Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1288: Hybrid in Commander

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

When the Commander Format Panel visited Wizards, I gave a presentation pitching why I felt it was important to change how hybrid worked in Commander. This podcast goes over the contents of that presentation and explains my reasoning for the change.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay. So this week, Gavin went on to our normal streaming show on Magic and talked about some possible changes for Commander. One of the things he talked about was possibly changing how the hybrid mana works in commander. And he mentioned that we had the commander committee at Wizards a month or two ago. And while we were there, I was the one who gave the speech about why we'd like to change how

hybrid manor works in commander. So what I wanted to do today was walk through the talk that I gave the commander committee talking about why I think is important and why I recommended we make the change. Because I want all of you to sort of here and listen to the reasoning that was so important to me. So that is today's topic. Why I believe hybrid mana should work differently than it currently does in Commander. Okay, so to start with, I began by telling the story of hybrid creation. I am the creator of hybrid mana. So the story goes back to 2002, I believe. I think I said January of

2004. I was tasked. I just become head designer in the middle of Chambers of Kamagawa block. So this was the first block that I was head designer. And we had tagged this block as being a return to multicol.

The very first block, the multicolor block was invasion. And that was the start of the third age of design. where we started theming our blocks. And so we did a block that was a multicolor block, and then we did a graveyard block, and then we did a typo block,

and then we did an artifact block, and now we were back to multicolor. We returned to multicolor first. It's both the first theme we did and the first theme we returned to because we knew how popular multicolor was. Players really enjoy multicolor. The challenge was, it was like four years later,

I really didn't want to just redo invasion. I wanted to make a set that was uniquely its own. So the way I did that is I said, okay, what was Invasion doing? Well, Invasion was about playing lots and lots of colors. I introduced the domain mechanic or there wasn't named at the time and just did a lot of things to try to say, hey, play as many colors as you can. So I was like, okay, I want to do the opposite of that. Okay, so we're going to be play as few colors as you can.

But we were a multicolor set. So that meant play two colors. So I said, okay, you know, Invasion was played lots of colors. This is play multicolor, but the most restrictive way to play multicolored. two-color. And I made the decision that I wanted to have all ten two-color pairs affected equally. I pitched that idea to Brady Dommermuth, who was the head of the creative team at the time, and he came back with the idea of the guilds.

Boom, we started doing, we made Ravnikas, you know it. But for this story, a different element of the story was one of the things that I was trying to do in trying to rediscover multicolor was really do a deep dive and understand how multicolored ticked. One of the things I like to do when we're doing something, especially when we're redoing something, is really spend some energy of understanding

what isn't. So I did a really deep dive on what multicolour was. And what I realized is like most of magic is about playing within the context of the game of magic. But the one thing that really goes into deck building

is the man of value of spells, the mana cost of spells. That one of the things about the whole color pie is the idea that there is restriction to what you can play. You normally can't play all the colors, or there's a big cost of playing all the colors. And one of the neat things about pushing two-color is two-color is something, it's quite viable. It's very easy to play a two-color deck.

I mean, we need to give you mana support, but I mean, a two-color deck is something that you can play. The two-colors is something... I mean, in fact, the default play in magic is playing two-collar. Some people with monocolor, some play more than two-collar, but two-collar is kind of the staple way that most people play. And the Manacost really does a lot to direct you, you know, what it does.

So one of the things I noticed when I studied multicolor cards, I think the card that I looked at two specific cards, and I used these in the talk just because I remember when I was looking, there's certain cards that really keyed me in. So the first card is Fires of Yavamaya. So Fires of Yavamaya is one red and green. it grants all your creature's haste and you can sack it to give a target creature plus two plus two to end of turn. And at the time, remember, haste wasn't really a green thing at the time.

So granting all your creatures haste, that was a very red thing to do. I mean, even now green is secondary in haste, so it doesn't tend to, the secondary color doesn't usually grant the ability. But anyway, so all your creatures gain haste, very red ability. Sacking this thing to do plus two plus two to a creature, especially at the time, giant growth, was a very green ability. So the idea of Fire as you have to cast red and green. I need both those in the spell because the spell has a red component to it and it has a green component to it. And the idea is, you know, legends obviously introduced multicolor that what multi-car gave us was we can design cards we couldn't design before. Because this couldn't be a amount of red card.

