My birthday was a couple of days before yours. I've been persistent, so hopefully I'll get lucky this time. Do you have any trivia on Lurking Predators or Cackling Counterpart?

Cackling Counterpart was us making a flashback clone. It’s normally tricky to do “creature fkashbacks” as they have to be tokens but then it dawned on us, we do tokens that are copies. Happy Belated Birthday!

DON'T LISTEN TO THEM MARO! I think Emmara is amazing and is going to rock standard once people give her a chance. Come on people, advent of the wurm, armada wurm, cackling counterpart. Open your minds!

You are not alone. Emmara has some fans. I think the big disappointment, by the way, is the favor disconnect not the power level.

So Llanowar Mentor and Kher Keep (and... is there more to the cycle?) make tokens that are copies of older creatures. Pack Rat makes a copy of itself. Cackling Counterpart / Seance / etc make copies of a card that is already in a game zone somewhere. Is there any reason why the Llanowar Mentor ability couldn't return someday, or are you just saying there's no plan for it?

EDIT: Tumblr’s acting up again. The question is: Why can’t we just change all the old instants and sorceries to have subtypes is that’s what we want to do? We don’t want a game where many of the cards don’t do what’s actually written on them. We consider errata to be a huge barrier which we are very cautious with.

Is a clone that may only copy creatures *you* control (or make a token, such as cackling counterpart,) too much for uncommon? Despite the token restriction, populate has me imagine that it's not out of the question - just unlikely.

The default for clones is now rare but as populate shows it’s a default which means if we think we have something simple enough and it’s something the set really needs we have the ability to push it down in rarity.  That said, expect most clones at rare from now on.