Before my birthday is over, I would love to invoke my right of trivia!Anything about my favorite part of Magic's world, the Love Song of Night and Day? Or if not, Mirage in general? (I fell in love with Magic when I found my parents' old collection of Mirage and 4th Edition, making me probably the youngest grumpy old magic player to ever shake their fist at these new confangled planeswalker cards)

The Love Song of Night and Day was a poem written by Jenny Scott when she was an editor on Magic. Pieces of it were used on flavor text in Mirage block. I would later read the poem at a wedding at a Magic Grand Prix. We would also eventually making a Saga that referenced it.Happy Birthday!

“Postcombat main phase” is a mouthful. But if you have topsy turvy then these two things aren’t equivalent. And neither are “at the beginning of your precombat main phase” and the weird “after your draw phase” thing that sagas do.

The names don’t change their order even with Topsy Turvy.

I find it very interesting when you mention "what could have been"s in Magic, such as your plan for the Weatherlight Saga or the Past-Present-Future block. Are you prohibited from talking about "what could have been" UB's? Is there a time limit where once it's been long enough, it's okay to talk about UB's that fell through?

Universes Beyond involve people/companies outside of Wizards, so that’s off limits for me to talk about.

Hey mark, long time reader, also long time asker. I like a challenge when deckbuilding. When I first found out about your psychographics, I thought “woah! it even have the same name as me!” (John). Commander helps tickle that itch for me, because I can start off with a dumb premise and try to make that concept as best I can, and since it’s not a competitive format, I know that there will always be SOMEONE with a deck on a similar power level, however bad that terrible deck idea ends up being.This brings me to a qualm that I personally have, and have seen purely anecdotal evidence that other people have too.It feels kinda lame when you guys make a commander that’s just “this is the best commander for X”. More and more we’re getting legends where they’re just the *correct* choice. If I want to build a sultai graveyard deck, Muldrotha is the answer. Nothing tops it, and I doubt anything every will top it. And that’s just one archetype. 5 color sagas? Bombadil. Snow? Jorn and Isu. Flash tribal? Nymris. Sure there are other cards that can be the commander, but you can say that about anything. Sure, I COULD make a Rakdos exile deck with Pavel Maliki in the command zone, but that’s just objectively wrong. The commander is always gonna be prosper. My point is that it’s getting harder and harder to say “how do I make this work” when you’re just handing us the blueprints and all the parts with a step by step instruction booklet on what to do.To be fair, many archetypes have so much innate complexity to them and have reached a critical mass of options where it’s impossible to tell what the “best” option is, as there are so many different facets and roads to go down. Orzhov aristocrats and mono-green stompy are easy examples.But the fact that it isn’t always the case doesn’t change the fact that happens a lot. I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way, but I’m also sure that if it was a majority opinion in the community y’all wouldn’t be doing it this much. I just want to know if you have anything to say about this perception that I and many others hold. Thank you for all you do in magic, I hope you respond.

One of the most common requests I get here on the blog is “make this color combination Commander for this particular theme”. Eventually, for some of them, we find an opportunity to make it. We don’t know when that opportunity will arise again. We shouldn’t try to make the best Commander we can for that slot? If it’s too weak, players will just complain and ask we make another one. The reality is a lot of players want prescriptive answers, and there’s no way to make them for the players that want them and not for the players that don’t. The idea is that players who want to do something different have access to the history of Magic to find less obvious answers.

When/if: Dropping the "(As this Saga enters and after your draw step, add a lore counter. Sacrifice after [...])" reminder text from Sagas (e.g., for space to add flavor text, or an applicable existing keyword).

We like cards to tell you what they do as much as we can.

Do you feel that the upkeep step works where it is in the turn structure? I really like how sagas trigger, after the draw step. It doesn't feel likely, but could the upkeep ever be moved?

I don’t think we’ll move it. We do use beginning of first main phase a lot.

What's a problem that Dryad Arbor causes that Urza's Saga doesn't?

It’s a land and a creature in all zones.

Happy birthday Mark! Inverse birthday trivia! Arna Kennerüd, a sky knight quoted in a bunch of flavor texts from Ice Age and Alliances, was the first Magic lore character I designed a fan card for when I was real young. They finally get a real card nearly 30 years later in MH3!Also, I want to thank you personally for The Weatherlight Saga, where my love for Magic's lore truly blossomed.

Thanks.

Hello! I just wanted to make a slight correction to yesterday's Making Magic article and its history of DFCs - you refer to Huatli, Poet of Unity as "the first creature that transformed into a Saga", but March of the Machine's Praetors formed an entire cycle of those.

Yes, I missed it.

Is there a term for these type of cards? "(Type) cards that don't have any (type) subtype"- creature cards without any creature subtype (such as "Go-Shintai of X", Legendary Enchantment Creatures - Shrine)- artifact cards without any artifact subtypes (such as "Greatest Show in the Multiverse", an Artifact Enchantment - Saga)- other type of cards without respective subtypes (such as "The Wanderer" for Planeswalker, "Evolving Wilds" for Land, "Lightning Bolt" for Instant, etc.)

There is not a term for it, as it’s not something we need to talk about in design.