This couldn't be a mono green card, at least in the day, green has, we have, the color pie is, you know, shipped a little bit. But the point was, at the time we made it, it had to have red and green in the manacosts because the red alone couldn't cast a spell and green alone couldn't cost the spell. That it was truly an and. That that's what multicolour was, traditional multicolour. It was and.

This is not just a red spell or a green spell. It is a red and green spell. But then there's another card I looked at, Heroes Reunion. Heroes Union costs green and white. It's an instant, and it says target creature gains seven life. Now, the interesting thing there is both green and white could do that. What you were getting was not that green or white couldn't do it. You were getting that both of them could do it.

So you were getting a discount that green could do it but not for this cost and white could do it for not for this cost. But the point was, it wasn't a traditional and card like we think of most multicolors. It was something a little bit different. It was playing in the overlap space between the two colors. And that's when I had my big, big, you know, brain moment, you know, lightning bolt in the brain moment where I'm like, oh, this is a multicolored card

that isn't really about and, it is about ore. And what I meant by that was, in order to play Fire's the Yamaia, the reason you need red and you need green is because there's elements of the card that are red. You have to have access to red to play it. And there are parts of the card that are green, so you need it have green to play it.

But Heroes Reunion, it is, What it's allowing you to do is something that both colors can do. That you, and what I realize is, you know, there was the ability, like, multicolored could be broader than we had been. That we had, I mean, multicolored got introduced in legends as an additive thing. Okay, well, now we can make cards that are both colors. But what I realized in the moment was, there were cards that let you play either color. That it was not an and-issuation, but an or-issuation. And I realized that there was something completely new we could do.

What if we had cards that I said to you, you could play this in a deck with green mana or in a deck with white mana. And the idea was that it allowed... Now, it just introduced a bunch of things. I was very excited when I made it. And it did a lot of little things too. Like, for example, you can't make a one drop.

It's hard to make a multicolour one drop, at least with traditional cards. Because you need two mana, right? How do you make a one drop if you have to have two different But hybrid would let you do that. Like hybrid just, it let you do some things that we didn't do before. And it was a different space. It's a, in some level, it's a narrower space. Because the gap, the overlap gap between colors is smaller than the potential of additive things.

But we made it. And so it was something that, it ended up being like a very valuable tool. The story I tell at the time when I made it was I was so proud. I was really excited because I really thought it had a lot of utility and then when I showed it around and everybody was like

but I was correct I mean one of the reasons I have my job is I'm very good at seeing potential a lot of what the head designer's job is is to find things that don't exist and bring them into existence and hybrid manna

probably of all the things I've designed since being at Wizards is one of the things I'm proud of stuff like it's once again there's the thing they call the paperclip effect where you find something that's so obvious that everyone was like, well, how else

could you do this, but you still have to find it? Like, the idea is when you see a paperclip, how else could a paperclip work? But you had to see the paperclip. So anyway, we have used hybrid currently in over 30 sets and just sort of talking about the future. When I was discussing with them,

hybrid mana we've realized is very, very valuable, especially in limited. And that one of the things that we need is we want to give you a lot of choices, and that hybrid is really good at giving you choices. Now, I do want to stress that when we think about hybrid mana, how do I say this? Oh, well, sorry, we'll get to that in a second.

So I'm trying to go in order of my talk. I talked about how it was so important, and we had such use to us. that we even had a big discussion in the council of colors about how can we expand what hybrid can do. Not mechanically. We didn't want colors to not do things they can't do mechanically. But there's one of the things I did a whole podcast on this

talking about aesthetic color pie. And what that means is there's things that colors, it's not that they can't do them mechanically, is we want to differentiate between them aesthetically. And so one of the things that we've been a little bit looser on for hypermata, because we've been doing more hybrid design, is allowing sort of the aesthetically, not mechanical bleed.

