Look, companion and mutate don't have any business in a real expansion.

Mutate is an un-set mechanic

Companion is a mechanic for some sort of supplemental set.

I disagree

Well clearly you're objectively wrong since the professional designers went "Alright this are okay to put in a new main set".

Mutate is completely normal. It's basically a Bestow variant.

Companion has no place existing, yet I see why they did it. And its "no place existing" is sort of like Epic or Sweep where it has no real right to do what it has, but I can't hate it TOO much now that it's here.

I'm just glad that the mechanics WERE more wild, rather than being cookie-cutter "Find a new condition on which to add +1/+1 counters to creatures" spam

MaRo admits that R&D makes mistakes all the time. Half his podcasts are about learning from them.

Literally all the mechanics you've compared companion and mutate to are considered among the 10-15 worst mechs ever done.

I'd like to see that list, honestly.

I get that for companion, and was in fact going for that, but Citation Needed for Bestow.

I don’t think mutate is that bad; I’m fine with it. Companion I agree feels like it belongs in a supplemental set. Has like vanguard and conspiracy vibes - it’s something I might be fine with at the kitchen table with friends for a twist on the game, but doesn’t feel right in a standard set.

This set has some goofy things. A few of the creature arts look like Pokémons. Some of the first cards I saw spoiled I thought were April fools jokes. Something about this set doesn’t feel cohesive and I want to blame that on companion.

There was huge blowup when transform was first spoiled with people saying it was silly and stupid and magic had jumped the shark and it was an un-set mechanic and that magic was over and etc. and etc. but i think it ended up being a relatively popular mechanic ultimately. There were at least 5 threads about it on the mothership during spoiler season.

I personally think its a good thing to take risks on designs, particularly if the fallout from those risks will be temporary if they don't pan out (which may or may not be the case with magic depending on your perspective). Being willing to be adventurous and try out new ideas that might not pan out is a good way to keep things fresh and to learn more about your game going forward.

As for whether companion and mutate will be flops or not, I think that the best way to answer that is to play with them. R&D has presumably already done this, and so they probably have a better perspective on the merit of the designs than any of us do, but I would guess they recognize that what they're doing has a high chance of backfiring when the cards are released to everyone and evaluated by a much larger and much more varied group of players.

That's what the Storm Scale is for
https://mtgstormscale.com/

Bestow has a 7 on the Storm Scale. I was surprised it was a 7, I'd have given it 8 or 9.

We JUST had a chance to bring Bestow back (Beyond Death) and design didn't take it so there's your big red flag about bestow.

See also This MaRo article

My first impression with Ikora is that it will be really fiddly to play with all the counter types involved. The set will basically be unplayable without a bunch of counters that you can clearly tell apart from each other, which basically means the punch-out counters are all but obligatory. I wonder if, depending on how this plays out, they will take a look at their policy of not mixing +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters in the same set -- the problems of being able to tell what is the board situation at a glance seem to be present in Ikoria too.

Mutate by itself doesn't bother me all that much, but it is really complex and has a fair amount of interactions that aren't immediately clear without consulting a rules article. It actually reminds me of evolution mechanics in other card games; a pity Gatecrash used the mechanic name.

The companion restrictions basically work for all except the highlander one (since someone interested in cheating could put a second or third copy of an important card just to increase the chances of finding it). I do foresee at least one game loss coming from someone carelessly putting only extra 19 cards for Yorion or forgetting about one odd-costed card in their Gyruda deck, though.

I dislike companions for another reason, though. They seem to be of two types -- you either build your deck so you fit then, or you have a deck that already fits the condition so you just add the companion for no cost. The GU companion is an example of the later, as it is basically free to include in Fires. I don't like this later design -- it's just free and guaranteed value that's impossible to interact with. The only real cost is one sideboard slot, which is negligible given the value.

Some individual cards seem fiddlier than usual, too. The ones I dislike the most are the giant that reshuffles into the deck upon cycling and asks you to keep track of the amount of times it's been cycled, and the artifact creature that gets one random keyword per turn. All in all, this is a set that really seems to wish to have been made for an online-only card game.

i can definitely agree with this

Its the arena set

They somehow lucked out in picking the right time for an online-only set.

Looking forward to lugging around keyword counters




Yes... how convenient....

The Storm Scale is false equivalency for this debate.
Some really well received mechanics have virtually no design space and end up rated higher on that scale while other, more lukewarm mechanics have more space and get rated lower.

The scale isn't about quality, not at least solely, but about recurrence.

Oh, Mutate has design space
Augment had design space too
That doesn't mean Mutate is the right fit for an expansion set

So, we acknowledge that bestow has a TON of rules baggage (because Licids had issues) but in the very article you linked above, bestow was well liked. Just not as well liked as devotion, which won out for the returning mechanic.
But Mutate isn't really breaking all that much new ground.
It's more or less just a version of Bloodrush on steroids.
Or, to go back into genuinely not liked mechanics, Banding.

So, here's the heart of the question: Why is mutate unacceptable?
While I think a subjective opinion is totally valid to express your stance, I don't think mutate is objectivelyworse than say, Bloodrush or madness.
Or Haunt (another really bad mechanic, for example)