If you’re new to our AMA transcripts, welcome! When possible we try to organize an AMA with Gavin Verhey about the new set/commander products. This AMA was about the regular Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty set releasing Febuary 18, 2022.

All of our Discord members - be those patrons or not - were able to submit questions ahead of time and ask live questions after the pre-picked questions got answered. Anyone was also free to join the live AMA using Discord’s stage feature.

For the first time ever we’ve also turned the AMA into a video on our YouTube Channel!

Jackson, Harvesttide Celebrant asks:
Since Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is the debut for the modified mechanic, I was wondering what the design decision was with ‘Equipment, Auras your control and counters’? What challenges did the game designers have to support the mechanic?

Gavin:
What a banger to start off with. The modified mechanic actually has really deep roots - I think I’ll make a video about this at some point but I’ll give you all a small preview. We actually talked about the modified mechanic all the way back in Dominaria, to give you an idea how long something takes to get made.

The idea was ‘a mechanic that would work if stuff was attached to your creature’ - if your creature was ‘better’ or ‘upgraded’ in some way. The natural way to do that are Equipment, Auras and counters. We tried it out in Dominaria, it didn’t really work there for a number of reasons.We tried it out again in Kaldheim and it didn’t work out there either. With Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty (NEO) we finally found the right place for it - it really represented the modern versus traditional thing that the set is going for - ‘This is an enhanced creature, it gets a bonus’.

I know there are some things this mechanic doesn’t work with - like Melded creatures aren't modified - but as a game designer you can’t do everything. You have to pick the things that make the most sense. Equipment, Auras and counters are things that are common enough and tie into all the things we see in this set, so it made sense to do here.

Senatorious:
Were there any difficulties in design you had to tweak for or was it pretty straight forward that these three things (Equipment, Aura, counters) made sense together and fit very naturally into the design you wanted?

Gavin:
I think the biggest difference that changed - from memory - is it didn’t originally only count for Auras you control - but then you run into situations where someone can pacify your creature and it would still get enhanced, so that was a little thing we changed.

A lot of the balancing came with how easy it would be to actually do - the conditions specifically - these three made a lot of sense and had made a lot of sense for a while, but how strong is it going to be in this set, and how strong can we make the buffs with it here.

Senatorious:
And then you have to support Equipment, Auras and counters in this set, otherwise you have an ability that doesn’t do enough in the new set.

Gavin:
Something Dave Humphreys (Development Manager for Magic at WOTC) is good at, is finding a lot of ways for things to connect together. Dave was the lead designer for Dominaria and Kaldheim and now Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. He’s had that same through line of looking at the modified mechanic and looking for a place to use it and now here laying some of the groundwork that made it work really well.

Harmless, Compleated Muffin; Iron and Sete, Space Cowboy ask:
What was the thought process behind the new Equipment creatures and the Reconfigure mechanic? Is this a keyword we will see in other sets, and was there any push back in having Equipment that are also Creatures?
(Sometimes people ask a similar or adjacent question which we combine and compact it into one)

Gavin:
I would say the biggest push back is that any time you mention the word Licid, people's hair at the back of their neck starts to stand up a little bit - and Reconfigure hearkens back to Licids in a lot of ways, which were a rules nightmare that caused a ton of issues - I talked about Licids not too long ago on my YouTube channel Good Morning Magic definitely go check that out (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRpXxMGBro4).

There’s a little bit of rules involved in Reconfigure, but it made a lot of sense and playing with it plays so natural - a Creature that becomes an Equipment and can go back to being a Creature. It fit well in this world of Kamigawa for technology, they were trying to find a cool technology mechanic and Reconfigure fit in well.

Often, Equipment decks - and I’m sure many EDH players will know this experience - have this problem where you draw the wrong mix of creatures and equipment. You draw too many creatures, not enough equipment or the other way around. This mechanic is great to help make sure that doesn’t happen, and ensures you’ll always have access to both creatures and equipment. I’m excited for all of you to give it a try.

