Gavin Verhey Commander 2021 AMA
Gavin Verhey, Chris Peeler and Athena Froehlich joined PlayEDH for an AMA about the Commander 2021 decks, following new standard Strixhaven set on the plane of Arcavios! People were able to send in questions ahead of time, and had an opportunity to ask more questions after the pre-selected questions were answered.
Enjoy the read! We hope you find some interesting tidbits and info about this new set.
1. ProGamerJEC asks: What cards did you design when you were creating the decks and which deck did you have the most influence on within the design process?
Gavin: This is a great question to start off with because it will help clarify exactly what my role is on these decks. I was the lead architect for Commander 2021, and the lead designer was Corey Bowen, who I want to give a big shout-out to. I did not design the decks directly, but I did architect them.
To architect means I'm basically a level above the design process, so I’m helping make sure that all the themes are well aligned, that anything that’s blocked is getting figured out, and giving feedback on how all of the decks work. I didn't actually design that many cards in these decks, but I gave a lot of feedback on them and tweaked them a little bit. It’s always hard to say if you made a card or didn’t make a card if you got an ability changed or something.
It’s really a group effort. The deck I had the most influence on definitely was the Lorehold deck. That was my favorite to play so I was always playing it while playtesting, and we’ve all heard a lot of feedback about White and Red-White. Me and Corey talked at length and had a lot of discussions about how we could give Red-White the tools that it needed, and how we wanted to go into a different direction this time around.
Thanks to people like Chris Mooney and Corey Bowen and myself, we were able to come up with something really new and unique to work on this time around, and I’m really happy with some of the first steps here.
Hopefully, we’ll see more like it in the future.
2. 8BitBlitz asks: When you were designing the new cards for Commander 2021, was your thought process more towards designing cards with synergy, or more cards that would be fun in Commander in general?
Gavin: In general when designing Magic cards, we care about both these things a lot.
#1: For the deck: we care about things that work well in the deck. In most cases, we want to be making things that are correct for the deck, but we don't want anything that is not going to be fun for EDH, once we make a card, it's played way more than just in that deck in particular.
#2: By making a card that is problematic in the EDH format, Magic has to live with that forever which is not great or ideal. There are a few exceptions to this, for example white in particular, and white red, we were happy to make some off theme cards that are good for that color, because it just needs the additional help in Commander right now.
As a whole we try to lean more into synergy, but you'll see some cards like Archaeomancer's Map on occasion.
3. Sydelio and Locust ask: Hey Gavin. I'm interested in hearing about the development of cards in the design process; can you give an example of a card that stayed the same from the beginning to release, and one that went through numerous changes?
Gavin: With the precon decks, it's almost always the face commanders because the face commanders are cards that are going to get played a lot.
They represent the entire theme of the deck, and they get changed constantly until we get to a good version. The deck that had the most trials and tribulations was the Green-Black deck. We tried a lot of different things for that deck. We tried Green-Black spellcasting, we tried Green-Black sacrifice, but ultimately ended up on Green-Black Lifegain.
So I think if you’re assuming that the face commanders change the most, then I would logically say that it was the Green-Black face commander.
Willowdusk, Essence Seer probably changed the most. I don’t know exactly off the top of my head, but that card changed a lot.
4. Swiftflight asks: What goes on in power balance discussions when producing new cards or upgrading old cards in new ways?
Gavin: One thing we want to be very careful about is power creep because that is something that will severely damage your game if you’re not careful about it. What we often try to do is change the power in different locations of the game and shine a spotlight on new and interesting themes.
For example, this time around with Strixhaven Commander, Red-White got an artifact theme and Green-Black got a life gain theme, which are not really things that decks in those colors would normally have done. But you get some new cards that aren’t necessarily more powerful than other previous cards, but are just a new way you can play with them, and that’s something we think about a lot.
5. Chief asks: Hello, Gavin. I like Strict Proctor and the concepts behind Monologue Tax and Archaeomancer's Map are interesting to me as well because I like white's rule-setting and taxing abilities. Is it hard to fit cards like these into the game, especially in Commander products, because of the possibility that they'll be viewed as unfun to play against? Do you think that we'll continue to see variations on these effects at different power levels on a regular basis?
Gavin: Yes, very much. We know White needs some assistance in Commander when it comes to card draw and mana ramp. I made a video with Ari Nieh in my Good Morning Magic YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJQGAlbTa2Q ) about two months ago. I'm talking with Ari on another potential new episode as well.
One of the things he talks about is things that White can do. A space we give in White is if White says you can't do a thing, it can also tax you with a card or a treasure for doing that. There is some interesting space there that we can play with, and a lot of cards that we can make.
That's one way for us to stride that line of the 'unfun' cards, it is true saying you can't do something isn't super fun, but saying 'hey, if you do this thing, I'll get a bonus from it', allows you to have your fun and me to get something from it too.
What you're starting to see in Strixhaven is the beginning of some cards like those that are coming in the future.
