Mark, why are some of the Duo cards shards and some wedges?

The only criteria was each animal (of the main ten) appeared twice. Whether it was a shard or wedge wasn’t something we worried about.

From what I can gather all the duos, like Bakersbane Duo are in shards: Bakersbane duo is green but fits in a squirrel (bg) or raccoon deck (rg), making it a basically a Jund card. The black cards are an exception: Glivedive duo is in a wedge, Mardu (bat wb and lizard rb). Presumably the other black one will be squirrel (bg) and rat (ub)My question is: why? Is the pattern of shards intentional? Is the deviation to one color having wedges intentional?

The only guideline was each animal appeared in just two duos.

Regarding the hypothetical Ward costs that give opponents an upside instead of directly costing you anything, there's at least one card which does that repeatedly: Wall of Shards has an opponent of your choice gain life as a cumulative upkeep cost. This demonstrates that the game already treats benefiting your opponents as a cost.

Just because a card was printed once that does something doesn’t mean all problems with that thing were solved. Wards have to be costs and another player doing something isn’t a cost.

Is there much design space for three color lands?

It’s limited.

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.

I asked a question the other day and didn’t get the answer I was looking for, although that’s because it was based on a faulty premise, and your response was correcting said premise, so that’s on me for asking a bad question. I am now going to rephrase the question using your correction:Y’all don’t like putting effects that are tertiary in a color on a multicolored card, which makes sense. But would that still be the case if the effect is tertiary in both colors of a 2 color card? What if it’s tertiary in 2 out of the 3 colors on a 3 color card, but isn’t in the 3rd color at all?

With a few rare exceptions, if all of the colors on a multicolor card have an ability as tertiary or lower (aka it doesn’t have it at all), that ability won’t appear on the card, even if multiple colors have it tertiary.

If/when three color manlands?

If. Three color is already a lot for a land.

Just saw a post on reddit worried about the lack of specifically Azban Legendaries in the last year, specifically pointing out that Commander Masters was the last set to have new Azban commanders.They're worried that a wedge that already is low in comparison to the others with legendary options is not getting much development in its legendary identity.Is there hope for the Azban players? And is there a reason why Azban lags behind the other wedges/shards in design?

Outside of faction sets, we usually don’t design within sets with specific colored combinations in mind. Three-color legendary creatures end up being what makes sense for that character. Commander decks tend to be the ones to fill in needs communicated by the players when there are gaps.

when you said that you referred to utility tokens like treasure, clue, food, blood, map, etc. as artifact tokens, did you forget about shards?

Shards knows what it did.

if/when a set with arcs+wedges where the ability to make five-color "soup" decks is a feature, not a bug? I'm thinking similar to alara reborn. i imagine the biggest hurdle is that such a set might have a negative effect on the surrounding sets in standard

That’s a huge hurdle. And it’s hard to make soup a feature as everyone plays the same cards.