Deiaros:
We’re seeing a lot of vehicles being spoiled for this new set. What inspired that, and what direction will future sets be taking with vehicles? Might we be seeing vehicles become a more powerful and viable option for casual formats like EDH, or is there a specific plan you have for the overal theme and function of vehicles?

Gavin:
When working on Kamigawa, the vehicles made a lot of sense - for the same reason they made sense on Kaladesh - which was a steampunk kind of plane with some futuristic elements and technology elements and the same is true here.
As far as EDH is concerned - they can definitely do with vehicles. They’re cards that survive wrath effects and become creatures again later. They’re cards that stick around and you can attack with post boardwipe, so I think there’s a lot of room for vehicles and a lot of room for vehicle commanders - we’ve seen Depala already, there’s some more options in this set - I think there’s plenty options to do more with vehicles in the future.

Senatorious:
That kind of makes me wonder if we’ll see vehicles that can be your commander real soon.
(Editor’s note: at the time the AMA was held, Shorikai was not yet previewed).

Gavin:
Some time ago I made a video about Commander Legends playtest cards that we didn’t use and one of those was a Legendary Vehicle that could be your commander - https://youtu.be/todKpc5Lgjc?t=233 (timestamped) - and I would be shocked if we did not do that type of card in the future. I think it’s only a matter of time until we have an Equipment as a commander too.

Kraum, Judge Compleat asks:
Channel is a mechanic that’s very hard to interact with - the main means to do so are Pithing Needle effects and Stifles - do you think the non-intractability of Channel was considered enough when designing cards with it?

Gavin:
It’s not so much that I’m worried with the effects Channel has - a lot of them are damage based effects or other effects that are pretty safe, I don’t think there’s going to be that many issues caused by Channel, which dovetails into the second part of the question: what they mean with non-intractability is not being able to get counterspelled easily.
You can still interact with the ability on the stack, you can respond with other interaction to save your creature, it just can’t be countered. I don’t mind cards that make counterspells a little bit worse. Channel can be important to break a stall in a counterspell-war for example. Obviously it was considered and noted, but I’m not really worried about that aspect of Channel.

Inkfathom; Max Gamer and Hatneas, the Hellbent ask:
What was the design goal of the Legendary land cycle with Channel - do you feel there is a downside design wise to making lands that have little downside to be played compared to a basic land?

Senatorious:
Before you answer that, I will preface this with: There are advantages to playing basic lands, they aren’t hit by effects like Blood Moon or Back to Basics - in some ways you may argue that basic lands have an advantage over non-basics - but that being said, what was the design choice of making a Legendary land cycle with channel?

Gavin:
Let’s take a step back all the way to the original Kamigawa block. Leading up to that, we were kind of off Legendary lands, or non-basic lands, a lot of people didn’t like doing them.
We don’t like cards that are ‘better’ than basic lands - better between quite large quotation marks here. Why would you not always play an Eiganjo Castle or Minamo, School at Water’s Edge for example? We did a cycle of 5 lands in the original set and it ended up working alright. It was a cool thing you could do and there were reasons why you wouldn’t want to play those cards, some of the cards you mentioned have shown up over time.

History has borne out that the occasional special land like these, not too many of them, is ok. It made a lot of sense to make another cycle of Legendary lands because those are things players recognise from the original set. We don’t do a lot of Legendary lands these days - The World Tree wasn’t legendary for example - for Kamigawa in particular, doing them made sense.

Are there going to be a lot of decks, especially in standard, running 1x of these? Probably, it’s pretty free to play your first copy of this. In EDH you might get dinged by Price of Progress or any other similar effect for doing so. We have to be careful that at some point the manabase isn’t 10 different one of Legendary lands.
These ‘spell’ lands as we saw in Zendikar are great for giving you flexibility in your deck in spaces you didn’t otherwise have - like Naturalize and destroy a non-basic on Boseiju. Sometimes you don’t main deck your artifact or enchantment removal, but now you have access to it on a land in your sideboard in more competitive formats.

