Hello, Mark, quick request: I'd like you errata the Outlaw batch to include Wizards effective immediately, and I'd also like you premptively errata all Lizard Warlocks in Bloomburrow into Lizard Wizards.This might have some unforseen play balance concerns and it would be tremendously confusing to have so many new cards not do what they say, but look at the upside: "Lizard Wizard" rhymes.Please and thank you.

If only creature types rhyming was a higher priority for R&D. : )

As someone who primarily plays commander I really dislike how it's been stapled on to Freerunning. Cards don't need to work in every deck. In fact, it feels much more rewarding when you stumble across cards that only work in the deck you're trying to build. Freerunning as an assassin's only thing would've been great. Cool mechanic, cool flavor, fits the IP. Including commander makes it feel forced and too direct. I get commander is the most popular format and you want to cater to it, but this is the absolute worst way to do that in my opinion. Just make cool cards with niche abilities and have them be legendary from time to time.

Assassin typal is pretty narrow. Note how Outlaws of Thunder Junction had to also attach Rogue and Mercenary and Pirates and Warlock to make it mechanically relevant. (There were only 87 Assassins in the game - not counting Changelings - before Assassin’s Creed released.)It just isn’t good game design to make a mechanic (the only new one, no less) one that can only be played in under .1% of decks. But it’s Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s in the title. It’s the core role of the game. So Corey (the lead design of the set) decided to find additional mechanical space to broaden it. Commander traditionally has trouble with aggression (aka not a lot of Commanders attack regularly) so Corey found a way to make the mechanic relevant in Commander.Even though every Commander deck has a Commander, free running doesn’t push in a way that makes every deck want or need it. I hear the message that some people don’t want us to design cards for Commander, but it’s a 800-pound gorilla that dominates tabletop play. If you go to many game stores, it’s the only pick-up game you can find. So to make our new mechanic (again, the only new mechanic in the whole set) something unplayable in our most popular format isn’t very viable. There is a truism in game design. “You design for the game being played.” You have to understand how your cards will be used by the players and lean into it. There are so many formats you can play that we (mostly) don’t design for, if that’s important to you. Magic is great in that you the player have so much agency in how you play. But we’re going to design for the format that dominates tabletop play.

Let's say, hypothetically, that the warlock creature type is deprecated, and we errata every warlock to be something else, but that something else isn't unified. Does that mean that cards that are currently in the Outlaw batch will be removed from it retroactively, or that there will be a solution in some form to ensure that they will all remain within it if they're within it currently?

I think the existence of the batch would keep us from getting rid of it. Note we can stop making new cards with something without erasing the old cards with it.

Hi Mark,It’s my birthday and me and my friends are going to play some OTJ sealed today. In honor of this, can I get some trivia on Outlaws, my favorite mechanic to come out of the set?

We made a list for Outlaw of any creature type that might make sense:

• Assassin
• Barbarian
• Berserker
• Minion
• Mercenary
• Ninja
• Pirate
• Rebel
• Rogue
• Warlock

Assassin and Rogue felt like automatic includes. We added Mercenary because we wanted the “henchperson” token to be a Mercenary. The creative team asked us to add Warlock because we needed to have an outlaw spellcaster to hit all the card concepts. That’s what we handed over to set design.When making a batch, we do between two and five, with three being optimal. Four seemed in a good spot and allowed set design to add something if they had to. They added Pirate because of all the Pirate cards in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. We did talk through many of the others. We considered bringing Minion back instead of doing Mercenary (we stopped doing it a while ago). We talked a lot about Ninja. In the end though, we felt this collection best served the mechanic.Happy Birthday!

I am making a custom set that has a lot of witches in it. I know witch isn’t a creature type so I was wondering which creature type is your go to when representing witches.

Probably Warlock.

Can a creature type exist in multiple batches? Could you guys do a spellcaster batch of Cleric, Wizard, Warlock, Shaman, and Druid even though Warlock is already part of the outlaw batch?

A creature is allowed to appear in multiple batches.

I'm glad my typal groupings have been answered with Outlaws.I also love the idea of future sets having a focus on one or two of these types, let's say Rogues and Warlocks, but using this grouping so that Constructed players can also use them with a bigger card pool, while not losing out on the typal uses in an Limited environment.Great design imo 👍

Happy to hear that.

Is flavor rule’s text going to be a thing now? The phrasing on Shoot the Sheriff seems oddly casual for rules text.

ALT

It’s reminder text. Reminder text is looser than rules text.

With the type now being available, why was the new Judith made a Shaman and not a Warlock?

I assume it was done to match her creature type from her Ravnica Allegiance card. As a general rule of thumb, we try to keep legendary creature’s creature type the same if there isn’t a story reason for a change.

I thought the general rule was that if an old card had a new creature type in the name, it got that creature type added to the card. See: Dread Warlock, and the abundance of Ranger cards. It makes sense not to do functional errata on things like Jacob or Eloise but I guess I'm not seeing why Dogged Detective doesn't fit that rule

The rule is *if* we choose to errata a creature type, we usually do creatures with that creature type in its name.