Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1297: Commander Design with Melissa DeTora

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

In this podcast, I sit down with Melissa DeTora, the leader of the Casual Play Design team, to talk about Commander design.

I'm not pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work at home edition. Well, I'd like to use my time at home to do interviews. So today I have Melissa Natorra on with me. Hi, Melissa. Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me.

Always great to be on. And we're going to talk all about the casual play team, which is something that you oversee. Yeah. So I guess we'll just get right into it and talk about what it is. Yeah, well, so we did do a podcast once. before. So we're not going to, we'll do a little bit of explaining, but we're going to get into the much of the crunchier side of things today. I want to talk about what you guys do, how you

work on sets. So we're going to get into that. But just to introduce the people that maybe haven't heard the last podcast we did. What is the casual play design team? Okay, so we're a playtesting team. We play test mostly commander. You know, we play, we play constructed commander decks using cards of upcoming sets. We also play test commander precons. We play test every magic product that we make, which includes main sets, jumpstart, Commander Freakons, mechanical unique secret layers, basically anything that we release that has mechanically unique cards, we will play test in the context of Commander. Okay, so we're going to just make a mythical set here, mythical set X that we make.

So we're going to talk about we make set X. So when does your team, when's the first time your team would get involved with set X, let's say? Okay, so the first time our team will get involved is probably, about the same time that play design will start working on the FFL part of the set. So pretty late in the process. So I'll just talk about some things that we do during what we call focus periods. So the team will do a file pass, leave a bunch of comments in the file for the leads for every set. We'll hold meetings with the various leads. So for the main set, we'll hold a meeting with the FFL lead, which is Jdeen, and the main set lead will vary from set to set.

So let's use a hypothetical set lead. Let's use Andrew Brown as an example. Okay. Well, we did this for EEOE, so I know it's the most recent set that he led. So get in a meeting room, go over all of the rairs and mythics of the set, and talk about what cards do we want to aim at Commander, what cards we want to aim at 60 card constructed, what cards we want to aim at any format, you know,

we want to make sure that there are cards for everybody. But what's important to do is assign the goals to the set. So, you know, if there is a card that FFL feels is very important for them to work on, we don't have to step on their toes with, like, what we want to do to the card. So that's why we do that. So we also do lots of play tests. So we do three play tests a week. And to prepare for the play tests, we will build decks.

So let's use EOE as an example here, I guess, because that's the set that I pick. So EOE has a commander product associated with it, and it also has a main set. So we'll pick a commander, let's say the station commander from the precond, which is a deck that cares about sacrificing your lands, okay? So we'll build a constructed commander deck out of that commander. We'll use other mechanically neat cards from the commander precon that are already, have been designed, and we'll also play cards from the main set. So what's important here is to test the interactions with the commander cards,

and the main set cards, because, you know, a back note for a little bit. So if you only playtest the Commander Precon cards in the context of the Commander Precon, you don't learn about interactions that happen out in the wild, that happen out in the real world, or interactions with the main set. So that's kind of an important goal for us is to just test interactions that the Commander Precon team will not see. Yeah, the other thing that's important that we should raise here is when we make a Magic set, our goal is to make something that everybody can play with and that commander is the number one play tabletop format we want to make sure that there's cards that that are fun for commander

yeah exactly and that's why it's really important that we playtest these cards in like different contexts than what um we have in the past um long ago before there was a casual play design team these cards only got play tested in the precons and also some of the cards would not get play tested at all. Like, what's an example? Um, like, uh, Boulders Gate, I think is a good example. There was no played, a casual play design team during Commander Legends Baldur's Gate. So those cards only got play tested in their draft format. So, you know, they wouldn't get play tested out, like in a constructive format or in a another, like a commander game that we would just build random decks for. So we couldn't really see the impact of something like take the initiative

or, you know, just the impact of the commanders outside of limited. So that's kind of like a big change that the casual play team has brought. So let's talk a little bit about mechanics. So obviously every premier set is going to have mechanics. How do you interact with the design team to maximize mechanics for commander? Yeah, sure. So I guess it starts as early as vision design, actually, because during our vision summit is, I think, the first time that I will see mechanics usually. And often what we would do in the Vision Summit

