Why Did Mark Rosewater Describe Three-Color Combinations With Conversations?

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Posted on Feb. 22, 2024, 10:41 p.m. by DemonDragonJ

When the original Ravnica block premiered, Mark Rosewater dedicated an article to each two-color combination, in which he described each combination, including its philosophies, strengths, and weaknesses, and I found those articles to make perfect sense, providing a description of each color combination that was easy to comprehend and helped me to understand each combination.

However, when the Alara and Tarkir blocks were released, Mark Rosewater wrote articles to describe each three-colored combination, but he wrote those as a conversation between the colors of each combination, which I found to be very distracting, and which made it difficult to fully comprehend each three-colored combination's identity and philosophy, so I wonder why Rosewater chose to write those articles in that format?

What does everyone else say about this? Why did Mark Rosewater write the articles about three-colored combinations as conversations, rather than using the same format that he used for the two-color combinations?

legendofa says... #2

Ask him directly. That's a serious suggestion--I believe you know about his Q&A blog, and while I've been reluctant to start an account simply to ask him questions, he appears to be very willing to answer exactly this sort of question. Any answer he can give will be more insightful than what you'll find around here.

But I would say he wanted to try a new stylistic choice, and decided that the conversation style was original and worked for his purposes.

February 22, 2024 10:52 p.m.