As far as color pie is concerned, does Horsemanship occupy a space more similar to Flying or "can't be blocked"? If it showed up as a one-off cameo in a premiere set, could it be on a white card?

It is a flying replacement and is fine in the appropriate colors.

I would like to voice my immense disappointment that there was not a horsemanship cameo in OTJ, I say this before BIG is fully revealed. But I would have loved some random 2/2 with horsemanship and no other text as a cute cameo in the Wild West set.

We tend to cameo cards that play mechanically well over it’s funny to read once.

It’s worth noting that one set, Portal Three Kingdoms, doesn’t have flying, though it does have horsemanship

That is true. I forgot about it.

Can I get a maybe on Horsemanship being in OTJ?

Maybe. : )

When will unicorn and Pegasus cards get horsemanship like they rightfully deserve?

I think they are more likely to get batched with Horses than anything else.

One thing I appreciate about Commander design - especially Universes Beyond where there's a huge number of new designs and capturing the flavor is of utmost importance - is that there's a willingness to use older, retired keywords. Things like Shadow, Horsemanship, Landwalk, Fear, etc are incredibly evocative flavorfully, but were removed because of play pattern concerns, particularly for Limited.

A small use of that resource can be powerful.

Horsemanship has a pretty decent spread across all colors except green, which makes sense since it was supposed to just be a 3 kingdom themed version of flying, but if we ever were to see horsemanship on new cards, could we see it start to take its own place in the color pie to differentiate it more from flying?

I don’t expect us doing horsemanship other than the random one-of jokey nod.

Has there ever been any consideration to letting Reach also block Horsemanship?

We think it would cause more confusion than it’s worth.

I'm sure you answered this, but was horsemanship ever considered in place of flying in LTR since there are so few flying creatures in the source material?

We explored a new evasion mechanic that could be blocked by creatures with the mechanic or flying. We don’t like how Horsemanship interacts outside of the limited play. So, no.

Loving what we’ve seen so far from tales of Middle-Earth! A slightly silly question: since The Lord of the Rings includes many steeds and relatively few flying things, was there ever any consideration of using horsemanship?

The lack of flying creatures was an issue we tackled throughout vision design and set design. We didn’t consider horsemanship, but we did explore a new mechanic that was unblockable except by this creatures with this mechanic or flying. In the end, we were able to find enough flying creatures that it wasn’t needed.