Concerning power creep, there may be a comparison and distinction to be made between distorting a format and adding relevant cards to a format. If a card is relevant, it shows up in decks, right? Maybe even a lot of decks. That's good for a format-relevant product. Otherwise, why even make the product?But then what is the delineating mark between format change (good) and format distortion (bad)?One could argue that Serra Angel is an example of format change. Arguably obsolete, nobody is really objecting to the card's irrelevance in eternal formats.So. What is that dividing line? Is formst chsnge just 'distortion over time'? I would argue that healthful change is oft misperceived as power creep, but it took a lot of cards in Commander before we figured out that '2 MV ramp and repeating value' were the prime culprits in accelerating the casual format beyond its 'battlecruiser Magic' roots.I'm not making a big argument one way or another, just trying to stimulate a brain or two..

For starters you’re not using “power creep” as I use it on this blog, but for the sake of saying the same thing for the tenth time, I understand you mean the increase of cards impacting older environments. You bring up the other thing we haven’t been talking about. Card influx talks in neutral terms. Add N relevant cards and impact the environment a particular amount. The faster you add N, the quicker it changes. The sets designed for older formats aren’t adding in cards neutrally though. They are adding in suites of cards built around particular mechanical themes. Adding in whole suites of cards changes environments more quickly as the threshold to make a deck theme relevant gets hit more quickly. That’s the other big impact of designing for a format. It causes you to impact it faster as you are designing whole swaths of mechanical pieces, not just cards. That’s very relevant to the topic at hand.

Hi Mark. I love Bloomburrow's design from veteran perspective! It's such a novel way to do a 10 color pair faction set. However, from a new player's perspective, I hope it won't be too overwhelming since the mechanics so far spoiled include Landfall, Storm, Flashback, Threshold, Gift, Offspring, Expend, Prowess, Forage, Food/Treasure, Valiant, 10 Typal themes, Pawprints, and Classes. Was there concern about complexity creep or do you think the 10 typal motif will facilitate learning the mechanics in the set (I'm not sure what you would call this phenomenon where, counterintuitively, adding more complexity simplifies cognitive processing, like adding hyphens to phone numbers)?

Most of the mechanics are put into a specific animal two-color pair, so you don’t end up playing the majority of these mechanics together. They are also on the simpler end of the spectrum.

Please get out of my head. I was just going to ask you for more hybrids at lower rarities for limited and to maybe reconsider threshold and then ... BOOM(burrow)

: )

Was it considered to switch “Threshold” to “Threshold 7”?

Not that I know of. We don’t want multiple numbers commingling.

I was surprised by the return of Threshold. Is the Storm Scale still 9?

Nope. It’s down to a 4.

Did you consider bringing back the tombstone mark for Threshold?

We did not, to the best of my knowledge.

If changing an ability word to a keyword is functional errata, what about vice versa? Because it has happened before (with threshold).

Yes, it’s functional errata.On occasion, we do functional errata.

Whenever poison counters are a major mechanic of a set in the future, do you expect to always use Corrupted or a similar threshold mechanic in that same set?

I believe the best way to design with poison is to make sure that it’s meaningful even if it doesn’t always defeat the other player. Corrupted is one tool to do that, but it’s (most likely) not the only one.

When you say that you're focusing in recent years on "writ[ing] the words we want in rules-text", and making the rules-text itself more-resonant... How much are you thinking about games like Netrunner and Doomtown, that are drenched in flavorful terminology? Which yes, some people do find a barrier... But it also captivates many potential players. For my current game-project, I'm going even further than those games, just leaning into the madness of theming all the verbs, the zone-names...

There is a threshold where the vocabulary strain becomes too much, but games can find a happy space where it’s enough to add flavor, but not too much that players shut down.

"It varies mechanic to mechanic, but they don’t score any lower as a group against other mechanics. Some, like Monarch, are quite popular."People are criticizing the helper card mechanics because they are very complex, require specific varied tracking and they are virtually impossible to play with unless you constantly refer to helper card (compared to most cards that you can understand by simply reading its oracle text or reminder text).The Monarch doesn't have any of those issues. It's an elegant and masterfully designed mechanic.

The Monarch is very simple and straightforward, so much so that the oracle text from The Monarch token could fit as reminder text on several monarch cards. That can't be said about Day/Night, The Initiative, Venture in the Dungeon, Rad counters or Tempted by the Ring.

I've probably looked at the double sided Tempted by the Ring helper token over 100 times and I can't confidently tell someone exactly how the mechanic works if I don't have the helper token to read from. It's an extremely complex and multifaceted mechanic. I would say more complicated and wordy than 98% of other Magic mechanics. Can you please make more "outside of the game" helper card style mechanics that are easy to comprehend and intuitive?The Monarch and Ascend are examples of mechanics like this. More of that please!

The more complex mechanics that create outside of the game elements are intimidating (i.e. Venture into the Dungeon, Tempted by the Ring, The Initiative, Day/Night) and in my experience, they slow down the game because players can't understand them easily.Lastly, I'm offering this feedback as a major Magic enthusiast and long time veteran player who also plays with experienced players regularly. I can't even begin to imagine how daunting these types of mechanics must feel for novice players!

I talk a lot about how different players enjoy different aspects of the game. What I talk far less about is different players struggle with different aspects. Some can’t handle excessive processing; some have issues with sequencing; some don’t understand the nuances of the rules; some aren’t good with memory. My best guess with you is you internalize (aka work from memory) card abilities most of the time, so cards which exceed your ability to memorize cause you issues.Because players see the game through the lens of their own experience, the feedback they tend to give is “stop doing thing X” because thing X is the element that they personally struggle with. The challenge is there are players that don’t struggle with that element of the game and thus enjoy thing X. For example, my biggest note on this blog about dungeons isn’t they’re too hard to process, but there aren’t enough of them. So, it’s a balance. We need to understand the ways in which people struggle and help accordingly where we can. I agree that we need to be cautious how complex and wordy we are on elements off the card. And we have to be careful how often we use that tool. Now there is a threshold where enough players struggle, that we have to question if a particular aspect is worth it. I don’t think we’re there yet with external game pieces, but I do loudly hear the note that we have to be better with as-fan of the helper cards showing up. The note that we need to auto-include more helper cards in the prerelease kits is also a strong one.So yes, I’m aware that outside game pieces come at a real cost for a certain type of player, and it is something we have to keep in mind when designing them. I personally think we could have simplified Tempted by the Ring a bit, for example, but I do think it was right to include in the product. Thanks for your feedback.