6. JesusChris and Lev-K ask: Hey Gavin, big fan of the refrain cards! Love to see them, I noticed however that unlike the original cycle of cards from future sight these aren’t a complete color cycle. Should we be looking for more cards to complete the cycle in a later Commander set or are these just a one-off ?
Gavin: This wasn't intended as a cycle originally - it was just two fun cards inspired by the Refrain cards - but because I love seeing patterns and I love Suspend, it won't stop me from putting any more of these into future sets.
I can't say if you’ll see any more in future sets necessarily, but you’ll know that I’m trying. So if you see a Green, White, or Black Suspend card that reverberates in the future, you’ll know where it came from.
7. Waffle the Doggle asks: Has a made-for-commander saga ever been considered for inclusion in a precon, and if not, are there any design related complications that have prevented this?
Gavin: No design related complications, one of the saddest cuts from a Commander product I've ever done was in Commander 2018, the Adaptive Enchantment deck, had a card called 'Saga of the Helvault', which was the Saga of Avacyn, we thought that was cool as a nod to the Innistrad story arch.
We made a card that stuck things in the Helvault and in the end, they all came back into play and you got an angel token from it. It didn't work out in that product, it didn't quite fit the theme of what the deck was doing well enough.
Someday I hope we can make a card like that, one-off Sagas in Commander decks are a charming thing to do, especially for stories players recognize, and the idea of Commander specific Sagas are not off the table at all.
Gavin after the AMA: I don't have any kind of physical card to share. It was from Commander 2018 so the archives of it were gone. IIRC the card was this:
Saga of the Helvault
3WW - Enchantment - Saga
Chapter 1, 2: For each player, exile target creature that player controls for as long as you control CARDNAME.
Chapter 3: Create a 6/6 white angel token with flying.
8. Jaiklay asks: What can you tell us about the design history of Tempting Contract? It's one of my favorite cards in Commander 2021.
Gavin: This card was discussed quite a lot. It was split on people - some said ‘why would anyone ever play this card’, and others said ‘this card is awesome’.
I think it's a good example of how when we released it into the world, we got basically the same exact responses. I think that’s great. And keep in mind, as you’re designing Magic cards, not every card is for everybody, but just because some people don’t like a card doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t make it.
Some of the best cards have reactions that are twos and tens as opposed to all sevens. And I think this is a card that did a pretty good job there.
9. Jason, Sparkbonder asks: Hey Gavin how was the keyword 'Demonstrate' thought of and changed throughout the design process?
Gavin: We don't always do a cycle in Commander decks, but this is one that we decided to do here. I came up with the idea of a demonstration, that's a nice flavorful thing for Strixhaven, as well as something that would involve spells, because spells are such a key part of Strixhaven.
The big changes here are that originally it was your opponent got to choose - right now it's may, you may - originally your opponents had to copy, but that didn't feel right, because that meant you didn't want to cast your spell sometimes.
There was a big debate whether or not the player casting the spell had the choice to demonstrate, and I'm glad with the direction we chose for this mechanic. Demonstrate was tricky to get right.
10. Nosrac2 asks: What was the most contentious design in Commander 2021? Was there a card that really sparked a lot of debate?
Gavin: The White ramp cards caused a lot of color pie discussion. The Blue-Green Wrath caused a lot of color pie discussion, and also Tempting Contract caused so much discussion around if this card did anything or not.
11. Deimos asks: We’ve seen set-specific mechanics from past sets (Mentor, Food, etc.) on cards in Commander 2021. Can we expect this more often?
Gavin: Yes, one of the things I've always loved about Commander is we get to use random one-off mechanics. To me this is a hallmark of Commander, you get to tap into these old mechanics that you don't see often.
Personally, I think our main sets could do more with that sometimes - we saw affinity for artifacts on Tezzeret in War of the Spark - I love doing this, you can expect to see more of this in the future. I have a short list of weird mechanics I want to get in sets, If you see a fortification in a future Commander product, you know who put it there.
12. Xenarthran asks: Did you design the new cards and then fill in complementary reprints, figure out the reprints and then design new cards to fill in the gaps, or somewhere in between?
Gavin: The way designing Commander decks works is a little bit of both. You usually start by designing the themes and the face commander, and you don’t finish the face commanders - it’s not like your first design is perfect, but you come up with a face commander that’s generally in the theme you want to do, and then you build a deck core using reprints.
You start playing with that, and then you figure out the gaps that are in that deck and choose reprints that will go and fill those gaps. So it really is a simultaneous process. Once we come up with a deck theme, we build the deck and we slowly figure out what that deck needs and create cards for it. The face commander will also be changed a lot during that time.
13. Jaiklay asks: Sign in Blood and Read the Bones are not in Silverquill Statement while Ambition's Cost is. How do you decide between different versions of similar effects to put into these decks?
Gavin: It depends on a couple of things, most of all on what the deck needs. Normally with Commander you want to do the biggest effect a lot of the time, but when it comes to Commander games and drawing cards, card draw is so important that you'd rather play a 4 mana draw 3, than a three mana draw two.
