Hi Mark, Will we see more retroactively established creature type "groups" like we've seen with party and outlaws already? Looking at sea creature types that are commonly grouped, like "Leviathans, Krakens, Octopuses, Merfolk, Serpents". Can you add whale if you do? Thanks.

I assume we’ll do more creature type batching. If we did sea creatures, would people people like Whales added

Hi Maro :) I'd like to trade in my survived-another-trip-round-the-sun token for some trivia about Xerex or Segovia pls

I love the planes that have some oddness to them like that, and I know that oddness is exactly why we'll probably never get to see them star in their own sets, so they definitely need more blogatog info to compensate

Segovia came about as basically a joke. This card got printed in Legends:

The Leviathan was obviously huge as evidenced by the whales in the art. But the card was a 3/3. How could that be? This prompted someone, on what was then called the continuity team, to invent a special world where everything is tiny. And as Magic works, once you invent something, it finds ways to get used.Happy Birthday!

Hi Mark! As a Vorthos I wanted to voice an opinion on the creature type "Alien". In brief I don't like it flavorfully because alieness is relative, especially in a setting that is composed by different worlds interacting with eachother. Mechanically I understand its role similar to Beast to group a lot of creatures whose species wouldn't get their own typeline, especially with sci-fi Universes Beyonds' products.
Creatures like "Davros" and "The face of Boe" that would be class-only without their species featured make sense as alien for a mechanical reason, but I think that cards like "Spelling Bee" or "Star Whale" work just fine as Insect and Whale and sticking the alien type on them just feels wrong.

Until we make a card that mechanically cares about something being an Alien. : )

I had a coworker whose last name is Segovia. He is 6.5 ft tall and weighed easily over 200lb. Any insight or trivia on how Segovia* got its name?*The plane, my coworker probably got it from his father

Here’s the story. Segovian Leviathan was in Legends. Everything about the name and art (see the wee whales) implies it’s a giant creature, but it’s only a 3/3. Players would joke about this, so the creative team came up with an answer. There was a world Segovia (based off the name) where everything is much smaller. That’s why this giant creature is 3/3.

Regarding Whales vs. Krackens, Leviathans, Octopuses, and Serpents. The first card to group them was Quest for Ula's Temple in Worldwake - which only had one kracken: Wrexial, the Risen Deep. Zendikar had 1 Krakens, 1 Octopus and 1 Serpent, but still no Leviathans. However, at the time of Worldwake's printing no whales had been printed since Great Whale in Urza's Saga nearly 12 years prior whereas Alara block had 3 Leviathans (and another was coming in M11).

FYI

I've noticed that a fair amount of your answers are more like non-answers. A recent question was "do the Simic have submarines, or just Izzet?" and you said "Izzet are mechanical engineers, Simic are biological." (Paraphrased) Obviously you spend a decent amount of energy working and writing answers, so I'm wondering why you answer so many questions in this way. Are these iterative things with no real answer? Annoying questions? Clues to answer ourselves? Thanks. ✌

That is an answer. It’s not very easy to bio-engineer a submarine. (Maybe a whale.)

Would batching have to explicitly call out everything in the batch each times its brought up, or could it list, like, 2-3 followed by an "etc."? Like, if there was a batch of "Aquatic creatures", could the reminder text be (Fish, Leviathans, Squid, etc. are aquatic.) even if the list also included whales, jellyfish, serpents, and whatever else that'd make sense but might not be in the set itself?

Magic rules don’t like “well, you know…”.

"enurdrizzt asked: What are the chances that we will ever see creatures that can travel the blind eternities that are relatively peaceful? Like space whales or squirrels trying to collect every nut in the multiverse?The current plan is planeswalkers are the only beings that can walk between planes. Eldrazi can co-exist in the blind eternities and a plane." So does that mean that other beings can exist in the blind eternities, but not also on a plane?

No.

"I believe living things inside them like bacteria make the journey okay." So if a giant intelligent whale ever got a spark, it could bring non-PW from plane to plane in its stomach?

If we ever get a giant intelligent whale planeswalker, we’ll see. : )

"When you summon them to another world, they stay small." In the game, we (the planeswalkers) constantly summon creatures from other planes to fight for us. Why does that never happen in the story?

It does. Segovian Leviathan, which we see in the art is many times larger than a whale, is but a 3/3.