Ten of Staves asks:
Were any commons designed specifically for Pauper?

Gavin:
I don’t think specifically for Pauper - we do keep Pauper in mind. Every couple of sets I'll do a pass and go ‘Oh this one is cool for Pauper’. One of the big discussion points for Pauper so far seems to be Moon-Circuit Hacker. We knew about that card before the previews happened, I expected people in Pauper will play it, that’s not a surprise to me.
In general, we don’t design a lot for Pauper, every now and then with something like a Masters set we’ll think about it a little more, but for Standard and Limited we have to make sure the cards are appropriate.

Generic Failure asks:
Are there any mechanics that you would have liked to see in the set that didn’t make it?

Gavin:
We tried to keep elements of the original Kamigawa and mix in the new elements as well. There’s only so many existing elements we could take and only so many we could get to work, given everything that’s going on.
The mechanic I personally hoped we could fit in was Arcane - I’m an Arcane fan. I think Splice onto has a lot of potential, and I know it was tried for this set, and in the end it didn’t work out. There’s a lot of other stuff going on and putting an instant and sorcery theme on top of an artifact and enchantment team didn’t really make a lot of sense. But maybe someday, if/when we get to a third Kamigawa, provided this one’s successful enough.

Senatorious:
It’s always been an interesting mechanic to me, but I never felt there were enough Arcane cards to make it a theme in a deck so I hope it will show up.

PraiseTheSunday asks:
When you return to a plane that was released a long time ago, what is the process of what you want to keep, change or add. What’s the process by which you go about choosing what makes it and what doesn’t make it?

Gavin:
How much time do we have? I can get into this for a while.
For Kamigawa we went back and tried to see what people really liked. What are things that people really remember? Think about a movie you liked - get it in your head. A movie you really like and have seen ten times. Take a moment and write down the big hits, what you remember liking about that movie. You’re not going to name it beat for beat plot perfect, probably. You don’t know every line of dialogue, you just know the broad strokes.

Going back to a set, I see it in the same fashion. ‘What are the broad strokes people really liked, what are the iconic cards and cycles, the characters, the places they want to see?’
On top of that, the previous Kamigawa set had some problems with not hitting on some of the tropes people recognized and we’re adding a new futuristic layer to it. What futuristic things can we do that are different, on top of the things people will recognize from the old Kamigawa. Looking at the new and the old was key to making that all happen.

Senatorious:
Speaking about something I saw in the chat about Commander Ninjutsu not being in this - here’s another shameless plug for your video series, since you mentioned that you have a video regarding Commander Ninjutsu.

Gavin:
Yeah, it feels like I got a video about everything. If you look at the video “5 Cards that I Regret Making” (https://youtu.be/nRTWrsGOFGs?t=232), Yuriko is one of them. You gotta watch the video for the whole context; I don’t regret making Yuriko, but I do regret how Commander Ninjutsu works.

Senatorious:
Yeah, part of me hopes that one day, the RC will just make Ninjutsu work from the Command Zone with Commander tax.

Gavin:
That’s what I wanted to do with Yuriko! But it didn’t end up working out.

Senatorious:
There are several older Legends with Ninjutsu that would be unlocked and interesting Commanders if they would do that, but this is about NEO, so onwards to the next question.

Genghiskanye’s friend and Maestra, Cheerful Tormentor ask:
We've seen a return to old mechanics alongside new ones, and a recent return to beloved worlds with Innistrad and now Kamigawa. With Neon Dynasty in particular, we've seen a revamp of old mechanics like Ninjutsu and Channel, tempered with new mechanics and interactions not seen before, like the Samurai/Warrior synergies and things of that nature. Should we expect this to be the norm for sets in the near future, and if so do we have any idea what this might look like?

