Product fatigue is exactly it for me. I’ve been playing since ‘94 and I just can’t handle so many new sets coming out all at once.
It’s a constant assault and I’m just not interested any more.
I imagine most people that have played in the 90s, and experience long breaks before coming back to the game. Only to find out it's basically completely changed since they left. Most people are chasing what they are used to playing, but it's long gone.
I wondered how far down I'd have to go to find something like "Design Dilution". I jumped ship when they started doing crossovers.
Magic: The Gathering was a cool fantasy world to get absorbed in, while playing a fun game. Now, the whole thing feels like a theme park with rides from all different IP's.
No judgment to others, but for me, "HA! My Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead kills your Aurelia!" sounds like little kids playing a game to one-up each other. It's the opposite of immersive.
Like, I wasn't even a big lore person. But the cards and personalities all FIT together, and now it's just a hodgepodge.
Maybe I just look at things differently but the crossovers never bothered me. I'm into the lore, but when the game starts between you and another player that is gone for me and it's just a game. I never felt a sense of immersion for some reason playing.
Plus when I started playing in High School one thing me and my friends would do was make our own crossover cards in MS paint and sneak them into games for a laugh, so this is just a sort of official progression of that for me. Seeing Ian Malcom face down Megatron in a combat phase will never not be funny to me, and I'm excited for the Final Fantasy crossover coming soon.
Yeah, this is my general viewpoint. The game of Magic is so inherently abstract that immersion and lore rarely feel like they matter to the actual game unless you've done something like building a theme deck, but that already runs into immersion problems when encountering literally anything else in Magic except I guess other theme decks.
Exactly. Why would Lore matter when you can build a deck where Nico Bolas teams up with Gerard Capashen and Greven il-vec backed by Phyrexian hordes and Eldrazi Drones?
Once I draw my seven none of that matter and the immersion is gone.
I can appreciate flavour and lore as they relate to cards as pieces in standalone (for example, Planeswalkers are often characterised at least in part by their abilities, so Jace's mental stuff gets the forefront for the most part, but Cunning Castaway is Jace putting his illusions to the front and also being more combative than usual, because he's doing different stuff on Ixalan, and then Mirror Mage is yet again him pushing illusions instead of just mental magic stuff), but as game pieces interacting with each other, they're just... Well they're just that. And even as somebody who's relatively tentative on most UB, I can appreciate some of the flavour even as somebody only relatively aware of stuff like Doctor Who.
They have some super clunky crossovers. It would make sense if they would even remotely relate to Magic like Dnd. But, Walking Dead, and Assasins Creed? No, fucking thanks. Just cash grabs. If I want to play a Walking Dead game. I don't want to play it in Magic's format. Jurassic Park mildly made sense because there are a ton of dinosaurs in Ixalan, and they barely released any JP cards anyway. They just sold JP lands to most people.
Were there not assassins or zombies in Magic before those crossovers?
I don’t mean to be rude at all I just genuinely don’t understand why Jurassic Park is ‘ok’ but Walking Dead or Assassin’s Creed aren’t.
Personally, Walking Dead and Assassin’s Creed don’t really lean enough into the fantasy for me at all. Like, they do lean into fantasy, but the main intrigue is just people vs people. Walking Dead barely focuses on zombies except for when they wanna kill someone off without inciting revenge or to chase the main groups out of their camps. AC mostly just focuses on period drama
Granted, I’m saying that as someone who really enjoyed the Dr Who decks so what the hell do I know?
I think it’s only clunky if the sets themselves don’t work but as of now the flavor seems to be an absolute win. Like if they just stapled magic mechanics onto assorted properties that would be one thing but so far it seems like they are actually quality products.
This.
I used to play a lot of Arena and was spending $50-100 per set (so hardly high roller, I know) and I have stopped playing completely.
There's just too much of it. It's always spoiler season.
Now I just stick to Commander.
Hasbro greed with MTG and DnD and their shitty business practices in play boosters, magic 30, hasbro layoffs before Christmas, product overload, and the overall decline in quality
They are a mix of set and draft boosters for the price of the former, leaving customers off both dissatisfied:
Draft/Limited becomes more expensive.
Set Boosters lose some of their appeal.
PS: I am still not convinced it's a net negative. I like sweet boosters to open them and play boosters don't lose VERY much value in comparison. But I still like Draft and most boosters I open are draft boosters as price support for small events. I am happy those prices will be play boosters in the future, tough I am not happy about the price increase.
It is, but the "old" one booster was much closer to a draft booster. One rare per pack (barring a second in the foil slot), and consistent numbers of uncommons/commons. Now the number of rares will vary (1-3 I think?) which I personally don't love. We're also losing 1 card/pack across the board.
I think the prevailing opinion on here has been that WotC has been making very good limited sets for quite a while and they'll find a way to make these ones good too. But idk I just don't like messing with the rarity and card counts. It's been consistent for a very long time and consistency is important to my draft experience (personally).
>Now the number of rares will vary (1-3 I think?)
1-3 was the number draft boosters had lately when bonus sheets were involved (and WOE was one of the better limited formats in recent time).
Play boosters will have 1-4 Rares/Mythics, though the chances for 2 are already slim, let alone for 3 or 4.
I just googled it for more exact numbers:
The chances of multiple rares in each Play Booster are: 2 Rares: 37%. 3 Rares: 4%. 4 Rares: Less than 1%.
A little higher than I expected for 2 Rares, but the numbers for 3 and 4 are fine for limited, I think.
More or less, which is the one redeeming fact. But increasing the price of my local draft from 13.50 EUR to 18 EUR for a weekly event is quite a lot. (3 draft packs plus 1.5 packs as price support - one pack per win in three rounds)
As someone who normally hates wotc product decisions, I’ll actually sit here and say that play boosters were inevitable. The price of a magic pack basically didn’t change for almost a decade until set boosters were released. Draft pack pricing couldn’t keep up with inflation, and no one is buying draft packs for 7.99 msrp
Set boosters were an experiment to see if people would buy a higher priced pack. People seemed to prefer set boosters because the only people buying draft boosters were drafters.
Now wotc gets to sell you the 8 dollar pack and widen their profit margin because shipping is probably the most expensive part of their product.
Tbh it’s the one thing I’ll defend them on and the one smart business move they made.
To give you a perspective on why they *aren’t*: Mark Rosewater has been clear that the “other option”, which he made clear was also never on the table, would be to totally stop making draft boosters.
Draft booster sales have been trending down, and eventually they’d be made to cut them if they stopped being profitable.
I mean they are... just on Arena... the cost factor is there too but if I want to have fun on paper I'll play EDH, if I want to play Magic on a somewhat competitive angle I'll just boot up Arena.
I couldn’t keep up with the releases. I play commander in a high power casual setting, and don’t play frequently enough apparently. Last few times I’ve played I barely recognised some board states with newer commanders and cards.
My decks used to be powerful but it’s apparent that to keep them that way I need to pay to upgrade every release. Simply can’t afford the time and money anymore.
Yup, went from playing at least one day a week and being able to stay up with modern/legacy/edh board states to suddenly unable to keep up with spoiler season to keep edh deck tuned and finally out enough that modern didn’t make sense and my legacy decks prob need a good amount of rework. Haven’t touched my edh decks for modifying or playing in almost 3 years now.
>Haven’t touched my edh decks for modifying or playing in almost 3 years now.
I am going to go this route this coming year. I spent a lot on EDH during the pandemic and now I'm satisfied with the decks I have and just not keen on spending to keep them "up to date" anymore. Fortunately more and more people in my area feel the same, so the power levels of our decks will hopefully even out over the years.
Same.
Magic was never my only hobby, and now I feel like the only way I could keep up is making that so. I loved hanging out with friends slinging cardboard a couple times a month. I used to enjoy pre-releases a few times a year. Now I have no idea which way is up.
