You said recently that Blasphemous Act and Chain Reaction are now considered out of pie for Red. Do you believe the same should be said of new Fallout card Megaton’s Fate, which deals 8 damage to each creature?

We want to separate red direct damage from black creature removal, so I’m a big believer in the 6 damage line.

Are Blashemous Act/Chain Reaction out of pie because of the rate? Would either be fine if they costed more?

We let red do scaleable damage based on mana, so, in theory, there’s an acceptable cost, but probably not a practical one.

I wonder if there was a sort of chain reaction with C18. Wizards announces a stream with the first info about it, excited Commander players flock to it. It turns out to have only a bit of info and only after a lot of stuff targeted at a different audience, so they get frustrated but latch onto the theme info. That leads to holding the decks to a higher theme standard than usual, and judging stuff off that theme more harshly than past Commander sets. Does that sound plausible to you?

Very plausible. If we had it to do over, we’d definitely do things a bit different.