"Amass, while not technically from this decade, is only five years old." It is insane to me that it has already been half a decade since War of the Spark. Where does the time go Mark?

Today I realized Magic 2010 came out *fifteen* years ago. At MagicCon, I had tons of adult players tell me how they read my articles when they were small children. Time is fickle, my friends. : )

Exile used to be “remove from the game”, meaning wish effects could get cards that were hit by something like path to exile or crumbling sanctuary. Could we ever see a mass errata that lets wishes made before M10 pull from exile, allowing them to work as they originally did? The introduction of exile effectively acted as functional errata for these cards, so letting them pull from exile would make them go back to how they functioned originally before M10

That was not their original intent, and I was part of the design team who made the wishes. It was something added later, I think after the cards had been out for a little while.

If or when: another rules revamp on the scale of 6th Edition and M2010?

6th Edition? Big If.Magic 2010? Little if.

What fights have you changed your mind on?

The big one was mana burn. I went from saving it in Sixth Edition to be the person leading the charge to get rid of it in Magic 2010.

You didn't actually answer paulapolos' question, so let me try re-wording it: How do you decide which complaints you hear are valid enough to make changes?

It comes down to a bunch of things:1) As with “bad” cards, is it something we are able to not do? If it has to happen, players complaining isn’t going to stop it. 2) Is it the only viable path? Introducing Standard wasn’t popular, but there were forces that were going to destroy Magic if we didn’t act, so we didn’t have much choice but to weather through the complaints.3) Is it something that we feel the audience doesn’t understand? Yes, changing the rules (Sixth Edition, Magic 2010, etc.) got negative reaction, but change tends to upset people and there was literally no way for players to understand the new thing without experiencing it. We had confidence that once they experienced it, they’d like it and they did.4) Is there a long term gain that players don’t understand? Sometimes we’re doing something that takes time to pay off and we weather complaints until we reach the new state.The rotation wasn’t #1, we could not do it. It wasn’t #2, we had other business options. It ended up not being #3 because players understand rotations and their dislike of them wasn’t because it was a new thing they didn’t understand.#4 is the one we hoped to hang our hat on, but research showed that we overvalued the positivity of change to the environment and undervalued the negativity of people not being able to play the same deck for a long period of time. It turns out many players have more negative associations with rotations than positive. They understand they have to happen, but they want them to happen at the slowest rate possible.The TLDR answer is that we have to gauge why players are upset and judge it against whether time will bring about change.

Was Kalonian Twingrove your design?

It was not. The only core set design time I’ve been on in ages was Magic 2010, the first core set with new cards.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and i was wondering if I could get any trivia on either Underworld Dreams, or my favorite Lorwyn giants Boldwyr Heavyweights.

One of my favorite things to do is reprint a card that no one sees coming. I remember on Magic 2010, talking about whether we could reprint Underworld Dreams as it had been problematic in the past. But we got the go ahead from development and I was quite giddy. Happy Birthday!

Hey Mark! Hope your weekend goes splendiforously. I was wondering if you could list the core sets you worked on?

Fifth Edition
Eighth Edition
Magic 2010

Retroactively, would you consider Alpha thru Tenth Edition to be core sets?

We referred to them as core sets before Magic 2010 came out.

I have recently read your Magic 2010 preview article, and apparently, you were allowed to break the color pie in this set. Why is that ? Isn't it even more confusing to new players ?

One of my big complaints is that we seem to most often break color pie in the set that is supposed to set the standard for what the color pie is. I think the big problem is it’s the set I’m least involved in and thus it gets policed less by me, the color pie guru.