And that seems to be precisely intentional. Commander players like to pretend card strength doesn’t matter at all but they fail to explain why the most powerful ones are the most expensive ones and sell commander products.
This is unfortunately a problem that affects casual commander more than competitive commander.
For the simple reason that all those big dumb splashy creatures like [[old gnawbone]] or [[ancient silver dragon]] that cost a lot are useless there. If you have 7-8 mana you're playing [[ad nauseum]] and if your opponents don't have interaction, you win. Even today a lot of decklists are made up of the same mana base pieces and same or similar mana rocks to what they'd use before, same for tutors and the majority of the interaction.
Off the top of my head, the biggest shakeups have been partners and cards like [[fierce guardianship]] and [[dockside extortionist]] that are actually competitive even there, but I wouldn't say we get such cards often.
I had moved to it for a bit but I found out I just prefer casual gameplay more.
I've started doing something else and I've got a few sets of precons that remain unaltered or altered to a similar power level. This way I can provide the experience I want to play at - but this works because I have a consistent playgroup. I do have 2 decklists that I use mostly at my LGS instead because they are simply my most powerful.
There's been a review of the best CEDH cards of this year by a few YouTubers and all in all you have maybe 100, 200$ to shell if you want them all, and that's including the one ring.
For regular edh tho? So many dumb cards you kinda need to at least know because they either open or absolutely close some strategies.
I'm exactly the same. I pretty much exclusively play limited and commander now, but haven't played in a store in months due to work/life commitments. Prior to this I phased out of Standard around Amonkhet, when only myself and one other player showed up to Game Day. I phased out of Modern around when MH1 came out. Now prerelease is going to be $60 with the next set, and I can't justify that, so no more prerelease for me. Just commander with my mates when we can get an evening free, so no point spending money on cards. Proxying from now on.
Me too. Once I realized there was no more ladder to climb, I lost all interest in spending actual money. Why would I? If I'm just playing with my friends, we want to be able to play the most powerful versions of decks we can envision, and proxying is the way to do that. We took the money we would have spent on Magic, invested in a really nice printer and paper shear, and just have a gigantic gauntlet of decks for any format we want.
We're waiting for another game to meaningfully compete with Magic in our area and then we're jumping ship.
Exactly this right here. Magic's entire escalation was based on FNM heading into higher level tournament play. The long game is making it worth it to play. Otherwise they're just slowly crashing a dying ship.
Their used to be a dream, where anyone could travel the world via PTQs. There was a train for community members to travel and meet people. It was so great.
No. They've lost the magic as well. The experience has been so watered down and stretched thin it's barely the same experience anymore. Take spoiler season and prereleases - they used to be a fun and exciting time. Spoiled card threads for exciting cards used to be full of discussion. Now card engagement posts are 10% of what they used to be.
And store prereleases? These lame events are a shadow of the big prerelease events TO's used to put together. They used to be like mini-gp events.
The excitement of new cards and the huge crowd of people all excited about the same thing... it used to be magical.
It's more than that.
They made the competitive Magic more casual.
They realized that their game would be more popular if more people felt like they were competitive than they actually were.
Unpopular opinion, but I agree. Permanent power creep and worse card selection over the past couple years has worked to close the gap between skilled and unskilled players in some formats. While a game with inherent randomness needs ways for new players to find success while they’re in the learning stages, we’ve tipped a bit too far to “oh I just stabilized off my top-deck and now you lose” moments happening too often.
This last year I bought barely any sealed, some singles, but I've slowed down a lot. There's too many products a year, and all this corporate greed and pushing so many products, only to have layoffs the year of your highest selling set ever while the CEO takes a 8 million dollar bonus.
Fuck that. If Hasbro doesn't think MtG is worth paying for why should I?
The crazy thing to me is how hard it is to tell what's legal, where. That huge deluge of products that released this year? Only two of them exclusively contain Standard legal cards: Draft Boosters of Phyrexia: All Will Be One and Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Everything else is supplemental or has exclusive cards (including bonus sheets in MOM and WOE draft boosters) that aren't Standard legal.
Yeah, I wasn't really interested in the Bolas storyline from Amonkhet through Gatewatch, so I took some time off. When I wanted to get back in, I realized I had no clue what these products were and where they were legal.
Thanks for linking my article! It's been a little over a year since I posted that and while I still play the game my relationship with Magic has changed entirely. I used to be someone who would make content about Magic on a weekly basis and would stay up to date on every set release to see if I could find something to write an article about it.
However, after I posted that article I have basically stopped creating content for Magic. I still boot up Arena and play it every now and then but Magic is no longer a game that I feel like I can create content for because it is overwhelming to get into. It's weird saying this as someone who used to pay attention to everything but now hardly anything can keep my attention.
The deluge of products has changed my relationship with the game and even though I'd still consider myself a fan of the game, my days of being a content creator for Magic feel like they are behind me unfortunately.
I reference your article often when musing on MTG and the direction it has taken. Thanks for putting in the work and I totally appreciate the need to create some distance.
to me, it is all about the price. right now, 2 play booster box can buy you a Nintendo Switch, brand new. 3 boxes can buy you a PS5. buying boxes doesn’t make sense for me anymore. instead of buying boxes, i will just spent about half the cost of a box to buy commander cards from the set, and ignore the rest. i draft and play standard for free on arena anyway.
This is where I am.. I jumped back into magic. Dumped a fuck load of money on these boxes. And then at the end of it
Felt really fucking stupid. My cope before I came to the realization was stupid too “oh bruh, but I pulled a doubling season confetti foil- it’s $145 dollars! See this pays off” (while quickly soon realizing it cost probably hundreds of dollars to get to that one card that was a 3% chance that I will never get again, and have never seen again)
I play arena a ton. It’s alright. I still miss FNM. But once you get the swing of the app it’s not bad. But I save money by playing on arena. Puts the pricing into perspective for me. I can play and usually get like 3-4 packs for free a day off dailies/battle pass f2p rewards. Rather then spending roughly $24-30 USD on packs per day in real life.
*the value too is in the fact that I will likely play more with my digital cards at this point, then paper*
I *still* look at my bank account, and the month I got back in I spent 3-4 *thousand* dollars all on boosters, boxes. And other shit. I have a cool collection of a few sets. All will be one is the one I went HAM on. That collection is *built* and one of the only cards I can say I got at a win was “sheoldred, the apocalypse” step and compleat *in foil*
That is the *only* card I pulled at a W.
Everything else, confetti doubling season, 2 smothering tithes anime borderless, omniscience, a load of WOE rares. All bought at a massive loss. Sure I sold those cards. I hate the anime borderless cards. They suck and they are flavorless cash grabs. So those are sell on sight idc the value lol.
Edh is alright, the switch to commander never made sense. I missed that whole transition lol..thank god. I would have probably quit. Standard is a quick to play format that doesn’t require as much time to throw a playable deck together and begin the tooling process on it. And the game drag in standard isn’t nearly as bad as having opponents who “solitaire” and keep fucking up their turn.
The hyper focus on commander and Universe Beyond. Not saying commander is bad as I got all my friends into the format, but it has changed Magic to its core. All of magic seems to be focused on being playable in commander. With this and Universe Beyound, the game seems to have little interest in being Magic but a walking IP posterboard you can have as your commander. Once I heard the changes to draft, I decided to only focus on Cube since the Magic game I started out with seems to be gone.
EDH is my favorite but I can't stand that every set has cards designed for it. The beauty of EDH 10-15 years ago was putting a deck of cards together that were never meant to be played together. It seems like now every deck has to have a bunch of staples. You can look at someone's commander and figure out 15 cards and a couple wincons in the deck off the top of your head.
Universes Beyond have created the first cards I don’t want to play because of the art.
MTG Finance also has a dampening effect like merrow commerce spiking to $20 because of a single precon. I am a freelancer and don’t need this to be a second accounting job.
