tk17studios asked:

"If the playtest cards didn’t have Magic backs, would that have helped them feel less real?" Yes, but I don't think that the solution is "make something less cool"? Playtest cards WITH Magic backs were super exciting and got a lot of people interested in buying boosters from WOTC; if they had token backs, that would have resulted in less interest in purchasing product, which doesn't seem like the goal?

Your missing the problem I’m trying to point out. We have a very high bar for the quality of a Magic card. When you all get your hands on one, you know that it’s been thoroughly vetted. We’ve playtested it and tweaked it and put it through its paces over many months and sometimes years. It was crafted to maximize it being a fun play experience. (And yes, there are the occasional balance issues, but that comes from trying to make a complex tournament environment that can’t be cracked in a day.)

The playtest cards come nowhere near that bar. Let’s take Maro’s Gone Nuts (an enchantment that doubles all effects that double things) that I designed. That card was never playtested, not even once. It was never in a deck or on the battlefield. Why? Because it’s not a real card. It’s a joke.

Why wouldn’t we really print that card? Because it’s either useless or crazy overpowered. There’s no point where it’s fair, fun gameplay. It’s fun to read. It’s not particularly fun to play.

By what about Un-cards? We specifically spends lots and lots of time making sure Un-cards are fun to read and fun to play. They go through lots of playtest and iteration to bring them up to the quality bar of a Magic card.

I think the playtest cards from the Mystery Booster are a cool thing, (we had a blast making them) but if the result of us printing them is that we lower the expectation of what the quality is of a Magic card, that’s a bad thing. So, when I’m talking about changing your perception of them, it’s because I understand what the playtest cards really are and I want you, the audience, seeing them the same way.

If that’s not something we can do, if they’re just as real to you all as the cards we carefully and meticulously craft of the highest quality, then that might mean we can’t do them again.