Mark Today is My Birthday!!! My favorite set is Kamigawa and My favorite charcter is Toshiro Umezawa and my favorite Creature type is Rat. But honestly I know everything about those 3 subjects. So the real Birthday trivia I want is, What is the best Birthday Present you ever got Mark?

For my 30th birthday, Lora (my then girlfriend/now wife), threw me a surprise party. It was a very nice party with catered food and a DJ. It was a wonderful party, but I didn’t know how she was able to afford it. I later found out she ate nothing but Raman noodles for six weeks to save up the money. That’s the first time I realized how serious she was about our relationship. Seven months later, I proposed to her.EDIT: A little additional information to add some more context. There was a place she could have gotten the money - me. I would have easily given her the money. I had it to give. But asking me meant it couldn’t be a surprise party and she knew how much I would enjoy having a surprise party. So, there was a much easier path she could have taken to get to a party, at let’s say a 70% rate, but she did what she did because she wanted to give me the best party even if it made things much harder for her.

Regarding characters with disabilities, there are more characters, Toshiro Umezawa was blind, Freyalise and Yisan can't see from one eye , Eight and half tails severed one his tails, Ravi has mental health issues after the homelands apocalypse, and Baral has to use a mask because of his third degree burn scars.

FYI

I was just looking at Tetsuko Umezawa, and her flavor text references Toshiro Umezawa of Kamigawa. Was this a misprint meaning to instead be Tetsuo Umezawa? If not, how did someone descended from a resident of Kamigawa end up on Dominaria?

I doubt they got the name wrong. A lot of research went into this set’s flavor text.

We have toshiro umezawa on kamigawa, tetsuo umezawa and tetsuko umezawa on Dominaria. How is the same family across different planes without a planeswalker in the family?

I’m not a story person, but I’ve been told there is an explanation that was told a while back.

Hi, MaRo! My birthday was the other day, and I was wondering if you had any trivia on either of my two favorite commanders, Toshiro Umezawa and Jaya Ballard.

I think Jaya Ballard stuck around as long as she did because the flavor text writers all enjoyed writing her. I’m happy that during my flavor writing time, I got to write a number of pieces for her. Happy Birthday!

Small correction on Kamigawa lore: Toshiro Umezawa is the ancestor of Tetsuo, not the other way around.

FYI

As a long-time reader of your blog, I've seen you answer many questions about black being the hero and white being a villain. The usual go-to answer is Toshiro Umezawa, but would you consider Sorin a black hero? He definitely played the good guy in Innistrad block.

Sorin is black/white so he is a black hero but he’s not a nonwhite hero.

In your columns about color pie, you often talk about the fact that every color is capable of both good and evil, depending on how one uses its philosophy (for example, how white's desire for order can lead to fascism). My question is : In Magic backstory, has there been a block where the main villain was white-aligned and the hero associated with black mana?

Yes, the Champions of Kamigawa block story did exactly that. The hero is Toshiro Umezawa, a black card. The villain is Konda, Lord of Eiganjo is the villain, a white card.