In a contemporary Magic: The Gathering climate where it seems nearly everything is being designed with Commander in mind, can Wizards of the Coast still make cards based around traditional 60-card play?
During the Commander press conference at MagicCon Las Vegas earlier this year, a question was asked of Principle Magic Designer, Gavin Verhey, about how Wizards is able to balance making cards for Commander while still taking care to give proper attention to 60-card formats such as Legacy, Modern, and Standard.
"Very carefully," he said before expanding on his comment. "We have two amazing teams -- we have our competitive play design team who is playing...to balance [the cards] for competitive play and we have a casual design team that is doing the same thing for Commander."
WATCH: How Wizards Designs for 60-Card and 100-Card Magic Simultaneously
The two teams, he says, are separate but they've been working closer and closer together over the past few years. For example, over the past couple of years, Wizards has embedded the lead of an upcoming set on that set's casual play design team.
"So they're actively playing the cards for Commander, iterating on them, get feedback on them and all that kind of stuff and it's basically the feedback from those two teams that help craft what those cards are going to look like," Verhey explains.
He says, though, that there are some times of contention between the two teams on deciding whether or not it's more important for them to include a card that's more important for the Commander crowd versus the more competitive 60-card crowd, and visa-versa. When that happens (and it's always on a case-by-case basis), players might be surprised on which side often wins out.
"In general I like to give the edge to competitive play," says Verhey.
He says that's partially because Commander already has so many cards that have been designed with the format in mind and he recognizes that, if they make a powerful and impactful card for Commander, it could find its way into 60-card play as well.
"Competitive play is just two people trying to destroy each other with the strongest cards imaginable and...the balance of that is much more minute," Verhey points out. "It's a very careful line to walk."
