Do you remember Gavin's first day on the job? Any good stories?

Gavin started in a section of R&D other than design (development, I think) so I was interacting with him all that much on his first day.

Hello! It's my birthday AND I just landed my job at WotC UK! Please may I have some trivia about my favourite creatures, badgers?

Rysorian Badger is one of a handful of cards named after a (former) Wizards employee. That employee is Rhias Hall and she used to work in our Organized Play department back in the early days of Magic. Happy Birthday and Congrats on the job!

Were you always this good at keeping secrets, or did you have to learn it on the job?

I started good at it and have gotten better. : )

I'm sure you and everyone else on the job are already aware, but please be careful with the increased rate of functional reprints! Having too many of a specific effect can lead to degenerate decks in formats with larger cardpools.

We try to use reprints when we can. I should note that we tend to let larger formats deal with the issue you’re talking about through other means that don’t prevent us from making new cards.

It seems you're asked the GDS question often, and the answer is always the same, so I'll ask a variation; what's the first day/week/month on the job like for new R&D employees? I'm curious to know how you bring people up to speed.

We tend to throw our interns into the deep end of the pool pretty quickly. There’s a few weeks to get their orientation, but they are assigned teams pretty quickly and they always have other projects to do as well. I think the GDS is a good entry for the design interns because it kind of gets them up and running before they get here.