is, as we play a test, kind of think about what mechanics are cool in Commander, what mechanics are relevant. And also, like, kind of more importantly, does the set have enough things to do in Commander, does the set have enough mechanics that you can build a Commander deck out of, like, are the cards too parasitic or, like, are they only geared towards limited or constructed, You know, so the feedback that I would leave would be in that regard of, like, hey, maybe there's not enough stuff to do in Commander and, like, give recommendations of how to make the mechanics more Commander relevant, or maybe some feedback would be like, hey, these mechanics are not really interesting in Commander at all. Maybe there's something else you can do here entirely. So that's Vision. So real quick, let me for the audience that might not.

I've done a podcast on Vision Summit, so you can go listen to that if you haven't. really quickly just to update everybody uh vision's about usually three to four months long about three quarters of the way through vision we have what's called the vision summit that is where we sit a whole bunch of people down we play with the set so we can get feedback one of the feedbacks we get is on from melissa and her team about hey is this set making sense for commander are they cool things to do in commander and that we will then take those notes from the vision summit and we still have a little bit of time to try to address them and so oftentimes we'll get feedback on commander and then the vision team will fit a little bit to see if we can help

the mechanics lean toward making them more commander friendly yeah and then another thing that sometimes happens is um maybe there's a really cool commander mechanic in the main set in vision but maybe it doesn't really fit in the set for some reason or it wants to um get repurposed of something else the vision lead might give it to the commander team and be like hey here's this really cool mechanic that we made, but it maybe doesn't fit in our set very well, but maybe you guys can do something cool with it for the Commander Precon. Yeah, another thing that comes up a lot is sometimes you have a neat idea or there's something you really want, or maybe you're doing a return and there's a fun returning mechanic, but it just doesn't fit in what the set is doing

and that we definitely think of the Commander decks as, oh, maybe this is a place we can do this thing that won't fit in the set. Yeah. So I think we can move on to set design now. So the casual play design team doesn't work very much with set design for a large portion of it. What might happen is like the set leave might ask us questions of like, hey, how's this card shaping up? Or like, hey, you know, there's this, you know, legendary character that's the main part of the story when we want to make sure it's cool for commanders. So can you give us some ideas for its design, like that kind of stuff? But during a lot of set design, we're not play testing the cards. It's mostly just like talking to leaves and stuff. And also just

checking in to see how the mechanics are shaping up to see how the legendary creatures are shaping up to like kind of get ready for down the line when we start play testing which is usually after set design has concluded so here's a question i'm just curious um if competitive is interested in a card like how often does it overlap that that it's something 60 card competitive wants to play and it's something you expect commander to be playing It does overlap sometimes, but that's why it's really important to have this meeting before we start playtesting to go over all the rarism mythics to make sure we're on the same page with, you know, what cards are important for FFL and what cards are important for Commander. That said, there are going to be overlaps at times. Let me try and think of an example. It might just be a hypothetical example.

you know there might be a card where it's like maybe it's a cheap legendary creature that also has this really cool like engine or something on it that is also like a really cool commander so um the legendary creature if is cheap is often going to be relevant and constructed because uh standard usually wants to play like low to the ground aggressive stuff so you know there might be some overlap there and then um if it's also a legendary creature in the command zone and it has some kind of like engine building quality to it then it'll be relevant in command. as well. So you may have a time where, like, maybe casual play design will want to change a card, maybe, like, buff a card to make it cooler in the command zone, but it might not be appropriate to make that change to standard. So in that case, we're going to have to, you know, sit in a meeting room and just kind of talk about, like, what's the most important goal here? And that's just kind of up to, like, me, the set lead and, like, J. Dean to kind of figure out together. I mean, I'll try and think of an example. Maybe I'll use Avatar since that set came out recently. Let's see. Oh, I have a good one. Avatar Ang, which is the four-color one. Is that a good example? I don't know,