And my, sort of a sample there might be hypothetically, can blue have reach, right? Well, blue is number one in flying, and flying creatures can block flying creatures. So we don't normally give blue reach from a flavor perspective, right, because blue doesn't need it. But, you know, or, sorry, from a mechanical perspective.

But aesthetically, it's like, blue is more the color of flying and reaches more green because green is the anti-flying color. So it doesn't fly but has answers to flyers. And so anyway, we're definitely spending a lot of time on our side wanting to expand the use of hybrid because hybrid is a very important tool. And so the point I said here is that hybrid mana is interesting

and that in commander, it is the only thing that sort of contradicts the design intent of how we make cards. And to explain something real quickly here, if you have a card that has an off-color activation, let's say I have a blue card with an off-color black activation. Yeah, in limited, you know, where you're forced and you need restrictions and you can throw this in your blue deck that doesn't have black in it. But from a constructed standpoint, we treat a blue card with a black activation as a blue-black card.

The intent is in constructed. You will not play that card unless you are playing blue and black. But the idea behind hybrid is that that is available to both color decks. That if we make a blue-black hybrid card, we do not think of that as a blue and black card. We think of that as a blue or black card. That a blue deck should have access to it and a black deck should have access to it. And the idea is if we want to make a card that blue and black have to have access to, we have traditional, we have the means to do that. And the way we do that is we put a blue symbol and a black symbol in the manacost.

Now, it is gated. Or sometimes maybe we put it in an activation cost or a triggered cost. Like, the idea is if we want you to have to use blue and black to optimize the card, we have a means to do that. We put a blue symbol and a black symbol on the card. If we want you to be able to play it in blue or in black, that's when we use hybrid. That's what hybrid is for.

And that hybrid, the only really big thing that we do that's more deck construction oriented, with few small exceptions, is the manacost. And that is why when we added hybrid, I mean, not that hybrid doesn't get used outside of the manacost, but the very first place we used it was the manacost because we want that deck building flexibility. That's why it was designed that way. So anyway, I want to, so I then talked through the three big reasons why I would recommend we change the hybrid manor rules.

Now, once again, the caveat I should get here, I'm the head designer of math. I'm talking about what I think is important for magic. Obviously, I have a very big design aesthetic in mind. I care a lot about how the game is portrayed and played. That is really important. And I do understand that there's something really neat to the idea that different formats get to change utility of cards to a certain extent. But just as if someone made a format that said,

all instances are only played on your turn, I'm like, okay, well, you are fundamentally changing the design intent of that. So if somebody did that, that's the same kind of note I'm giving. So let me jump into the reason. So number one, it makes design work differently than intended. And this is the big one. The fact that we make cards and they're specifically designed to do something. So let me walk through some of the examples.

Okay, so sometimes we have design space and we are very limited in design space, Companion was my example here. When we made companions, there weren't a lot that we can make. We realized that we can make about 10. So what we said is we're going to make use of hybrid manna. And we obviously, because we had 10, we put it into the 10-2-color pairs. And the idea is, okay, by putting into hybrid pairs, we allow each color access to four of them.

Right? Each color, each color, now four of the 10 can be played by that color. And that way, we can maximize every color having access to them. But because of how color identity works, because of how hybrid works in Commander, it had the opposite effect in Commander. Rather than opening up and making more people have more access, more decks of access, it limited the decks of access. Now, if you're playing a minor color deck, you can't play a companion at all. I mean, they were designed so every monocolor deck could play four of them. Now you can play zero of them.

And even if playing a two-collar deck, you've access to only one. companion, not all different companions. Next, sometimes I used wave of aggressions for this one. Wave of aggressions is a red and white card that lets you attack for second time. Normally that's a primary red ability. And the problem we run into is that some abilities we just don't do very often. Attack twice a turn, maybe once a year we do it. So because we do it so often, we only tend to do it in the primary color just because we only do it once a year, we'll do it in the primary color.

