So, here are the answers I gave for the essay question portion of the third Great Designer Search. Obviously, I didn't make it past the multiple choice test, as previously stated. I figured I'd give you guys a chance to read these, as nobody at WotC was going to. That way, I can feel validated if they receive praise. I'm not going to bother with the first question, since it doesn't really provide any insight regarding my mindset as a designer. For the record, here's what they were looking for. If anybody else here entered and was rejected, feel free to post your own essays in this thread. Without further ado:

2. An evergreen mechanic is a keyword mechanic that shows up in (almost) every set. If you had to make an existing keyword mechanic evergreen, which one would you choose and why?

If I had to make an existing non-evergreen keyword into an evergreen keyword, I would choose Kicker. I have two major reasons for this. The first is the amount of available design space for cards with Kicker. As a mechanic, it functions on every type of spell, possibly even Planeswalkers. The Kicker cost for a spell can be mana, something else, or both, and the resulting effect can also be nearly anything. In fact, I’d argue that Kicker has more design flexibility than every other existing mechanic in Magic, period. As an evergreen keyword, designers could take advantage of that flexibility to better integrate Kicker into future sets. Want to reuse Morbid? Print some cards with a Kicker cost of ‘sacrifice a creature’. Need a good way to enable battlecruiser gameplay in limited? Print some cards with Kicker abilities that buff individual creatures. The second reason is that Kicker is fairly easy for players to understand compared to other keyword mechanics. You pay an additional cost when casting a spell to get an additional effect. There are no awkward rules interactions like with Morph or Madness, and it doesn’t force players to keep track of information they normally wouldn’t, like with Energy or Ascend. Most of the time, the additional cost is just mana, which is what players usually use to pay costs. The one downside is that if you include the reminder text then Kicker takes up about three lines of a card’s text box. However, if the mechanic were to become evergreen, then players would gradually become accustomed to it, and you could start printing the reminder text less often.

3. If you had to remove evergreen status from a keyword mechanic that is currently evergreen, which one would you remove and why?

If I had to remove an existing evergreen keyword’s evergreen status, I would choose Defender. I have three major reasons for this. The first is that it’s the only evergreen keyword that is almost exclusively a downside whenever it’s applied. Ignoring cards like Vent Sentinel, putting Defender onto a creature will make that creature worse by reducing its functionality on the battlefield, as being able to attack is half of combat. And cards that give other creatures Defender such as Guard Duty have less utility than actual removal spells or Pacifism-type effects, so they’re practically outclassed. The second reason it that it only reduces the number of words you would otherwise need to print on cards by a tiny amount. ‘This creature can’t attack’ is only three more words than Defender and works identically in the rules (again, ignoring cards like Vent Sentinel). When the Unblockable terminology was phased out, its replacement text, ‘this creature can’t be blocked’, had even more words than that, and players didn’t really mind the change much. The third is that it honestly isn’t used very often in contemporary sets. As of the time of this essay test, there are only seven cards in standard that use Defender in some way. That’s effectively only one per set. Awaken wasn’t printed on Waker of the Wilds and Metalcraft wasn’t printed on Inventor’s Fair or Toolcraft Exemplar, despite those cards using those mechanics, because Awaken and Metalcraft weren’t on any other cards in Ixalan or Kaladesh. I’d argue that Defender shouldn’t be treated any differently, in that creatures unable to attack should still be printed, but that keywording such a sparsely used ability isn’t necessary.

(After submissions, I realized that Unblockable wasn't actually a keyword. But my point still stands.)

4.You're going to teach Magic to a stranger. What's your strategy to have the best possible outcome?

I could answer this question with a step by step list of what rules I would explain and when, from the phases of a turn to card types. Such explanations are of course needed. However, based on my experience teaching Magic, that would be skipping the most critical factor. My ideal strategy for converting a fresh face into a full-fledged Magic player hinges on first making sure they know what Magic is all about and that they genuinely WANT to learn the game. Just overhearing a stranger ask “that looks fun, how do you play?” isn’t enough to get me to leap from my chair and grab a welcome deck. Instead, I’d give them a rundown on exactly what type of game it is first and watch how they react. If the idea of an ever-expanding multiplayer battle tactics game with deep mechanics, a heavy focus on deckbuilding, and collection elements doesn’t appeal to them, then I might recommend a different game instead. If they still seem excited after learning all that, THEN I’d break out the welcome deck and provide a crash course on the basic rules. In the past, I’ve tried teaching two people how to play Magic, my mother and my cousin, and while that’s hardly an adequate sample size, it does make for a decent case study of why I’d take this approach. My cousin is the sort of person who loves games, and had taught me a couple back in the day. So, when I went and taught him Magic, he was very receptive, and quickly latched onto white-blue as his favorite color pair. My mother, meanwhile, just wanted another way to connect with me. And even though she frequently plays Mahjong, which is also fairly complicated, Magic just wasn’t her thing. Despite my best efforts at teaching, she remained completely unable to play. That’s the difference passion and excitement can make.