For these Commander decks, 4 mana draw 3 was the way to go. Also looking at the mana curve of a deck is very important when considering cards.
14. Phazon Hedron and Derpsword ask: Why did some decks get Guild Signets and/or Talismans while other decks didn't get any or only got one of the two?
Gavin: That comes down to what the decks needed. As we’re looking at the design of them - what their mana curve was like, what their total mana rock count was - some decks need mana rocks more than others.
One of the other things that is really novel and only really done in Commander design is that on the Commander team, a different person is in charge of each deck. That really gives it a kind of personal touch. While the lead designer - in this case, Corey Bowen - at the end of the day got the call over all the final decklists, really what those individual designers do heavily point the deck in a direction.
Some people had more mana rocks than others. And I think it’s cool that when you see the final version of a deck, every deck kind of has its own personality.
One of the great things about Commander decks is that when you buy them off the shelf, it really does feel like it’s custom made for you. I find that to be a really enjoyable part of the Commander precons.
15. Alchmyst and Nephalia ask: Typically Commander sets come with 2 alternate Commanders with the same full color identity as the face Commander. For C21 why did you decide to just make one alternate Commander bearing the same color-pair identity? Additionally, what thoughts went into deciding who the ‘face’ and who the ‘alternate’ Commander was?’
Gavin: I made a video about this on Good Morning Magic last week
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr0ovUnHKmA ) and if you want the longer answer, go watch that video.
The short version is: we looked at the data and feedback from our players, and found the third legend we were making wasn't doing a lot for us. It wasn't as well refined and not seeing that much play. When you release a bunch of cards with the same color identity that are legendary at the same time, players only make so many decks.In Strixhaven, between the Red-White Commander deck, and the Red-White main set, there are seven different Commanders.
We cut the third legend in the Commander deck and we put in another mono colored legend, so that every deck would have two mono colored legends.
That means you have a different thing to build around, a whole new mono colored direction, and that card goes into more decks. Cards like Losheel, Clockwork Scholar can go into any white deck you're building. We're going to see how it does here, getting feedback is important, but in general we're tending to favor the two faces + some more mono colored Legends.We're making so many Legends now, we want to be careful about 'Legend creep', because people only have so much time to build new decks.
16. RoveZ, Panda the dripful, JustanEspookyGhost, and Broton ask: How come the new Commander deck didn't have any ‘Partner with...’ cards?
Gavin: I love ‘Partner with…’, it's great. I love to put it in the places where it makes sense. But also, I wouldn't expect it all the time and I wouldn't expect it every year.
First of all, having two Commanders is just inherently powerful. You start with an extra card in hand, essentially. Partners also have this challenge where they’re very limited in what you can put on them because they have to have the ‘Partner with…’ reminder text.
There’s only so much space that can go on Partners. This time around, we could've done it but we just did Partners last year, so I think we can save those for times where it makes a lot of sense to do them.
In Ikoria, it made a ton of sense because you got the bonder and their monster. Here, it really made more sense to focus on the individual people who are the lumini of their colors. That’s what we focused on this time around. With that said, plenty of chances in the future for ‘Partner with…’ - you have not seen the end of the mechanic.
17. Wraithslayer101 and Jason Spiller ask: What was the thinking behind the decision to make the Silverquill deck a political deck?
Gavin: One of the cool things for Commander 2021 is that we brought Sheldon Menery in to be on the design team for this product - he worked on this set and some others - he led the Silverquill deck.
Sheldon loves political gameplay, he pitched the idea, and it was a cool new bend on the archetype, White-Black politics. It wasn't the only theme in the deck, we did put a bit of a +1/+1 counter theme in there as well, but I thought it was a really cool suggestion from Sheldon, and it led to a novel new White-Black deck. As a Silverquill mage, I'm excited to play this deck.
18. Bird Umbra asks: How did the mechanics of past red-white Commander products, and the community perception of red-white in Commander, influence the development of Lorehold Legacies?
Gavin: Greatly, It really did. All of your feedback is so important. It truly is. That's why I love being on the ground floor, and all of our community team and many of our designers love being on the ground floor, being on Twitter, listening to everything, because it really does matter.
We use it to make changes to our game all the time. One of the challenges is that we get a lot of feedback, but we work on a long timeline, so you don't see it right away. If you think about the Red-White discussion, a lot of talk about Red-White needing more Commanders was 2+ years ago when it really started kicking off. Even though we reacted quickly, you didn’t really start to see it until - maybe you got a little bit here and there - but a lot of it showed up right here with the new kind of color identity for Red-White.
It does take a long time, but we definitely knew approaching this that we wanted something new and different; not just something attack-y because Red-White has a million different attack-y Commanders. With that said, you are not only going to see non-attack-y Red-White Commanders in the future because some players will be like ‘I like attacking in Red-White, don’t get rid of them’.
