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.

Not a question, but a comment. It would have been nice if you left warlock out of outlaws or did something different so the classes would have made a good acronym. Like, without warlocks it could have been RAMP for outlaws.

The reason we included Warlock was we have a lot of spellcasters in sets (being the game is at it’s core about magic), and we needed ways to do them and be outlaws. Choosing elements of a batch have a lot of factors to weigh, and making a good acronym is just pretty low. By the way, if we were prioritizing making acronyms, I would have swapped Mercenary for Ninja to make PRAWN. : )

I had a great time drafting OTJ last night! I noticed, after opening an entire box, there are a LOT of different tokens. My first thought was how they do an excellent job of increasing design space and contribute to overall worldbuilding. Unfortunately we didn't open any Mercenary tokens and only 1 treasure – the two most needed tokens in the set. Comparatively, we got 3 sheep, angels, gnomes, 5 food, & 4 Elk among others. I point this out because I think token diversity is a budget to consider.

It is. We do have set limits.

Hi Mark, once you decide to use Mercenary in creature cards in OTJ, was it too late to add some Mercenaries to other sets in standard?

There were enough Rogues, Warlocks, Assassins, and Pirates that it wasn’t an issue. Future sets can make use of the Mercenary creature type.

Enjoyed your podcast running through past mercenary cards. One thing that stood out to me is that the mercenary "recruitment" mechanic of searching for a lower cmc creature and putting it on field doesn't feel like something you'd do today. Is there a general move against searching effects? I guess the closest now would be "look at the top X cards of your library...." style effects

We’ve shifted away from tutor mechanics as they make games play out too similarly. You’re correct, we’re more likely to do “look at top cards of your library” as it both has more variance and encourages having more cards of the theme in your deck.

You've said R&D made a point to look for ways to incorporate flavorful terminology into OTJ's rules text, i.e. "commit a crime". In that vein, was it ever considered to make the Mercenary token a predefined token with an evocative name? E.g. "Create a Lackey token. (It's a 1/1 red Mercenary creature with yadda yadda.)"

Not in vision design.

Why was Mercenary chosen for the henchfolk cards in OTJ instead of Minion? Thank you for answering our questions sir.

We support Minion in that we haven’t changed it from the cards that have it, but we don’t use it on new cards anymore. With the exception of three cards in Commander 2019 that were redone legendary creatures that were originally Minion (Chainer, K'rrik, and Xantcha), we haven’t printed Minion on a card since Legions in 2003 (21 years ago!)

Why did you choose to make the mercenary tokens red?

It was the best match to the combination of the ability of the creature and the flavor.

An assassin, a rogue, a mercenary, a warlock, and a pirate walk into a bar. What are they doing there together?

Having a secret batch meeting. Zendikar has similar party parties.

"Committing crimes, the outlaw batch, plotting, spree, the mercenary token - all villain themed." TBH, I though that was supposed to be plot as in "story beat", not plot as in "scheme".

No, plot as in to scheme. You’re casting spells now to set up future turns.