While at MagicCon, between playing a lot of Magic with other con visitors, and watching panels on the massive Mana Stage they had set up, we also got to chat with some folks from Wizards at some behind-closed-door Q& A meetings. We got to ask key Wizards personnel about the upcoming The Hobbit and Reality Fracture sets, as well as the future of the Commander format.
Starting with The Hobbit, we got a bit more information about how they’re primarily sticking to the second edition of the book, along with the appendices in Return of the King for supplementary sources. They also went into the major difference between this set and the previous Tales of Middle-Earth, wherein that set was grander in scale and darker in tone, The Hobbit will have a more whimsical approach to its set. An interesting tidbit during the session was the internal discussion about not having enough creatures on the property, like The Hobbit (or other Universes Beyond IPs) that don’t have flying creatures. The question was, with a game like Magic, where “flying” is a consistently important keyword in sets, how do you build a set where there aren’t really enough creatures in the property that lend themselves to a keyword like flying.
One of the talks we were lucky enough to have was with Gavin Verhey, Principal Designer at Magic: The Gathering, during which we went in-depth on the Commander format. One of the interesting things touched on was the design process of the commander decks, when structuring them for veteran players vs new ones. Gavin went into detail discussing how they usually focus on one or two commander decks that play pretty straightforward, as a good starting deck for someone new to the format, while having a single deck that features more complicated mechanics to satisfy veterans, and a third deck that’s a middle ground between the two. He also brought up the return of commander starter decks, with a fresh set of five mono-color decks coming later this year, a change of pace from the usual multi-color commander precons released nowadays.
Gavin then went into how they test new cards added to the commander precons they design, using a side deck of just the new cards. They’ll then choose to randomly draw from that deck instead of the main deck to pull one of the new cards, so that they can consistently guarantee they get to see some of those cards during a game. It’s an honestly genius idea for testing deck builds, even for regular players, since a commander deck features 100 cards, it can be hard to test upgrades to a deck, since you just have to hope you draw said cards. This way, you’ll always make sure the cards you’re testing for a deck always come up.
The last Q&A session we had with the team at Wizards covered the upcoming and highly anticipated Reality Fracture set. Mark Rosewater, longtime Head Designer at Magic, went into detail about this set being a capstone to the long-term story they’ve been setting up of Jace wanting to “fix” the multiverse and how a “what if?” set has consistently been at the top of the list of requests from fans over the years. But more importantly, it was designed so that even if you haven’t been following the in-universe story this whole time, the set should still be fun to engage with in a vacuum setting. They discussed making sure that players who might not be familiar with older Magic characters or cards, still know that a card in the set is a “Jace created multiverse variant” through artwork on the card itself showing fragments of the original card art alongside the new one, a special Jace watermark in the textbox, and in some cases including both versions of a card in booster packs like the revealed Chandra, Torch of Defiance and Chandra, Chill of Compliance. Most interestingly, they had already confirmed that the set takes place in Jace’s version of Strixhaven, Hexhaven, but teased that we’ll definitely get to see how Jace has changed other planes in the Magic universe as well.
Overall, the three Q&As offered a great glimpse into the two upcoming sets and Wizards of the Coast’s design philosophy on the commander format. They had already gone into a great deal of detail in their preview panel at the show, but getting some extra time to really dig into additional questions was great.
