Do you have a number one with a bullet character you were most excited to design for Marvel? And can you pin it to tell us one day?

I’ll share this. When we were first pitching to Marvel, Aaron Forsythe came to me to design a bunch of cards to use in the pitch. He told me to mostly use high profile characters, but one should be a deep cut (to average Marvel fans, not to hard core fans). I chose one of my favorite characters and designed a super fun card. Later when I was leading the vision design of a Marvel set, I put that creature in. I believe it won the rare poll and is still in the file, pretty close to my original design (although numbers might have been tweaked). When the card comes out, I’ll identify it.

Hello! It's my birthday today, and also my 1 year anniversary of playing Magic, since I got my first deck last year as a gift! Could I request a trivia fact about my favourite card/character, Olivia Voldaren, or one of the other Legendary vampires? (Or a hint on whether we'll be seeing Olivia again in the upcoming Innistrad set?) Thank you and also Happy Hanukkah!

Olivia was created as a top down Count Dracula. She, while still named Count Dracula, won our internal rare poll where we use employees to gauge how cool the rares and mythic rares are. This led to some discussion about how much the name, which the card wasn’t going to have, influenced the vote, and forced us to change our policy to give realistic names to cards before the rare poll.Happy Birthday!

hey maro! 6 minutes before my birthday ends, got any trivia on the voldaren line of vampires?

Olivia Voldaren’s design name was Count Dracula and won the internal R&D rare poll. Happy Birthday!

Hi! Tomorrow is my seventeenth birthday, so could you share some trivia about one of my favorite legendary creatures, Olivia Voldaren?

In design, Olivia Volaren was Count Dracula and she won the internal rare poll. Mark Gottlieb really wanted to change her but I liked the design (as it was mine) and refused to change it quoting the rare poll as evidence that it would be popular. Happy Birthday!

Can I get some birthday trivia regarding my favorite character and card in Magic; Olivia Voldaren?

Olivia Voldaren was Count Dracula in design. We named all our tropes after the most famous version to make sure people got what we were going for. I was very proud of the design as the lord of the vampires got to choose between killing and turning creatures. The card won the internal rare poll we run to gauge first impressions. I got in a big fight with another designer who really wanted to change the card but I held firm because I liked the design. The creative team thought it would be cool to flip the gender and Olivia was born. Happy Birthday!

Does the Rare Poll include members of R&D? Or is it a poll of other employees who just happen to play magic, like Joe from accounting?

It includes any Wizards employees, including R&D, who wants to take the poll.

What's the internal rare poll?

To get a sense of how the public will respond, we do a poll of Magic players at Wizards about the rare and mythic rare cards.

Can you tell us more about the internal rare poll? What do you use that data for?

It’s a tool to gauge how “cool” individual rare cards are. Development will often use this data to tweak rares and mythic rares.

Would you ever make a Born of the Gods article or podcast that tells us what the top 5 rare or mythics for the Internal Rate Poll?

That’s more of a development article than a design one. The rare poll happens during development.

What is the internal rare poll? Thank you :)

To get a sense of which rares and mythic rares are exciting, we poll Wizards employees that play Magic.