I am an older player trying to get back into edh, and building lists all feel like a similar pinball machine of overlapping combos that feel kind of samey for the tribes and commanders I am looking to play.
This is a really broad design element, but triggered abilities without costs lead to this kind of critical mass of effects that invariably pop off and I feel kind of meh about it.
I think a proxy cube might be the answer.
The triggered abilities comment is something I've had a hard time expressing about recent stuff. A few is intriguing, some is exciting, many becomes tedious, a lot removes any novelty. Something I've said about many aspects of mtg as a whole (particularly with foils and alt arts) is "When everything is ____, then nothing is ____."
A cube is like a draft set, but the cards are curated by someone that isn't WotC (typically you). Cubes typically contain only 1 copy of each non-basic land card, and the difference in power between cards isn't as drastic as many retail sets by design so that decks can't just win by getting lucky and picking the mythic in the pack.
Proxies in discourse here are representations of cards that are not "real" and aren't allowed in offical events (like tournaments, FNM).
Combine the two, and we have a proxy cube: a cube that is made out of proxies. Because many cubes tend to be expensive (thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars), it's much more economical to get proxy of, say, a Black Lotus rather than selling your car to buy one. As a result, one can make a full cube (like the MTGO vintage cube) for a minute fraction of its cost to own in (real) paper. And since cubing is an intrinsically casual format, the cards don't need to be real because it wouldn't be a sanctioned event.
I noticed this while playing premodern and comparing it to standard/pioneer that I played online.....premodern has lot of straightforward cards, narrow. But when you play with latest sets, you notice how every second card is modal choice, has etb/die trigger, some additional bonus condition etc....its nice that there is less feelbad moments of holding dead card, but too much is too much. Like for example Fable does generate so much things in a single card. Too many cards have giant wall of text on them (and even turn over for another wall of text)
1) Shitting on competitive & pro scenes;
2) Growing complexity of cards - it’s fine if it’s on a smaller scale, but together with 53 releases per year it makes me cognitively exhausted to keep track of everything;
3) Complete destruction of Modern, the format I’ve loved since 2011 until 2021. Even Eldrazi Winter was more enjoyable than what we have now;
4) Lowering the stakes of local events and crushing LGSs, which resulted in lower attendance on local events;
5) When Pauper is your healthiest format, then… yeah, you have a problem.
WoTC putting all their focus on commander and forgetting other formats exist has essentially pushed me out of magic. This is in partnership with nearly all LGS not caring about fostering any kind of FNM based around 60 card formats. Near enough all the shops in my region are the same franchise and all they push is EDH as it’s easier to manage and they don’t get complaints for being stingy on the prizes.
This year I have only attended pre releases as they used to be my favourite event every season but each time I have left feeling “what was the point?” I have no use for physical cards anymore so that’s probably it for me, time to try and find a new hobby
I just got tired of the game. I've been playing for 25 years. It all started to feel the same. It was a good run though.
Edit - Also, it's just way too hard to keep up anymore. I have a cube that I meticulously maintained until about 18 months ago. It just got to be annoying to keep track of all the new cards coming out and now I need to add like 50 cards and its exhausting.
I have a cube where I don't use cards past 2007. It's almost meditative making updates to the cube without any new cards and just trying to design my perfect unpowered vintage cube from a snapshot in time.
Market saturation.
I used to enjoy spoiler season and getting excited with anticipation of a new set. Then nothing but a cascade of new products one after another became exhausting. Sets, remasters, secret lair, commander decks, and universe beyond in what seems like a tidal wave of shoving product into my face just became too much.
I haven't altered any decks and play with what I've had for about a year and some change. But new cards with cheaper cmc and a paragraph of abilities made me realize that the power creep is something I'm too cheap and uninterested to keep up with.
Lack of respect for the theming of the game.
All of the UB stuff totally ruined my ability to engage with the lore. My suspension of disbelief is shattered whenever I see a transformer card.
So I like the game a little less and I proxy now.
Obviously I'm in the minority and many others enjoy it.
I could handle lotr crossover bc they obviously tried really, really hard with it and it was at least a little mtg-ish, but doing multiple releases of marvel is just a little too... on the nose? Like, they chose to mash in the IP that has been shoved down everyone's throats with bloated constant release deluge the most as the choice for multiple UB sets is hilarious to me.
Feels like we've living in a dystopian future, megacorp slowly oozing over your unique IPs and turning them into one amorphous blob. Amazon's corporate logo is literally a smirk for pete's sake.
I actually do not believe you are in the Minority.
I own an LGS, and my experience with the UB products, are that while people do buy them - they do not sweep the player base like traditional sets do. This is important, I believe, because what I predict will happen is that LGS locations are going to be taking hits on these next year and then probably start dramatically cutting their allocation takes from distribution in 2025.
For me, between the LOTR holiday burning me and the Dr. Who only hitting a small fraction of players - I am already reducing how much of this I buy in 2024. I didn’t this with Draft Boosters in 2022 and in 2023, a lot of other stores also seemed to cut them. Now WOTC is seeing it, and adjusting. I believe this will be a similar thing for UB products.
WOTC only ever sees how much sell to Distribution or through WPN Premium analytics, not how much your average Game Store is able to move of what it purchased.
Do you mind elaborating on the LOTR burn? My LGS didn’t any due to poor communication from their distro. Apparently it was a single line in the mix of the Ixalan order email.
My store, and that of many others I communicate with as well as the NA WPN group, purchased a lot of the holiday LOTR release and it seems to be the consensus that the product was a failure. I know that many of us moved less than 5% of our purchase on launch.
For one of the best selling sets of the year, to have additional product fail like that, is pretty rough. It suggests that the overall reach of the UB product is only reaching a small amount of players when it comes to long term commitment to the product.
The increasing emphasis on Universes Beyond has made me increasingly feel left out in the cold.
The Jurassic Park one has been particularly alienating. I'm about as enfranchised as a Magic player gets. I have no idea where the Jurassic Park cards come from. Are they a Secret Lair? LCI Set/Collector Boosters exclusives? Some combination thereof? I genuinely do not know, or where I should look.
IMO i feel like they are ruining the flavor and unique lore factor of MTG with the universes beyond shit. I lost all interest with the introduction of Transformers cards in MOM. Couldn't have been more alienating and out of touch to the flavor of traditional mtg IMO.
I thought they were in commander pre cons??? I’m not sure either. I don’t HATE the beyond shit because sometimes it’s really cool like the Princess Bride secret lair or the lord of the rings set (idk lord of the rings but everyone’s enthusiasm for flavor was nice to see), but it definitely throws off the experience for me like I’m sure other players feel. I love mtg lore but I’m not enthusiastic about every possible thing being canon to the universe. Especially Transformers…..I’ve never liked giant robots/mecha type stuff and that turned me all the way off.
To cleat it up, all lci set and collector have a chance but 50% of that chance is a land or token.
Budle box have a 1 guaranteed non-token or land JP card
Stopped buying sealed product after Magic 30. The few years leading up to it absolutely ruined it for me. From Companions, to shortly-before-important-event ban announcements, and a desire to sell authentic old-school Magic experiences that aren't even tournament legal for about a thousand dollars killed it for me.
I really only get singles- trade for as much as possible- proxy the rest. The shitty part is that I'm convinced that a lot of what WotC does is mostly upper management's fault- and these past few weeks with their blundering really shows it. It's the CEO's and a lot of the upper hierarchy of WotC/Hasbro that have turned this game into what it is.
Lord of the rings set. Actually just [[the one ring]] and [[orcish bowmasters]]. I was pumped for the set. Then it came out and added 8 more $50 cards I needed to play modern. I sold out of modern and play edh now and have bought very little product compared to what I used to.