5. What is Magic's greatest strength and why?

Magic has many strengths, from its deep gameplay to the huge community of players. However, the one thing I think Magic has over every other existing tabletop game is its variety. There are over a dozen different formats you can play, including sanctioned constructed formats like Standard and Legacy, limited formats like Booster Draft and Sealed, and casual formats like Commander or Planechase. And all of them use the same basic rules, so once you learn to play one, learning the rest becomes trivial. People can even create their own format in the form of Cube Draft! Moreover, due to Magic’s twenty five year history, there are over 10,000 different cards available. I can’t think of any other tabletop games that have that many different game pieces. And with new sets releasing every few months, it’s almost impossible for the game to become stale. Even a player who only plays Legacy with one unchanging deck will still encounter a wide variety of opponents, each employing their own strategy. And since it’s a card game, your library will be in a different order each time, further increasing the number of possible scenarios you can encounter. This keeps every game exciting, with the luck of the draw being almost as critical as the cards used or the skill of the player. Put all of that together, and you have the secret formula that turns new players into lifelong fans. Not all people like variety in their games, but for those that do, Magic is the best there is, bar none, as evidenced by the huge number of people who play it every day.

6. What is Magic's greatest weakness and why?

I’d argue that the greatest weakness of Magic is the current state of the secondary market for singles and out of print sealed product. As objects available for purchase, Magic cards are of course subject to the free market economy, including supply and demand. Cards printed at higher rarities and cards that are highly desired by players will therefore be more expensive to obtain, such is the way of capitalism. The reason this is an issue is that the ability for a player to enjoy Magic shouldn’t be limited by their financial means. For instance, let’s say a player, who I’ll call Jane, wants to try playing Vintage, simply because she has fun casting the most powerful spells she possibly can. But Jane doesn’t have fifteen thousand dollars on hand to spend on a deck. So, she settles for Standard, longing for the day she can finally partake in Vintage. See the problem here? In most other strategy games, real world money isn’t a barrier to having all the options, even in cases where different players might be playing different roles entirely. The fact that the most popular Magic formats - Standard and Booster Draft - require a continuous influx of money is a major turnoff for people too, especially when so many alternatives, such as chess, only require a single purchase. Sports like soccer are universally enjoyed around the world because most of them are so cheap to play. A huge potential swath of players is forever cut off from Magic simply because they can’t afford it.

7. What Magic mechanic most deserves a second chance (aka which had the worst first introduction compared to its potential)?

I’m going to say Affinity. Now, I already know what you’re thinking: “NAME REDACTED, Affinity was one of the most broken mechanics ever made! It completely destroyed Standard at the time!” To that I would reply: “That’s not quite true. Affinity FOR ARTIFACTS was a broken mechanic. Not Affinity as a whole.” Because of the stigma attached to it, Affinity has never been reused since Mirrodin block. However, by focusing on subtypes instead, it’s most certainly possible to breathe new life into the mechanic. I have a couple of ideas as to how this could be done, one of which was already explored a bit in Darksteel with the Location Golem cycle: basic land types. I think the best place to put Affinity for plains and company would be in a multicolor focused set. For example, when Magic next goes to Ravnica, a mono-green creature affiliated with the Gruul might have Affinity for mountains. That way, the card could still be played in green decks without red, but its rate would improve in an Gruul deck, kind of like a middle ground between a hybrid mana cost card and a gold card. Another approach would be to use creature types in a tribal set. A cycle of spells that become cheaper when you’re playing a specific tribe was literally just printed in Rivals of Ixalan, so I know it’s on the table. However, Affinity is more flexible, with the degree of benefit scaling with the degree of deckbuilding commitment. Also, it can be quite resonant in terms of flavor. For instance, a demon having Affinity for humans makes perfect sense, in that most demons would appreciate some fleshy offerings, while a wolf with Affinity for wolves evokes the mentality of a pack hunter perfectly.

