While the entire Magic community continues to bask in the glow of Gatecrash, R&D head Mark Rosewater and Gatecrash lead developer Dave Humpherys hosted a Google Hangout chat yesterday in which they discussed how the newly-released set came to be with fans from across the globe. One of the topics that came up was, inevitably, Mark's fanboyish love for the Ooze creature type, and the fact that Gatecrash has a very good (Human!) Ooze in Experiment One as well as three cards that make X/X green Ooze creature tokens with Miming Slime, Ooze Flux, and Mystic Genesis.
Rosewater was an influence on the designing of all of these cards. He didn't get everything he wanted out of the creature type in the set, however. When asked on Tumblr afterward, by user flashchi, "Chances of an Ooze lord to compliment all these Oozes!!?! :D" he responded:
Probably my biggest Gatecrash regret is that I forgot to make an ooze lord.
The implication is that the rest of R&D would be on board with giving that type a lord, and there were just too many other things for him to put in the set file for it to be on his mind. Just as Mark himself has said, the design space as well as the demand is in place for relatively-obscure tribes to get their own lord creatures. If the Ooze lord isn't in Gatecrash, perhaps it'll be in Dragon's Maze, in an environment where it will be able to play off the Gatecrash Oozes as well as Return to Ravnica's Gobbling Ooze and Slime Molding. Mark talks a lot about fulfilling expectations and the "rule of three" within blocks, so maybe this odd little subtheme is going to come to a head come the spring. Dare I speculate about a successor to Experiment Kraj lurking in the zonots of the revived Simic that will emerge to lead its slimy brethren to victory? Unlikely as that possibility is, there are definitely some hints elsewhere as to how the current block's going to end. I don't think it's a stretch to say there will be Oozes around during Dragon's Maze.
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