Focusing on the small differences between Nalathni dragon, nexus of fate, and the secret lair feels like a deliberate splitting of hairs and intentionally ignoring the commonalities which is what is upsetting players: once the window of opportunity to get these cards has passed, it’s going to be incredibly hard to get them. This response feels like the communities concerns are being ignored which makes us more upset and feeling overall gaslit. It doesn’t inspire confidence.

Here’s my problem. My job is about splitting hairs. Chroma was a failed mechanic and Devotion was a hit. The difference between something working and something not can often be tiny executions. I try on this blog to let you see my designer persona which does a lot of nit-picking, but you bring a good point that when the audience is upset, that’s not the persona you need and I apologize for that. You guys are hurting and what you need from me is an acknowledgement of that hurt. You need sympathetic Mark and not designer Mark. One of the by-products of being a face of Magic is I’m a lightning rod for feedback. There’s good and bad to that, but it does mean that I have a unique insight into what is upsetting you all. I just wrote a write-up to share with my bosses to explain what I’ve learned, and I want to thank you all for feeling comfortable enough with me to share your issues. So, I’m sorry so many of you are hurting right now. I’ll stop acting like designer Mark on this topic. It’s just causing more pain and that’s the last thing I want.

Hey, Mark. I'm listening to your podcast on 20 things that were going to kill Magic, and you say that Nalathni Dragon was a mistake; having a functionally unique card that was a special promo where you didn't have an easy way to obtain it off you weren't there to get one yourself. Do you feel the Buy-a-Box promos are different enough from Nalathni Dragon? If so, why? They seem to me like a functionally unique set of a cards, in some cases super pushed, that most people don't have access to.

The Nalathni Dragon required you show up at an event in Atlanta, Georgia (in the US) to attend an event that at best tangentially connected to Magic. Buy-a-Box requires you to go to your local game store and buy a box of Magic. Those two things are quite different.

Long ago, Wizards of the Coast made Nalathni Dragon, a promo card exclusive to DragonCon. When that turned out to be a horrible idea, they promised never to print exclusive promo cards again. Now, HASCON has come around and we have another convention-exclusive promo card. Wizards has gone back on their promise. Why is it okay for them to do this, yet not okay for them to go back on the Reserved List? What makes one different from the other?

We print unique functional silver-bordered cards not found in boosters. The holiday cards, for example, fall in this group. We aren’t breaking a promise as we said we wouldn’t do it in black border.

The Zendikar Expeditions promos and the Nalathni Dragon problem. With the SDCC promos, WotC was printing the functionally same cards at the same time in the core set. With Zendikar Expeditions, there is no way to purchase a normal treatment of (most of) these cards from Wizards currently.

I don’t think limiting promotions to cards only in print will lead to good promo cards.

In five years when you do the silver anniversary of Magic, perhaps you can amend your "20 things that Almost Killed Magic" to include 5 things that actually almost did like: overprinting Fallen Empires, following up the Chronicles debacle with a set like Homelands, the Over-powered-ness of Urza's block, following up Urza's block with the utter crappiness of Masques block, and Time Spiral's block of overcomplicated mess? I think each of those put the game in more danger than Nalathni Dragon.

The article was more about controversies than things that were actually in danger of killing the game. I just chose an attention-grabbing headline.

The new back on black promos and the Nalathni Dragon problem.

The problem with Nalathni Dragon was that it was a unique card and the only place you could get it was at Dragoncon. The new promos are cards that exist in Magic 2014. The promos are just a neat treatment of the cards not the only place to get them.