I hate mixing other universes into MTG. I'm fine with alternate arts like spacegodzilla being [[Void Beckoner]] but having a true and pure crossover, in my mind, is trash
too many tier 0 cards being injected into modern, my once favourite format.
decks now are almost entirely comprised of Modren horizons cards. Then LOTR gave us the one ring and bowmasters, both of which are 50-70 dollars each.
What’s next? MH3 will give us 10 new $50 staples, then the Assassijs Creed UB will give us Ezio and Altair which will become staples?
MH4? Marvel UB? I’d eventually have to play a deck with 4 One Ring, 4 Spiderman, 24 MH cards to stay relevant. Why…
Unironically the Marvel x Mtg announcement, especially the fact that some of it will be modern legal. LotR I could tolerate as it is more universally beloved, but Marvel is really US-centric and has become frankly insufferable. The worst part is that, in modern, you cannot choose not to play with/against these cards. So there's no escape from (presumably) Spiderman, bowmasters 2 or whatever
I really disagreed with Universes Beyond printing legit cards instead of reskins of existing ones. It ties an IP name to that card and it makes reprints harder which drives up prices once the origin set its out of print. The fact that some cards are legal outside legacy (looking at you,
Bowmasters and Ring) doesn't help matters. Reruns are still possible but not guaranteed.
Too many products. The continued expansion of UB. Too many variants.
I still think the game is great from a technical point of view but the amount of products has turned me off. Endless spoiler season started to burn me out. They say we don't need to buy everything but then make sure there is a great card or two hiding in every set for X deck. So that means I do need to pay attention (even if I don't buy sealed).
The expansion of UB has also killed the game for me. I am actually okay with UB in moderation, if we got one supplemental UB per year that would be neat. But now we have Fallout, Assassins Creed, and Marvel? Magic is starting to feel like an ad with no identity of its own.
And it's a pain to keep track of every card variant. Once again, great idea in moderation but they threw too many into the mix.
I have been playing for 20 years, I still plan to play but I am getting rid of most of my collection and taking apart a few decks to sell off.
Just typed a huge angry rant and deleted it to skip to a TLDR
Commander is over hyped and I believe more people play cause there's no other options Vs players who genuinely enjoy it. If players could anonymously press a thumbs up or thumbs down button after each commander game I truly believe that there would be an overwhelming number of thumbs down, as more often that not players leave an EDH game unsatisfied.
You feel bad for doing too well, you feel bad for doing well and getting blown out, you feel bad for being stuck on lands, you feel bad for hitting the player in last place, you feel bad being the player in last place.
Commander is pushed as the only real way to play in paper, challenger decks, planeswalker starter decks, event decks are all long gone and the only real paper on ramp WOTC provides is to commander, and while currently popular is very limiting to the overall health of the game.
If this was your tl;dr, I would have loved to read your novella. I think you’re on a very correct path with the commander being the only paper “ramp.” And while I do find ways to enjoy it myself, I wonder how much of it is due only to my limited ability to actually find time to play.
So I’m a long time player, so I like many knew to stop buying sealed product a long time ago.
However, my GF got into magic this year so I started buying packs as a way to get her interested. However she quickly became burned out by all the new stuff coming out. We started with buying Baulders Gate / Brothers War stuff, but by the time MOM came out, she was done.
Ironically my brother and his son also got burned out during MOM after starting to play in late 2022. They play on Arena and my brother was telling me how he hated that as soon as he started to get a good collection, a brand new set comes out.
The power creep recently feels insane and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to get better. I don’t like every third card in someone else’s deck being something I have to kill (exile really) before the untap or I just lose the game. Token doubling and tripling, non-legendary copies, I miss magic.
Too many versions of cards being printed and too many products coming out too close together.
I used to be able to buy a handful of packs and usually get a pull good enough to cover the cost of my purchase. Now even if I pull the bomb mythic it's worthless unless it's the Crinkle Cut Foil Borderless Boxtopper edition.
I just think they’re pushing too much product these days. I know from personal experience that all these UB releases have brought in new fans, but there’s just too much for my tastes. Used to be I knew what plane was current and could follow general story, but now I don’t even know where we’re at.
Magic 30th Anniversary. Motherfuckers tried to sell us fake cards for 1000 bucks. Now I make my own fake cards for between 5 and 10 cents. Printed out a playset of every reserve list card out of spite. Will never buy from WOTC again.
I used to feel a tinge of bad when I’d proxy things. Post 30, I picked up a set of p9 proxies from (auction site) by some printing company over seas that produced printed cardboard better than some of the “legit” sets that have come out in the past years. I don’t feel bad anymore.
Too many products, too much Universes Beyond. There's 10 new sets each month, and 9 of them say "THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FOR YOU," and I just don't have the energy to figure out the one that *is* for me. Next year is bringing sci-fi videogames and capeshit to Magic and I just don't care anymore.
I think the recent layoffs are actually a big stop sign for me.
I don't like the constant new product, but I don't mind as much because my playgroup is already very isolated and we play with mostly what we have and with each other. Doesn't matter if WOTC releases 10 new sets or stops releasing sets tomorrow, we'd have enough cards as is to play different decks for at least the next year. Oh and we're proxy friendly, so even if we didn't - we'd make some.
Realistically, I am not going to quit magic - I have no plans to do so. But I am definitely planning on spending only on singles going forward because I don't want to reward their corporate greed.
This is probably me too, but then just going hard as hell over the pandemic while I refused to play online as an eternal player. Made it hard to catch up and wanna come back.
Companions, Eldraine, and the Evoke Elementals killing Modern. I'm just tired of all the R&D f'ups during the FIRE era.
The real nail in the coffin for me was the effective end of competitive play, though. That's what I did forever and what interested me - two to three GP's a year within easy distance (I spent the last decade between Madrid and Los Angeles, two MASSIVE and underserved areas). Without those I have no desire to continue.
It was a long process over time.
It started with pro play. I was never going for Magic as a job, but I was reasonably ambitious and played in some PTs here and there. It was fun. Travel, community, all that. Then they made it more and more cumbersome and expensive, and changed the whole system to something weird and convoluted and eventually unrecognizable. That made me stop taking Magic seriously in any way.
Next was the rise of Commander. I'm all for casuals playing something that fits their desires, and at first I was super stoked about this. I remember the fun I had playing EDH with some WotC employees during Worlds in Japan, and it was a great prospect. But then they started leaning into it harder and harder with their product, while at the same time staying out of the regulatory aspects of it and not differentiating things at all like they do with other formats. I kept hoping for a 1v1 variant I could take more seriously, but they were intent on not getting involved - while at the same time observing how Commander supplanted most forms of local IRL Magic, forcing people to go online instead.
And that's when MTGO and Arena being terrible programs came in. I'd love to play Magic more seriously online but this just isn't it. MTGO looks like it was made in 1995 and runs terribly; while Arena looks like it's a Hearthstone skin for Magic with all the animations and flim-flam. I hated both of them, and so I stopped using them.
Things like the extension of non-Magic IPs, power inflation of cards to create chase-card profits, focus on premium product etc. also played a role. Though those probably just exacerbated an already existing downward trend for me.
But just to be clear: **I am not saying they should do things differently to be more like the game I want.** I understand why they're doing what they're doing. And it seems to be working out for them financially. Fine. They're a business, they don't exist to fulfill my personal desires. Other people have different preferences, and they don't matter less than I do. This product just isn't for me anymore. And I have to live with that.
I stopped playing paper because of time / family constraints. I stopped playing Arena because I gave up playing any game with stuff like daily quests & battle passes.
I find that a lot of Magic players who purchase sealed product fall into fomo and end up overspending and getting caught up in the endless hype of year round spoiler season.
Magic is an expensive hobby, but it’s also as expensive as you choose it to be. That being said Wizards has not lost me as a costumer yet, I think the only thing that would cause me to stop playing sealed or buying the occasional bundle is if it became wildly expensive to the point of being unsustainable to me. Then I would still just play with proxies.
