Douglas

From the third link in the commentary: I am known to our friend Sarah as "Box".

Dan seems to be a fan of that show, it might be deliberate.

I'd guess it's mostly because there are no incredible long shot odds, you always get something at least halfway decent, and there are ways to bypass the randomness - trading with other people, or just buying the exact card you want from a store that sells individual cards. Also, there are play formats specifically designed to level the playing field for everyone no matter how many or few cards you've bought before.

What, were you browsing dumblaws.com or something? I did a report on that for an essay back in high school once. As I recall, one I found particularly amusing was some city that had a $500 fine for detonating a nuclear device within the city limits. Would enough of the city even be left after such an event to be able to collect the fine?

WoM perceives the world through magic, meaning that it knows about every use of magic. If anyone has a spell for rapidly scanning a book to skip needing to read it, which seems pretty likely to me, then wouldn't WoM know the contents of every book that spell has ever been used to scan?

Movie producers, if they care enough to try, know or can find out enough to portray something that seems plausible to most of their audience. I'd expect that usually there are some important details either omitted or actually wrong. For EGS, how it was done isn't particularly relevant to the story. I'm guessing it'll be left at "Sirleck knew how, and it worked", with few or no details revealed. Magus may be able to make up for a lot of that with magic. He specialized in battle magic, true, but he's also a wizard who received a systematic education that likely covered a lot of different stuff. Also, Sirleck set up the transfer in ways that assumed the receiver of wealth would have Magus' body. That factor is one that Magus does, in fact, genuinely have. I'd also expect him to have set it up with the money split among several different transfer mechanisms, so that any one of them being stopped by discovery or betrayal wouldn't leave him poor. There would inevitably be variation in how much knowledge and lack of scruples each one required, and Magus could just be grabbing some portion of them. Sirleck was rich enough that even a quarter of his wealth would probably be more than enough for anything Magus needs.

I'm willing to cut Dan some slack on this. How to truly tracelessly transfer large amounts of money is specialized knowledge that is mostly of interest to criminals and police investigators, and Dan is in neither category. In-setting, Sirleck has transferred his wealth from one host to another several times, has no scruples whatsoever, and presumably has lots of criminal contacts. I would expect him to be an expert at it, and Magus is now the beneficiary of that expertise.

He couldn't talk before, and outright "didn't work". He was stuffed in a crate because he was just a slightly fancy stick with a magical aura that did nothing functional. He might have been able to see, hear, and think - he knew his purpose and creator somehow - but there were no external indications of it.

Before he knew Seers were a thing, he thought he was a "wizard with a quirk". I think it's safe to say that he long ago decked himself out in all sorts of wand-like devices to enable him to cast an arsenal of spells. I don't think what Arthur can do is of any meaningful use in assessing what Magus might be able to do. Arthur is a seer. One established trait of seers is that they have enormous amounts of magic energy that they can put into the spells they cast (via wands), to the point that it had Pandora going on about Tedd having the power to bend worlds - plural - to his will. A seer being able to overwhelm someone's magic resistance doesn't really say anything about how anyone other than a seer might do.

I'm sure this yelled admonishment won't be misinterpreted at all. There is zero chance that Magus will think Ellen is angry about him not turning her back into a man.

Yeah, the situation has just changed from "I don't have much time" to "I have NO time." DGB agents equipped and ready for serious magical trouble will be stepping through those doors literally any second now, if Magus is still in line of sight when they do he's risking capture. Yes again, if Magus gets even the most cursory of conversations with Ellen he'd immediately bring up the zapping and Ellen would immediately and very emphatically refuse, and Magus would accept that. If Magus not getting the chance to talk would result in Magus doing the zapping, then this choice of DGB response time is changing whether Magus zaps Ellen or not, and that seems a drastic change and doesn't fit Magus' characterization or how Dan phrased the commentary. Dan could be going for Ellen getting zapped, to be followed by Tedd promptly giving her a watch to set her base form back to the Ellen clone form he's got on file, and Magus being surprised by it the next time he sees Ellen, but I'd be surprised if that's it. My guess is that the mentioned long term character consequences will be Magus feeling guilt over having failed to fix even that much of his wrongdoings.

The Genie outfit grants her the ability to transform anyone who asks for it, as discussed here.

Her waist looks about normal to me. Are you sure the line you're looking at isn't the edge of her jacket's pocket?

That's not what I meant. Think of it this way: Magic operates kind of like a computer, and "taken at its most technical" how magic works is the operating system, like Windows. A specific magic system is then a program, let's say a word processor, that runs on the computer. The current system is Microsoft Word, and an older one (which is now forcibly prevented from running) is OpenOffice. The researcher discovers that Microsoft Word uses a particular Windows system call to display text. He tries to do something else (or rather, make something that does something else) with that Windows system call, but what he tries coincidentally happens to be something that OpenOffice did (and Microsoft Word does not), so Windows rejects the call even though it's technically valid.

With how the Will of Magic described the minimal changes as none, and many, my guess is that someone had figured out some of the more fundamental system-independent principles underlying magic, used those to design Kevin, and ran into a system-specific block that was part of keeping another system inaccessible.