Mark, I have a question for the Acorn Rules Manager. This weekend I was judging The MagicCon: Chicago Cube event and had multiple players draft Rosie Cotton and Icing Manipulator. We ruled that putting a +1/+1 counter on a creature was not the same as creating a token, even if that +1/+1 counter happens to be a food token. What is the official ruling on this interaction?

The token becoming a Food doesn’t happen until its on the creature, so your ruling was correct.

How is it that Staying Power can only be acorn, but Riding the Dilu Horse and Nature's Blessing work in the non-acorn rules? Can the rules manager fix this at their whim, but more pressing things are in the way? I'd prefer the solution of Riding and Blessing getting some errata or being made acorn cards but having Staying Power be un-acorned would also satisfy, so long as these are consistent.

The game is capable of making effects that last for the duration of the game. Staying Power’s issue is the rules have issues with making some temporary effects permanent. As is often the case with weird effects, the rules can handle 99% of the issues, but weird corner cases exist and the rules have to handle all cases.

If you took another look at cipher and decided to add a variant where some effects would be cast at next upkeep instead of when damage is done, do you think (with caveat that your not the rules manager) it might be possible to just redefine cipher with the two options, or would that be a different mechanic?

That would be a different mechanic. We have discussed it.

Re: Battles have more baked-in rules than Auras or Sagas.I feel this isn't quite true.While Battles have more individual rules, I feel this is more a rules manager preference (since a lot of newer things added to the rules seem to separate each sentence into a new shorter subrule, whereas older rules like auras, probably written by someone else, tend to just add those further points as new sentences under one big rule).In actual real "How many words does it take to make Auras and Battles work?" terms though, it takes 1305 words of baked-in Comp Rules to make Auras work, while it only takes 638 words of baked-in Comp Rules to make Battles work (less than half that of Auras).I'll concede Sagas are surprisingly short at 301 words!

Auras were created before Sixth Edition rules, so it’ wasn’t designed to fit the rules, the rules were designed to fit it. That ends up being a lot wordier. Note wordiness and complexity are correlated, but different things.

Could rangeling without basic land types possibly be made in black border?

It would be possible, I believe, but note I’m not the Rules Manager.

Just adding to the opinions on the Doctor Who decks, I wish Time Lord was Time-Lord instead.

One of the important things when making an Universes Beyond product is staying true to your source material. Time Lord is never hyphenated, so we wanted to respect that. We did work with the rules manager, and the only thing we gave up was ever having Time or Lord be a creature type by itself. (Lord was removed as a creature type in the Grand Creature Type update many years ago.)

Hi Mark. My birthday was a couple of days ago. You've occasionally mentioned ideas you've had that made the rules manager's eye twitch. But can you tell a story about something you thought for sure wouldn't work out, and then the rules manager came back and said it could be done?

I was worried when first working with mutate that it wouldn’t work out in the rules.