Wazzzaaaaap, Mark da Shark,Just wanted to send kudos and share my excitement about so much of Bloomburrow! It's gonna be my first prerelease in a long while, since M20, I think, as well as there's so many things to love about it. I've been a big fan of Doug Beyer since Kaladesh, glad he was the lead designer on this set. Also super pumped to be getting both a revisit to the Heroic mechanic in Valiant, one of my favorite mechanics from Theros, and the amount of rabbit typal support. My Cadira commander deck is gonna go through a major redesign when the set is properly out. Hope you have a lovely day!

I’m glad you’re so excited. I can’t wait to hear all the prerelease stories.

Do you own any Commander decks?

Preconstructed? Yes.

I like Planeschase but dislike Dr. Who. Mechanically, the Dr. Who product added some fun and interesting cards, but I skipped it because of the IP. How well did it do and is there a chance of getting more in-universe Planeschase?

The feedback on March of the Machine Commander decks and the Doctor Who Commander didn’t have the planechase element listed as high points of the set for players.

Hi Maro: I’m definitely disappointed that there won’t be normal Commanders in the Commander decks. If people want a foil or showcase version then isn’t that what the collector boosters are for? I recently picked up the last set of challenger decks for casual play and it’s annoying I need to order another Kappa Tech-Wrecker and normal VOW/MID basics to replace included cards. I absolutely love precons — note my profile pic — and it’d be sad if they became another thing which “isn’t for me”.

The challenge is some players want one thing and some want another and we can only do one thing. As for putting the Commanders in the collector booster, we’ve done extensive polling of the audience for the collector booster and they mostly don’t want the Commander cards in the product.

I just want to say I'm a huge fan of the fact that you have starter decks for the Assassin's Creed set. That new players (especially those who like Assassin's Creed, but may not have played Magic before) have somewhere to start that's not a blank slate is awesome. I also think the size of the Beyond Booster set also nicely bridges a gap between commander decks, secret lairs, and tent pole sets. High fives to all involved!

High fives to be applied.

Why do a starter deck for assassins creed? The starter decks are intended for players just starting out but the assasins creed cards are modern legal so the complexity and power level should be for more advanced players. You didn't do commander decks for this product when they made way more sense than mh3

Beginners can play cards that are Modern legal. : )

As someone who primarily plays commander I really dislike how it's been stapled on to Freerunning. Cards don't need to work in every deck. In fact, it feels much more rewarding when you stumble across cards that only work in the deck you're trying to build. Freerunning as an assassin's only thing would've been great. Cool mechanic, cool flavor, fits the IP. Including commander makes it feel forced and too direct. I get commander is the most popular format and you want to cater to it, but this is the absolute worst way to do that in my opinion. Just make cool cards with niche abilities and have them be legendary from time to time.

Assassin typal is pretty narrow. Note how Outlaws of Thunder Junction had to also attach Rogue and Mercenary and Pirates and Warlock to make it mechanically relevant. (There were only 87 Assassins in the game - not counting Changelings - before Assassin’s Creed released.)It just isn’t good game design to make a mechanic (the only new one, no less) one that can only be played in under .1% of decks. But it’s Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s in the title. It’s the core role of the game. So Corey (the lead design of the set) decided to find additional mechanical space to broaden it. Commander traditionally has trouble with aggression (aka not a lot of Commanders attack regularly) so Corey found a way to make the mechanic relevant in Commander.Even though every Commander deck has a Commander, free running doesn’t push in a way that makes every deck want or need it. I hear the message that some people don’t want us to design cards for Commander, but it’s a 800-pound gorilla that dominates tabletop play. If you go to many game stores, it’s the only pick-up game you can find. So to make our new mechanic (again, the only new mechanic in the whole set) something unplayable in our most popular format isn’t very viable. There is a truism in game design. “You design for the game being played.” You have to understand how your cards will be used by the players and lean into it. There are so many formats you can play that we (mostly) don’t design for, if that’s important to you. Magic is great in that you the player have so much agency in how you play. But we’re going to design for the format that dominates tabletop play.

Hi Mark! I am here once again to ask when/if four color factions are possible as a minor theme, like in Ikoria, or as a set of commander decks, like Warhammer 40k. We need names for the combos (please c:)!

Us making names, through other means, has a much higher percent chance than us building a set around four-color factions.

Did the Warhammer 40k Universes Beyond decks do well? What's the chance of magic doing another one? Those sets got me way more interested in 40k, and now I'm painting a Drukhari (Dark Elf) Army, so it would be really cool to see some of the other factions the first four decks missed be represented in magic.

The Commander decks did well, so there’s always a chance.

Hey Mark, I just wanted to let you know about my support for processors. I use them in my scarab God commander deck to be able to put creatures I exiled with scarab god's ability back into the graveyard so I can exile them again to get extra copies of a creature.

Processors only allow you to return opponent’s cards in exile to their owner’s graveyard.