any idea why cards that can make colorless OR colored mana (like nightshade dryad) are templated with one ability for colorless, and one for colored?

The other way to write it would be “T: Add W, U, B, R, G or C” which would make give it a five-color color identity and make the card very hard to play in Commander.

Can you do a podcast about effects that used to be evergreen / low on the Storm scale but now aren't (and why)? For example, old sets used to always have a take on Samite Healer, Prodigal Sorcerer, Frozen Shade, etc. sometimes with a set mechanic, but now we almost never see those, much less at low rarities.

I’ll add it to the “short” list.

Hi, Mark-The artifact land Frames from Modern Horizons II don't seem to indicate their artifactness at all. Just an opinion, but I strongly do not like that. I would easily miss that they are artifacts. Somewhat related, I still adamantly believe the old artifact border COLOR (not the old frames, just the color) is much better at being distinct from colored permanents compared to current artifact/ colorless borders. I think they are too light, and I often mistake them for white cards. Thanks for the attention, keep up the good work!

The old frame was too close to the land frame. The key is finding the right shade of silver.

Mark, I wanna give high fives to you and everyone who worked on the LotR. I'm not a LotR fan- no shade intended, I just find it difficult to get into the series- and yet the cards are so mechanically interesting and fun that I find myself hyped for each reveal anyway.

Thanks. One of the cool things about Universes Beyond is inspires us to create designs we might not have otherwise created.

Re: confusion about "natural artifacts." I think there's some desire to find intuitive, "natural," if you'll excuse the pun, sense of boundaries to what Green is. As someone who remembers the jokes about early Magic where "everything can be done with Blue mana because a Wizard does it," it sometimes feels like the pendulum has swung to "all mana is part of Nature, so the entire Color Pie is just shades of Green." I'm not sure how to address or clear up that confusion, certainly not in an intuitive way.

I’m not saying everything is natural. I’m saying some artifacts can be a natural thing.

In light of the release of the color pie nuts and bolts (or shades and swatches in this case), I wanted to ask about a statement you made regarding the constant shifting of the color pie: Do you believe that a "perfect" balance is possible? A point at which the things that each color can do are so perfectly and evenly distributed that they no longer need to change? Or do you think that's not possible?

I think flux is built into the game as a key component.

If or when: another set where in the story the bad guys win?

When. The bad guys do win from time to time. Also, there are shades of gray. Someone’s good guy could be someone else’s bad guy.

"We try to be careful about non-creature subtypes that have no support anywhere near them." and it's a real shame. it feels weird and inconsistent to distinguish horrors and nightmares or shades and spirits when neither gets supported in every set they're included in, but then turn around and not make mechanical-flavor distinctions between deserts and badlands, or different types of equipment.

Every creature has a creature type, so players are used to them being mostly flavor. It’s not true about other card types.

I've always been a big fan of shades, what are your opinions on them power wise and thematically, additionally, Black has always had a variety of cards like dark ritual and cabal stronghold, but they always seem to be few and far between, Shades seemed to have been designed around that specific strength of Black, also seen in cards like Crypt Ghast, What is the name of this feature and will it continue to see longterm support?

Rituals long ago moved from black to red. Black still gets the infrequent turn resource into black mana though.

"The biggest problem with a Shade lord is because of the mechanical tie of Shades with self-pump, they don’t tend to work well in the same deck. Unless you play the lord, they are anti-synergistic." - Could ": Activate abilities of all Shades you control" be a solution?

Only if every Shade has that ability which would force us to cost every Shade assuming you had multiple Shades on the battlefield, which would make them suck outside of a dedicated Shade deck.