Quick Hits

• Mark Rosewater is launching a new podcast series called "What Went Wrong", teasing post-mortems on mechanics that overshot their targets. A listener's shortlist — Storm, Dredge, and Companion — is squarely in play, and MaRo says "I'm sure I'll get there." (Blogatog)
• The bonus card for Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Second Breakfast is Food Coma, revealed via r/secretlair_collectors and shared to the main sub. (Reddit)
• EDHREC hands down final grades on the Final Fantasy commanders in its Over/Under review, checking which legends beat pre-release expectations — and whether the author called them. (EDHREC)
• MTGGoldfish's weekly update spotlights "Commander, but Only Lands" — exactly the kind of format-warping jank premise that lands-matter players live for. (MTGGoldfish)
• A player sorting through their late father's things found 11 sealed Urza's Saga boosters and is asking the community whether to open them — the thread of the day for anyone who's ever dreamed of a garage find. (Reddit)

Set News

• The Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Second Breakfast drop hides Food Coma as its bonus card, confirmed through r/secretlair_collectors. If you ordered the food-token Lair, check your bonus slot. (Reddit)
• The Commandfest Toronto promo situation is getting fixed: the original poster reports the show's events lead reached out, and a team member will hand-deliver the missing foil Fyndhorn Elves promos. If you went home short at another event, it's worth contacting the events team directly. (Reddit)

Commander Corner

• EDHREC's Over/Under review of the Final Fantasy commanders delivers the "not-quite-final call" on which legends overperformed, which flopped, and how accurate the pre-release projections were. (EDHREC)
• In a Hobbit-season mood swing, EDHREC skips sleeper picks from the new set and instead runs down the top 10 most-played Commander cards of all time — a nostalgia trip worth taking before your next brew session. (EDHREC)
• Also from EDHREC: Battle of the Bards argues with itself over which Bard from The Hobbit deserves the command zone, alongside a social-dynamics piece asking whether bad threat assessment — not the deck — was why you hated your last game. (Bards, Threat assessment)
• The sub is staging a pentacolor planeswalker showdown: Arzakon vs. Jared. The framing is honest — neither is a cEDH monster, but which five-color 'walker commander actually plays better? (Reddit)
• One brewer wants to run The Ur-Dragon as a Gruul commander, ignoring four colors of identity just to keep the eminence discount on big dummies — the thread weighs whether that trade is worth it. (Reddit)
• Tooling: a free web app called Spellstate tracks Commander life across up to five phones/tablets with a big-screen TV mode — no install required. (Reddit)
• New-player traffic is heavy, with multiple threads asking whether to start with precons — including one player already deep on the Edge of Eternities decks (World Shaper, Counter Intelligence) and another hunting vampire starts. (Precons, Vampires)

Limited & Draft

• A player stuck in a 1-3 rut posted their full 17lands draft log for crowd-sourced review — a good reminder that the community will happily sanity-check your picks and play patterns if you ask. (Reddit)
• Etiquette corner: a improving drafter asks whether offering deck advice at casual FNM drafts is rude now that they're noticeably stomping newer players. Worth a read before you backseat-build someone's sealed pool. (Reddit)
• On Blogatog, MaRo explained why Aetherdrift's speed capped out at max speed rather than scaling indefinitely: "Uncapped scaling effects are much harder to design than threshold effects." (Blogatog)
• A first-time Unfinity drafter went undefeated with Jund attractions and praised how the silly mechanics never got in the way; MaRo agrees the set drafts well and rewards redrafting thanks to hidden complexity. (Blogatog)

Finance & Market

• Beyond the Urza's Saga garage find, the community is busy with card care and collection logistics: one player is trying to safely remove tape stuck to a card, another is organizing 50 full-art Edge of Eternities basics for FNM and RCQ play, and the weekly trading thread is open for business. (Tape removal, Lands, Trading)

Design & Lore

• The "What Went Wrong" series came out of a listener citing MaRo's line from "Getting the Banned Together" that he now does "a lot more big picture design... and less individual card design" — so mechanic autopsies fit the moment. Expect Storm, Dredge, and Companion discourse to resurface hard. (Blogatog)
• On representation: Narset is the most prominent officially neurodivergent Magic character, but MaRo shares a personal, unofficial hunch that "numerous planeswalkers might be neurodivergent." (Blogatog)
• Purple mana trivia: the theoretical sixth basic land would have carried the subtype City (Inquest guessed Cave), and design never got far enough to draw a symbol. (Blogatog)
• Prepared was literally pitched in Strixhaven vision design — MaRo confirms that whenever R&D re-explores an old space, he walks the team through what was tried before. Mechanics rarely die; they wait. (Blogatog)
• MaRo's favorite non-Unset basic land cycle? Original Ravnica, praising the team's push to get more metaphorical, "especially with Plains." Also: dead characters aren't off-limits — "Dying hasn't stopped us designing cards for characters." (Lands, Death)
• Over on Reddit, one player argues that consolidating creature types — Viashino into Lizard, Cephalid into Octopus — is a good thing, kicking off a typal taxonomy debate worth skimming before the next Roundup. (Reddit)