xenrac asked:

Alternately, you could not ditch humans entirely and just let them play a background role, like they did in Innistrad. The minority group isn't asking for Magic to become MLP, we are asking for a single set that caters to us. Which in the 1 for 1 model, where we don't have to linger in a world for a whole year, is sounding like less and less of a big ask. Also where is the harm in having a single non-humanoid walker? We just lost the biggest two examples in WAR after all.

There are a lot of things that a minority of players would like us to do. If you look at it from the perspective of just that one thing, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. We make a lot of sets, why can’t just one of them be allocated for this thing? But here’s the problem. The list of these requests is a giant list. It’s not just one thing. It’s hundreds of things. We try and do a lot of them, but we’re only going to get to a tiny percentage of that list. That means a lot of items are going to take a while to happen or possibly never happen. As for planeswalkers, they’re very important to the brand, so we take a lot of effort to understand what players want to see. The evidence is overwhelming that to the vast majority of players connection is important and they prefer humans (even over humanoids) as they connect easier with them. Our compromise to the non-Human crowd is the non-Human humanoids, of which we make a lot. Note that sapience is required for a spark, so it’s tough having a non-humanoid. I do expect us one day to get to things like a sphinx or a centaur. As for Bolas and Ugin - they’re not dead. If we’d planned to never make another Bolas or Ugin, we would have killed them. The fact we didn’t means that, odds are, you’ll see them again.