Don’t worry, there will still be plenty of Red-White Commanders in the future that care about attacking. But we’re also going to explore some new space. Cards like Feather the Redeemed in War of the Spark were a great opening direction, and this version of Red-White here in Strixhaven is another really cool direction, and one that you’ve not seen the last of.
19. Sloth asks: Regarding the Prismari precon, is there a struggle to design a deck that feels functionally unique or different compared to previous precons? Charm Breaker Devils; Talrand, Sky Summoner and a myriad of other cards find their way into Blue/Red/X decks often. Do you have hopes that design space for Izzet - or in this case Prismari - can be explored beyond the scope of casting instants, sorceries and/or artifacts?
Gavin: Blue-Red has a decent number of design spaces, spellslinger of course being very popular. In Strixhaven, we knew when we did Blue-Red, spells would make the most sense. We had to figure out how to make it different from any Izzet deck you've played before.
What we looked at originally was having it be creatures plus spells. There were spells that would cascade you into creatures, this was a mechanic that we were figuring out at the time. It was very fiddly. You needed the right creatures and spells in hand and it didn't really work. Instead we pulled back, and focused on big spells. The entire deck isn't just about big spells, but there are some cards that in particular care about big spells mattering.
You can see that on the face Commander - Zaffai, Thunder Conductor - wanting to cast spells that are 5 or more or 10 or more. As you build the deck yourself, you'll find you can do things with Zaffai you weren't able to do with other Blue-Red spells or effects in previous decks.
20. Astimageon and Schrodinger, Quandrix Fractal ask: How did the themes of the different decks evolve over time?
Gavin: I touched on a few of these already, but let’s go through them really fast. Red-White was artifacts basically the whole time once we decided we wanted to do something different, so that one stuck the same. Red-Blue as I just mentioned, we had the small spells plus cascading into creatures theme that then changed into big spells.
For Blue-Green, we looked at a couple of different things, but tokens was pretty consistent from the beginning because we knew we were doing Fractals in the main set, and there was a point in the main set where tokens were a bit bigger of a design thing. It just seemed like an interesting directions to go down that we hadn’t done before.
Green-Black changed the most. As I mentioned earlier, we tried a lot of things for Green-Black. We did try life at the beginning, then we went to sacrifice and spellcasting and a bunch of other stuff before going back to lifegain, which I think ultimately worked out pretty well. Black-White started off as politics, and then kind of had the counters theme added into it as it went along because politics alone wasn’t quite enough. So that’s how they evolved over time.
As you can see, they all evolved varying amounts. But a lot of the work from early on did stay consistent throughout. Usually, the first few meetings of a design team are for trying to hammer down on the themes and figuring them out.
Once you get a proof of concept that works and you make sure that a deck will work around something, the theme usually stays the same. I’d say that in every product, probably about 0-1 of the themes change over the course of it. Not a ton, just a little.
21. Arctic Phreeze asks: With the Strixhaven Commander Decks soft-focused on tokens in each of the decks, are there plans to design further precons around an environment with a shared mechanic?
Gavin: It's funny, a lot of the times we do things, and players draw connections between them, despite the fact we did not have the intent to have a connection between them. People like to draw lines and see themes.
There is nothing representative of us wanting to have tokens across all of the decks, but they ended up that way. Could we do precons around a shared mechanic? Totally possible, but in this case, any correlation was a total coincidence.
22. Jace, J Waffles and PraisetheSunday ask: What were you and your team’s thoughts about using the schools to explore new archetypes within the color pairs in C21?
Gavin: Very positive. I think one of the things that Strixhaven challenged us to do - not just the Commander decks, but the main set too - we've seen all five of these color combos before. We’ve seen them in Ravnica. We couldn't just be ‘different Ravnica’.
We needed to do something that was unique, that was its own. And so for every one of the two-color pairs. We looked for a different thing they could do that wasn’t just their Ravnica guild. For example, Black-Green wasn’t going to be about the reanimation stuff and the graveyard as much. We tried to do something different. It was a really enjoyable experience trying to do something different this time around, and I hope this comes through in the Commander decks.
23. Felicity, Lux and Nonaka ask: Strixhaven focused on enemy color pairs and in many ways subverted the mechanical expectations of those color pairs with the 5 colleges. Can we expect a similar set to strixhaven in the next few years that takes allied colors and applies a similar approach to exploring more about what a color pair can mechanically represent?
Gavin: This is not canon - this response is me, Gavin making stuff up - what I want to happen is if we go back to Arcavios, the plane where Strixhaven is on, and we saw another college, say the rival college with the other 5 color pairs.
That'd be super cool, we can do the whole school thing again, and we could see what those other 5 color pairs look like.
Once again, totally making this up, in my head that would be very fun to do. One of the things in Strixhaven we wanted to do was see if we are able to make a non Ravnica set about 2 color factions, and the answer is yes. People are loving these factions. A lot of people say things like 'I can't identify with Izzet, but I can identify with Prismari'. I think it's been a huge success and I can see us doing this again, either on Arcavios or on another plane.