Gavin:
Everytime we return to a world we’ve been to before, you’re gonna see us give you some old and some new. The exact percentages are going to change depending on the world - maybe some need more old or some need more new, but that’s the gist of what’s going on.
With Neon Dynasty, I needed to put in more new than before, but with the return to Innistrad, we needed a little less new because we were already leaning on old, cool mechanics. So, I think it just depends from set to set, but there’s always going to be new, cool synergies.
Look at all of Innistrad, look at the Mirrodins we’ve done, look at the Ravnicas we’ve done - they always build on what’s come before them and have their own new twist. You can definitely expect there to be new twists on old stuff in the future.

Onceisonce asks:
In preparing for the design of this set, which of the original characters were you most excited about paying homage to?

Senatorious:
I think a lot of that has to do with how there’s several cards that call back to the characters from the original Kamigawa block, like there’s a Saga that features Kiki-Jiki. So are there any original characters you were especially excited to reference?

Gavin:
This one is so wild to me because Kamigawa’s whole thing was characters. Every single creature that was Rare of Mythic in the original set was legendary, in all three sets. There’s, I think, 118 Legendaries between all three sets? So there’s tons to build upon and expand.

I would say the one that I was most excited for us to go back to and do again was an Umezawa. The name carries so much cachet in Magic - maybe some brave people have their Commander decks with him, but the Umezawa that we say in Betrayers of Kamigawa was not very strong. To go back and do a proper, exciting Umezawa this time around, that’s such a cool thing to be able to do.

Senatorious:
Yeah, I’ve always been interested in the Umezawa family. There was Toshiro Umezawa and then Tetsuko Umezawa, and now we have another Umezawa in Satoru. Is that all of them or is there one more?

Gavin:
There’s the Umezawa that was in Dominaria, there’s the one in Legends, there’s one in Kamigawa and then some other cards that mention Umezawa.

C H I E F asks:
I have a question about the death trigger of Ao, the Dawn Sky. One of the modes is ‘Look at the top seven cards of your library. Put any number of nonland permanent cards with total mana value 4 or less from among them onto the battlefield. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.’ This is pretty new for white - what was the thought process behind this and is this something white might continue to do?

Gavin:
The answer to this is yes - this is something white gets. Look at your top and get small creatures or small mana value creatures - it’s totally within white’s realm. Look at Ranger-Captain of Eos or Militia Bugler and similar cards.
Impulsing for the cards, or looking at a bunch of them is a little fresher but it’s totally a thing white can do. If you like it, it’s a good thing and we’ll try more of those things in the future.
On the design team we’re trying different things out for white, and some of them hit and work out really well, and some of them miss and don’t. I remember last year when Strixhaven came out with Secret Rendez-Vous and people were like ‘Ugh, this is the only way you’re going to fix white? What are you doing!’.
What I tried to tell people at the time and still echo now is we’re trying a lot of different things for white, and a lot of things that will make white stronger in Commander and some of them are going to hit and some of them are going to miss. Knowing which ones hit is really useful, so if you like this kind of direction, we can do more of it for sure.

Jackson, Harvesttide Celebrant asks:
I know a lot of people, including myself, have been mourning the Compleation of Tamiyo. I was wondering what went on behind the scenes or between the various departments to make her MTG’s first Compleated Planeswalker and were there any others considered for that position?

Gavin:
Oh man, this discussion had gone on for a very long time between a lot of people. One of the great things about Magic and our design team is how close we all work together - it’s not just the design team but the other people too. This meant the creative team and the design team worked very close to get this set up.
It took a lot of effort and meetings and then determining who it was going to be, but finally I was happy with the way we landed on it and kept it secret and marketing ruled it out because the reactions from players on that day was… I couldn’t have hoped for anything better. Everyone was paying attention, everyone felt that kind of gut punch, and it was hard to see. I’m definitely happy with how that turned out and you’ll have to wait until the future to see if there’s anything else that happens in that vein.

Senatorious:
One thing I also wanted to ask just as a side note - I could be wrong and I could be misremembering it and I haven’t necessarily read the short story related to Tamiyo’s Compleation yet - I was under the impression based on some things that happened way back in Mirrodin and New Phyrexia relating to Venser that Planeswalkers couldn’t be Compleated? Is that incorrect or was there something that changed?

