No UR artifacts matter legend in Kaladesh, possible it won't happen in Aether Revolt either

Here's one of the trickiest things about this job: when we make a set, we miss things. We don't do things that players wanted that we just didn't properly anticipate. When that happens, we get a lot of feedback from all of you about how you were upset thing A or thing B didn't happen. We listen to that feedback and look for future opportunities to do those things.

The hard part is that what players want and what they tell us are not one and the same. For instance, in this case, the strong message was that players wanted a legendary Werewolf. Why? Because we had made a legendary creature (or creatures) for all the other tribes on Innistrad, but we hadn't done one for Werewolves. It was presented as a lack of completion.

We heard the message loud and clear, but there wasn't much we could do until we returned to Innistrad. We don't do Werewolves very often and we seldom do double-faced cards. If we wanted to make a legendary double-faced Werewolf (which is what we believed players wanted), we had to wait.

When the time finally came, we knew we needed a legendary Werewolf, but we had to figure out what exactly that meant. Here's the things we felt we knew:

It needed to be double-faced—Our thought was that what made Werewolves special was the fact that they had two distinct states, so we wanted to make sure our legendary Werewolf had that quality.

It needed to be red-green—Werewolves are in red and green on Innistrad, and we knew that a legendary Werewolf needed to hit both colors.

It needed to be playable in multiplayer—While requests for legendary creatures come from many sources, one of the bigger sources is Commander players. That meant we wanted to make sure this card worked in multiplayer.

What we didn't pick up on was that for some players, the reason they wanted it was to use it to specifically play a tribal Werewolf deck. We made sure the card played well in a Werewolf deck, but we were trying to go broader and make sure that the card had more flexibility. In addition, we tend to make "lords" (things that improve other creatures of a certain tribe or tribes) non-legendary so that players can play with four in their deck and occasionally get multiples out at once.

And that is why our Werewolf legendary creature doesn't specifically call out Werewolves. The frustrating part is that for the people asking, they knew why they wanted the card—so when we didn't deliver what they wanted, they felt like we weren't listening. Magic has a lot of moving parts and our attention is drawn so many different places, but we are very much listening and we try to deliver what we think you all want. Things that seem so obvious to you aren't always that obvious to us.

>It needed to be playable in multiplayer—While requests for legendary creatures come from many sources, one of the bigger sources is Commander players. That meant we wanted to make sure this card worked in multiplayer.

How the ANYTHING about Ulrich say "I work in Multiplayer"

Single target pump.

Single target fight.

WHAT ABOUT THIS CONTRIBUTES TO MULTIPLAYER PLAYABILITY?!

Who cares honestly

As an edh player, you can fuck off

Its just Maro pulling shit out of his ass again...

Jesus Christ.
Just allow non-legendary creatures to be commanders, there isn't a single reason why not doing so.

>What we didn't pick up on was that for some players, the reason they wanted it was to use it to specifically play a tribal Werewolf deck.

How can you be so fucking dense? Why the fuck else would players want a tribal legendary creature in Commander?

>Magic has a lot of moving parts and our attention is drawn so many different places, but we are very much listening and we try to deliver what we think you all want. Things that seem so obvious to you aren't always that obvious to us.

Nope, sorry, still dumb. In a set like Innistrad that had a heavy tribal theme it should be pretty obvious that a people want a tribal legendary creature to be work for the tribe.

Can't really blame him for this one. I thought people were asking for the exact thing they ended up printing.

>In a set like Innistrad that had a heavy tribal theme
But it doesn't. It has incidental tribal support. Dark Ascension added lords, which have later been called mistakes as they made the tribal subtheme too important, and they weren't legendary either.

None of the multicolored legendaries in Innistrad acted as lords.

>Innistrad had both Arlinn Kord and Ulrich

>but having a U/R artifact legend is somehow completely absurd

hmmm really makes you think

Cards like Olivia Voldaren cared very, very much about her own creature type and works great as a Vampire commander

No one wanted Ulrich to be basic bitch "Give Werewolves +1/+1" Lord

Something like Gisa and Geralf is a perfect example of a tribal commander done right

You thought people were asking for a shit card?

Ulrich is a turd, it's unplable in basically any format.

Not even durdly Standard Werewolf decks want him except maybe as a 1-of

>Cards like Olivia Voldaren cared very, very much about her own creature type
Not in the way a lord does. She offers you no incentive to fill your deck with vampires.

>and works great as a Vampire commander
By that point its purely for flavor reasons. If you just want a Commander for flavor reasons rather than mechanical you might as well use Ulrich.