maybe that card was always named at Commander. I'm going to just use this as a hypothetical example. I don't think this actually happened, but imagine there's this Avatar An card and it's being played in standard and, you know, maybe it's playing too strong in standard, for example. So this is a pretty important card for Commander because it's like has this really aspirational build around. It's a legendary creature. It's also the main character of the set. So pretty important to like be able to build a Commander deck with it. So in this situation where like play design wants to change the card and maybe Commander playtesting wants to change the card,

we'll sit in a meeting room and just kind of talk about what's the most important thing here? Like what's the most important goal? And like in the case of Avatar Ang, it is more important that it's a cool commander than a standard card. So we would look for ways to like make changes that don't affect one v1 constructive that will affect commander. Like trying to think of an example of the Ang card. Like this card changed a lot over time. Like I remember like way long ago it didn't used to care about doing all the bendings. things that, like, was a completely different design.

But once we made the decision, hey, we want this to be commander only, we were just kind of like, okay, what's the coolest thing this can be for commander, you know, and we kind of came to a design. I was like, oh, what if it did all the air, what if did all the bendings, you know, like, what if it told you to play all the bendings in the same deck, you know? So we kind of just went that direction. Hopefully that answered the question. No, no, no, no.

I mean, the one thing that, to me is what interesting is, like, I often talk about how every card has to have an audience, right? Every card's for somebody. And then a lot of what your team's job is is to figure out, okay, what cards are for the audience that you serve? So I guess my question for you is, how do you figure out what cards are most attuned for what your team should be doing? It's very case-by-case. I don't think there's like an easy, like one-size-fits-all answer to that question. generally, like, gold cards that are legendary are more served for command zone.

Cheaper, aggressive, slanted creatures, just like low-manicost stuff often is going to be more served for 1V1. And then you have this middle ground of just like cool rairs and mythics that are monolored that can kind of just be for everybody. But, like, again, there's no one-size-fits-all answer. It's very case-by-case depending on just, you know, what is the set. what is important to the lead and, like, what's important to the set? What, like, what kind of themes are standard trying to encourage in the standard format is another question to think about? Yeah, one of the things that is definitely really interesting to me is, I know a lot of people, when they think about designing for a commander, they focus on the commanders, which obviously you guys spend a lot of time on. But let's talk a little bit about the 99, right?

A lot of time is spent on not just making things that are fun for the commanders, but making things fun for just the general game. Could you talk a little bit about how you do that? Yeah, yeah, sure. So I think mechanics is a good place to start. So I guess going back to Air Avatar, Avatar, yeah, yeah, that's the name of it. Going back to the Avatar set, each bending does a pretty interesting thing. And we thought it would be really cool if there could be a commander deck around. each of those things I like we couldn't do everything because like air bending is just so um

has such a small footprint in the set but like we wanted there to be an earth bending deck for example um so often there's going to be one or two commander shots for this um strategy so for avatar we have Toff who is an earthbending character I think Boomy was another I don't remember the names of cars I don't really know Avatar super well honestly but you know we have like one two or three commander shots of the mechanic we're trying to encourage, and then a bunch of shots for the 99. And then like another thing that isn't exclusive to Avatar, but like we want to also find mechanics that are backwards compatible with all of magic as well. Like if you put every card that said earth bending into your commander deck, you're just not going to have enough

cards. So you want to like find designs that lend themselves to like play more cards from older magic so you could actually like build an actual deck. you know so like with earth bending more ways to animate lands you know or like plus one plus one counters or stuff like that are ways like like cars you can put in your earthbending deck from older magic that can actually make a functional deck as one example yeah one of the challenges I know from my end of things is that when we make a mechanic if the mechanic is too too uh you know singular what it's doing it's too parasitic then you just can't have enough cards to make the deck out of.

And we want to make sure that some of our themes, people can do that. And if all your cards come from the deck that we're making, the set we're making, there's usually not enough to make a commander deck out of. Yeah, for sure. And there's actually something that comes up in Commander Precon set design, when you're trying to pick themes for Commander Precons, and you're just like, okay, so, you know, we're on, let's see, what's a good example set? I guess Avatar still.

imagine we were making a pre-con with earth-bending, and you have a main set you can pull some cards from, you have maybe 10 to 12 new slots for new cards for a deck, you're just not going to have enough earth-bending cards to make a functional commander deck. So often with commander precons, you're not going to use the set mechanic as your theme. Sometimes you will, it really depends on what the theme is, but, like, let's see, for EOE, which I think was the last magic IP set to come out. It was. Cool. You know, sometimes it's hard to keep track because we work on so many sets that are not released yet.