But at the time, we felt that white was the secondary color. I will say there's some debate right now whether it's supposed to be white or blue. The country is actively debating what's the secondary color? But the idea was we had this opportunity to say,

oh, well, because we're using hybrid, we could give the secondary color some access in a place that it could not. And the idea was, oh, okay, this is really cool. Here's the opportunity for us to give white access to the thing. it's secondary in the ability because of the infrequently of the ability

it's very hard to let the secondary color do it but we'll do it. And by using hybrid, it allowed us to get a second color onto the card and allow access to it. But the problem was in Commander, well, the only people that can play already can play red. Well, if you can play red, you have access to this ability.

So the idea that we're trying to let the secondary color of access, using hybrid as a tool to let you do that doesn't work in Commander because you only have access if you already have access to the color that primarily can do it. Next, and this is more of a Universe's Beyond thing.

It's not, I mean, obviously people care about characters in the universe magic, but when we're doing Universes Beyond, one of the things is we know we get a lot of data from the property, you know, our license are about what characters are popular. And a lot of times

we use hybrid mana because we want those characters to have access to more decks. Who players are really going to like this? If we make this a hybrid card, you know, that we make it hybrid green-white, now all green decks and all white decks can play it, meaning we put it in hybrid to expand the use of the character because we want people to have more access to the character. But in Commander, it restricts access. You know, we do it specifically so more people can play it, and now less people can play it. Another example I gave, and this one

involved something that isn't out yet. I'll lose my example that. I can't give you the exact example, but I can give the context of the example. I was talking about how we were making a universe is beyond set, and we had a character that primarily, or not primarily, there was a color that was a color that made the most sense for that character. But for constructed, for reasons of how we were building things, we needed to have access to a second color. And if we only had one color, well, okay, in order to play the way we needed to play, we'll put it in this color.

But that first color really was what people think of them as being the color. And I'm like, oh, well, hybrid's a nice solution to this. Let's say, for example, I need the character to work in a black red deck. Or I need it to work in a red deck, but the character has a lot of black elements to it. So what I can do is that we make it a black-red hybrid card. It has the feeling of being black, meaning, A, characters who want to, people want to play that in a black deck can, and it has the flavor of a character having black to it. But we can mechanically make it so the red deck can play.

play it without needing access to the black. But once again, if we make that card to do that, again, giving, like, the commander rules cut off the access, meaning we're purposely designing it so the red deck has access to it with flavors of black, but without requirement of black.

But with the commander rules, you get the requirement of black. Also, a lot of times, because of the nature of limited, and the reason we've been going up in hybrid, I use the vulture from Spider-Man's example, you know, Volcher was in blue and black because for limited purposes,

we needed him to shift. Like, we needed him to have flexibility. But the nice things in most formats, okay, he can go into blue deck, he can go into black deck. Like, the flexibility is not a negative. Us putting there for limited to make him have the flexibility he need for limited, it doesn't get punished and constructed because you still have a flexibility. But in Commander, all of a sudden, now if you like the Vulture, if that's a really favorite character, you're now obligated to a blue and black in order to play that character. So, like, once again, we are trying to give you more flexibility and you get

less flexibility. The last example I gave is another thing that happens sometimes, we get pinched on creature types. My example here was villains in Spider-Man. So, for example, the ultimate green goblin is a black and red card.

And the reason is that we needed, like, we needed some flexibility for him in what he was doing. He did good things in limited, for example, in red, But we wanted to make sure that if you wanted to make a villain's deck, we wanted to maximize the number of villains. And because in the villain deck, at least in Spider-Man, you want to be blue and black.

We wanted to make sure that he went in the blue-and-black villain deck. So we wanted to make sure that we could fit the functionality we needed. And that's one of the ways in typo just increased the amount of typo in different colors. Like, that's sort of the ongoing theme through all these examples is that hybrid was invented as a way to give flexibility to us to designers, to allow us to give more people access. And that is a lot of what hybrid is trying to do. A lot of hybrid's functionality is giving people more access.

