I'm enjoying Bloomburrow previews far more than I expected. It might be too early to tell but so far I've been disappointed by the shortage of lizards revealed. As a player who does not love the friendly furry creatures (bats included), I hope to see more scaly friends.

It’s the black/red draft archetype.

Hey Maro, I noticed that many of the lizards in Bloomburrow are outlaws and many can commit crimes (and are the outlaw colours RB). Please high five the people responsible for adding more cross set synergy/support to the game :)

Will do.

I wonder if non-mammal animals (such as crab, fish, insect, octopus, or spider) were considered as a draft archetype for Bloomburrow.

Lizards are one of the ten two-color pair animals.

Hey Mark, so have a question for you from an ecologists perspective here. Why is it that some classes of animals within magic, such as mammals, amphibians, reptiles are broken down into family classes as archetypes (rabbit, wolf, frog, lizard, snake etc) but birds are just birds and not broken down any further? Just an odd one I've noticed for a while haha

We wanted to make bird lords rather than hawk lords.

Hi Mark,I am enjoying the Bloomburrow story so far, though I have one criticism about the lore of the plane. It seems like every creature type in the plane is named as *animal*folk and while I don’t mind if sometimes that is the case, the fact that every single one is named that starts to really jump out at me and it loses some of the immersion. I’m not saying it’s a lazy cop out and maybe this is intentional but I feel like this could have been mitigated if say the rabbit folk were called Harengon or maybe Lizardfolk were Viashinos, like some of the creatures types had some unique names at least to make the world feel a bit more immersive

I think juggling ten new names for each of the relevant animal folk (and the story uses creatures beyond the ten) would be a lot more taxing than you’re imaging.

How are lizards portrayed in the anthropomorphic animal genre?

I’d check out the movie Rango. : )

Was the Lizard typal in Bloomburrow part of the motivation for making the Viashino errata at this specific time?

I’m sure it influenced the timing.

I'd like to voice my dislike of the paring down of some of the creature types, because I feel like differing viewpoints are good in game design and I've not really seen that many statements voiced in opposition to these changes. My view of it is that it strips out a lot of uniqueness of Magic as a setting. Other settings have humanoid lizards, but they don't have Viashino. Other settings have undersea-dwelling peoples, but they don't have Cephalids. Naga becoming Snake was completely understandable, and I think the justifications for it were valid. I do not think Viashino becoming Lizard or Cephalid becoming Octopus were remotely justified. On top of that, it creates some weird points, where you can see clearly crocodilian humanoids (the Viashino from Alara) now labeled as Lizards, which not only are separate types in Magic, they're not even closely related in real life (crocodiles are more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than lizards). I've seen a number of very loud people advocate for trimming all the "unnecessary" types in Magic out, but their proposals usually end up as "there should be about 20 creature types total." This is not only unsatisfactory from a game design standpoint--as it would make tribal decks a bit *too* easy to accomplish--but absolutely catastrophic from a flavor perspective as well. At that point, why not just have typelines be "TYPE1", "TYPE2", and so forth? Flavor and function have to work together, and sacrificing too much of either is a bad thing. Too little function, and the game becomes unplayable. Too little flavor, and the game becomes cold and sterile. This is not to say that trimming on creature types is a bad thing--I think Magic wouldn't be hurt by trimming on a few more creature types if you asked me--but just that I think the choice of creature types being trimmed is odd, to say the least. Why does a regularly printed creature type with new cards that were printed just earlier this year get the boot, and not something like trilobite, which has all of 5 cards, with a 4 year gap between the printing of the most recent one and the one before that? If this is to help tribal decks, why are there still one-off or two-off creature types being printed, like Varmint and Coyote?

We’re not getting rid of Viashino. They will continue to creatively exist. We will still refer to them in titles and flavor text as Viashino. All we’re doing is consolidating the creature types so that we’re consistent in how we use them. Magic has been treating animal humanoids this way (aka using the animal as the creature type) for two plus decades. All we’re doing is going back and fixing the few that got done before we adopted this policy back in the early days of Magic.

With viashino, naga, and cephalids becoming lizards, snakes, and octopi, I am a bit concerned for other humanoid animal based races. Will minotaur become ox? Will merfolk become fish? I'm very curious where you guys will draw the line on such things

The line is we’re not using names we made up for animal humanoids as creature types. (They’ll still be used in names and flavor text.) Pre-existing names from things like mythology are fine, so Minotaur and Merfolk aren’t going anywhere.

What's the story behind the cards "Viashino Warrior" and "Lizard Warrior"? They have very similar art and identical MVs and P/Ts. Seems too similar to just be a coincidence. Does it have something to do with "Lizard Warrior" being a Portal card?

Portal had some cards that were reskins of existing cards, but simplified creatively (aka removed proper names new players wouldn’t know).