Yeah, I'm looking on a set right now from 2009, so. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So those two decks, there is a land sacrifice deck and a charge. counter deck. Neither of those themes are in EEOE as like a main theme of the set, you know? EOE had lander tokens, it had spacecrafts, what else does I have? Warp, void. Oh yeah, sure, like a lot of like kind of generic stuff. But like those mechanics with names, they're just not enough of those that exist. So you can't make a commander deck out of those.

So we had to just kind of look to like, what are these themes in EOE trying to encourage and just kind of like make up a theme that encourages a lot of EOE cards, but also allows you to find enough cool cards from Magic Pass that can go in the deck. So with EOE, the new mechanic is spacecrafts. Well, if you make a commander deck that tells you play all the spacecrafts in one deck, you're just not going to have enough spacecrafts. So the direction that we went with there was the charge counter stuff and proliferate. You know, so you can play the cool spacecrafts in your deck, but also you can play your Lux cannon and your, I don't know, thrumming birds and that kind of stuff. So you have like enough like pieces, like, you know, older mechanics that still work with the spacecraft stuff, you know.

Okay, so you brought about the decks. Let's talk a little bit about picking themes of decks. When do decks theme get picked? Um, okay, so we do vision design for commander precons. Um, it usually starts about a month or so after the set design team starts of that set. So pretty decently after, um, like after the world has been picked, after we know the mechanics of the set, um, that's when vision design would typically start. So, uh, the vision team, uh, the lead, like, you know, again, we already know what the themes of the main set are. So, um, envision, that's the time where you're trying to pick the themes of the precons. So I can talk a little bit about how we go about picking themes for the precons. The first thing we do is we just look at what the main set is doing and see if there's anything that's cool and promising there that can make an interesting commander deck. So we'll like kind of take a look at all the themes,

do a bunch of research on existing commander decks, like we will go to EDH rack, we'll do like a bunch of magic searches on like magic database and stuff, and just see, like, are there enough cards that exist in magic where you can build a 100 card deck out of, you know? And sometimes the answer is, yes, this theme works great. And, but a lot of times the answer is, no, there are just not enough cards, especially if it's a new mechanic, you know? Like, if the theme of the set is, like, doing instance and sorceries, well, that's broad enough where you'll be able to do that theme fine. But if the theme of the set is, uh, let's see, like the crafting mechanics. from LCI, that might be a lot tougher to care about that because, you know, there's only,

like, so a few cards with crafting. And there's also other challenges with crafting, like the fact that they're all double-faced cards. But anyway, there are going to be times where you're not going to be able to use the themes from the main set. So in the cases where you can't use themes from the main set, we're often going to just look at, like, who are the characters that are on the world, right? So, let's, what's a good example? I want to use an existing magic plane that has a lot of stuff as an example. Maybe, Tarkier. TDM?

Yeah, Tarkier's a good one. Yeah, I was actually the vision lead of that set, so I know exactly what we did for that one. So the themes were, a lot of the themes for TDM were, like, very limited focus or constructed focus, and didn't, like, lend themselves very well to commanders. So we didn't pick a lot of themes from the main set for the commander decks. We did Dragon Typle, which was a main theme. That was a pretty easy theme to nail down because the main set was doing Dragon Typle. We hadn't done a Dragon Typele pre-Kund in a while.

It just seemed like a very easy theme to do. And then for Absan, they were doing, is it called Endur. I think it's called Endur, which is Plus One Plus One Counters and Tokens. And like that's fine, but that's the thing that we do a lot. So we wanted to do something kind of different. So we ended up doing a toughness matters deck. I don't know, I had a lot of big creatures and we just thought that theme would be like cool and sideways and just a little bit different. And then for the, for Just Guy, we knew that the character was Narset.

