This is hatemail not just about how Monarch and Initiative should never be allowed in two-player, which they shouldn't. (No comment on them in greater-than-2P games; I'm sure they're wonderful there. I have no objection to them existing SO LONG AS they are ruled to just not work in two-player.) This hatemail is SPECIFICALLY about Palace Jailer. Why does it say "until an opponent becomes the Monarch"?! It should not ever be allowed in two-player! Thank you for listening to my hatemail.

Should there exist cards legal in Commander, but not Legacy? Such a designation doesn’t currently exist.

Maybe it's a bit of a reductionist view, but at a larger timeframe, eternal formats don't really exist. They thrive for a time and are then replaced by something else. Legacy replaced Vintage, Modern replaced Legacy, one day Pioneer will replace Modern and after that, new formats will be born. Yes, there are still Vintage and Legacy players, but at a macro scale, the percentage of players is shrinking.
I think it is very okay to accept this as a fact of the game.

The word “eternal” is a poor choice as we use “eternal” to mean formats with access to (mostly) all the cards. Vintage, Legacy, and Commander are all eternal formats. So eternal formats do exist. : )But your larger point of how Magic keeps shifting where it focuses its formats is true.

Milling!

Just learned in a podcast you're somewhat the "father" of the mill mechanic!
Was sad there was no new tools for dimir mill in MH3, are there any incoming for mill decks (not self-mill) in Duskmourne? The mechanic would be fitting with the setting...
thanks!

I can’t talk to the future, but we will be doing more mill effects, even if I can’t say when or where.I should stress that I did not invent mill. Millstone, the first card to mill cards, was in Antiquities and was designed by the East Coast Playtesters (Skaff Elias, Jim Lin, Dave Petty, and Chris Page) with help from Joel Mick.I was a champion of milling and made a lot of cards with it.

I've heard rumours that Wizards is trying to make Modern more similar to Legacy, and Pioneer more similar to Modern.
Whats your stance on this?

The opposite is true. We want each format to be distinctively its own. It is true though that as formats getting bigger, they change, so Modern has more qualities it shares with Legacy as the card pool gets larger, but the two do play differently.

Re:Power CreepI think the root of the issue is that some long time players are sad that multiformat all-stars are being outclassed. Cards like Liliana of the Veil barely see standard play let alone modern or legacy or Tarmogoyf being so relatively weak that a commander making token copies of it feels like a silly novelty more than a terrifying threat. These cards that are very powerful in theory. They haven't been 1 to 1 outclassed but never the less are functionally not relavent in modern/legacy. This is a hard pill for many players to swallow when these cards were titans for nearly a decade.I think calling the argument of calling this shift power creep or not power creep is splitting hairs and maybe there needs to be some new terminology coined.

It’s the nature of a game that keeps releasing new content. There are formats like Old School (which only use cards from ‘93, '94, and '95) if you want to play with exclusively older cards.

While I get why it's unlikely, my preferred use of stickers in Magic would be as permanent alterations to cards intended for use in a cube or some sort of other legacy (game content, not the format) product. Just hoping that idea can at least stay on the radar.

We do have a Hackathon where we designed a Magic Legacy product. The big stumbling block is the data says the vast majority of players don’t want to permanently sticker their cards. It’s why we made sure in Unfinity that they came off easily and didn’t harm them.

why cant they wizards make a set thats only legal in commander?

A body outside of Wizards, the Commander Rules Committee, determines set legality for the format. If we made a set not legal in eternal formats, the cards wouldn’t be legal in Commander. Yes, we could technically make it legal in eternal formats and then ban all the cards in Legacy, but we don’t like to use the ban list in that way.

Hi Mark, I've played both Legacy and Commander pretty extensively, so reading the discourse on the recent bans has been interesting. I actually adore attractions in Commander, mostly because it's a fun "extra" mechanic. The fun stops pretty quickly when people are using the goblin as a huge ritual, so I think both sides have validity. Have you guys put any thought into the Eternal legality question? I feel like this isn't the last time something like this will happen.

Once again. I would love to have the ability to put cards in Commander without them being legal in Legacy, but Commander’s legality is currently tied to eternal legality. The group that decides on Commander legality is separate from Wizards.

Can you elaborate on why you can't make commander-only cards? While Wizards doesn't have explicit control over Commander legality, it seems like you ought to have de facto control by virtue of the fact that you can dictate legality for most non-commander formats.If, for example, you had pre-emptively banned sticker cards from Legacy and Vintage, the end result would be that the cards would be only legal in Commander and Limited. Is there a reason you don't consider doing something like that a viable option?

We don’t like pre-banning cards. It also just adds a lot of card names to the banned list which makes it harder to process.Commander is in an odd place as there’s a separate group that determines legality. We’re trying to not overstep our bounds.

The problems with sticker and attractions were extremely predictable and were pointed out by many people as soon as it was announced that they were legacy legal and I hope in future more thought will be put into the logistics of any similar mechanics that may appear in the future

The motive behind the decision was simple. Commander is a casual format, and Un-sets are our most casual product. We wanted players to have access to the cards that worked within the rules. All the wacky stuff was kept opt-in only. The only reason the cards were legal in eternal constructed formats is that’s the legality rule as set up by the people that run Commander. It was never our intent for the cards to be relevant in high-end tournament play. The deck construction rules for stickers and Attractions were designed to be high variance specifically to keep them out of tournaments. At every step in design, we changed mana costs to keep them from being high powered cards. If a card was questionable, we made it acorn. Obviously, we missed on one card. It was a common aimed at limited. That was our mistake. We missed on one card.I would love for there to be a way to have cards legal in Commander without having them be legal in eternal formats. We just aren’t the body that determines Commander legality.