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

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.