24. Artorias, Loveable Necromancer asks: When designing Commander 2021, were there any design choices you deliberately avoided when revisiting enemy color pairings?
Gavin: We wanted to avoid doing anything we had already done previously. That was the big one. So for Red-White, let’s not do another attacking Commander, for example. For Green-Black, let’s do something different than graveyard. That kind of thing.
25. Rogus asks: One of my favorite things about EDH is the janky, kitchen-table madness, inherent to noncompetitive Commander. How is the spirit of jank alive in Commander 2021, and how will you keep the jank alive in future products?
Gavin: It's definitely interesting, I get that feedback a lot of time from people - 'I miss when Commander was janky and you just made decks with stuff you had' - and it's a tough line to walk. We're making more Magic cards than ever, and there's a lot of Commander things coming out, but also the resources to make your deck are getting better.
When Commander existed 10 years ago, EDHRec did not exist, people weren't talking about Commander on Twitter or anywhere else you can imagine, like Reddit or PlayEDH just weren't there. Places where people were comparing decks and refining them with other people across the world - Commander was still a brand new format.
We often see this in a cycle of a format where early on people go 'this is amazing and undiscovered, there is all this new stuff to build around' and people play it for a while and years down the road, people are very nostalgic for 'old days' in the format.
I hear the same thing about Modern, where people go 'I miss back when Modern was early and anything goes, you never knew what you were going to play against and it was less evolved'. It's not anyone's fault that Modern became more evolved over time, things just got refined out and crunched and stuff just happens.
With Commander, the big thing we want to do to make that 'janky feel' is to create cards for all power levels and make sure that there is all kinds of stuff for all kinds of players. Make your political cards, make your everyone has to attack cards, make your goofy build-arounds.
This is one of the things I feel Commander Legends was really good for, creating a lot of weird oddball commanders that you have to build around in quirky ways, because those decks are often not the strongest thing you can do. If you look at a card like Averna, the Chaos Bloom it's not the strongest card you can choose at all, but it's really a really quirky and unusual deck compared to others, and that's kind of cool.
Hopefully, people will talk to each other, and use places like PlayEDH, and find the play space and power level they are looking for. Having a space for people to play those decks is important.
26. TarantinoJr asks: How do you strike a balance when designing precons both for newer players to learn with right out of the box, and for experienced players who want new deck ideas and starting points with the precons?
Gavin: Well, there’s a couple of things we’ve done here. First of all, I want to point out the distinguishing nature of the two different kinds of Commander decks we're making right now. There's this release, Commander 2021, which is the more traditional Commander release, and there are also the Commander decks you’ve seen with sets like Commander Legends and Zendikar Rising or Kaldheim. There are cards in there for experienced players, and some good reprints with a handful of new cards. Those are really great for brand new players to pick up because they play right out of the box and they're meant to almost be at a slightly easier to understand level for someone new coming into the game. They’re replacing Planeswalker decks, that’s what they’re meant for.
With these decks, we're able to go a little more hogwild with this stuff. There are more new cards, more wonky mechanics, and things like that. So that’s one thing.
But the other thing is just kind of looking at the range that you’re making. In a 5 precon product like Strixhaven Commander, what we often do is we look at all 5 of the deck themes and try and put in some that are going to be easier to access and some that are for the more enfranchised, experienced player. This time around, the political deck is really something that you want to play if you are super experienced at Commander because that takes a lot of knowing who the threat is, you get to assess stuff, pointing people in the right direction, where a Blue-Green tokens deck with big sea monsters that make tokens is a lot more straightforward. Having a range on a spectrum so a newer player can find a deck that’s right for them is really important.
27: HikarW asks: What are some of the advantages and disadvantages you found from two years of designing Commander decks around a new set and world instead of just whatever plane and lore you want
Gavin: There are definitely a lot of advantages. You get to use the theme from the main set but which the main set did not get to blow out all the way - like Black-Green doesn't get a full on life gain card in standard - but the Commander deck does.
Restrictions breed creativity, and we were able to do some designs this way, which we might have never come up with otherwise. I don't think we've had to sacrifice too much of the 'commanderyness' of the decks, because we are still adding different cards wherever we want.
The challenges are that there are some mechanics that are tricky to use. We have to assume all these new cards are on this plane. Making say: a new embalm card, is pretty tricky. On Strixhaven not a lot of things are getting embalmed.
The other thing that for me personally is a larger issue, is revisiting a lot of old random characters. Like going 'Hey here is Tawnos, and check out Brudiclad!' who was a piece of flavor text on a card in Future Sight.
We have other places to put cards like those. We have plenty of sets like Commander Legends or Modern Horizons 2 which is coming out soon, sets like Jumpstart, and so on.
Doing a Commander release that does have some of that stuff isn't off the table. You haven't seen the last of cool one-off fun Legendary characters either.
