Hi Mark. I hope you're having a nice Monday. I think it's great that you guys are focusing more on Commander and the casualty side of Magic, which has historically been more in the background. However, I think the health of competitive is formats is being neglected. Many of the formats I used to enjoy no longer have the same compelling and engaging gameplay that they used to. At first I though it was just me, but many people feel the same way. Is there anywhere I can voice this concern? Thanks.

Here’s a good place to voice it. I should stress that we’re spending just as many resources as we always have (if not more) on competitive play. Yes, we added a casual play design team, but never shrunk the competitive ply design team. In fact, we added people to it.

Is there any concern about the current complexity of Commander games?Cards like Crystalline Giant, Wheel of Misfortune, and dozens of recent legendary creatures with 2 paragraphs of text, as well as relatively complex mechanics used only in a single set (connive, enlist, casualty, training) have lead to some games in which I've spent more time reading than playing. It comes up most often when I play with strangers and against unfamiliar decks. Thanks in advance, and I really admire your dedication to and involvement with the community :)

Formats that use cards from all the sets are inherently complex.

Regarding complexity and mental load:One of my friends in our playgroup has given nearly identical feedback about complexity and power creep, and a handful of content creators / doomsayers have echoed those same notions.I am the opposite. I love new mechanics. New Capenna was a fever dream of connive (which is a 5 star ability), blitz, casualty and what have you. These terms were overwhelming for the first ten minutes of our first precon matchup, but then we talked them through at the table and everyone got it.Sefris / dungeons is my favorite commander deck, so much so that I’m looking to build an initiative/monarch deck with Vela the Night Clad at the helm.And I’ve been enthusiastically been trying to make my Myra commander deck work too. Again, I explain in clear terms to my spell table group how attractions work, and everyone gets it within a turn or two, and good times are had.I hear the complexity feedback, but also I always wonder what the alternative is. Simple vigilance and haste and reach keyworded creatures every few months from here to eternity?

The nature of a trading card game is we have to keep exploring and trying new things. If complexity is an issue, there are a lot of formats that can cut it down for you. Ones that use (almost) all the cards are just going to continue to rise in complexity.

Hi Mark, since Streets of New Capenna and the Alara block are both bottom-up designs based on a tri-color shard mechanic, would it have been possible, in theory, to have designed a Return to Alara set that assigned the SNC faction mechanics instead to their corresponding shard (Bant gets shield, Grixis gets casualty etc.)?

When we return to a world with factions, we try to synergize the different incarnations, so they play well together. This means we wouldn’t use the Streets of New Capenna takes on the arcs in an Alara set.

Hi Mark, with Casualty on Ob Nixilis, that means the rules handle it on permanents; was "only instants/sorceries" a design choice for the limited environment? And could Join the Maestros have been a creature, theorically?

Ob was the last casualty card made, I believe, so it was stretched beyond its original design far into the design process.

For the casualty mechanic, does each copy also have casualty X so you can sac multiple creatures and chain copies until you run out of creatures?

Casualty is only on instants and sorceries. It is possible for permanents to grant it to instants and sorceries.

Tibalt could appear on other worlds, but let's be honest: he won't. He's a casualty of the decision to focus on the same characters every block from now on.

Nothing has changed as far as this is concerned. We used to have ten Planeswalkers a year with five in the core set that mostly stayed the same. Now we put those five out through the existing sets rather than have them all in a core set. The reason Tibalt got squeezed out is because we were trying to include so many other Planeswalkers beyond the Gatewatch.