I've noticed a lot of simic cards that copy enemy permanents recently, but I was curious about how that works pie-wise, since blue copies permanents all on its own while green rarely has that effect for even their own stuff, but it seems to be a pretty big thing for green+blue recently

Green is allowed to copy its own permanents, but it doesn’t do it a lot.

Can I get a maybe on a 1/2 red and blue fish? :)

One day. : )

When you were creating Outlaws of Thunder Junction, where you ever concerned that when people talked about drafting OTJ that some older players might be worried about seeing UG madness?

: )For those non-old timers out there. Blocks were often nicknamed with the first letter of each set in the block. So Odyssey/Torment/Judgment draft was often called OTJ. One its major draft archetype was green/blue madness.

Hey Maro,If/when functional reprint of Serra angel into blue with a relevant creature type. Just realized now that blue has vigilance and flying.

Been there done that. (Okay, it was Planar Chaos, but we could reprint it.)

I was just talking with a friend about how card draw, despite being "Blue's thing", all colors need it because having cards in hand is a resource that all decks need, and thus Blue card draw is the only unconditional one, but every color has been getting some form of conditional card draw that ties it to its color philosophies.This begs the question, why does Green have such a monopoly on ramp? Can't the same thing be done for that? The closest thing is White's catch up mechanics

All colors get the ability to fetch their own basic land type. Red has some ramp, but more one-shot than repeatable. And white does some catch-up ramp. In addition, we make a bunch of colorless cards that can help.

would it be in pie for blue to permanently remove a creatures abilities with an instant/sorcery? or is that too close to removing and replacing it?

Unlikely. If an instant or sorcery, it would be temporary. For a permanent effect, we’d use an aura.

Hi Mark, I was listening to your podcast episode on the alphabet in magic, and you say something along the lines of "I can't quite remember why we used Q for the untap symbol". If you still don't know, could it be that Q in English is almost guaranteed to be followed by a U, which is what you most likely would have used if it was not already used by Uncommon and Blue?

I think it most looked like the circle of the tap symbol.

Despite being Archelos' home plane, I noticed a distinct lack of Turtlefolks on Bloomburrow- even including the commander set they did not even get a one-off card. Additionally, not a single art in the set depict one, and the closest we got was a Frogfolk wearing a turtle shell (in my opinion looks a little morbid to be honest). Which leads me to ask, did something happen to them?

Frogs and Turtles were the two front runners for green/blue and Frogs won out. Bloomburrow does have one Turtle.

Hi Mark, it's my birthday for another hour or so, and so I'd like to request some trivia on Sphinxes in Magic.

We had trouble finding blue’s iconic creature. It needed to fly as blue is the color most associated with flying. We also wanted the creature to be intelligent. Dragons were red’s iconic. We stumbled upon Sphinxes one day, and said, “they tell riddles, that’s pretty smart.” Happy Birthday!

Hey I wanted to ask about phasing, personally I’m not a fan of it in blue. I feel like it gives blue too many answers.

Blue is the color of bounce and flickering. Who better to get phasing?