So that was like we knew that that was who we wanted to be as the commander. And Narset cares about non-creature spells. So since that was the character, we knew we wanted to do, it was a pretty easy theme to just do non-creature spells. You know? So that's kind of what we do. We look to see who the characters are and like what kind of themes you could do out of those existing characters. And if it's a new character, the creative lead is usually on the team as well to talk about like, oh, hey, here's this new character. Here's the power suite. Here's the, you know, the creative, what this person cares about like creatively and that kind of stuff. So you can kind of figure out what theme you can do based on like the role building. Okay, so Vision Design, you do your first stab at the themes. What's the next step? Okay, so Envision, the next step is build the deck. We don't have new card designs at this time.

We only, we'll design the Face Commander, and we'll then build the deck out of just reprints. And so early on in the process, we're building very loose, like, prototypes, proof of concept kind of versions of the deck. So we won't build a real mana base. We'll just throw in like, you know, all your lands produce any color, you know, all command towers, that kind of thing. But like the goal of that is to make sure that there's enough reprints to draw from

from the existing card pool. Because if there isn't, we can't do that theme. You have to just kind of scrap the idea and like come up with something else. But, you know, assuming that we were able to successfully build a deck and we feel that there's enough reprints to draw from the existing carpool, we'll just start playtesting and just kind of see if this theme is cool, if it's promising, if there's

enough design space to build 12 new cards out of this theme. And that's pretty much it for a vision design. Like, vision design is pretty short. It's usually one month, and it's just pick the themes, build the prototypes of the decks, and just do a playtest to make sure that the decks can function.

Okay, and then we move to set design. Yeah, then we move to set design, which is like a pretty similar to what, you know, main set design would be you have a design team. Each person on the design team will be assigned a deck usually. So it's usually four people on the team. If it's like Tarkia where there's five decks, you'll have a fifth person to pick up that fifth deck or somebody will just take two decks. But you will own that deck for most of that team. Maybe halfway through if the lead wants to swap things out, you might like own another deck, but

typically you're going to just own that deck throughout that whole process. And from there, the team will be designing new cards for the deck. Usually it's pretty collaborative. So, like, if I own the Dragon Typle deck, it's not just on me to design the Dragon Typle cards. Other people on the team can contribute, and I can also contribute to other people's designs as well. So the meetings usually consist of group design of, like, all the new cards in the deck. They consist of, the meetings can also consist of playtests, like we'll usually playtests. once a week will also include the set lead of the main set.

So the Tarkier set lead will come join a play test to make sure that they know what we're doing and we know what they're doing. So we can make sure we can just design the best cards we can, not like overlap and just, you know, like make sure that the best cards are in each product, right? So if like, so the design lead for that set was Adam Prozac. Prozac. So if Adam Prozac has this really awesome teamer, dragon card, that would make a great commander card. But for some reason, like, they don't want it in their set. Maybe it's problematic and limited. Maybe it's not really a card. That standard is, they're, like, concerned with it for some reason. He could just give that card to the commander team. And, like, we can just

put that in our decks and vice versa. Like, if we just, if we came up with a card that looks like a really fun standard card, we can ship that over to that team of. as well. So that's why, like, we'll have that lead involved in our playtest, you know. Yeah. So, I mean, cards can flow back and forth between the two. They can, yeah. Yep. And that has happened more and more recently as we've been more and more collaborative with who's involved in commander's set team design and main set design. So there's another thing I know you guys been doing. I know how recent this is, but I want to talk a little bit about trying to make sure that the set lead who's designing the

main set is making cards that are relevant for the constructed decks you guys are making. Yes, that is pretty new, probably in the last, like, six months or so. So we have a goal for Commander Precons, and that is to have relevant upgrades, like, cool cards for the Precon in their sets. What's an example I can use? I think TARC here is a really good example because, like, the themes of TARC here just, like, were pretty good for the precons and for the main set. They crossed together really well because there were just a lot of really cool dragons.

