thornthallid asked:
Whilst not all legends should be a top-down design, would you agree that not making Ludevic top-down was a mistake?

markrosewater said:
Here’s the problem. We made the Partner mechanic which required a lot of mechanical structure. That meant the cards were designed bottom up and not top down.

The cards had to be legendary because of the requirement to be commanders, so we had two options: Make up completely new characters or try to see if we could find existing characters that hadn’t yet gotten a card that made some sense with the existing designs.

Previous Commander products told us players really like when we reference existing characters, so we set out to try and match characters to the designed cards. This is tricky as you don’t have the fine control you have with top down designs.

Should we have saved any characters until we could have done them as top down designs? Maybe. There’s a strong case that Ludevic might have been one in that category.

But I imagine a parallel world where we chose to do less existing characters so we could save them for a future top down design, and people are complaining that we didn’t have enough “known” legendary characters.

“Why haven’t you done __________ ?” Is a very common question here. If we had saved Ludevic for a future time, that might be many years from now.

Designing Magic is hard because so many people want different things and trying to juggle them all so you make as many people as happy as you can is difficult.

I hear that many of you Imagined Ludevic as being a top down design and maybe with 20/20 hindsight, that would have been the correct call, but we didn’t have that hindsight when we’re making things.

Players had said they wanted a Ludevic card and we had an opportunity to make one, and we knew another chance was most likely years away, so we took the opportunity.

The reason I constantly seek feedback is so we can learn. If we did something differently than you wanted us to, tell me, so I can get a sense when we made a mistake (or did something correct) and can adjust accordingly in the future.

Basically they did the math and it was less annoying to hear people complain about cards that didn't quite fit their beloved characters than it was to hear people whine about why didn't their beloved characters get printed this time around, knowing that it'd be years of that whining before they got around to it next time.

rtrt227 asked:
Yesterday was my birthday, bit I guess you didn't see my ask. Do you know anything about Massacre Girl from Ravnica? Or any of the characters from there who haven't gotten cards yet?

markrosewater said:
Massacre Girl almost made it on a card once but the card had to change enough that it didn’t fit her character.

Happy Belated Birthday!

There have been at least two attempts to make a Massacre Girl card so far. We'll get there eventually! Unless we lose interest.

Id imagine one of the cards with her in the flavor from rtr.

Any chance you can tell us what card Massacre Girl turned into when it was changed? I'm guessing that the second card may not have seen print so you may not have extra stories about that.