But the rules give people less access. It does literally the exact opposite. The reason a lot of our designs use hybrid is because it gives flexibility. And the hybrid rule takes away the flexibility. And that's one of the big problems. Like I said, if you were to format where all your, you can only play spells in your turn, well, we make instance specifically so they work not on your contract. turn. Not that you can't, I mean, and once again, you can cast instance on your turn. It is not as if

the cards are uncastable, but they are not meeting the design intent. And that's the point, that when we, the designers, make something, we make conscious choices to allow people access. And when we use hybrid, we use it very much to do something. And the fact that it doesn't work causes a lot of problems. And that was one of the ongoing themes is we use hybrid. We use it a lot. Our usage is, you know, is trending upward. It's a very, very, very. valuable tool for us. It does a lot of things, but one of the things it does for us is provide flexibility, and part of that is giving more players, more access to things we want to give access to. But in Commander, it is restricting access, not adding access. So it's flying in the

face. Okay, number two, I firmly believe that it fights player intuition. The story I gave is I was in one of the, I think in Chicago, I was playing in an unknown event, one of the, one the Gavin's unknown events. And it basically was like limited commander. Here's a whole bunch of cards. Make a 60 card commander deck. You have to have a, you have to have a commander and you have to follow commander definite rules.

And I realized after the event was all done, like I think I was back at work, that I had put hybrid cards in my deck that didn't work. They were illegal. And so when I got back, I owned up to it. And like, everybody felt like, oh, yeah, I did that too. Like what we realized was, so there's this idea of inclusive for is exclusive, how do you think of decks? And a lot of players, I would argue the majority of players, think of decks as being inclusive, meaning if I have a green-white commander,

what that means is I can play green cards and I can play white cards. I can play cards of the color of my commander. And so, and the reason that I think the majority of players think that way is because that's how normal magic works. Outside commander, that's how every other format works. it's inclusive, that when I sort of think of what colors my deck is, I can play any things that those colors can cast. That's what I can do. Now, some people, and I know Sheldmanery, definitely had this mindset of being exclusive.

The point of color identity is not that you can play those colors, is that you can't play the other colors. That if you are green and white, it's not that you can play green and white, is that you can't play black, blue, and red. And I think a lot of people that I know argue against it, That's the way they think of it. They think exclusively.

But one of the big things that we do in design is we want to create systems where people can follow the system. No matter what format you play in, I want the rules to work the same. No matter what format you play, I want the color pie to work the same. Like we want our tools to be universal throughout so that people can learn the rules and then follow the rules no matter how they play magic. And that is why I firmly believe, and I have some anecdotal evidence, I don't have a hard data on this, that a lot of players who play Commander just play hybrid cards thinking they can do it

and have no idea they can't do it, that the idea of thinking exclusive has to be taught to you because naturally if you sort of follow the larger systems of how magic works, decks are inclusive, not exclusive. And like I said, most people that really get into it that I find they're very much against the rule are that's how they think of the deck. they think of exclusive, not inclusive. But as somebody who wants univized systems that wants people to play magic all the same,

that wants to learn one rule in a event, apply across formats, like the rules, like the color pie. That is how deck construction works in all the rest of magic. Is that it's exclusive, not exclusive. And Commander can be inclusive. It's not that you can't think of Commander as inclusively. It just has to do philosophically how you think about things. Okay, number three.

Number three, I will admit with a, I put, I think it would make more players happy. This one, I will say there's lots of subjectivity to that. Obviously, it's why everyone's talking about it online right now. My, and once again, anecdotal evidence, I have a blog, blog, which I answer questions every day. And one of the things in bloggatog is there are certain through lines, meaning there are certain requests that get asked all the time.

Returning to Kamagawa was one of the things that was, I got asked constantly. And it was one of the reasons that I made it act when I saw an opportunity, to go back to Kamagawa, I pushed hard to get us back to Kamagawa. In my top 10 requests, and maybe in my top five, is, please, please, please, change commander so hybrid works. It is a very, very common request that I get. Now, let me give the caveat. I've always been, I'm a big advocate for doing that.

