Planar Chaos Reflections

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.