Mark, I was doing some research and I noticed that the Bloodrush and Channel abilities are exactly the same. Yet, you rate one as a 6 on the Storm scale and the other as a 7. Why the difference? And can you share any insight as to how the latter got renamed to the former with the RtR block?

Bloodrush is a subset of Channel.

I'm actually surprised you think Kamigawa was mostly poor ideas. I feel like it's been piecemeal vindicated over time as its mechanics and themes are brought back with slight tweaks. Dominaria showed that a legend focused set was a cool idea, Innistrad the fun of cards that could transform, channel was narrowed for bloodrush, etc. I obviously don't have access to the market research you do, but it's always seemed to me that the sets biggest weakness was its comparative power level in standard

A legendary focus was a bad idea at the time. We now live in a time where Commander is popular and there’s an upside for legendary. Odyssey had done threshold years before, so two stage cards had already been done. Channel, was a bit overly broad, but I’ll agree it played well. A Japanese top-down design was probably the coolest idea, but the choice to design the creative first and then design the mechanics afterwards was horribly flawed.

Hey Mark! My Birthday is the 13th, and is as wondering if you could tell me anything about one of my favorite mechanics, Bloodrush? Thank you!

Bloodrush came about because we were looking for a surprise combat mechanic we could put on creatures.Happy Birthday!

Why is the Wolf / Werewolf theme in SOI playing combat tricks when playing Werewolves also means you shouldn't be playing too many spells? Isn't it a bit anti-synergistic? If I were to use pumping effects in a Werewolf deck, I think things like Kessig's Wolf Run and bloodrush cards would be safer.

Because Werewolves and Wolves have a combat based strategy and having combat interaction makes them more dynamic. Yes, there’s some tension, but tension isn’t always bad.

bloodthirst or bloodrush?

Bloodthirst.

Wild Beastmaster was a scavenge enabler? I thought it was one of those cards in RTR that was secretly placed to be incredibly playable with Gatecrash (specifically Bloodrush)?

It also did that. Cards can have multiple purposes.

I was personally very disappointed we didn't see a card with both scavenge and bloodrush in RTR block (and detain + overload to a lesser extent). Here's hoping they'll come together at some point.

We tend not to cross the streams when doing guilds. Who exactly is using the key spell of two different guilds? We already have ten factions to follow.

Detain, Extort, Batallion, Populate, Cipher, Overload, Evolve, Unleash, Scavenge, Bloodrush or Fuse?

Battalion.

reinforce or blood rush?

Bloodrush.

Bloodrush or Populate?

Close one. I’ll say populate.