28. Audina Puzzle, Mr.Evans, and TheDarkestTimeline ask: Did Commander 2020 influence how you approached Commander 2021 especially due to the cycle of free spells in 2020?
Note: TheDarkestTimeline also wanted to bring up Dockside Extortionist from C19.
Gavin: Our timelines were so hilarious because I think this set was locked down by the time Commander 2020 came out - that’s not 100% accurate - I think we maybe had some small spaces to tweak a few things if we wanted to, but not by much. It was mostly locked down and done and through editing. So, not really from Commander 2020.
In general, when it comes to cards like the free spells and Dockside Extortionist, one thing we are very conscious of that we don't want to do is make cards that are must-plays in Commander. Every time you make a card like an Arcane Signet - which I now believe is a mistake, we should not have made Arcane Signet - it just makes the number of choices you get to make when you make your deck go down by 1.
Part of the fun of Commander is getting to put all of your weird cards in your deck that you love, and the more cards you feel like you have to play, the worse off it is, I think. So we’re trying not to make staples.
Instead, what we’re trying to do is make things that are good in certain decks and good in certain archetypes, but not good to always play all the time. The one exception I will give here is for some White cards because White could just use some more staples, and that’s why you see things like Archaeomancer’s Map because yes, White really does need it.
Dockside Extortionist ended up a little too strong. Frankly, it’s nice to give Red some more staples, but Extortionist ended up stronger than what we would’ve liked and Fierce Guardianship certainly did not need to exist. So that’s kind of our current philosophy, and we’re still learning a lot from the community. All your feedback is super useful.
29: Lumf asks: Out of the new Strixhaven mechanics - Magecraft, Ward, Demonstrate, and Learn- which one is your favorite?
Gavin: I love Learn/Lesson. I know it's the most awkward one to talk about for Commander. When Sheldon was at the office, there was a lot of discussion on this because wishboards don't work in EDH, but we decided to leave the Learn/Lesson mechanic as is, and I'm happy with that. I think it's a cool mechanic for constructed play.
Originally we tried this mechanic in Kaladesh. It was this idea of an 'invention mechanic' and you could invent a one mana value Artifact from outside the game, but that got cut because it was a little too complex.
I've always loved this mechanic, and I'm glad we get to do it here.
30. Russian Spy asks: If the storm scale is named after Storm, why bring it back in the precons?
Gavin: Because we're all about breaking barriers and doing things that we say couldn't be done. We made Weather the Storm in Modern Horizons, so it's not the first Storm card in a million years.
The problem with Storm is when you combo kill people with it. This is a card you can't really combo kill people with aside from, say, Stuffy Doll or Brash Taunter, so it felt pretty safe to me.
31: Bird Umbra asks: Do you have any interesting stories from the development of Commander 2021?
Gavin: I've covered a lot of them already in this AMA - the Black-Green deck changed a lot, Sheldon came on the team - one story that I will give you is one about Corey Bowen, the lead designer, who will be coming up on Good Morning Magic in a little bit.
Strixhaven is one of the first main products we finished during the pandemic. We did a little bit of the tail end of the project, during the beginning of the pandemic. It was a real team effort to get all the playtesting done, it took a lot of effort working out how we were going to playtest.
Big hats off to everyone involved, like Corey and Glenn Jones, I'm really happy what we came up with, we did some really great final tweaks in playtesting this set.
All of the questions up to this point had been asked ahead of time and picked out of a large list of submissions. Senatorious read peoples questions to Gavin and they tried to go over as many as possible.
Continuing onward from this point, Chris Peeler, Athena Froehlich and Senatorious started highlighting questions asked during the time the AMA was live. You will start seeing some of them weigh in on questions and answers from this point onward.
32: Jub, Bringer of Fog asks: Now that Commander decks follow regular set releases, are you still looking to bring back older characters, that maybe haven’t had the chance to get cards before?
Gavin: I touched on this a little bit before. That is one of the things I do miss with this set-align model of Commander decks. I was the lead designer of Commander Legends, I like putting in old throwbacks that reference flavor text like Hans Eriksson and the likes in Magic sets.
I still have a long list of Legends to go through. Some people who’ve been following me for a while know that already. I have a list of Legends I’d like to get made, but there are a lot of places we can put them, for example Modern Horizons 2.
Future sets in the vein of Jumpstart or Commander Legends or other similar sets we have down the line. I know that we’re all getting used to this Commander set alignment, we do like doing them, but that doesn’t mean we won’t make some more traditional Commander products in the future.
Chris: I can’t give away too much right now, but for people looking to get more old characters to come out in 2021, there’s going to be some cool stuff coming out that I think people are going to get a kick out of.
33: Slater asks: Can you tell us more about the new foil etch ‘thick’ Display Commander card?
Chris: I really quickly wanted to mention that Adam Styborski and I on WeeklyMTG last week did an unboxing video where we try to show off some of the new commanders and you can get a look at them there (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txi-2O3DcpQ).
