Dear Sir, It appears I've happened fortuitously to visit your blog on your birthday. Felicitations! In honour of the occasion, you have been granted the Devour Food ability until the next time it becomes Day. However, you may also need to pay Cumulative Upkeep. My question: what is your favourite creature whose power and toughness as numerals together form your new age?

I’ll say Ancient Greenwarden. I enjoy both Elementals and doubling things.

"What if Indomitable Creativity had the creatures enter from the library?"Complex replacement effect interactions were never my specialty even before the hypothetical... But my initial concern is based on anything that messes with the library as part of a replacement effect.

Firstly, while I can't think of replacements that require payment off the top of my head, Chromatic Sphere's card draw mana ability always makes me wary.

The potentially messier example would be Devour ('as ~ enters you may sacrifice creatures') combined with Blightsteel Colossus ('if it would die, shuffle it into your library instead), for which I'd love confirmation/correction from less rusty rules experts.

While applying replacement effects you haven't yet made zone changes, but this would end up with the game attempting to move cards from the library at the same time as they were being shuffled away. (And I've no idea what the current precedent is for that, if one exists.)

Even in the event the rules can handle the above scenario, it would be intentionally allowing a messy interaction for questionable gain. There would always be a group that insisted the ruling was incorrect. ("Never give an order you aren't certain will be followed.")

An FYI with someone more familiar with the rules.

Hello, this is just an Alara appreciation reminder: A world with one of the coolest and very iconic mechanics (Cascade, Unearth, Exalted, Devour), very clear destinction between the shards (though now there might be some exciting mixing of mana), very magical, very well written story. As someone who loves to explore a world, the story of the inhabitants and dive deep in the fantasy, Alara is one of THE most enjoyable planes.

A return to Alara is a possibility.

Kaladesh Masterpieces were cool because you could buy a Draft pack and you had a 1:150 chance of pulling a masterpiece. It was super unlikely which made it was and the cards were VERY unique. The Neon Ink experiment is cool in theory. I do like the idea that there is a version of Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos that is extremely rare (the red one) but when you have a card in a single set with SEVEN different versions, even if one of them is highly elusive, it makes it feel way less special.

When we were doing Masterpieces, the number one complaint, and by a huge margin, was they weren’t accessible enough.

Could you print a black-bordered card with “Devour Everything 1”, or does Emrakul’s “protection from everything” imply that “everything” includes non-permanents?

My guess is you can only devour permanents and everything has been defined as more than just permanents.

you said that Devour and Food aren't synergistic, but in MH2A we got Caprichrome, which has "Devour artifact 1". Does its existence increase the chances?

It’s not inherently synergistic. Can you make it more synergistic? Sure.

If/When on a Legendary Dragon without Flying? Just seems like it would be a nice and unqiue Legendary Dragon, could be like the Dragon Wurms where they are grounded. I am just curious to see more interesting and niche design for a Dragon to not have Flying occasionally.

We’ve already made one. Wingless Dragons (aka Dragons that don’t fly) are Wurms in Magic. Battlebond had Grothama, All-Devouring, a legendary Wurm.

Hey Mark, can you tell us a thing you like in a set that was poorly received and a thing that you don't like in a set that was well received

I liked devoid and it was not well received. I thought it was a nice answer to a really thorny problem. I tried to stop the original Akroma from being printed with that design as I felt it didn’t do a good job of capturing her character. The card was beloved.EDIT: Auto-correct! I meant devoid not devour.

If green is the "food-chain" predation colour, why does it get so few "sacrifice another creature" effects like Devour?

Because “sacrifice” doesn’t feel like “eat” but “feed”. Fight is more used to capture green predation. Also, flavor is broader than mechanics. Many choices are about making the gameplay feel unique per color. You could justify almost any mechanic in any color with the right flavor, so we have to be careful using it as justification.

Did any Modern Horizons designs get absorbed by War of the Spark? Makeshift Battalion, Tenth District Legionnaire, and Devouring Hellion seem like they were very obviously designed to have Battalion, Heroic, and Devour, respectively.

They were, but that was all the doing of the War of the Spark’s set design team.