There’s no clean way to template [unexilable], and it doesn’t happen enough that we need a whole keyword.Why can’t you just write “can’t be exiled”

We can, but I believe there are effects you would expect it to stop that it doesn’t.

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.

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.

Hi Mark! Bloomburrow looks amazing from the previews we've seen, hope you're all feeling pleased with the reactions. I had a question about Alania, the Divergent Storm - was the card originally designed to give "gift a card" to your spells? The wording for it feels really similar.

That’s where we started, but the rules/templating didn’t allow it, so we had to use slightly different rules text.

Hi, Mark! A templating question (with some recent card text for reference):

Whenever you commit a crime, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. This ability triggers only once each turn.

Whenever one or more +1/+1 counters are put on Dusk Legion Duelist, draw a card. This ability triggers only once each turn.To save space and avoid any sense of letdown, why does Magic not more frequently use phrasing such as the following?

The first time you commit a crime each turn, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life.

The first time one or more +1/+1 counters are put on Dusk Legion Duelist each turn, draw a card.Unrelated feedback: I quite like these designs, which slot perfectly into a certain Burn deck of mine: Amped Raptor; Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury; Fear of Missing Out (such good art); Bloodbraid Marauder; also Inventor's Axe.

Two main reasons. One, it becomes a memory issue where you have to think back to what you did before you cast this spell. Two, it increases the chances that you miss a chance to use the card the turn you play it.

Just found a Fireball from Beatdown, and it has X and Y in the mana cost. Why the decision to make Y in the mana cost vs the regular wording when it was first printed?

Fireball templating has gone through many changes. One time we tried a second variable. I didn’t go well.

In my view, Magic excelled at consistency for many years. You surely understood this consistency - you spent a decade answering questions on this blog in which you laid out where the lines were. Mechs were out. Guns were out. Space opera was out. Mirrodin was "as science-fiction as we'll get". You went as far as to respond to a question asking for more sci-fi with, "If you stretch your identity too far, you start losing it."I understand that you and Wizards have in the last few years changed your minds, and decided to eschew consistency in favor of variety. But certainly you can acknowledge that this *is* a fundamental change, and that Magic *was* good at consistency?

You act as if my line was constant. It wasn’t. I didn’t have a hard line for twenty years that I then one day just changed. It’s been continually moving for almost thirty years.I’m the first to admit that Magic has grown in ways I didn’t anticipate, but when it did, I adapted. The game is capable of a lot more variety than I thought was possible.My current thought (evolved from years of working on the game) is that the variety is a strength of the game. Magic, at its core, is about customizability. Each person can make the game what they want it to be. The more options, the more flexibility, the more each person can find what they love in the game.Note consistency is important. There are a lot of mechanical elements (rules, color pie, templating, etc.) that need to have structure to them, so that the game continues to play similarly, but the creative elements are much more adaptable.

I order some scrambled eggs knowing that the eggs came from a chicken. Sometimes a quail or a duck, but at least its a bird. I get concerned when the menu tells me they will be serving iguana eggs. I know it's an egg. I know how they'll cook it. I'm gonna be sitting nervously at my table regardless. When it gets served to me and it turns out to be nothing like what I know scrambled eggs to be like, I'm not going to be thrilled to see the seasonal menu next week list shark eggs.

There is a lot of consistency in Magic: the rules, the color pie, templating, etc. Creative is the place where we take, and have taken, the most liberty in pushing new boundaries.

It’s something we did for the Eldrazi,Well the eldrazi are eldrich abominations, very strange templating makes sense for them. But that isn’t the case for all colorless cards. So why not just make that the eldrazi frame instead of the colorless frame?

We’ve used the colorless frame on non-Eldrazi and players seemed to like it.

Shouldn’t Nine-Lives familiar say “this permanent” instead of “this creature” so it’s clear that its ability still works if it’s not a creature?

We template for ease of comprehension in normal use cases and not to make it easier to understand weird interactions that will seldom happen.