Gavin:
I don’t want to speak for the creative team, they’re much deeper into it than I am, I wouldn’t want to speak out of turn. I think there might have been fanon that that statement was true, because something similar happened, but I’m not totally sure. I’m pretty sure you can dig around online to find the answer, Jay Anelli on Twitter had a thread about this recently (https://twitter.com/jay13x/status/1486779553909510146).

Alchmyst, Aether Adept:
I had a question about one of my favorite baddies in Magic, Tezzeret. What was the thought process in having them be just mono blue? He’s commonly shown as blue black aligned as seen in the Schemer, Master of Metal, Agent of Bolas and Master of the Bridge. Were there considerations in adjusting his color identity or even adding a color - he’s known for a lust of power and frequent outbursts, so was a partially red Tezzeret ever considered

Gavin:
When it comes to the color identity of Planeswalkers, we have a thing called the Planeswalker grid where we look ahead to all of our sets and try to make sure that we have the right color balance of Planeswalkers in Standard.
We had a problem several years ago where we kept releasing Planeswalkers that were all the same colors and it meant that certain colors in Standard had way too many Planeswalker options.
Now we’re trying to make sure things are relatively evened out - I don’t know exactly what went into the decisions around Tezzeret, but I believe it was just ‘mono blue makes sense for him’ - it fit the Planeswalker grid well. He’s an artifacty Planeswalker so giving him the ability to go into any blue deck was pretty important I think. He can go in a blue white vehicles deck for example.
He certainly could have been a different color, but the version of Tezzeret we’re seeing here is blue, and Tezzeret’s core is always blue, blue is his most dominant color so it makes sense to me.

Jason Spiller and Zach ask:
What can you tell us about the design process for Tatsunari, Toad Rider; a Sultai Frog Enchantment matters Legend.

Senatorious:
Green is often seen for enchantments, and Bant is often seen too but Sultai seems pretty unusual and he certainly fits right in with the set but it’s a very unusual card and I think a lot of people are interested in it.

Gavin:
Let’s see - where to go with this one. It’s a wacky Magic card. Dave Humphreys was the lead designer of this set so I don’t know all the decisions that were made behind the scenes on every aspect of things. I can’t guarantee I’m going to nail this question perfectly.If I were to take a guess, one of two things happened with this card.
Either it was a top down based on a creative - a character that the creative team wanted into the set or Dave had this idea for a card that would make a token when you cast an Enchantment and creative bottom-upped this and decided ‘we’re going to make a toad rider’ and Dave came up with some other abilities to put on it.
In the set, black is in a unique place where it gets bonuses from both Artifacts and Enchantments, that might have played into it as well. I don’t know more about this one and I probably should because I’m going to get asked about it a lot I predict. Sorry I can’t help you with that one more than I did here.

Max Gamer asks:
What factors were taking into considering to make Mirror Box a lower mana value than Mirror Gallery? What can you tell us about the design of Mirror Box - it only applies to permanents you control and your creatures get a bonus.

Gavin:
Here’s the problem with Mirror Gallery… it sucks. It’s a five mana Artifact that does nothing on its own, you play it and then somehow you have to get other Legends into play. It’s a card that in the first Kamigawa block was so breathtaking, you read the textbook and you were like ‘this is so cool’, but then you tried playing and building with it and it was so impractical. You play a 5 mana artifact that on its own does nothing, then after play a Legendary creature, and if they kill my Mirror Gallery at any point, all my stuff implodes - It was so not strong. To make matters even worse, the fact it was symmetrical - back then the Legend rule would kill your opponent’s version of it - so sometimes your card doesn’t even do what you want it to do.

