Color Palette and Exception to Rules

Hey again! In response to this point: “To use a metaphor, it’s why an interior decorator uses a color palette. You want to confine the choices, so the overall aesthetic comes through.”I would just say that I don’t think y’all should necessarily be so 100% rigid. If 99% of the MID and VOW cards are two colors, it doesn’t ruin the overall aesthetic to have Edgar be three colors.Exceptions to the rule can be a nice addition to the aesthetic. Edgar is the OG vampire after all. One of the biggest names on the plane. For him to be three colors in a block that’s defined by two colors…it adds to his eminence. It fits. To reduce him to two colors and a rare simply because the team arbitrarily restricted itself to two-colors only and that you can’t have two mythic in the same combo (black and white)—it’s actually, I think, a disservice to the aesthetic. It’s not in the best interest of the flavor, character, or fans.I understand maintaining those aesthetic restrictions for all the plane-flavored cards, right? Like the cycle of Cemetary mythics. Those cards make up most of the set and are in service to the set.But when it comes to the main characters, especially already established characters, restrictive aesthetic limitations should come second. The characters should come first. If that means doubling up a mythic slot, so be it. If that means going three colors instead of two, so be it. Fans attach to those characters and want them to be kick ass. When they’re not, you get responses like the response to Odric and Edgar. Is it better to have stuck to the arbitrary restrictions at the expense of fan reaction to these characters or would it have been better to make a couple exceptions and have an overall happier response?

Since you were so kind to spell out your side, let me spell out mine. Each player has things they personally care about. That’s shaped by what format(s) they play, how long they’ve been playing, who they play with, how they play, etc. To that individual person, the priorities of the things they care about are obviously very high, so they tend to look at Magic as a means to give them the things they most care about. And the majority of players don’t want that many things. Why can’t we just give them the things they care about? It would be so easy. You only have to change a few cards here or there.Now look at from our side. There are tens of millions of players who each have their own desires. That list of “just a few cards they want” becomes many times longer than there will be Magic cards in existence in the game’s lifetime. We spend a lot of time collecting data and creating lists of what players want and are constantly making cards to meet common requests. Add to that problem, the players want contradicting things. If we had made a red/white/black Edgar, I’d be answering a different post about how they already have a red/white/black Edgar, why couldn’t we make something new, something that would inspire a different deck? Meeting player desires is complicated.Then we get to what I’ll call our problems. We have to make a Magic set. There’s a lot that comes with doing that. A premier set has to offer something for all the formats (constructed and limited), it has to be fun to play, it has to be flavorful, it has to be distinctive to set itself apart from the various other sets we make, among many other needs. To do this, there are a lot of internal constraints built into the system of making Magic sets. Some are about optimal game play, some are about play balance, some are about marketing, some are about digital play, some are about organized play, some are about various resources (like say available artists), some are setting up sets around it to be successful, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.What this means to the problem at hand is just changing one card is often not as simple as “just change it”. Let’s talk about Edgar. What if we made the Coffin red on the back. What harm would that cause? For starters, it would make it a three-color card in a two-color draft format. That means we’d probably want to move it up to mythic rare to minimize players opening it in draft because it communicates to do something that the set doesn’t support. But wait, Kaya’s sitting in the white/black slot at mythic rare (because we color balance rarities), and she’s a planeswalker, and barring special sets like War of the Spark, our planeswalkers are mythic rare. So why not just have two white/black cards? Okay, what do we pull? The second we break a colored cycle, I get a different group of players writing to me because the color they adore didn’t get as many mythic rares as the other colors. And color balancing exists for a reason (for example, aesthetics and play design). Ignoring it raises all the problems that it was created to solve. In addition to that, we purposefully made three legendary Vampires to support each of the three two-color combinations to allow a variety of Vampire decks in Commander. When we change Edgar, we lose our white/black Vampire commander. Do we replace it with a new one? If so, what other card do we remove from the set? If not, we make an imbalance, and I’m getting questions about why white/black Vampires don’t get a commander. And then there are the cycle issues. Normally, we design our multicolor cards in cycles. We don’t just make one three-color card, we make five, going around the color pie (usually all shards or all wedges). So, does changing Edgar require us to change four other cards? And again, the set isn’t made to support three-color draft archetypes, so do all those have to be at mythic rare? And if we don’t make them, then I get the complaints that red/white/black got a new commander, but no other wedge combinations did. And then there are the reciprocity issues. If Vampires got a three-color commander why didn’t the Werewolves get one in Midnight Hunt? So, now a change in this set might require a change in a whole other set that has just as many repercussions as this change did. What I’m trying to point out here is there’s a reason for our restrictions, and it’s not just something we can change quite as easily as you think we can. On top of all that, Magic has to keep making new content. If enough players really want something, they’ll voice it to us, it’ll get on a list, and one day we’ll make it. Players like you will be very excited to see it. Having some things players want that doesn’t yet exist is good for us, because it allows us to keep making cards that excite people.We very much listen to and care about feedback, and where we can find ways to make concessions to our structure in the future in ways we think a lot of players we’ll enjoy, we’ll always consider it, but I need you to understand that it’s a far more complex ask than I think you realize.