Hi Mark, how are you?? Sooo, now that the full set is out... "A mechanic returns that I had to fight tooth and nail to get into the set it premiered in —" was?

Historic.

Are you excited to return to Eldraine? Because I am SO excited to return to Eldraine!

I am excited. Whenever we return to a world that I had to fight tooth and nail to get printed the first time, it makes me happy.

I understand the playtest cards can't be considered real cards for many reasons (power level, rules consistency, etc...), but I like the fact that they have normal Magic backs, so I can put a Barry's Land in my Domain deck or a Maro's Gone Nuts in my Doubling Season for a casual game and have some fun!

I think people are misinterpreting my earlier post. It’s not that I don’t see the value or enjoyability in the playtest cards. I get why they’re fun. We had a lot of fun making them. I understand why many of you want to get your hands on them. I’m voicing my worry as Head Designer. I take my stewardship of Magic very seriously. There’s a reason we spend so much time making a Magic set. Our goal is to make it the best game in the world. If someone came to me and said, “For the next set, we’re not going to spend our normal amount of time and energy on the set. We’re just going to throw something together.” I would fight that decision tooth and nail.I’m just worried that in the guise of making something silly, we backed into doing the thing I would never have done straight up. That’s my concern. I don’t want to make Magic less, even accidentally.

Un-rules questions: What happens if try to put an Augment card onto the battlefield, e.g. with "Tooth and Nail"? What if you try to cast an Augment without paying its mana cost, e.g. with the Cascade ability of "Violent Outburst"?

An Augment can’t exist without being attached to a Host. If it somehow gets on the battlefield, it goes to the graveyard just as an unattached Aura would.

I remember you saying in an article how you fought tooth and nail for a legendary Werewolf creature, but what was the public response to Ulrich? Are we likely to see him again when we circle back to Innistrad?

Ulrich wasn’t what some players wanted for a legendary werewolf so he turned out to be a very contentious card.

Can you use Tooth and Nail to search for and bring both halves of B.F.M. into play?

Yes, if you can bring both halves onto the battlefield at the same time they will enter attached together as a single creature (although they count as two creature cards in all other zones).

There will eventually be some designer, somewhere, who will think it's cute to make a card with "Exile target emblem," defeating their whole purpose. Please fight tooth and nail against such egregious zone creep!

I will. The inability if emblems to be removed us a key part of their mechanical identity.

We sometimes hear about how you fought tooth and nail against something only to lose and you think it was a mistake to this day or have been proven right (re: Mental Misstep, which prompted this question), but are there any examples where you fought against something tooth and nail, were beaten, then it turned out your were totally wrong and the thing was awesome?

I tried to stop Akroma as I thought her abilities didn’t match her flavor in the story and were a bit boring for such a high profile card. I tried to get it changed, failed and she has gone on to be wildly popular.

You talk a lot about graveyard matters sets and mechanics; what are the odds of doing an exile matters set?

Since I strongly feel that exiled things should stay exile and I fight tooth and nail every time we make a card that tries to bring things back from exile, I’d say low.