Hi Mark! Hopefully third time is a charm :) While reading the preview columns for Planar Chaos, I saw you wrote this: "Every choice we make has a firm grounding in the philosophical underpinnings of the colors". However, some cards clearly don't have that "firm grounding". Do you remember what made you think that Harmonize was green or Melancholy was black? It surprises me because it's so obviously not the case. Did you maybe get too carried away by the conceptual side of your idea? Thanks!

Sometimes when you mess in space you’ve never messed in before, you can have problems in understanding the scope of what you’re doing. Every effect we shifted colors in, we thought a lot about, and it was based on precedent, but sometimes we missed the forest for the trees, as the expression goes.Take Harmonize. It’s not as if green didn’t have access to card draw. What we missed is how shifting it away from being creature dependent fundamentally shifted how it got used, and allowed green to fill in a weakness in a way that was subtler than we understood at the time.Look, there’s a reason “hindsight is 20/20” in an expression. There are a lot of decisions that seem glaringly wrong looking back, but it often comes with knowledge you simply didn’t have at the time. Planar Chaos taught us the danger of playing with fundamentals. They’re a lot harder to work with than it seems at first blush.

When you say that Harmonize is the Planar Chaos card you'd most like to undo for color-pie reasons... Is that because of its high rate of play, or because it set an expectation among players, or because it actually set precedent that caused other out-of-pie green card-drawing to be made later on? If I were deleting cards from history, the third reason would be the most important to me, and the second insofar as it leads to the third.

It’s all three.

Hello Mark, what was the biggest bend/break card(s) you ever designed?

Not sure. The one that probably sees the most play is Harmonize.

About wish: "The spell in D&D was very red and the argument was it was impulsive tutoring. We ended up deciding to let in be in the set, but not be a precedent." Regardless of it not being a precedent, the card will be avaliable in eternal formats forever. For many people, it will look like a precedent. I'm getting "Harmonize" vibes here.

Not a precedent means we don’t use it in R&D to justify printing more cards just like it. Harmonize was also not a precedent. It’s why we keep reprinting Harmonize rather than make new versions.

Harmonize got reprinted in standard limited, even if only as a Mystical Archive card. Did the council of colours debate its inclusion? Did you lose a fight for the colour pie?

The Council of Colors steps in when we add a card to a new (non-digital) format. That wasn’t the case with Mystical Archive.

The thing is, by constantly printing and reprinting cards like Harmonize and Chaos Warp, it doesn't matter if you say they are in their colors slice of the pie, players have access to those effects, and will believe that they are in pie. Personally, I think if it is actually a colour pie break, you shouldn't ever reprint it, and definitely not add it to new formats.

If I could keep color pie breaks from being reprinted I would.

I realize the art for Harmonize and Faithless Looting aren’t for everyone - but I think it’s great and motivates me to get those cards specifically. I hope Wizards knows that there are people who appreciate this kind of more adventurous art direction.

I’m curious what people here think of art like the Mystical Archive Faithless Looting.

But, is Harmonize a Green card *name*?

Sure.

Just wanted to say I really appreciate your commitment to not making white a clone of other colors just because that would make it stronger in commander. A surprising amount of people just want things like white harmonize. I look forward to seeing the new territory it explores, though!

Happy to hear that.

On the topic of acceptable color bends, is there a possibility that Planar Chaos's colorbent cards could ever return in a Modern Horizons style set? Given the massive success of things like Green Carddraw, Black Lifelink, and White Hexproof in design, I think that they were a massive boon to the color pie's range.

You saying that is only further proof to me that we shouldn’t have done it in the first place (let alone doing it again). The color’s being different is fundamental to the wellness of the game. Let me give an example. Green shouldn’t have Harmonize and now it’s a staple of Commander. You make one exception once and now it’s something that color can do forever.