In the Fallen Empires DTW (which I loved by the way), you mention that Fallen Empires had almost no flying or other evasion. Do you think that might have been the result of building the set “too top down,” meaning they had great ideas about the factions and simply forgot to include evasive creatures because the factions they came up with were all land and sea armies? This feels like a good lesson that could be useful to anyone designing a set without a design skeleton.

The East Coast Playtesters just weren’t super fond of flying. Most their sets had a smaller percentage of fliers than average (at the time).

If or when: a plane where the usual creature types are shuffled around a bit, but still fit their new colors? Ex. goblins on this plane are more civilized and selfless than average and are in White, merfolk swim in lava and live in volcanoes and are Red, undeath is seen as a natural part of the cycle of life thus zombies and animated skeletons are in Green, etc.

Designing for the eternal world, especially Commander, complicates this. Because we’re trying hard to connect with themes of the past, it becomes hard to add new cards to a theme, but specifically put them in a different color(s) than they originally appeared in. We do like to stretch creature types to new colors, but usually associated with a color that has some history to it.

Does your article from today mean that evoke creatures count as instants and sorceries in the design skeleton?

The fact that they can be creatures means you count them as creatures from a design skeleton standpoint.

I've been brainstorming an idea for a set I'd like to design. Besides the set skeleton and color pie articles, what other articles and resources would be useful in designing?

My “Nuts & Bolts” series will be the most helpful.

if/when: batching for "undead" creatures (zombies, skeletons, vampires, ghouls etc.)?

If, but I could see it working in the right set.

Hiya, huge fan of skeletons and seeing so many great ones being printed lately has made me really happy and really excited for more.

Glad to hear that.

First, I want to say I really like Thunder Junction more than I thought I would. It could end up being my favorite set this year. Great job to you and the team! Second, back in AFR, the commander precons had a humanoid adventurer face commander and a monster alt commander. I thought that was really cool because I'm a big fan of monsters and weird creatures and love building decks with them as the commander. Magic has some really great monsterous creature types that are underrepresented as legendary creatures. I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I'd love for one humanoid and one beast/monster commander to be the norm for precon design. The Grand Larceny, Desert Bloon, and Quick Draw precons are great examples of this. Having Yuma, Gonti, and Stella Lee as the humanoid face commanders and Kirri Talented Sprout, Felix Five Boots, and Eris Roar of the Storm as the more monstrous alt commanders.
I bring this up because I was really hoping for something a little more monsterous for the Most Wanted precon alt commander. Like a Skeleton or Nightmare or Horror or Minotaur, or Bird. Something along those lines would be really interesting with one of the outlaw creature types. Instead, we got a Dwarf. Vihaan Goldwaker is a great card, don't get me wrong. I just wish that every precon could have alt commanders that are a little more "out there" in terms of creature type usage instead of another human or dwarf or elf, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

My thoughts are there’s some one out there who loves Dwarves who’s super happy because we made a Dwarf card for them. I hear you that you’d like more non-humanoid legendary creatures, and that is something we’re dedicated to doing, as evidenced by the decks you did enjoy, but there’s a lot of player desires to meet, which means we need to spread the love a bit.

When designing sets for limited, do you guys tend to add things like the guildgates, dual taplands or the gain 1 life taplands after finishing the skeleton? How do they fit into the design skeleton otherwise?

Vision design will put a cycle of dual lands at common if the set structure needs it, and will take a stab at a version to use. Set design is free to change it up if what vision design made isn’t fitting the other needs of the set.

Why does blue need vigilance so badly? It went from none to a lot in the design skeleton more so than mechanics blue has had for years. Why not just use when this creature attacks untap it?

It’s just simpler to use vigilance. We also are more willing to have a third color have evergreen keywords.

How many different "Set Skeletons" do you have? I see similar patterns in every set, and I feel like a lot of the skeletal components don't *need* to be in every set. Having different set skeletons might help with that. Maybe we could go a few sets without a Moat Piranhas variant. Also, you could have a skeleton specifically for formats you want to be fast, and a different skeleton for when you want the format to be slow (less 1 drops, etc.)

The set skeleton is just a default starting place. Each set deviates from it in different ways.