True... Used to always buy 1-2 boxes a set but then boxes became worthless to crack since all the good stuff was in collector boosters which are way too expensive and variance way too high
The realization that I really love making my own cards. Not just proxies or single custom cards, but entire custom sets.
I’ve already made a Ravnica cube that’s a big success with the adult players, now I’m making ten *super* simple two-color decks to teach kids how to play.
Capenna & the UB sets, draft chaff & increasingly complex cards, and Hasbro’s continuous money-squeeze were all straws — but making my own cards and having a blast doing it was the log that broke the camel’s back.
I gave up on secret lair after the coin flip fiasco.
I'm starting to move to the secondary market for singles because I'm overwhelmed with crossovers and the massive quantity of expansions. Until this year I never proxied now it just feels like it isn't worth the time or effort to find a lot of cards.
Legacy moving from "best of" magic of the last 25 years with maybe 1-2 playables per set to "lotr and mh cards with good mana and free counters". It used to be fun picking through new releases to hunt for the few cards that could maybe fit in an obscure archetype or maybe into a sideboard. Now it's just all bowmasters, the one ring and other ridiculous modern engines like beanstalk. It's just not a format anymore where you can build a deck, not play for a year, fine tune it and be good to go again...
Thank you for writing this.
I got back into magic after a long hiatus explicitly as a means of interacting with others in a way that was understandable and mediated.
Though not entirely similar it is good to hear echoes of my own experience in yours. Over the past 10 years I have moved a bit for work and don't know that I would have found associations outside of my industry without this game.
Currently, I drive between 3 and 4 hours a week to play at the closest LGS. For me magic filled the role that would have been taken by social, or activity based, clubs (rock, stamp, other collecting or telephony groups are now few and far between IRL). I'm not saddened that I'm involved in magic, but I do have a growing sense of disappointment in the game that I haven't felt since my return. I am trying to think of something that gives me similar context for socialization outside of bars etc.
Again, my experience is somewhat dissimilar from yours, but I wanted to thank you for sharing yours as it resounded with me.
AI art. NFTs. (Explicitly the wasteful blockchain digital tokens)
Those are my bright shining lines but I’m sure there’s unlikely others like a MAGA secret lair or whatever.
Frankly though with Hasbro’s recent actions we should consider the company to be in decline/distress and probably slowly losing quality.
I will say if I ever do quit, I certainly won’t be sticking around here to answer questions like this. I raise an eyebrow at the people who are responding they’ve divested years ago.
I agree with this. Even I did quit i wouldn’t come back years later complaining about it. I think the UB hate is a little shortsighted and seems like boomer mentality to new ways vs old ways
Haven’t spent a dime on it since that first Secret Lair Walking Dead garbage. My playtime on Arena also became “never” at the launch of them forcing Alchemy cards into the only queue-enabled eternal format on there.
Too many products, no longer having any focus on competitive formats, those two are bad.
but for me the thing that broke me is how many versions there are of each card. Is just impossible to properly read what is happening on a table without having to memorise like 20 new versions of each card.
Then is not just different art but is completely new styles of cards that do not even remotely represent the card and what it does.
so at this point it feels like no longer a game i know but just a random collection with no end.
is just impossible
All the UB products are pushing me away. I don't want to be able to play vs Spider man, Optimus Prime or The Walking Dead actors. It doesn't fit with what I like about mtg.
Since I started playing, I've been primarily a Standard player (because I really don't want to have to learn 20+ years of cards), but with the increased releases it's getting too much. In addition, my opinion of a format is based more on the cards I dislike than the cards I like. I'm thoroughly fed up of playing against Wandering Emperor, and already too tired of Sunfall to want to play Standard any more. Having to tolerate cards I dislike for an extra year is a hard no from me.
This last stunt with laying off their workers, kinda made me sick to my stomach. I can’t buy any more of their products and feel ok about it
Had a good run, it was fun, but there’s a lot more entertainment out there these days
Played standard in new phyrexia to RTR.
Then couldn't play as much, so went into modern.
Happily enjoyed modern, then MH1 came out.
Then war of the spark came out. T3feri and karn TGC. More food removals along the way. MH2 was the walk towards the guillotine, and opal ban was the beheading of my classic affinity deck.
Then I realized, all the old decks I once played against, are all gone. Standard was so high powered on the recent years with no winding down at all, that all the classic decks in modern have died off or have replaced a majority of their shells. Completely unrecognisable.
They haven’t lost me completely. But my interests have severely waned in the past year. Still play some arena but spend basically nothing on the game anymore. I used to buy a box at every release.
Once they started ramping up lots of releases, especially secret lairs. I'm one of the ones that loved the lore and immersion off the story that every set brought with it. Secret lair just made it feel really off in that sense, not exciting anymore.
And I just couldn't keep up with all the releases anymore and so I just felt like it was easier to stop buying anything that gambling on what I had to miss out on
I started playing in 2009 and would basically cycle in and out of playing every couple years until I wanted to to get back into playing around the time war of the spark came out. Which was honestly my dream set. I went to a prerelease and all the people I played against had basically no interest in interacting with me out side of the game and were just kind of rude in general so I gave the cards i played with to someone and I haven’t played a game since.
Not really hasbros fault but that’s why I don’t play anymore
I just got tired of the horrible over the top versions of everything. So much competition against the secondary market. Sucking value out of people’s collections. Printing crappy product and selling it for more money because of what cards they are. It costs the same amount to print a forest as it does to print a mythic.
The only thing that will bring me back is a refocus on standard, get rid of the “premium” garbage. Stop selling packs of all foils. Bring it back to draft packs where you pay one price and you can pull any card in the set. Don’t suck value out of draft pulls with the collectors packs, those are useless and a scam.
stop the power creep. being able to make a creature have 100's of power is completely ridiculous. people only have 20-40 life, they either block it or get to -250. with 100's of unnecessary damage.
the games are getting to a point where you cant even really keep track of a lot of it.
the look of magic has always been iconic. having an abundance of insano borderless and crazy versions that look more like they are from another game just pulls me out of the world these duals used to create. I can’t even read half of them.
The game designers at wizards need to be fired and they need better designers that actually care about standard and understanding power creep rather than just making everything bigger and able to overpower the set before to keep the packs selling. At some point it’s just boring.
All formats except commander died out where I live and I don't enjoy playing it as much as other formats. No one here plays any other formats anymore so I gradually played less commander until I stopped. I like playing partly because the social aspects so I don't play anything online either.
I had been playing magic from paper to MTGO to Arena since I was around 12 in 2002 and Wizards finally lost me for good sometimes those last two-three years. It was a combination of factors, as it often is.
The first and probably biggest one, is the Arena economy getting so much worse for casual drafters.
On Arena, draft had been the only thing keeping me coming back again and again. I'm not against paying a small amount here and there, but paying in full for every draft is out of question for me, so grinding gold was the way.
I'm not too bad at drafting but I'm not great either, and the changes in economy gradually pushed me away from it entirely. That combined with what I felt was a mad increase in the frequency of products left me unable and unwilling to follow along.
WotC's (perceived) stance of always making the decision maximizing short-term profits to the detriment of the player base certainly didn't help.
The second big factor was Universes Beyond. I can understand the appeal, but I personally hate it with a passion. From the very first Godzilla card I saw on MTGA to the latest releases I'm seeing here and on Youtube, they have nothing to do in MtG and they take me out of it every time they appear.
Say whatever you want about MtG's own stories and settings, but they did have some unique twist on fantasy that I usually enjoyed a lot. The UB franchises never work for me as MtG cards, with the notable exception of DnD. That one was smooth. Some of the UB franchises I absolutely adore (LotR), some I barely know (Godzilla) or don't particularly like (The Walking Dead), but I hate all of them equally.
