I was listening to some of the podcasts you put out leading up to Thunder Junction release and you mention types of players as "johnny" or "jenny" or "spike" and I was curious what you meant by that. I thought I understood from context when you were talking about "spikey" decks but then I heard the others and didn't feel sure. Are these players in the design team or pros that players are meant to be familiar with or something?

Here’s my article from the topic in 2006. Note I hadn’t yet added the female names for Timmy (Tammy) and Johnny (Jenny). (Spike is unisex.):

Timmy, Johnny, and Spike Revisited | MAGIC: THE GATHERING

Hi Mark, your articles are still not all recovered. I can't find "When Cards Go Bad, Part 2"

Do you mean “When Cards Go Bad Revisited”?

When Cards Go Bad Revisited | MAGIC: THE GATHERING

You mentioned a while back that the problem with pitch cards discarding a different color is that it could lead to lead to color pie problems. Could a card be one color but pitch a different color if the effect was in pie for both colors? Like a naturalize effect in Green and white; or a redirect in Red and blue.

That is possible, but narrow in application.

Is there any reason that card’s are typically worded to prevent and redeal damage, rather than just redirect it?

I believe it’s cleaner in the rules as you don’t have worry about qualities of the damage.

You had a very old article titled "Connect the Dots" (which is sadly missing from the archives, I read it through Wayback Machine). You mentioned about an exercise for creativity: "pick two items at random and find a connection between them". But you didn't give any examples there. Can you share some examples for the readers?

I’ll get the link fixed. Here’s the article (from when I reran it):

Connect the Dots | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
Now here’s an example. What does a cow have to do with a carrot?• They both start with “c”.• You can eat both.• They’re both alive.• You can find both in a field. • The second last letter is an “o”.• Neither are native to North America.

how did you get into tabletop gaming? how did you end up at wizards? do you have tips for anyone interested in these kinds of fields?

I have an article for that:

The (Not So) Secret Origin of Maro | MAGIC: THE GATHERING

You had two articles before where you roleplayed as each color to answer questions. What was the name of those articles and will you ever be resuming them, or consider getting the Council of Colors to answer questions in a similar way?

They were called Colorful Replies: First article - https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/colorful-replies-2018-07-16Second article - https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/return-colorful-replies-2019-07-29

Return of Colorful Replies | MAGIC: THE GATHERING

Colorful Replies | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
One day, I’ll do a third one.

I reallly don't like the hastening proliferation of non-magic IPs in eternal formats. Warhammer, D&D, and Walking Dead cards all now have non-trivial representation, and whenever I see one of these cards, I'm completely taken out of the universe. I know that, aside from Commander, these are more competitive formats and Wizards might not think that matters, but that kind of matters. Yeah, I'm choosing not to play with these cards. But my opponent is. I can't opt out!

I touch upon this issue in the following column (“The Big Picture”):

The Big Picture | MAGIC: THE GATHERING
In short, we have to prioritize the joy of people playing with something over the unhappiness of people playing against it. Yes, you have to occasionally play against something you might not like, but that’s just baked into a trading card game where you don’t control what your opponent plays. For you it’s other IPs. For someone else it’s counterspells or art they find disturbing. To use my buffet analogy, we can’t not serve fish for all the lovers of fish because there are diners who don’t like fish.

Mark could you please relink the new storm article? I couldn’t find it on the website.

Here you go:

Storm Scale: Throne of Eldraine through Strixhaven, Part 1

Hi Mark, first, thanks for the consistent insights into so much of mtg's thought processes and history! A thing I've wondered and thought about a lot is why the ability to interact with the stack seems to be so locked into blue and what sorts of other possible stack interactions might be plausible and meaningful for the other colours to use. I never tend to get very far; red has some effects to redirect spells/abilities and green has "can't be countered". Is this a thing being explored?

There just isn’t much viable stack interaction beyond counterspells and redirection.