A thought I had the other day: you're very good at being composed and firm when public facing, especially about controversial issues. Would I be correct that you (like most people with jobs) sometimes do so through hidden gritted teeth, because they're fights you're either in the middle of fighting or have lost, and felt very strongly about? My hand high fives you for being able to be a cheerful face of the game while taking the blame for things you personally oppose.

Sometimes I have to argue for things I fought very hard against, but lost.High fived myself.

on the subject of UB: I agree that everyone can have their own idea of what MTG is, but the issue with UB is nonetheless that it's encroaching. your comparison with un-set cards is not great, because un cards are not legal in Modern (for example) and I don't need to buy them to keep up with the competition, like UB cards.

How about I use horror? There are a number of players that are very turned off by the use of horror in the game, especially involving disturbing imagery. They consider it too far a deviation from Magic’s core high fantasy, and some have a negative visceral response. Many of those cards are legal in Modern.

I know that the retro frame BRC decks were controversial. But considering the popularity of commander, could we get, occasionally maybe, a deck or two that also appears in a retro frame version? Even for non-commander players those decks did provide A TON of versions for decks and cubes of old frame fans. I can say, it was the first and only commander product I bought.

The retro frames are polarizing, both beloved and behated. The feedback we got is that players like having the option to have them, but don’t like them as the only option. That means retro frames are more likely to be used as booster fun than the only frame for a whole product.

Hey Mark. I know you aren't on story team but as someone who does have more behind the scenes than us I wanted to ask you about the mole person in MKM. It seems kinda controversial in some places I see because it's the first molefolk on Ravnica and he is very cartoony which clashes with the plane. Do you know what's up with it?

I went and looked at the card. I don’t find the art cartoony.

Hi Mark. I was a huge fan of Ikoria as a set and it was interesting reading your lessons learned. It was interesting hearing how Mutate (now being one of my favourite mechanics) and Companion (a rather controversial mechanic) competed for development due to their complexity. Looking back, if you had to pick one, would you have rathered the set design focused solely on Mutate or Companion?

I would have pushed Companion back to another set.

what's the card that you remember there being the most controversy around when still in development among R&D?

Walking Corpse (vanilla common 1B 2/2) caused more discussion than any other card I remember. : )

Did people have more of a problem with the mixed legality of Unfinity or the fact that the acorn stamp was used instead of a mix of black- and silver-borders?

Different people had different issues, but my guess is more players were upset about the lack of silver borders.

Companions were a hugely controversial mechanic and have fairly limited design space, with a current Storm Scale of 9. However, given how significant they were, it's difficult to imagine returning to Ikoria without at least nodding to them in some way. How do you feel on that subject, and do you have any thoughts you can share about what a return to Ikoria would look like?

I don’t think Companions are intrinsic to Ikoria.

Why can't there be one or two random slivers? You've put gates in sets without mazes end of a pay off for them

We don’t tend to make cards with mechanical creature type themes in sets where there isn’t enough mechanical payoff. Also, one-of Slivers are a bit weird flavorwise. The one Gate was pretty controversial and we almost didn’t do it, so not exactly the poster child for repetition.

I get that the legendary supertype is a controversial conversation, but aren't its limitations also a good thing? Only being able to have one of the same legendary at once allows for more powerful designs that are problematic in multiples, no?

There are thousands of legendary creatures, and we’ve used the legendary restriction mechanically on just a handful of cards. I would make a mechanic, called something like unique, for that function if we ever changed the legendary rules (which I don’t anticipate us doing).