>Gisa and Geralf
Were not printed in original Innistrad. There we got Grimgrin, who offers you no incentive to play zombies.

Olivia was the only one who really cared about her type. It was Olivia, Taft, Grimgrin, and now Ulrich and new Sigarda filling out the allied color legends.

LOL

>By that point its purely for flavor reasons. If you just want a Commander for flavor reasons rather than mechanical you might as well use Ulrich.

Olivia is flavorful AND mechanically powerful

Meanwhile Ulrich is practically anti-flavor (Apparently the Alpha of the pack, who would logically have fought the other males to gain that position, can't fight other werewolves because ???) and he's a piece of shit that offers nothing of any value to a, EDH deck, werewolf tribal or otherwise.

Also, Grimgrin kinda does incentivize Zombie tribal since they synergise really really well with him. Especially ones like Gravecrawler, even if the synergy isn't explicit in the card.

>mechanically powerful
Mechanically powerful is a completely different thing than what you said. Olivia does not offer any mechanical benefits to being the commander of a vampire deck.

>Grimgrin kinda does incentivize Zombie tribal since they synergise really really well with him
Some zombies synergise with him. He also synergises really well with some vampires, some skeletons, and a whole bunch of other creatures that are not zombies or even undead.

these are the broblems with ulrich. even if we wasn't a tribal legend, he could have not been hot garbage. a similar event:
>mirrodin has two swords with protection from enemy colors and minor, useful saboteur abilities
>players demand the cycle be finished
>wotc didn't mean to nake a cycle, but yeah sure
>third sword significantly weaker than first two
>fourth sword wildly more powerful
>last sword has variable power abilities just because
>everyone left just wondering what the hell happened

He pretty much ensured that commanderfags are gonna hate pooloogirl on principle.
Which is good for me, whenever a "diversity" character gets ill received I'm happy.
If they wanna make non-normative characters they have to be actual good characters like Teferi, Tezzeret, Koth and Daretti, not stupid crap like Alesha and Narset.

>Just allow non-legendary creatures to be commanders
No. An ungodly amount of bullshit would happen.

lesbo grandma was supposed to save us.

It is an effect that is good when it flips a lot. Which happens in multiplayer a lot.

>There we got Grimgrin, who offers you no incentive to play zombies.
Except for the fact that zombies got all kinds of mass tokens and recursion as a general theme, and Grimgrin wants to eat a lot of creatures.
True, it's not specifically "zombies", but he works best with zombies by proxy.

Like what?

And werewolves have to have cards that let them flip and directly synergizes with the best werewolf ever printed.

If you are willing to make that kind of stretch, Ulrich fits.

Look, if you don't like the power level, say that.

>We do market research so we know what players think
>W-what do you mean that you wanted a U/R Artificer?

Sets are made far in advance. Planeswalkers are all designed by the creative team first.

So, the creative team does not know what players want? that's the reason why they killed all the angels on innistrad?

He's going to flip a lot, and his antiwerewolf clause is there so that your Ulrich and someone else's Ulrich won't do things casuals don't understand when they both flip.

In terms of card mechanics like needs to be a UR, no other color, legendary creature card, probably not.

If all you say you wanted was a UR artificer character, they delivered. They might've heard about the demand and started work on it and no one thought to stop them.

They knew the overwhelming opinion was that people preferred Innistrad being the Spooky Horror World over the Angels Curbstomp Everything World. So they went and made it back to Spooky Horror World before doing other stuff by getting rid of the Curbstomp Angels.

Innistrad could have been spooky with angels. no need to force emrakul out of their shitholes and ruinuing the best characters

The Angels were never the best characters.

...you mean the angels with next to no characterization whatsoever prior to Shadows?

The angels following Avacyn got culled or mutated out of control under Emrakul's influence. Emrakul got sealed into the moon at the end signalling an end to the cosmic horror. The angels who were not following her were following Sigarda and continue to do so in the aftermath, taking Avacyn's place. There are angels still around, but I'm sure there's a lot of lingering fear of them.

I am sorry, but you (and others who liked the angels) are in the minority.

almost like it's his job

That proves that the majority has shittaste

Body and mind was only bad because mill is bad. It still provides good protections.

Not liking "Angels win, here's an entire large set of the victory lap, fuck you if you like anything other than angels/humans/Grisslebrand" is not shit taste.

>Angels win
>Angels didn't killed Olivia
>Angels didn't killed Griselbrand
>Angels didn't killed the werevolves
>Angels didn't killed Ludevic and Co
Wew lad