Magic: The Gathering's Head Designer Advises Against Using Dead Animals As Game Pieces

thegamer.com:

Magic: The Gathering’s head designer has recommended players don’t use dead animals as game pieces for the upcoming parody set, Unfinity.

Even wilder, Mark Rosewater has encouraged players not to break the laws of science and reanimate the dead in an attempt to gain an in-game advantage.

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While Magic has lots of ways to bring back ‘dead’ creatures from your graveyard, players have posed Rosewater through his Blogatog blog with a hypothetical situation. Using the new Unfinity card Animate Object, what if you targeted a dead object – such as a rat – and then brought it back to life?

Animate Object uses Unfinity’s new sticker mechanic , which lets you put power/toughness, name, ability, and art stickers on things to modify their properties. While it’s mostly used to change Magic cards, Animate Object allows you to take any inanimate object you own, put stickers on it, and treat it as if it was a creature. A lamp, a chair, or, as some players have pointed out, dead animals count as inanimate.

However, this then raised a further question: what happens if that inanimate object becomes animate? The answer is complex: if the item was never alive, like a Roomba, it being switched on doesn’t make it animate. However, hypothetically, if you found a way to bring your dead pet back to life, it would stand to reason that it is no longer inanimate and loses all of its stickers. Despite this, Rosewater refused to confirm or deny the rules surrounding necromancy, simply electing to “advise against reanimating dead things”.

In another comment, he did leave the door open for using your (living) pets in other ways. In response to the quest about Roombas, Rosewater did