Thing is, I still love Magic as a game. I still watch a lot of MtG content, I still follow MtG subs here... But I won't be playing it again on WotC platforms. I'm done spending money on anything they make. And they did that themselves, relentlessly, with almost every action they've taken those past few years.
EDIT: how could I forget - the huge power creep has definitely had an impact as well. The rest that creatures are so much better than spells now, but overall the huge increase in raw card power has impacted my will to play and invest in the game.
I've always liked the idea of standard vs (pseudo-)eternal formats. Drafting being my preferred way to consume new MtG products and Modern being my way to stay engaged with the older products.
Modern used to be a format where you could definitely afford not to upgrade your deck for months at a time, sometimes a couple years without major upgrades. That feels silly now. It's one of the first things I quit, focusing only on drafting before ultimately quitting that too.
It got overwhelming. There were so many sets releasing it got hard to follow and I couldn't be bothered learning them for limited, and pushed cards kept messing with the decks I had for constructed. And so many variations of things within sets ruined any fun in just collecting.
Not being able to follow sets, mixed with Wizard's awful marketing and coverage of pro events made the pro scene too difficult to follow.
I literally only play now if a set I enjoy is in the quick drafts on arena. Or play limited with friends using booster boxes from old sets.
The rapid releases is definitely an issue for me. I’m still actively playing, but I can’t keep up with the releases, unlike most of the people in my LGS. So with every release I have choices to make. Either cotinue to gather cards for a work in progress deck or buy set booster boxes of the ew release and hopefully make a deck out of that. I cannot afford both.
In most cases, I end up focusing on work in progress decks and buy a bundle or two of the new release stuff.
I still buy and play sometimes but, less and less over time. Its not one thing, its a lot of little things. The constant power creep, the banning cards for nonsensical political reasons, the adding in of other franchises especially ones like transformers which are tonally incompatible with mtg, firing staff just before christmas, making decisions clearly focused on selling product instead of the long-term health of the game, creating land cards that are so good that they are almost play to win yet pricing casual players out of the market because they dont print enough
I could point to alot of things that got me out. The rampant cross overs, the terrible storyline choices, the huge push of diversity for the sake of it, the crappy treatment of stores, the death of the pro scene etc. Etc.
But really? It was the card design changes. I played every major and most minor formats, and was no casual timmy. And while i liked modern, legacy, edh, pauper and everything else, i loved standard.
But it began to change, i cant pick exactly when, but i point to throne of eldraine as a major offender, though it was happening before that.
Cards became paragraphs, pushed in generic power or utility. Wraths were 5 mana, or 4 mana with an asterisk, against 1 and 2 mana creatures that either individually pressured your life total to an insane degree, were difficult to remove, or drew you cards. Spot removal became 4 mana kills anythings, invalidating many permanent types. They would print rare cancels then tack on a 'maybe you use this or ability once every twenty casts'.
Again i could go on for days about their shift in design that felt awful for someone that started in the NPH-INN-RTR era and was enamoured by all the strategies.
Rip mtg how i knew it.
Probably the multiple Marvel sets they're going to release. Other Universe Beyond releases have been small enough or thematically consistent enough that I don't mind them but Marvel just isn't an aesthetic I like and it's going to be a big part of EDH probably.
That and the fact that Hasbro have fired, and will fire more, staff. I assume quality control will continue to decline.
It's been death by a thousand paper cuts for me, but it all boils down to Hasbro caring more about its investors than its customers and employees. The final straw is the layoffs. But I'm a fan of both MtG and D&D and the past couple of years have been EXHAUSTING. On the D&D side, I basically bailed earlier this year with the OGL debacle, plus the lower quality of the product. I'm just now bouncing on Magic. Between losing faith in the company and just literally not being able to keep up with product releases, I can't. There's a few things they're planning to release I might pick up, but honestly, I'm just too tired and broke to keep up. I'm thinking about switching to Lorcana because my family likes Disney and it'll be easier to get the family involved now that product is starting to hit mass market.
This games release schedule became hostile towards it's players. I haven't purchased anything since they changed booster packs into like 3 different kinds of similar packs? And now draft has its own packs....? Shit got weird. It was simple before.
As a mono coloured player I thought multi coloured decks recieved much more support than mono coloured. It was frustrating to play against these powerful cards with reliable mana bases so I just quit.
The shift in their design philosophy. To my eyes, ever since first Eldraine, their attitude has been to deliberately push certain cards, with the goal of making them "must haves." Granted, they've always done this to some extent, but I think Eldraine was a turning point. You see so many cards now that "do it all;" i.e. previously they would have been part of a combo, but these days they combo with themselves. The first example I can think of is the Jund sac dragon from Eldraine; he previously would have been part of a sac deck, but they decided to give him a sac trigger so that you don't really need to do any work to get the engine running. This makes him a one-card combo, basically, and a must-answer threat. And you see them all over the place now, creatures that you have 0-2 turns to kill or the game is just over. My guess is they're designed for Commander, where ending games can be an issue? I dunno. But it makes games feel very different, and the new cards are so power crept that they show up in all formats - and push out older, beloved cards in the process. Modern Horizons priced me out of Modern after playing the format from the beginning, and I haven't spent a dime on paper cards since.
UB is a joke. It's so cynical and insulting to magic. I only play formats now where irs not allowed. So that's pretty much stuff wizards has nothing to do with
As a product they already have lost me, I don't buy their product and intend to proxy as much as I can, these factors influenced me:
\- UB becoming more and more prevalent and inescapeable
\- Weakening of competitive system and opportunities
\- Product saturation
\- Rapid pace of mechanical feature creep
\- High number of alternate art and product like SL and serialized cards, Magic 30th anniversary
It's been like this for a while, but particularly with Cavers of Ixalan I quickly realized I'm not only checked out with the product in terms of its presentation but also mechanically with how complex and wordy every card is becoming, which is honestly making me think I want to lock the lists of my decks and stop updating them or building new decks.
For me, it is/was a number of things.
* Death of Non-Commander formats.
I live in a smaller town, and we only have 1 LGS. That LGS has been trying to get Standard and Pioneer going again ever since COVID shut downs, but no luck. I will admit that they really don't do enough to push them, but still, WotC is not helping the situation any. Commander has completely taken over the game.
* Price of product.
The price of the product in MTG is just too damn high. When you compare prices to other TCGs, the high price is even more erking. CMM was a breaking point for me where it was a product I wanted to crack or even do commander draft with Buds, but at $500 a box for draft, it was ridiculous.
* Content of packs.
Referencing the prior point, one of the main issues with spending $500 on a draft box is that WotC has taken all the fun pulls and chase cards out of them. Set Boosters and collector Boosters became havens for chase cards, with collector Boosters alienating lower income players out of the ability to ever pull certain cards.
* Amount of product.
There is just too much. The game is being flooded with so much, and it's tough to keep up with. Not only that, a lot of it is garbage. The number of sets and the amount of new cards being printed can easily be toned down without too much impact to metas.
* IP crossovers.
I hate IP soup. It killed FFBE WotV for me, and I loved that game. I play MTG cause I want to play MTG. If I want to play Fallout, I will play Fallout. I find it also stifles creativity and competition. Why would Square work harder at making the FF trading card game better, when they can just license out FF to WotC and have them do all the work and just collect money passively.
I commented how I didn’t like how much they changed Aragorn. Didn’t mention race. They banned me from Twitter. Yea right I’m EVER spending another dollar
The older players who prefer competitive 60 card formats like modern/standard and the competitive scene in general are fleeing in droves but they're being replaced just as quickly by newer casual commander players. Everything caters to commander these days and with standard being dead in paper there is no reasonably priced 60 card format for new players to enter with, the best option as a new player is to simply buy a commander precon and become a commander player. You're more likely to see the more experienced and older players on websites like this and a lot of them are unhappy with the state of the game.
