Hey, Ari here. I'm reluctant to even respond here because it's deeply saddening to me that one grumpy tweet, taken out of context and interpreted uncharitably, has had such a disproportionate effect on some players' perception of me. But if this is going to get brought up every single time my name appears, I want to clarify what I meant and how I should have said it better.
The context of this tweet was a thread where a player was trying to convince me that better communication about the color pie and exactly how and why we make certain decisions would make people happier about White. What I should have written, with the genie wording, is this:
"Education will not solve this problem. Commander has rapidly become our flagship casual format, and we haven't pivoted fast enough to ensure each color has the right tools to compete. No explanation of color pie philosophy or methodology, no matter how deep, is going to change that. In fact, the further we get into the weeds, the less comprehensible and persuasive the explanation will be. Ultimately, players don't want an explanation - they want better White cards. The solution to this problem is to print better motherfucking White cards!"
My wording was lazy and I can understand the uncharitable interpretations from people who saw the tweet outside of that context. For that I take full responsibility and apologize unconditionally. As soon as I realized how poorly I'd phrased it, and that it was upsetting people, I deleted it- but by then, a massive wave of harassment came in from That Other Subreddit, and so I left Twitter for the sake of my own mental health.
Prior to being harassed off Twitter, I had spent about a year - a year! - doing my best to answer players' questions about the color pie and listening to their complaints about White. After leaving, I continued to help out behind the scenes by writing the script for this video at Gavin's request. Before GDS3, I co-founded Goblin Artisans because I wanted a place for hobbyist designers to flex their muscles. So, you can judge for yourself whether the narrative of "Ari thinks players are dumb and don't deserve explanations" based on this one tweet, which I thought about for less than five seconds, is accurate.
I remain very proud of the changes we made to the color pie, and many of the awesome white cards which I promoted or personally designed in recent and upcoming sets. But honestly, color pie was a pretty small part of my work at Wizards, even though it was a lot of my Twitter presence. I'm much, much more proud of Kamigawa, Brother's War, CENSORED, and CENSORED.