They have a nice pleasant sort of thickness and sturdiness to it, it’s almost like credit card thickness. They have that sort of foil etch treatment like the Commander Legends cards. What you are going to see in the Strixhaven set is that some of the Japanese Mystical Archive cards are going to also have this foil etch treatment.
Note from Chris: The foil etch treatment on the Mystical Archive cards is primarily on the border and piping of the cards rather than the entire face of the card. It’s more subtle than the Commander Legends implementation of the same process and I hope players enjoy them!
Gavin: One of the pieces of data we’ve gotten for a while now is that the gigantic foil commanders on the front of the Commander box just weren’t doing a lot for people. There are some fans out there and if you are one of them, I apologize for getting rid of them. A lot of people just said ‘I can’t play with this, it doesn’t fit in a deck box, I can’t do much with this, it goes in my closet or it gets thrown away’.
We wanted to find something that players would enjoy and use a little bit more. These cards can fit in your deck box, and because your Commander card starts outside of the game, you can use it as your Commander if you want to. Most people will go like ‘I got the card right here, but I’m going to use this awesome thicker version instead’. It’s a neat twist on what the original oversize cards were trying to do, I’ve given you an awesome version you can play in Commander, and this should be one you can actually use in your deck and play with.
34: Biospark292 asks: Cool to see treasure fit in red white in this set. Are we going to see treasure support for blue and black in the future? Where does treasure sit in the color pie?
Gavin: Every color can get treasure, if the reason is right. Blue is probably least likely to get it, even though that’s where it began, because blue doesn’t really do mana ramp. You’ll see it in Black, Green and Red and more of it in White, and of course the occasional card in Blue, it really can go everywhere.
This is a great example of how we can find a new mechanic that worked well in Ixalan, and have slowly started to incorporate it into sets. So no, you haven’t seen the last of treasure, and you’ll see plenty of it. Sorry gold fans, treasure is what we’re going with.
35: MayaHEEEDH asks: Does Gyome have Gordon Ramsey chef energy or some other celebrity chef?
Chris: I have an answer, because I’ve been watching a lot of Top Chef, but I want to hear your answer on this Gavin.
Gavin: I feel like Gyome is very friendly, but also a little bit reluctant. He’s in the kitchen, he’s nice when you go up and talk to him, but he never leaves, and he’s going ‘Ugh, I’m making the same dish I’ve made a thousand times’', but he has a good heart. This response is also Gavin made up fanfiction by the way - there might be an official answer, that is my Gavin Verhey answer.
Chris: To be clear, this is Chris’s fanfiction - I’m picking up more of a Jonathan Waxman vibe if that name rings a bell for anybody - same idea, jovial and nice but maybe not quite the same level of intensity like from Gordon Ramsey.
Gavin: The only Iron Chef I watch is Ironroot Chef but i’ll take your word for it.
36: Moviewatcher asks: Can you share a story about the lore or creation of Ruxa, Patient Professor?
Gavin: I think it basically went like this:
‘Hey, you know what would be fun’ - “No, what?” - ‘A vanilla Commander’ - “Sounds pretty cool”.
I think that’s how it started. And of course, there was a lot of refinement, and the way we did it was pretty clever.
It’s an ‘ability’ we can grant them that isn’t actually an ability, so that’s neat. It really started from a place of ‘we want a vanilla Commander, what’s the right color for that, Green has a lot of bears, that’d be funny, let’s make it a bear’ and it evolved from that. I think the final card is pretty hilarious.
38: Sydelio asks: Are we ever going to see enchantments, artifacts, or other non-creature, non-planeswalker cards that have ‘can be your Commander’?
Adding to this question, Senatorious: Or perhaps, more MDFCs, kind of like Esika?
Gavin: I think more MDFCs are definitely on the table. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback around this batch and how many words were on them, so we want to be careful with that going forward.
When it comes to ‘can be your Commander’, I made a video about some playtest cards from Commander Legends that didn’t make the cut ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=todKpc5Lgjc ).
Two that I handed off and that didn’t make it through development, was a Predator Vehicle that could be your Commander and was a partner, and another one I showed off was an equipment that could be your Commander.
All the way back in Commander 2017’s design, Nazahn was originally a Commander that could also have an equipment in the command zone.
I’ve always loved the idea, I think it’s cute and I hope that at some point in the future we’re able to actually do it.
40: JHZZZ asks: Are there any plans to do four color Commander decks again?
Gavin: The thing about four color is that it’s very very very hard to do. What we found when we made the four color precons is that the decks were very mishmashy, they all started to look the same and the decks were starting to get defined less by what color they were, and more by what color they weren’t.
In retrospect, the four color Commander decks were more of a box checking thing. ‘Hey, can we do this? I guess we can do this’. I’m not saying it’s impossible, it could certainly happen again, and especially last year and this year we cycled out Commander decks, all three color Commander decks, all two color Commander decks.
