I'd like to voice my dislike of the paring down of some of the creature types, because I feel like differing viewpoints are good in game design and I've not really seen that many statements voiced in opposition to these changes. My view of it is that it strips out a lot of uniqueness of Magic as a setting. Other settings have humanoid lizards, but they don't have Viashino. Other settings have undersea-dwelling peoples, but they don't have Cephalids. Naga becoming Snake was completely understandable, and I think the justifications for it were valid. I do not think Viashino becoming Lizard or Cephalid becoming Octopus were remotely justified. On top of that, it creates some weird points, where you can see clearly crocodilian humanoids (the Viashino from Alara) now labeled as Lizards, which not only are separate types in Magic, they're not even closely related in real life (crocodiles are more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than lizards). I've seen a number of very loud people advocate for trimming all the "unnecessary" types in Magic out, but their proposals usually end up as "there should be about 20 creature types total." This is not only unsatisfactory from a game design standpoint--as it would make tribal decks a bit *too* easy to accomplish--but absolutely catastrophic from a flavor perspective as well. At that point, why not just have typelines be "TYPE1", "TYPE2", and so forth? Flavor and function have to work together, and sacrificing too much of either is a bad thing. Too little function, and the game becomes unplayable. Too little flavor, and the game becomes cold and sterile. This is not to say that trimming on creature types is a bad thing--I think Magic wouldn't be hurt by trimming on a few more creature types if you asked me--but just that I think the choice of creature types being trimmed is odd, to say the least. Why does a regularly printed creature type with new cards that were printed just earlier this year get the boot, and not something like trilobite, which has all of 5 cards, with a 4 year gap between the printing of the most recent one and the one before that? If this is to help tribal decks, why are there still one-off or two-off creature types being printed, like Varmint and Coyote?

We’re not getting rid of Viashino. They will continue to creatively exist. We will still refer to them in titles and flavor text as Viashino. All we’re doing is consolidating the creature types so that we’re consistent in how we use them. Magic has been treating animal humanoids this way (aka using the animal as the creature type) for two plus decades. All we’re doing is going back and fixing the few that got done before we adopted this policy back in the early days of Magic.

Hi Mark, I'm hoping you can settle a debate I'm having with friends. Is Varmint considered a creature class, race, or a status type (where it can acts as either a race or class depending on the context)? I thought it was a class initially, until I saw Voracious Varmint.

It’s similar to Beast.