Hi Mark! I'm looking at Planar Chaos, and it's got me wondering: Could the rules handle the line of text "choose a color other than purple"?

My guess is no. Purple would have to be defined.

can i request a planar chaos 2 a what if set with correct colorshifting or cards and no color pie breaks?

I’m not sure we have a whole cohesive set.

Not exactly a question, just sending my appreciation that you take the time to respond to things and engage with the community. Love ya.
But for an actual question, I grew up on that one red black planar chaos deck with the madness effects. How you guys feel about those?

Thanks. It’s hard not to look back on Planar Chais things with a little bit of trepidation.

With a lot of cards being what ifs in MH3 is there any chance we see a "what if" cards of Planeswalkers if their lives turned out different, ie. a white healer Liliana etc in a future set?

I don’t believe the MH3 cards are “what if”, not in the way Planar Chaos was. That said, “what if” is a popular request theme.

Hello!

Last time I wrote, I asked about Planar Chaos, and whether design might go back to something like that with the color pie. Thank you for your response. I can appreciate how it was a novel idea back then, but you do it more now in small ways over time.

My next question also has to do with color.

Like a lot of people, I love commander. I've created a challenge for myself. I'm trying to build a deck in every color combination.

I finally finished colorless, which was a challenge I've been afraid of since I started playing in Alara. Now I'm looking at four color commanders.

I have Omnath. I love Omnath. Landfall's been a favorite, since Zendikar is close to my heart.

And oh. There's Atraxa. Atraxa excites me. I think I'll focus her on poison counters.

But then there's the other combinations. After the Nephilim in Guildpact, most call them Glint, (no white) Dune, (no blue) and Witch (no red).

I see Breya, Saskia, and Yidris. They're awesome cards, and Yidris excites me somewhat. But it feels like a very tiny box that's been built many, many times before.

And those three cards are really it for those three color groupings. There's a whole bunch of representation for WURG especially with Doctor Who UB, and WUBG has the two Atraxa. But the other three don't get much.

Partner is an option I've considered. But at a glance, it seems a bit forced.

Do you think design will do more with the quad-color groupings? Would a set like Alara or Tarkir be possible, but with quad-color tribes? Or does that overcomplicate design too much?

Four-color legendary cards are in a weird place. We don’t want to make them such that people are just using them to play more colors in Commander, so it means we have to be very focused in what they’re doing, and finding a home for such a design is tricky.

You've said there's no room to add a sixth color. If, hypothetically, you absolutely had to add one, do you think the existing colors have enough depth that you could steal some mechanics from each color to make a new one, but still leave each existing color feeling like it has enough to it?

We tried that experiment, sort of, with purple in Planar Chaos design. And there we had the alternate reality, reworking of the color pie as a tool, and it was still too difficult.

Have you ever thought about doing a sixth color in an un-set, or in the play test cards?

The closest we came to actually doing a sixth color was Planar Chaos, the set about an alternate reality version of Magic. A sixth color both takes a lot of architecture and is hard to fill up as every ability is already assigned to colors.

"The only parallel multiverse we know of is the Un-iverse. We have yet to see parallel universes." I think you've forgotten about Planar Chaos, where we saw exactly that.

A fine point. I don’t know where Planar Chaos represents.

Along similar lines, do you see a possibility for more Planar Chaos fun in Magic's future? Seeing colors do things they don't usually do is always entertaining. I'm especially enjoying looking at older sets and seeing how the color pie "used" to work, before the rules were more formalized and documented (cards like Lifeforce, Tsunami, and Deathgrip being some more extreme examples).

We don’t want to make a set where colors are breaking color pie, or even bending it too much in aggregate. That said, there is potential for a set where we shift things into colors that can do things, but haven’t had as much chance to do them.

Hi, is venarian glimmer a severe bend or a total break on Blue?

It’s a Planar Chaos card, for starters. Let’s call it a break. Blue can do forced looting, but it doesn’t control what you discard.