8. Of all the Magic expansions that you've played with, pick your favorite and then explain the biggest problem with it.

Asking me to pick my favorite Magic expansion is like asking a mother to decide which of their children is the best. But since I HAVE to choose, I’ll say Return to Ravnica. There’s just something, well, magical about the set. I could spend all day singing its praises. However, there is one huge problem with the set: color balance in limited. In Return to Ravnica, five of the ten guilds are represented, each with many multicolored cards and their own named mechanic. The issue with that arrangement is that essentially half of the possible decks you could build have zero support in the set. Sure, a player COULD draft a white-black deck from three packs of RTR, but then they would be missing out on all the powerful multicolored cards at higher rarities. A player drafting one of the supported guilds can not only tune their deck around a specific mechanic, but also has the chance to open bombs like Niv-Mizzet or Supreme Verdict, which puts any player not in one of those color pairs at a significant disadvantage. One of the best parts of Magic having a color pie is that players can explore the myriad combinations of colors in concert with eachother when deckbuilding. In Magic today, I don’t think Return to Ravnica would have been structured like it was. Practically every set from the past few years has had a cycle of ten gold uncommons, one for each color pair, to support that color pair in limited. Each lends itself to its own archetype. In an eight person draft, odds are good that no two players will end up in the same color pair stealing eachother’s picks, so why does Return to Ravnica often force players to do so in order to have the best chance at winning?

9. Of all the Magic expansions that you've played with, pick your least favorite and then explain the best part about it.

My least favorite Magic expansion out of the ones I was around to try is M14. It was fairly bland overall, and the changes made to the art design of the slivers were less than stellar. As a glutton for lore and flavor, I’ve never been a huge fan of core sets, at least not until they started getting major story elements in M15. However, it’s that very lack of a cohesive theme which allows M14 to access its greatest strength as a set: the fact that it has something for everyone. It doesn’t hit the critical mass of any one factor because the design team crammed in everything but the kitchen sink. Going back to the psychographic profiles, M14 gave Spike access to Scavenging Ooze and Mutavault in Standard, along with mighty new cards like smash hit Young Pyromancer and Archangel of Thune. Rise of the Dark Realms and Kalonian Hydra are two of the most Timmy-approved squares of paper in history. One of my personal all-time favorite cards is from M14: combo all-star Strionic Resonator. The set also gifted Johnny/Jenny with Shadowborn Apostle, Elite Arcanist, and Ring of Three Wishes. Even Vorthos got to make potions with Bogbrew Witch and feed creatures to a Colossal Whale. This makes M14 a prime example of how to create a good core set, one that can effectively draw in new players eager to experience more of what Magic has to offer (again, except for the slivers). It just so happened that I was already an enfranchised player of over four years by the time M14 was printed, and lost out on that spark.

10. You have the ability to change any one thing about Magic. What do you change and why?

Anything? That’s a lot of responsibility! I wouldn’t want to do something like abolish the reserved list or replace all Standard Friday Night Magic events with Modern ones, because even though I personally would love for both of those things to happen, tons of other people wouldn’t. So, instead, I’d elect to reopen the door for Magic to reference outside stories and franchises, much like the game’s very first expansion: Arabian Nights. Such a change would only increase the possibilities for the future of Magic, even if it was only limited to supplemental sets like Conspiracy. How cool would it be to have an entire set themed around the world and characters of Dungeons and Dragons? Or the works of Shakespeare? Heck, other companies could even pay Wizards of the Coast to make sets featuring their own properties as a way to increase brand awareness. The best part about this hypothetical shift is that players who only want to experience original, canon content could just ignore the licensed sets and therefore won’t have to suffer anything they dislike as a result. This sort of thing is happening with Magic right now, and fairly extensively. Unstable wasn’t meant to cater to competitive players, and Modern Masters wasn’t meant to cater to kitchen table players. But both are great sets and their creation was surely justified, even though neither were ever going to reach as wide an audience as an ordinary expansion. The addition of licensed sets to Magic would be almost entirely upside and bring smiles to thousands of faces, making it the best kind of change.

I would disagree with making kicker evergreen, personally. Specifically because of how flexible it is. A huge swath of keywords could have simply been kicker (or multikicker), with little to no functional change to the card. If kicker were evergreen, then you would be less likely to see more flavorful mechanics that could be implemented as kicker.

On #3, I'll point out that your examples of Awaken and Metalcraft aren't keyword abilities, but rather ability words that have no actual rules meaning.

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Point of order, awaken is a keyword ability. It's just a kicker-esque one that can only go on instants and sorceries, like overload. Note Halimar Tidecaller. But yeah, it still couldn't be put on Waker of the Wilds's ability.

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There is a subtle diference between Awaken and Metalcraft, but it is a difference which matters:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=401844
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=213794

Metalcraft is in italics.

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With regards to kicker, you may recall a past Mark Rosewater column where he described the most flexible design feature, split cards. The article had mock-ups of various keywords as split cards, including kicker and ninjutsu!

#6 may be an honest answer, but it says nothing about your talents as a designer.

For #10, I agree, and propose the next expansion be Equestria!