it enough to change the prowess mechanic into an ability word.

Mark, I recently went back and listened to your podcast, "Five Requests I Refuse" and appreciated your points about why you can't let every color do whatever the players might ask for. I get it: limiting each color keeps its identity distinct and gives other colors ways to win against it.But that raises the opposite question: why do the colors overlap as much as they do? Vigilance is available to green, white, and blue. Lifegain is in green, white, and (sometimes) black. Prowess is in blue, red, and white. Most colors get access to some form of creature removal. Ditto card draw (although with different conditions).

I get why the colors have to be as distinct as they are. Why shouldn't they be *more* distinct?

Because we have a lot of Magic cards to make and we need the flexibility to make them feel different from one another.

"Probably when. Prowess is deciduous and tertiary in white." You've been SAYING that prowess is tertiary in White for 9 years now, but there has never been a mono-white card with prowess outside of Khans block that isn't a reprint of a card from Khans block. Even among those reprints, 3 of the 4 are from Masters sets. So, if White is supposed to have access to prowess, I'd like to see it actually have access to prowess. Otherwise, I kind of wish you'd just admit that it's only in red and blue.

White being allowed access to prowess means we’re allowed to make it if we find a set that needs it, not that we’re forced to make it. A tertiary ability can take many years to appear.

Would something that was restricted to "you cast a noncreature permanent spell" be closer to a 'fixed' prowess?

I’m not sure there’s a reason to fix prowess.

I'd like to request an article that goes in-depth on mechanics like Prowess and Skulk, that talks about why they didn't work out as evergreen mechanics. Perhaps other mechanics too that you think would fit into such an article.

Seems more like a podcast topic than an article.

could black get prowess? it's the color that cares the most about noncreature spells after red and blue, correct?

No. Black, green, and white all can care about noncreature spells in different ways. Blue is primary in prowess, red secondary, and white tertiary.

Some people I've been talking to are confused by the reminder text for Plot. They believe that, since it says to "play only as a sorcery", that the spell in question actually becomes a sorcery and e.g. would trigger Prowess. I know that can't be how it works, both because reminder text isn't rules text and because it working like that would require massive rewrites to spell resolution, but they continue insisting that if it didn't work like that the card wouldn't say it.
Can you please clarify this?

The spell does not become a sorcery, if it isn’t one already. You can only play it at the times you can play a sorcery. The card stays the card type it is. Note, none of the card with plot are instants or permanents with flash, but there are cards that let you plot other cards.

hey mark! recently people I know have been expressing issues with what I'm calling "vocabulary fatigue". Wizards has been recently utilizing a lot of very flavorful mechanic names and ability words, which is something i myself appreciate, as someone who plays a lot of limited and only needs to focus on a few of them at a time, but a lot of my friends are saying is making their experience with the recent sets worse, because they have to remember what cards do when it isn't super obvious from their actual text. In the past year or so we've had a lot of new "action batching" mechanics (by which i mean vocabulary that references a specific action or kind of action so that cards can more easily care about that action without spelling the action out every time) such as "the ring tempts you", "decend", "commit a crime", "collect evidence", "suspect", and "face a villainous choice" as opposed to older magic sets, which didn't deal with this design space as much. although other mechanics in the same vein exist, like Monsterous, their prolificness in the last year or so feels like complexity creep.Although the names are flavorful and saving on card space as allows for powerful and interesting cards, the volume of new vocabulary for older pretty routine actions (such as making your opponent choose things, permanents entering the graveyard from anywhere, interacting with your opponent or their cards, or exiling cards from your graveyard to pay a cost) can feel incomprehensible and overwhelming at times. There's a reason "whenever you cast a noncreature spell" has bever been erattaed to "whenever you exhibit your prowess"
Thanks for reading! Have a great day.

The reasons for the vocabulary increase in the type of effects you’re talking about is the result of solving a core problem. Commander has become the most played tabletop format. In order to hit a threshold that a theme is playable in Commander, it has to appear on more cards than can possibly fit in a single set. In fact, more that can fit in three sets (so even a return to blocks wouldn’t solve this problem.) The solution is to play into themes that are backwards compatible. At first, we just hit upon themes that Magic has been doing a long time (caring about card types, graveyard, typal, etc.). Eventually, though we start to both exhaust those and start to feel to repetitive. One of our solutions was discovered in Dominaria with historic. What we call batching. If we combo existing things, but in a flavorful combination, we create new backward compatible themes that haven’t yet been the core of decks. Yeah, you’ve made artifact decks and legendary decks, but none with those two effects, plus Sagas, combined. In order for batching to work, we need to give it a flavor to hold it together, and that requires vocabulary. The flavor also helps the mechanic feel organic to the set it’s in. In short, player preferences create new design challenges, and this trend is one of the things design is doing to meet those challenges.