One of the things we did in NEO is that we went back and looked for things that were really iconic - I’ve already said this - what is the memory you have of that moment. Mirror Gallery is a card that a lot of players remember and it holds a lot of that cool cachet, but it’s never really been very good or playable. What if we took this card that people loved and made a cooler version of it.
One thing I always look at is, if players are really enjoying a card and it’s not good, you can probably make a version that was good that people would love having around. Mirror Box is a great example of this - it’s a little better than Mirror Gallery on a few different axis - I’m really excited to see Mirror Box make peoples Legendary matters decks better and I expect this to be a pretty hot card from the set.

Badrick; Zach; Omniknight:
NEO has a futuristic cyberpunk theme, which is significantly different from what we are used to seeing in a typical high fantasy Magic set. Could you share some of the strategies that the design team used to make this set feel distinctly like Magic despite new ground in this sci-fi-esque world.

Gavin: Despite all the technology, a lot of it is powered by Magic. There’s a lot of Magic still in the world. You have all the old Kamigawa elements like the Kami still rolling around too. Magic has always experimented with its settings.
If you look at Mirrodin, that had a lot of futuristic stuff going on - Kaladesh too. If you go all the way back and look at Urza, he made giant mechs too - that’s nothing that is super new to Magic. Every set has different places on the pendulum, and NEO is maybe the furthest we’ve ever gone in this direction and we’re really curious what people think about it.
Still having Magic apparent in the world, still having mystical stuff happening,doing things that are futuristic but in magical ways - looking at a lot of the artwork - helps that a lot.

Toby asks:
Over the last few years we’ve only spent small amounts of time in some of the most richly realized new planes - such as Kaldheim and Strixhaven - will we return to the Neon Dynasty or Kamigawa again in the near future or is this a one-off?

Gavin:
A lot will be told by how successful the set is - right now things are looking really good - but we’ll have to wait and see. If it’s successful then I’m sure we’ll go back at some point, and if it's not then Kamigawa will go back to being trodden out another eighteen more years or something like that. It’s certainly on the table, we always wait and see what happens to our new worlds though.

I think it’s important for the people that haven’t heard this before - we work really far in advance. I’m working on cards and sets right now through the mid to late 2020’s is some of the stuff I’m touching. We have to set things far in advance - we can’t go ‘Oh, NEO was a success, we’ll make the next set Kamigawa too’ or something similar. There’s going to be some space between them. If NEO is a success, I can see the plane return in the future.

(Read more on how designing sets changed here https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/advanced-planning-2014-01-06)

Harmless, Compleated Muffin:
What inspired the artifact plus enchantment matters elements of Kamigawa Neon Dynasty?

Gavin:
I have a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajruiYRaKSY) that talks about this question, but one thing that we learned as we’re going into the set is that there were two conflicting factors here.
There’s the modern stuff that we wanted to do, like all the technology stuff, and then there’s the past stuff - all of the old traditions of Kamigawa. The main conflict or duality of this set is modernity versus tradition. So the things that are modern are on one side with technology, things that are traditional are on the other side with the older aspects of Kamigawa that we saw before.

What we did is we realised that that’s represented in Magic in two ways. Enchantments were a great way to show off the traditional, and artifacts were a great way to show off the modern side. And so once we realized that we’re gonna have this artifact versus enchantment thing going on here, we laid them out on a spectrum of the colors that would be the more modern or the colors that would be the more traditional.
For example, the most modern color is Blue, followed by Red, and the most traditional color is Green, followed by White. Black is in the middle. And being the most ambitious color, willing to do whatever it takes to get its way, Black has cards that care about both artifacts and enchantments. It’s really this duality - modernity versus tradition - that a lot of the core of the set was built upon. And you’ll see that throughout the entire set.

Senatorious:
I think it’s a good time to go ahead and post Roadside Reliquary over in the #spoilers channel.
This card is really interesting, especially in Commander where you have lots of effects where you can repeatedly return lands to the battlefield. So in the right decks, I think that this could do quite a bit. Why don’t you tell us a bit about how Roadside Reliquary was designed?