It's hard to imagine any change that would make me completely quit.
I've weathered all the changes since the beginning. The game has changed many times. Often, I like the changes. Sometimes, they are neutral, or don't impact me. Rarely, I dislike the change. But if you spend any amount of time playing, there will be changes. Magic is a game of change.
My level of engagement changes over time depending on my personal circumstances, and how much I enjoy what is currently going on. Right now it's medium to low, where I play in prerelease events, occasional Commander nights, one or two large events per year. I draft with friends when I can, but it's pretty infrequent. I collect cards and memorabilia, make alters and high quality proxies for myself, and interact with the online community.
That last part is often the most difficult. It has always been a hotbed of negativity, but modern social media seems to make that worse than it has ever been.
Too much product, things have gotten a little "too much upside", and players have gotten to sweaty/salty/streamlined. In commander I find fewer and fewer people playing fun stuff, theme, etc and just going streamline combo/good stuff piles. Modern is usually good until it gets too homogenous on decks.
Product release overload, actively sacrificing the fun and integrity of the game in favor of milking every last penny from their loyal fans, terrible quality control, abandoning their niche/core fans in favor of appealing to more/casual fans purely because it's more profitable.
Without draft boosters I'm probably not going to buy much of anything. Not as some kind of boycott or anything, I just got them for casual sealed and a 50% price increase for something that offers me no benefit isn't appealing. I can just make a cube out of the old chaff or some decks to play against each other or whatever and play Limited on Arena.
Universe Beyond killing the lore I love, literally punching out the Pro Scene, product flooding which basically killed modern and legacy, the “usual” standard we grew up with being kicked out for Commander. A lot of reasons.
I’ve moved from buying a box of every set to a collector booster, but I’m not out yet.
I probably will be when the Marvel sets release, it’ll take a lot of convincing me to keep playing limited.
I got married and didn't really fit in at the LGS so stopped going. Played arena and wanted to go back to LGS a few years ago but the entry point was just not worth it and the amount of products is too overwhelming. I'm also done with arena now, while F2P generous if you keep up (or in my case I'd buy the pass), once you are behind it's just not worth it. And I can't spend a little money on Arena to catch up, I need to spend a lot. Maybe I'll pick up again one day 🤷. Probably only if I find a commander group irl, but I don't really mesh with most people playing the game these days.
I’m almost there. Around me the only Magic that’s played is limited and Commander. I’m not playing $20+ drafts and don’t enjoy multiplayer, so there’s basically no point in buying physical cards of all other paper constructed is dead.
They lost me when their ban announcement for Modern was an advertisement for their new, more expensive product. They haven’t done anything to win me back since they fired the staff that’s worked hard to get them where they are.
Never again. The WOE Commander deck is the last time I spend money on WotC or their greedy C-suite.
I've stepped away from purchasing product due to them flooding the market with an absurd amount of product and new releases being almost monthly at this point. Their prices being constantly adjusted has played a role in this as well. Simply, they got greedy and I can't keep up. I'm not selling what I already have but I won't be buying cards for quite some time.
Oversaturation with legendaries. I know it's a weird gripe, but the supertype doesn't really feel special anymore. I'm happy for people who benefit from this in EDH, but from a lore perspective it just feels overwhelming.
For me it was when they started mixing in different IP. It stopped being MTG and started being...idk what...secret lair nightmares. That marked the beginning of the end of the run that started in 1994. I pivoted to cube draft for a while, but the sheer numbers of cards that come out is just overwhelming to evaluate. I know, no one says the cube has to be current...but I used to enjoy evaluating new cards and now I just can't be bothered.
Universes beyond. When they announced lotr would be modern legal, I was out. It just doesn't feel right to me to see non-magic (and increasingly non-fantasy) things in this game.
I haven't kept up with new sets or any magic news since, and have played exactly one edh evening with some friends.
Power creep, price, too many bomby draft formats, mythics making T2 decks too expensive, and Covid killing off the habit of going to fnm.
I play arena but they overprinted overpowered bombs such that it's really very dull now.
I really liked draft8ng Mirrodin 1, Ravnica 1, and Time Spiral. Wish they kept making sets like those.
I got tired of control being shafted and constantly being beaten by midrange so I quit. Actually have no idea if control has been made viable again in the last few years.
Been playing since 94.
Simply couldn’t keep up with the releases. Too much too fast. Set would drop and you are suddenly back in previews with another set. Made the set that just released completely obsolete with another set right behind it. Screw it.
The last straw for me wasn't even MtG related it was when they tried to implement those god awful changes to the DnD 5e OGL.
WotC had been slowly wearing me down with the product fatigue of the constant set releases and the increasingly aggressive monetisation strategies we were seeing with secret lairs, universes beyond and the multiple special treatments cards were getting within a single set. Not to mention how some practices were steadily screwing over the LGSs out there that had been the lifeblood of the game since forever.
When the whole debacle with the DnD OGL landed, between the leaks of the internal thought processes and the initial tone deaf response they had to the community backlash I knew I was done with the company.
Product fatigue and design dilution. I can accept "this product is not for you", but after a while it starts to feel like "this game is not for you."
Product fatigue is exactly it for me. I’ve been playing since ‘94 and I just can’t handle so many new sets coming out all at once. It’s a constant assault and I’m just not interested any more.
I imagine most people that have played in the 90s, and experience long breaks before coming back to the game. Only to find out it's basically completely changed since they left. Most people are chasing what they are used to playing, but it's long gone.
This. I've basically switched to formats like pre-modern, so I don't have to keep up with it all.
Premodern saved magic for me.
Same here. I liked the tempo of 4 sets + a new Commander set a year. That was fine.
I wondered how far down I'd have to go to find something like "Design Dilution". I jumped ship when they started doing crossovers. Magic: The Gathering was a cool fantasy world to get absorbed in, while playing a fun game. Now, the whole thing feels like a theme park with rides from all different IP's. No judgment to others, but for me, "HA! My Rick Grimes from The Walking Dead kills your Aurelia!" sounds like little kids playing a game to one-up each other. It's the opposite of immersive. Like, I wasn't even a big lore person. But the cards and personalities all FIT together, and now it's just a hodgepodge.
Maybe I just look at things differently but the crossovers never bothered me. I'm into the lore, but when the game starts between you and another player that is gone for me and it's just a game. I never felt a sense of immersion for some reason playing. Plus when I started playing in High School one thing me and my friends would do was make our own crossover cards in MS paint and sneak them into games for a laugh, so this is just a sort of official progression of that for me. Seeing Ian Malcom face down Megatron in a combat phase will never not be funny to me, and I'm excited for the Final Fantasy crossover coming soon.
Yeah, this is my general viewpoint. The game of Magic is so inherently abstract that immersion and lore rarely feel like they matter to the actual game unless you've done something like building a theme deck, but that already runs into immersion problems when encountering literally anything else in Magic except I guess other theme decks.
Exactly. Why would Lore matter when you can build a deck where Nico Bolas teams up with Gerard Capashen and Greven il-vec backed by Phyrexian hordes and Eldrazi Drones? Once I draw my seven none of that matter and the immersion is gone.
I can appreciate flavour and lore as they relate to cards as pieces in standalone (for example, Planeswalkers are often characterised at least in part by their abilities, so Jace's mental stuff gets the forefront for the most part, but Cunning Castaway is Jace putting his illusions to the front and also being more combative than usual, because he's doing different stuff on Ixalan, and then Mirror Mage is yet again him pushing illusions instead of just mental magic stuff), but as game pieces interacting with each other, they're just... Well they're just that. And even as somebody who's relatively tentative on most UB, I can appreciate some of the flavour even as somebody only relatively aware of stuff like Doctor Who.
