Can I get a maybe on more legendary Rats in bloomburrow? My goal is to make a sultai Nashi deck with every legendary rat ever, but so far the pickings are slim :)

Maybe. : )

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.

Did All Will Be One have a wedge theme at some point in design? It seems like the sets biggest mechanics all appear primarily in sets of wedge colors (WBG poison, URW artifacts, BGU proliferate, GUR oil counters)

Not specifically, but sometimes designs drift in certain directions.

If/When? WBG and BGU planeswalkers.

I assume when, but not necessarily soon.

If or when - RGW, WBG and BGU Planeswalkers?

If, but not necessarily soon.

Hi Mark,I've successfully entered my fifth decade of life and wish to invoke the rite of birthday trivia, pretty please. What've you got on The Sultai Brood?

Khans of Tarkir was originally going to be four factions, two two-color and two three-color. That is until the creative team came up with the Sultai Brood. Brady Dommermuth, the then creative director, begged me to add it. I did, but realized that if we went to five factions, we’d have to change the colors to all have the same number of colors. That became wedge as it’s the one mix we hadn’t done before. I would later us the original faction color breakdown in Ixalan.Happy Birthday!

Based on the recent article you shared, I'm curious what colours the Tarkir clans were before you added Sultai.

Two were two-color and two three-color. I don’t remember off the top of my head. I believe we mostly added colors, but one of the three-color factions was probably an arc.

What color gets Red Elemental Blast now?

“Counter target blue spell” is a blue effect.“Destroy target permanent” is white/black or black/green, so I assume either could do “destroy target red permanent”. That means it would be white/blue/black or black/green/blue.

Hi Mark, I was looking at the ONE cards, and I noticed that a lot of the mechanics seem to fall into 3 color pairs, specifically the enemy color wedges (Temur has oil counters, Sultai has proliferate, Abzan has toxic, and Jeskai seems to have some artifact synergies). I was curious if this was intentional, and if it was, if it means that ONE was a wedge set at some point in design, or if this was a result of some other part of the way you design sets.

It was purposeful that certain themes show up in three colors, but it wasn’t because the set was ever a three-color set. It just lets us have some nuance with draft color pairs. For instance, white, black, and green are the toxic colors, so it lets us do three different draft archetypes that are each distinct from one another.

Hi Mark! I've heard you really like zombies (as do i), and had a question about legendary type zombies. Ive noticed there isn't alot of 3 color zombies, no Sultai legendaries of them, and was wondering if we could possibly see some more in the near future?

Sultai? There are only two green Zombies. EDIT: Oops, I just looked at monogreen. There are a bunch of multicolored Zombies with green.