Gavin:
Roadside Reliquary plays into exactly what I was talking about - modernity versus tradition. There’s stuff that cares about artifacts and stuff that cares about enchantments, that’s the main conflict engine happening here. And so, if you play this card and you’ve got artifacts in your deck, awesome - you can crack it and draw a card, if you’ve got enchantments rolling around, you can crack it and draw a card; on its own, this card already has my attention. It’s a colorless land that goes into any Commander deck, and at some point you can cash it in for a card - cool.
Where it really gets spicy to me is where those two things meet. Once you get in that Black space I was mentioning before, where you’ve got modernity versus tradition on the same card, and if you control both of them, you draw two cards, which, for two mana and tap and sac a land is really strong. Normally, we charge you like 6 mana for this effect on other cards, like on the Blighted Cataract from Battle for Zendikar.
So this is a card I expect to make it into a decent amount of decks, and of course into your Lands decks and Gitrog and whatever. The cost to play is pretty low, especially in a two color or less Commander deck, given that it’s a colorless land, so I expect this one to see play.

Senatorious:
Awesome! I’m certainly going to be looking through my decks to see what decks I’ve got that have a reasonable number of artifacts and enchantments that would want to run this. It’s certainly an interesting card with the right tools.

Gavin:
And especially I’ll mention that in any Commander deck, you’re almost certainly going to have mana rocks. So even at just its base of 2, tap, sac, draw a card at some point in the game, it seems totally playable to me.

Demonaru asks:
Is there a reason that you chose follow through the Kodama and Dragon cycles, but elected to not create a new cycle of the Myojin? (Editor’s note: This AMA was held before the new cycle of Myojins were revealed)

Gavin:
Well, I’ll say two things: One, you all don’t know the whole set yet, so I don’t want to confirm or deny anything. But I will say that when you look back at Kamigawa, the dragons are really iconic. And the Kodama are a little less iconic, but there was still one in each set, and there was one in Commander Legends recently, plus there was a cycle to finish, while the Myojin were a finished cycle that didn’t see a ton of play. They were all expensive and not that highly played, so when you’re going back to grab stuff from your greatest hits, there are lot less of the greatest hits there.

Savannah asks:
Love the Enchantress support we’ve gotten over the past year! What were some of the challenges and perks in bringing back Sagas for their NEO iteration?

Gavin:
Yeah, there were a lot of challenges with figuring out how these ones that turn into creatures would work, like what their rates were going to be. And even what the frames were going to look like. For a while, we actually looked at them having Power/Toughness boxes in the bottom right-hand corner and the last step being “this becomes a creature”.
There were a lot of challenges to try and figure it out, and getting the numbers right, but I’m really happy with how they turned out. Another challenge was if they could attack on the same turn or not - we ended up with them exiling and returning. But there’s a lot of stuff like that that we have to figure out - tiny things around the edges.

EternalSoldier asks:
Is it possible that we might ever see an Artifact Enchantment card?

Gavin:
Totally possible - there’s nothing saying that we can’t do an Artifact Enchantment card. I think that we would need a reason to do it though. A lot people ask me “hey, why haven’t you done X?”, and my answer is “well, does X actually need to exist or is this just a box you’re trying to check?”.
Good design is normally not box-checking, so I think we could totally do it, someday, maybe, but a) we need a good creative concept for it, and b) we would need a reason. Now there are some - the God weapons from Theros block are Artifact Enchantments, so they do exist in Magic, but we need a good reason to do them.

Senatorious:
I’ve seen a couple of people asking if there are any Commanders from this set that you’re thinking about building a new Commander deck for.

Gavin:
I’m really excited about the UW Vehicle Commander that makes Pilot tokens. I think that that card is going to be a blast to build with, and then the Mardu Bash-harmonicon. That card is one I’m very excited to go build with.

Sete, Space Cowboy asks:
The three color Commanders we’ve seen so far have all been great fun. Can we expect more three color Commanders to show up in sets that don’t have a Shard or Wedge theme?

