During Eldritch Moon design, was there ever any discussion of having Emrakul have a 5-color emerge cost to have a 5-color identity for Commander?

Not that I remember.

Why can't Squirming Emergence hit lands?

It’s either a play design concern or an avoiding confusion issue, as many players have trouble understanding how mana values interact with lands.

Hey Mark, I wanted to follow up on a question I asked a while back regarding the decision to make Universes Beyond cards eternal-legal. You responded with your “buffet” analogy, essentially explaining that it’s important for players to be able to pick and choose which parts of Magic they want to interact with. However, I feel that this buffet analogy, while logical, is flawed — particularly in regards to casual play. When I sit down to play a game of commander, (continuing with food metaphors) I am no longer eating by myself, rather, each player has brought their favorite food item from the buffet and then each item is mixed together in a bowl. As you can imagine, this can result in some pretty gross substances (fish and ice cream, anyone?). However, if each player brings a food item of the same type (fruit, pasta, meat, etc) then the resulting stew is just… better. To this point, one could argue “well, just find other people with the same type of food as you”, and I believe herein lies the flaw. The polarizing effect of these radical departures from the game’s 30 year history of world-building and character development may very well result in the “Gathering” of MTG becoming the “Gatherings”. I do understand that Universes Beyond provides the opportunity for attracting new players — when a non-MTG player sees their favorite character from their favorite IP on a card, how could they not be curious? However, I am much more concerned about the consequences this will have on the existing player base — the ones who fell in love with Magic because it was Magic, not Warhammer, or Lord of the Rings, or Doctor Who. Looking towards the future, as more and more UB cards are printed and begin showing up more and more often on the commander table, there will no doubt come a point in which UB cards will have to be added to the “rule zero” discussion. And that just feels bad. It feels bad for me, because it adds an extra layer of difficulty to finding people to play with who have non-UB deck lists, and it feels bad to the UB-player, because they feel excluded. Perhaps once these bad feelings become widespread enough, a new format will emerge, “non-UB Commander”. Only time will tell. Anyways, thank you so much for all you do for the game (especially listening to criticism like this!!)

Your question presupposes that not wanting to mix Magic and non-Magic IP is the preferred opinion of players. That’s not what our market research shows. That group, while very vocal online, is actually a small minority. The biggest driving factor of what cards players want to include in their deck is what they think will be fun to play (which also works with the rest of their deck). Basically, game play is a significantly larger factor for card inclusion than flavor.But if it’s a big factor for you, then yes, find a play group that shares your sensibilities, so that you all can play Magic in the form that you most enjoy. Magic’s customizability is one of its biggest strengths.

I was wondering where Emerge is on the Storm scale? We only got to see it on 10 cards and self-sacrifice outside of aristocrats is really fun.

I’d call Emerge a 6. It needs the right set, but it was generally liked, has plenty of design space, and played well.

I have a question about Squee's inability to die. Did it first emerge from gameplay and then into the story, or from the story into his first card (Squee, Goblin Nabob)? Was it something that was planned for his character from the start?

I guess it’s my fault. When I designed the original card for Squee, his ability to return from the graveyard wasn’t meant to represent he was being reincarnated, just that he was lucky and hard to kill. That card later inspired an author to build his immortality into the character.

Any chance mutate gets in on that modified action? If keywords, rules text, etc are trending toward more easily comprehensible at face value, it makes sense to allow keywords like modified to be inclusive to mutate, which could use the support.

Why don’t we just include every old mechanic that flavorfully could make sense with modified? We could include mutate. And threshold. And amplify. And exalted. And augment. And embalm. And haunt. And emerge. And transform. And soulbond. And hellbent. That’s the problem. The game’s almost thirty years old. We’ve made a lot of mechanics. If every new mechanic tried to include every old mechanic that possibly could apply, we couldn’t fit the reminder text on the card (and it starts getting a lot more complicated).What we do is pick the most common and available mechanics (ideally ones in the set) and count those. Every aura, equipment or card that adds counters to creatures is a lot of backward compatibility.

Was Emerge considered for Ikoria?

No.

In your podcast with Doug Beyer on "War of the Spark," it focused on planeswalkers, but I'm wondering how non-planeswalkers like Niv-Mizzet factored into the design or story? How important was Niv in development, especially considering his popularity? Did his 5-color avatar version emerge as a side note or afterthought? Or did it develop in tandem with the larger storyline?

The legendary creatures were more handled card by card in set design.

Did you ever try Emerge for Ikoria to capture the flavor of Mutate?

No, we did that with Mutate.

Story question: the GRN/RNA stories didn’t address the story spotlight cards in their respective sets. When will we see those threads tied together? A WAR story? When is that? Or is Greg’s story that? I need to understand what the Firemind’s Research was or what the Emergency Powers were.

There are a series of stories coming out that cover all Guilds of Ravnica & Ravnica Allegiance.