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One of the biggest problems I see in young designers is the  desire to  get too tactical in the design. They get very focused on  what's supposed  to be the good cards. In design playtest I purposefully  try to put the  cards at around the same level because I want all the  cards to get  played.

I for one would really prefer that you kept it that way.   Having Development turn some cards into what Spike thinks is "good" is  what allows Spike to dismiss everything else as "bad", and I think  that's awfully disrespectful of him.  You have to pay money to  commission art and flavor text for every card, and you have every card  communicate some meaningful concept, either a factoid about your  fictional universe or a meaningful metaphor for real life (eg goblins as  a metaphor for stupid, self-destructive people, who we all too often  have making our decisions for us in politics, at work, and so forth).   Attaching any of this information to a card, and then allowing  Development to make that card bad, means that the message fails to get  across, and the money was wasted.  If you adhered to a consistent power  level for every card, so they were all equally good in a vacuum, all  equally good at any level of combination, all containing some  combination of "usefulness in situation regardless of situation's  commonality" and "commonality of situations containing usefulness  regardless of its degree" which totals the same value, no card would  ever be "bad", no card would ever be ignored and dismissed, and the work  of everyone who has ever worked on any of those cards would be  validated.

Don't ignore that little voice that feels sad when Development calls  your baby ugly, MaRo.  If you accept that your baby is ugly, you stop  loving it, and its presence in society becomes destructive.  Printing  bad cards wastes cardboard and frustrates players.  You should make  every card a masterpiece, even if that means you don't make very many of  them and have to charge more for them - the important thing is that  everyone who buys a card gets what they paid for.

Me: And that's why this will be a perfect fit for the set.
Developer: I see why the set wants that element but that isn't how the players are going to use it.
Me: What do you mean?
Developer: Well, because of [Reason A], the card won't be used as you want them to use it but rather as [Use B].
Me: I never thought of that. What can we do to avoid [Reason A]?
Developer: I've been thinking about that ...

Where was development to say Mindslaver should've exiled itself?


Ehm, 1 soopspoon of flexibility?