People might vocally know I'm an advocate for doing that. So, once again, there's some chances. The reason so many people tell me is I'm, they're preaching to the choir, I'm the sympathetic ear, and I'm the head designer. Maybe I can do something about it. So, but it is a really, really common request. Again, also, it's less like if people say, please don't do something, then please do something.

But that was my note to really say to them is, I get a lot of requests on Blogger Talk. It is, I think I would say my top five requests of things people ask all the time. Okay, so the last thing that Gavin had asked me in the meeting was to pitch my take of what I think the rules should be. and so here is what I suggested is I said for purposes of the 99

that whenever you have a hybrid manna you are allowed to treat that as either so you have a green white hybrid mana you can treat it as green you can treat it as white or if you want to you can treat it as green and white it is up to the person putting the card into the deck to decide how they want to treat it

but what meant is if you have a green white card and you're playing a green deck you can treat it as green You can look at that symbol go, it's a green mana symbol. I'm treated as green mana symbol. The rules let me put a green mana symbol into my deck. Under my recommendation, and once again, this is not necessarily how to work. This is my recommendation in my talk was that it doesn't change how commanders work.

If you have a green-white hybrid commander, your color identity is green and white. You can play green cards and white card. Even by the rules, by the lady, from the 99, since I let you choose both as an option, you can just choose both, and it is that. But I'm saying this rule doesn't even apply to commanders. your commander's your color identity

if you're green and white is fine you're green and white and your commander I did not get into there's some fine questions about how two grid works I did not really answer those questions in the mean I gave some opinions on how they could work from a game design standpoint

the cleanest way to understand them is to treat them as ore but they're unique in the sense that they aren't a second color and so how you treat color versus colorlessness is a different answer. So I said following the rules I'm

talking about, those would require individual rules to figure out. So I'm not really advocating one way or the other. I think the most important stuff for me is I just, like I said, sort of my through line for today is my job as head designer is I want to make magic

as fun as it can be for as many people as it can be. And part of that is We design a game to do that. It is very hard when people use our car. I mean, I'm used to people, you know, it's fun to make a card and people find a different way to use it. That is great. That is normal magic.

That is fun. The different here is that the core identity behind what hybrid man is, the reason I always talk about being or is, it is designed to increase flexibility. It is designed to allow more access. That is the reason of hybrid. It's a much more constricted design space, but the reason we make use of it is because that overlap allows us to do something important, which is when we are pinched, when space is an issue, and we want to maximize the ability to allow more people access, it's the tool that we use. So the idea that this format, through this definition, restricts assets, not increases access, literally flies in the face of the entire creation of hybrid mana. Hybrid manna and traditional multi-collar are separated purposely. They work differently purposely.

And that's my point, that if you just said, I make a format, in my format, you can only play cards on your turn. I, the designer, will go, would instance work in that format? Yes, they work. But are instance doing what instance are designed to do? No, they're not. That you are fighting against the design intent. And that's the core thing, that we, the designers, make cards to work a certain way, to have a certain functionality. so that players can have fun with them.

I am fine. I'm not against the idea of debt restrictions. I like restrictions. I'm just saying in this particular case that I do think that giving people access, A, follows what most people think does work, and B, follows the intent that we mean when we make the cards

so that we can increase flexibility with them so that more people have access. And it allows us to usually take things that are restricted and make them less restricted. And that the current rule only makes them more restricted. and that just really flies in the face and does things like

let less people play companions less people have access to typo things for typal needs less people have less access to secondary colors like it just lets people have less access to things in a way that I think is not good that is my argument but anyway

I just really want to record it this is what I talked about them this is the speech that I gave my speech said pretty pictures that you guys don't get to see but this is the core and I did answer a question so after I talked to them we probably talked for

maybe an hour. Like, I answer a whole bunch of questions, so you guys don't get the Q&A question part. But, um, I hope this helps. I hope this at least explains my reasoning and the, and the point why I and R&E, um, really, really would like to return the functionality of hybrid as originally intended, uh, to the commander format. Okay, guys, I'm now how it works. We all know that means. It means the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.