Gavin:
Yeah! There’s no reason why we can’t do some sometimes. I think a lot of it is just: is there a character it makes sense for, and do we have a strong reason to do it? We make so many cards for Commander now, as I’m sure you all know, that we have these precons all the time that are also places where we can put three color cards if they don’t make a lot of sense in a set because they don’t work very well in Limited and all this other stuff. Of course there’s nothing stopping us from making three color cards in main sets, so we can do more in the future.

Bumble, Abzan Emissary:
In more recent sets, a lot of cards have “this ability only triggers once each turn” on them, to, I assume, balance the card. What is the reason this hadn’t been done before? Or perhaps, what brought about this relatively new balancing tool?

Gavin:
Well, there’s two reasons. One is, as you mentioned, power level stuff - bounding it so it can’t happen repeatedly to shut off infinite combos or cards getting out of hand really quickly. Another is that it’s a tool you want in White’s toolbox to let you do things like draw cards. There’s kind of a new line we’re drawing for White that’s “if you’re doing a White thing, you can draw a card, but you can’t draw more than one card a turn” a lot of the time with some of these designs.

PraiseTheSunday asks:
How often does a card’s subtype affect its design? For instance, do you ever decide that you want to do a Toad Ninja, and then try to figure out what a design around it would be?

Gavin:
On occasions, it can be the case. If there’s something that we really want to do or it’s like “ok, we want to do Ikoria”, we should have this kind of type because it’s a really unusual type that we want to make a top-down version of, or there’s a legendary character we want to in particular, or in sets that care about creature types.
But a lot of the time, the creature types are added much later by the creative team, so we’ll come up with them and the creative team will give them a creature type. There’s some collaboration there, but it’s something I think of a lot less than the creative members do.

Shadoa asks:
What’s the story of Wandering Emperor having Flash? Were there any challenges with giving a Planeswalker Flash?

Gavin:
Rules-wise, I don’t think there were any challenges - it just works. The biggest challenge was making sure you could activate it on your opponent’s turn, which it worked out to do. As far as why, it just made sense for the Wanderer’s character. Their whole thing is that they can show up anywhere and everywhere out of nowhere, we’ve seen that in the past with some of their cards. So here it made sense that they could show up at any time.

Llis asks:
With Shrines returning to this set as Enchantment Creatures, is there a chance that we might see a Shrine-based Commander?

Gavin:
Certainly possible. (Editor’s note: at the time the AMA was held, Go-Shintai) was not yet previewed.

Bumble, Abzan Emissary asks:
With the release of Isshin shortly after the release of Wulfgar, I wonder if cards recently released with similar abilities are considered when thinking about what abilities cards should get. A lot of people have said that Wulfgar seems to have a similar play pattern and effect to Isshin. How much attention or thought is paid to “hey, we had a legendary creature in the previous set that did something very similar”?

Gavin:
First of all, yes - we pay attention to all of the cards that are coming out. Everyone sees all the cards, we do slideshows to show off all the cards to people internally, so everyone has access to all of this stuff. And plus, the designers of different sets are reviewing each other’s sets, so they make sure that things are round. With Wulfgar and Isshin, one thing that’s worth noting about them is that the different colour identities mean you get to build very different decks. Even though there are some similarities, the colour identities alone are enough to separate them. And sometimes, moving around things like that alone can be enough of a compelling reason to do so.

Exxaxl asks:
Are we going to see more Turtle Ninjas in each color with different color headpieces or was Kappa Tech-Wrecker a one off and not a TMNT reference?

Gavin:
I guess you’ll have to wait and see! All I’m going to say is: You can play four copies in a deck.

Gavin: I’ll just say this real quick since we’re about to wrap up: Thanks to everyone for coming out, thanks for all the great questions - I get asked a lot of questions all the time, and there are a lot of really interesting ones here that are not the kinds of things I normally get asked. I really hope that you can take these answers, enjoy them, and tell your friends as well, and that you’ll enjoy the set when you get to play with it.

Senatorious:
I think that’s going to be it for today. Again, thanks so much for coming Gavin, we always love having you on PlayEDH. I can’t wait to do it again!

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