Hello everyone, welcome to the Magic R&D Developer’s Blog. I’m Ian Duke, a senior game designer on Magic R&D’s development team. The development team is responsible for the second half of Magic card and set design, with an extra focus on game balance and competitive play.

This blog is a new feature we’re starting up to better engage with the community on topics that concern game balance, tournament play and designing Magic sets. Each week we’ll be answering a few questions from among your submissions. Since our goal is to give you some real depth and insight on each question we pick, we won’t be able to answer everything. But we do hope to hit a good cross section of topics that are being discussed within the community. We also hope to get some standalone features posted, like our thoughts on how things turned out with recent sets and where things differed from our expectations.

A couple quick tips on having your question selected: First, be respectful. One of the best things about Magic is how passionate players can be about the game, but remember that Magic has a diverse fan base, and there are lots of folks out there who might have different opinions or appreciate different content than you do. Second, make sure to ask questions we can actually answer! We can’t comment on upcoming sets or products, so it’s much better to ask questions about cards or topics that are already out there in the real world.

Our intent is to incorporate a variety of answers, thoughts and features from all the members of our development team. We’re excited to have another way to interact with the community, and with a little bit more agility and back-and-forth than article series and interviews have given us so far. You can start submitting your questions now and we’ll aim to have our first round of answers posted later next week. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Ian