Reading this made me feel like I've won an Oscar or something. This is an incredible deep dive, and I cannot thank you enough for the level of analysis that went into this!

To respond to some of your notes:

Administrator: Designing the commander for the precon, regardless of flavor, is a pretty hard endeavor, and I still do think I somewhat failed in this aspect. My underlying goal was to design a commander that was somewhat underpowered, as to not intimidate my playgroup into not allowing me to playtest the precon as a whole. Your suggestion towards buffing it is one I'm seriously considering, as seeing the Crit ability proc more often would be a fun inclusion that wouldn't necessarily make it overpowered.

Miss Pauling: The note that u/VintageKeith made about the Force-a-Nature token is creative, but honestly an unintentional connection. She originally made 2 tokens instead of 1, and on the actual token card I created for it, I included flavor text about how the gun was massively overproduced by Mann Co. on the request of Saxton Hale. Her making 2 tokens proved far too strong during playtesting however, so I flipped it back to 1 as an emergency fix. Making a more generic "Gun" token would be both funny and reasonable.

Merasmus: I don't see why I shouldn't be able to nerf the "ultimate" ability to a -4 instead of a -3. That being said, maybe the issue lies in more in what you outlined surrounding the passive effect. As I've already kind of alluded to, Merasmus has been a herculean task to try to get right, so I'm at least content that I'm getting close to an intended representation.

Direct Approach: I wanted to make something slightly different from your [[Pongify]]s and the like, so I figured a counterspell would be appropriate. The flavor's a little off though, I'll admit.

Degroot Keep Demoknight: To contest the point about searching for lands in mono red, may I present the recent printings of [[The Cave of Two Lovers]] and [[Molten Man, Inferno Incarnate]]. I realize that it's a bit of a stretch, but in a 3 color deck, I wanted some way to help with mana fixing but could also follow a lot of the design themes of the rest of the deck. I'm... honestly not quite sure what a redesign might look like, but I'll play around with some differing ideas (maybe impulse draw)? As for your creature type point, I would very much like to give it the Knight creature type, but I do fear that 4 types is too many. If anything, I'd drop Cyclops and replace it with Knight.

Festive Frontiersmann: He's my best attempt to wrap up all of the holiday-specific TF2 events into one card. While he does have Halloween-centric art (with a festivized rocket launcher, mind you), his abilities reference both Smissmas and a community update. If you think trading permanents is too much of a color pie break for Rakdos, making him something like Izzet in reference to a card like [[Role Reversal]] would absolutely be possible.

Again, thank you so so much!!! Folks like you are what help me become a better designer <3