Hi Mark. Ive seen that you do trivia for birthdays and hoping maybe i could get a lil on my favorite card, voice of resurgence.

The card was originally rare but when we moved Emmara down to rare to line up the cycle of maze runners, it got moved up to mythic rare. Happy Birthday!

I think a major part of the problem with Voice of Resurgence is the mana cost. CMC 1 or 2 mythics just don't feel right, so people get upset when cards that cheap are mythic.

I think mythic rares need to feel special and unique. I don’t think a low mana cost is a limit to cards feeling that way. What do you all think?

Mark, there are a lot if people who are mad about Voice of Resurgence, complaining that such a powerful (and universal?) card should have never been printed as Mythic, pointing to some promise made by Wizards art he Alara Block. While I don't necessarily agree with them, I have the good fortune of owning four since before the explosive demand for the card, thus perhaps making my perspective irrelevant. How do you feel about the situation?

Here’s what I actually said: This now leads us to the next question: How are cards split between rare and mythic rare? Or more to the point, what kind of cards are going to become mythic rares? We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. They will not just be a list of each set’s most powerful tournament-level cards. We’ve also decided that there are certain things we specifically do not want to be mythic rares. The largest category is utility cards, what I’ll define as cards that fill a universal function. Some examples of this category would be cycles of dual lands and cards like Mutavault or Char. That also addresses a long-standing issue that some players have had with certain rares like dual lands. Because we’re making fewer cards per set, in the new world individual rares will be easier to acquire because each rare in a large set now appears 25% more often. Voice of Resurgence does not do something I above said we wouldn’t do. It’s not a utility card and I didn’t say we wouldn’t make tournament cards at mythic rare. I said we wouldn’t make all the tournament cards at mythic rare. As the Delver of Secrets conversation of two days ago shows, we have format defining cards at common as well as at rare and mythic rare.

How do you stay so patient when people ask you silly things? Someone recently asked for more "*/* not tied to hand size". This person apparently isn't aware of Wayfaring Temple, Voice of Resurgence, Splinterfright, Rubblehulk, Pack Rat, Malignus, Geist-Honored Monk, Crusader of Odric, Consuming Aberration, or Boneyard Wurm. Exactly how many */*'s do they want? And how do you stay so calm?

After years of doing this, I can get in a meditative zone while answering. : )

I would just like to say that I'm very happy that you are taking the time to look up Emmara's story and to write it down for us. This is the stuff that makes me like you! :) (And you make Magic awesome.)

So here’s what happened. Originally, some of the maze runners (aka guild champions) were rare and some were mythic rare. They couldn’t all be mythic rare because we only had nine mythic rare slots. Ral Zarek, a planeswalker, had already taken up the tenth slot. (Planeswalkers for complexity and specialness reasons need to be mythic rare.)  We talked about Ral just being the Izzet representative but decided that for numerous purposes (Commander being one of the biggest) we wanted a blue/red legendary creature and thus an Izzet maze runner.  It was decided well into development that the maze runners should all be the same rarity which meant they had to be rare as mythic rare wasn’t possible. This resulted in us making some changes to turn the mythic rare maze runners into rare maze runners.  One of those swaps was Voice of Resurgence with Emmara. As many have guessed, Emmara originally made the */* token (seen in the background of her art). It wasn’t a straight swap and there was lots of massaging of both cards. That is what happened.