Do you think cards like beast within, pongify, rapid hybridization and harmonize should get reprinted in commander precons? Beast within is a staple and the blue removal spells are very strong and actually are not that cheap for nonrares. Should they continue to appear in commander decks since they are already in the format or would you prefer other cards?

If a card is already in the format and there is demand for it, we’ll include it in Commander decks. I personally don’t enjoy color pie breaks being major players, but that ship has long since sailed.

Would you classify "Beast Within" a color break? It's ubiquitous in Commander and I'd like to hear what you think about this.

It is a color pie break.

I remember you saying that green's draw is tied to it's creature, so how does Beast Wisperer makes it a color break? And why is it white, when it doesn't have a cap of the creature's power and cards drawn per turn?

I mistakenly read the question as asking about Beast Within. Beast Whisperer is no longer monogreen (it’s now green/blue) as we’ve been cutting back how easy it is for green to draw cards. We want it to be doing things more in green’s strategy, so it’s more about playing one big creature than a lot of little ones.

Hi Mark! Not so much a question but an observation. The new Secret Lair Beast Within card feels a little off as the first line of rules text now reads "Its controller creates a 3/3 green Beast creature token" before the text that names a target. I'm aware that 99.99% of the time it won't be an issue as its an aesthetic upgrade aimed towards enfranchised players but it feels a little anti-magic considering how text order/syntax can sometimes make the difference between a card resolves or not.

Not my area, but my guess is it was updated to the current version of the template.

You seem to be under the impression that green has some kind of issue with non-creature based removal, but you printed Beast Within, Lignify, and Song of the Dryads in monogreen, and 2 of those are some of the best commander removal in the game for difficult-to-handle Commanders.

All three of those cards are color pie breaks that never should have been printed in green. That’s one of the biggest challenges of eternal formats - mistakes live forever.

"No, white doesn’t get “destroy target land”." White got a colorshifted Beast Within in Modern Horizons, Generous Gift, which is single-target land destruction.

That was a bend for that very reason. It was a color-shifter card that very rarely gets used for land destruction, so the Council of Colors allowed the bend for that particular card.

Let's say beast within was exactly the same, but gave the opponent a 5/5 instead. Would that be okay?

No. The issue isn’t what you’re giving your opponent. It’s what green should and shouldn’t be able to do

What makes Beast Within Not Okay for dealing with creatures, but Kenrith's Transformation Just Fine?

There was much argument about whether it was okay. The fact is could be undone was what let us allow it as a severe bend but not a break.

Earlier you said if there's a choice between two similar cards, you choose the one that's in color pie. So why does the Naya Populate deck have Beast Within instead of Generous Gift? They're identical cards, both in-color for the deck, and the later was specifically made because the former was out of pie.

I said we “usually”. There are exceptions.

At least to me, Generous Gift feels less natural than Beast Within. Targeted land destruction may not be a break in white in the sense that it doesn't undercut a core white weakness, but green killing creatures directly has more precedent even if it's considered a break in the modern colour pie; nor is gifting creatures very white. The flavour, fun as it is, of white getting land destruction because an elephant squashes it flat seems a case of stretching flavour to justify an off-colour ability.

Green was never supposed to be able to kill creatures in the color pie. I had a drag out fight over Dessert Twister in Fifth Edition twenty plus years ago (which I lost because there wasn’t a good replacement, but they claimed wasn’t a precedent). And white giving people things in exchange for destroying something has been in White’s color pie since the beginning. So yes, Generous Gift is and has always been more in color pie than it’s green version .