Do you think there could ever be a devotion variant that cared in some capacity about mana symbols in cards in your graveyard?

Chroma could do that. If we did devotion out of the graveyard it would have an additional word, something like grave devotion.

Do you know why Maevolent Rumble reveals the top 4 cards, you choose a permanent, and put the rest in the graveyard, whereas Cache Grab mills 4, then returns a permanent to hand?

They’re in different sets where each execution plays into the themes of that set.

Hey Mark, just wanted to say that I'm a big fan of graveyard mechanics and seeing Threshold return in Bloomburrow as well as Delirium in Duskmourn has made me really happy. I would like to ask how do you balance using returning mechanics vs creating new ones when designing sets in completely new planes.

If an old mechanic will accomplish what we need, we try to use the old mechanic, but there are a lot of factors that can make us want to use something new instead.

Do you know how squirrels became BG? Not just for Bloomburrow but over the years

They started green. I made the first black one in Unstable to match the flavor of the card. It evolved from there. Being black/green allows them to interact with the graveyard which has allowed a lot of interesting design space.

Why don’t creature tokens stay in the graveyard when they die? Would the design team ever consider making a card that lets creature tokens stay in the graveyard when they die?

It causes a lot of wonkiness with the rules. Un-sets have you covered though:

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.

"we shouldn't [allow casting exiled cards]"What about putting exiled cards into your graveyard or shuffling them back into your library? Is there a sufficient number of extra steps or hoops to jump through to get your cards back from exile?

For me, no. Exile is an important tool to permanent get rid of cards. If we don’t want to permanently get rid of them, we can just destroy them.

Is there a way for my opponents cards to end up in my graveyard in black border?

No.

If I have infinite clown tokens (thanks to combining mox lotus with clown car.) and Claire on the field. And then a board wipe is used followed by me discarding emrakul to shuffle my graveyard into my library. Then what happen?

Your deck has infinite clown tokens, so basically you do nothing but draw clown tokens for the rest of the game.

can i request more activated abilities that activate from hand/graveyard?

We will do more, but they both want to be done with a light touch.