So we'll use that as an example. So Ureni, who is the commander for the typel precon, had a really cool version in the main set. So you could go pick up that card and add that to your deck. Also, there were just a really, like a high number of dragon typel cards. like the Dragon Storms, or, I don't know, like, your Dragons cost zero, that card. So we want, like, just make sure that, like, each deck has a number of interesting choices for the player in case they want to upgrade or, or, like, they're purchasing both the Precon and the main set.

You know, they have options for how they can customize their deck. Okay, so set design, so what's the end part of set design? after we're pretty happy with the shapes of the new cards and the decks and set design ends CPD commander play design will start so that will start with like I said we'll have the meeting with the lead to talk about like what are the goals of each deck and like what's important for all of these cards like what's important for the set lead to preserve on each of the cards in case we want to make changes you know, just make sure we're on the same page. And then we just start playtesting. So like I was saying earlier, we do three playtests a week. And then during the week, each member of the team

will just build decks out of basically, like, it's pretty open-ended for deck building, especially early in the process. So for Tarkir, for example, like maybe I'll build my Renni main set commander, but I'll include a bunch of cards from the commander precons. And I'll also try and include the strongest commander dragon type of cards that exist in magic that are not in the precons, just to get a feel for how they all play together, right? Basically, like, the goals are, like, make sure that the cards that we have positioned as upgrades for the commander precond are getting there, making sure they're cool enough. You know, making sure the cards all play fun, making sure there's, like, nothing problematic.

Like, it's okay to have very powerful cards or, like, combos and stuff, but, like, make sure that they're reasonable, fun to play. you're not comboing, that kind of stuff. So we just do a lot of play tests during this time. We make a lot of card changes. We have a meeting once a week to talk to the leads about cards that we're finding not fun or finding problematic to make changes.

And then it's just kind of rinse and repeat, you know? Play test, do verbal or written feedback, have a meeting talk about changes, make changes, start the process over. Like later on in the process, we'll have more focused play testing because once cards are in relatively stable spots, we won't have to playtest them anymore.

And we'll only be playtesting cards that were just, like, cards have changed a lot, cards that we're still pretty unsure about. So I'll assign out like decks to build like, oh, hey, you know, this this Ureni card is playing really strong. We haven't seen it with this with X and Y interaction yet. Hey, can you build this deck for the next play test? So I'll do little deck building assignments like that

as we get down the line. All right. Well, that, I mean, we're almost out of time today, but I hope the audience gets a sense of, I mean, you guys spend a lot of time and energy. Like, I, I know people, because competitive, you know, competitive designs going on for a long time, the idea that, oh, we have to make sure

that this card or that card is costed correctly. But, you know, you guys are doing all of that just on the casual side of things. Yeah, yeah, we're also making sure cars are costing correctly. And I think for Commander, we don't need to be as precise as play design does with standard because they're playing such a small format and also they have to balance things like competitively like if a card is not fun and very strong and standard and you want to win you have to play that card still but in commander

yeah people still want to win in commander but like commander is more of a social format you're just there to have a good time if there's a card that your playgroup really doesn't like choose not to play it, you know? So if there's a card that is like very strong for Commander, your playgroup can just be like, hey, how about you just don't play that card, you know? And now that we have the bracket system in place and there's more guidelines as well, if a card ends up being a little stronger than we had anticipated, it can just be played for like bracket four games, if it's like meeting the criteria of that, for example. That's like, that's another thing that has kind of helped us in the development process.

Okay, well, I want to thank you for joining us today, Melissa. It's always fun to sort of see behind the scenes, and there's a lot of work that you guys do, and I don't know how much the average person is aware of it, so. Yeah, thanks. It's always fun being on, and the last time I was on, we talked about similar stuff, but things have changed a lot, and this one was a lot more crunchy than the last one, I think, so hopefully you guys enjoy it. Yeah, the feedback I always get from the audience is,

Because you guys like crunchy stuff, so trying to get more crunchy content for you. So anyway, I just want to thank you for being here today, Melissa. And I'm sure we'll have you on again. All right, thank you. So, guys, I can now see my desk. So we all know what that means is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. Well, see you all next time.

Bye-bye.