Another year we did more of an uneven style, Commander 2017, 2018 or 2019, I could see a four color deck maybe getting in there, but I don’t think it is super likely we would do 4 or 5 four colors decks again, we did that one time, it was a gigantic challenge, and a lot of the commanders that were made were incredibly powerful, like Atraxa and Breya, I don’t know if we’re eager to do it.
Senatorious: I can see how doing a set of all of them would be difficult, but maybe doing one here or there would be a bit more manageable.
41: Deku asks: Were there any cards in the Strixhaven Commander decks that ended up being too strong and therefore had to be cut?
Gavin: To talk a little bit about our process, what a lot of players don’t realize is that we come up with so many cards that don’t get made. We’re not going ‘we make a card, put it in, we’re good to go’. For a normal Magic set like say Strixhaven, we’ll make thousands of cards over the course of designing the set. I’m not exaggerating, literally thousands of cards.
Imagine making up a whole mechanic, and that whole mechanic doesn’t make the cut - those cards get stripped out - you do that a ton of times.
For Commander, we don’t make quite as many cards, but I would still imagine there is what, 70 or 80 new cards in these Commander decks, probably 200 to 300 cards were made for the product, if not more than that. Some are cut for good reasons, and some are just great designs that didn’t make it, and we’ll save those for another set someday.
42: badNews, badNews asks: Are you planning on creating more commanders like Yedora, Grave Gardener in the future, that can interact with old mechanics like face down cards, in new and unexpected ways?
Gavin: I don’t know if we’re planning on it and I don’t know if for Matt Tabak’s health that’s a good idea - or yes it’s Jess Dunks now - but in all seriousness, we’re not necessarily planning on any, but face down is an interesting space to play with and I think we could do more with it in the future, sure.
I love face down cards, in the Mystery Booster playtest cards I made the Spellmorph Raise dead, I love face down stuff.
43: Ninvoth Times asks: So you were talking a little bit about the design process for something like Commander. Do Commander decks have a design skeleton like the main set?
Gavin: There is, to an extent. It is a different world from a normal standard set though. As I mentioned earlier, when you’re trying to make your deck and make new cards, you’re trying to make it compliment the rest of your deck.
While there are general guidelines, a lot of the time you’re trying to fill the gaps your deck has. Some decks will just need more help than others. If you look at Red-White artifact matters, it needs a bunch of new cards to make it work, whereas a deck that is Blue-Red spells has alot of cards that will already work.
So in Blue-Red you’re able to make more cool individual one-offs, and in the White-Red deck you’re going to need to make more artifacts or cards that care about artifacts because you need more to leverage your theme.
44: Jac000bi: Is there any talk for reworking exiled cards so that they will count as ‘outside the game’ for the purpose of cards like Wish cards or Learn mechanics? If something ‘happens to be exiled’ so that you could pull it from there.
Gavin: When it comes to exiled, I don’t think we have any plans for that. I know wishes used to work that way, I don’t think that’s what we want to go back to necessarily. We have cards that specifically do this, like Karn, The Great Creator pulls cards out of exile, but I don’t think we have any plans to do that.
I also want to emphasise that we let Sheldon know about the mechanic, he talked with the Rules Committee about them, and ultimately the RC makes the decisions for the Commander format.
We’re happy to inform them, and we’re happy to talk with them, but Commander has grown and done really really well and I think they do a pretty good job. We defer to them on this, and at this point I’m happy with what they want to do, and that’s no wishboard.
As always, I’ll say rule zero. If you want to sit down at a table of Commander with me and you want to use a wishboard, I will not stop you. Now if that means you combo kill me on turn 2 we’re going to need to have a chat, but in general if you want to grab your pest making lesson card from your sideboard, for me that’s all good.
45: Alchmyst: In your own personal non-canon opinion, what other famous Planeswalkers that didn’t appear in the set might have been students in Strixhaven, and if possible what schools would they have been a part of?
Gavin: I think enemy colored planeswalkers are the ones that would show up here, right? I can see Saheeli totally doing some awesome art stuff where on the flip side Tamiyo probably not so much. She likes words more than maths, she’d probably go ‘What do you mean you guys are doing this maths thing?’
I’d maybe look at the enemy colored Planeswalkers of times past, as long as nobody with Phyrexian oil has shown up we’re probably in good shape, right?
Senatorious: I could definitely have seen Vraska showing up in Witherbloom, yeah.
46. Chris: Chris Peeler asks: Are there any cool Easter eggs in Commander 2021 that you were happy that made it in there?
Gavin: The answer is almost certainly yes, but nothing comes to mind. So many cards and designs have changed that I don’t want to say anything without looking at each card first, there are all kinds of fun references in there.
I will say there are a lot of fun references towards tropes, I’ll tweet some of the more fun ones out.
This was the end of the one hour AMA session Gavin got invited for at PlayEDH.
Gavin then left saying he had to ‘go to a business meeting about designing cards, as you do.’
We’re looking forward to hosting an event with Gavin, Chris and Athena again in the future.
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