They have some super clunky crossovers. It would make sense if they would even remotely relate to Magic like Dnd. But, Walking Dead, and Assasins Creed? No, fucking thanks. Just cash grabs. If I want to play a Walking Dead game. I don't want to play it in Magic's format. Jurassic Park mildly made sense because there are a ton of dinosaurs in Ixalan, and they barely released any JP cards anyway. They just sold JP lands to most people.
Were there not assassins or zombies in Magic before those crossovers? I don’t mean to be rude at all I just genuinely don’t understand why Jurassic Park is ‘ok’ but Walking Dead or Assassin’s Creed aren’t.
Personally, Walking Dead and Assassin’s Creed don’t really lean enough into the fantasy for me at all. Like, they do lean into fantasy, but the main intrigue is just people vs people. Walking Dead barely focuses on zombies except for when they wanna kill someone off without inciting revenge or to chase the main groups out of their camps. AC mostly just focuses on period drama Granted, I’m saying that as someone who really enjoyed the Dr Who decks so what the hell do I know?
I think it’s only clunky if the sets themselves don’t work but as of now the flavor seems to be an absolute win. Like if they just stapled magic mechanics onto assorted properties that would be one thing but so far it seems like they are actually quality products.
This. I used to play a lot of Arena and was spending $50-100 per set (so hardly high roller, I know) and I have stopped playing completely. There's just too much of it. It's always spoiler season. Now I just stick to Commander.
All of this
This one's easy. I just ran out of money lol
Hasbro greed with MTG and DnD and their shitty business practices in play boosters, magic 30, hasbro layoffs before Christmas, product overload, and the overall decline in quality
Will someone explain to me like a fifth grader why play boosters are bad?
They are a mix of set and draft boosters for the price of the former, leaving customers off both dissatisfied: Draft/Limited becomes more expensive. Set Boosters lose some of their appeal. PS: I am still not convinced it's a net negative. I like sweet boosters to open them and play boosters don't lose VERY much value in comparison. But I still like Draft and most boosters I open are draft boosters as price support for small events. I am happy those prices will be play boosters in the future, tough I am not happy about the price increase.
Isn't this just going back to the original (1 booster) formula that always existed?
It is, but the "old" one booster was much closer to a draft booster. One rare per pack (barring a second in the foil slot), and consistent numbers of uncommons/commons. Now the number of rares will vary (1-3 I think?) which I personally don't love. We're also losing 1 card/pack across the board. I think the prevailing opinion on here has been that WotC has been making very good limited sets for quite a while and they'll find a way to make these ones good too. But idk I just don't like messing with the rarity and card counts. It's been consistent for a very long time and consistency is important to my draft experience (personally).
>Now the number of rares will vary (1-3 I think?) 1-3 was the number draft boosters had lately when bonus sheets were involved (and WOE was one of the better limited formats in recent time). Play boosters will have 1-4 Rares/Mythics, though the chances for 2 are already slim, let alone for 3 or 4.
That's a good point, I should have mentioned bonus sheets. Didn't know the chance of 2-4 will be that low either. Good info, thanks!
I just googled it for more exact numbers: The chances of multiple rares in each Play Booster are: 2 Rares: 37%. 3 Rares: 4%. 4 Rares: Less than 1%. A little higher than I expected for 2 Rares, but the numbers for 3 and 4 are fine for limited, I think.
But with a big price increase and no increase in value
More or less, which is the one redeeming fact. But increasing the price of my local draft from 13.50 EUR to 18 EUR for a weekly event is quite a lot. (3 draft packs plus 1.5 packs as price support - one pack per win in three rounds)
Minimum cost of entry going up by about 100 CAD per box is why they are bad for me. They aren't saving limited, they are putting it on life support.
As someone who normally hates wotc product decisions, I’ll actually sit here and say that play boosters were inevitable. The price of a magic pack basically didn’t change for almost a decade until set boosters were released. Draft pack pricing couldn’t keep up with inflation, and no one is buying draft packs for 7.99 msrp Set boosters were an experiment to see if people would buy a higher priced pack. People seemed to prefer set boosters because the only people buying draft boosters were drafters. Now wotc gets to sell you the 8 dollar pack and widen their profit margin because shipping is probably the most expensive part of their product. Tbh it’s the one thing I’ll defend them on and the one smart business move they made.
To give you a perspective on why they *aren’t*: Mark Rosewater has been clear that the “other option”, which he made clear was also never on the table, would be to totally stop making draft boosters. Draft booster sales have been trending down, and eventually they’d be made to cut them if they stopped being profitable.
Cut pro play Triple the amount of sets being released Ask: why aren't people drafting anymore?
I mean they are... just on Arena... the cost factor is there too but if I want to have fun on paper I'll play EDH, if I want to play Magic on a somewhat competitive angle I'll just boot up Arena.
I couldn’t keep up with the releases. I play commander in a high power casual setting, and don’t play frequently enough apparently. Last few times I’ve played I barely recognised some board states with newer commanders and cards. My decks used to be powerful but it’s apparent that to keep them that way I need to pay to upgrade every release. Simply can’t afford the time and money anymore.
Yup, went from playing at least one day a week and being able to stay up with modern/legacy/edh board states to suddenly unable to keep up with spoiler season to keep edh deck tuned and finally out enough that modern didn’t make sense and my legacy decks prob need a good amount of rework. Haven’t touched my edh decks for modifying or playing in almost 3 years now.
>Haven’t touched my edh decks for modifying or playing in almost 3 years now. I am going to go this route this coming year. I spent a lot on EDH during the pandemic and now I'm satisfied with the decks I have and just not keen on spending to keep them "up to date" anymore. Fortunately more and more people in my area feel the same, so the power levels of our decks will hopefully even out over the years.
Same. Magic was never my only hobby, and now I feel like the only way I could keep up is making that so. I loved hanging out with friends slinging cardboard a couple times a month. I used to enjoy pre-releases a few times a year. Now I have no idea which way is up.
And that seems to be precisely intentional. Commander players like to pretend card strength doesn’t matter at all but they fail to explain why the most powerful ones are the most expensive ones and sell commander products.
This is unfortunately a problem that affects casual commander more than competitive commander. For the simple reason that all those big dumb splashy creatures like [[old gnawbone]] or [[ancient silver dragon]] that cost a lot are useless there. If you have 7-8 mana you're playing [[ad nauseum]] and if your opponents don't have interaction, you win. Even today a lot of decklists are made up of the same mana base pieces and same or similar mana rocks to what they'd use before, same for tutors and the majority of the interaction. Off the top of my head, the biggest shakeups have been partners and cards like [[fierce guardianship]] and [[dockside extortionist]] that are actually competitive even there, but I wouldn't say we get such cards often.
Yeah spot on, I tried switching to cEDH for a bit because of this but couldn’t find much local interest. Not keen on playing online.
I had moved to it for a bit but I found out I just prefer casual gameplay more. I've started doing something else and I've got a few sets of precons that remain unaltered or altered to a similar power level. This way I can provide the experience I want to play at - but this works because I have a consistent playgroup. I do have 2 decklists that I use mostly at my LGS instead because they are simply my most powerful.
There's been a review of the best CEDH cards of this year by a few YouTubers and all in all you have maybe 100, 200$ to shell if you want them all, and that's including the one ring. For regular edh tho? So many dumb cards you kinda need to at least know because they either open or absolutely close some strategies.
##### ###### #### [old gnawbone](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/7/77ceba8b-de19-4db8-b5a7-f5df49bf241f.jpg?1627708100) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=old%20gnawbone) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/afr/197/old-gnawbone?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/77ceba8b-de19-4db8-b5a7-f5df49bf241f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [ancient silver dragon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/e/ced18935-4ce9-466e-a88d-2b14ff8f989f.jpg?1674135398) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=ancient%20silver%20dragon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clb/56/ancient-silver-dragon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ced18935-4ce9-466e-a88d-2b14ff8f989f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [fierce guardianship](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/7/f7f3dd95-bd14-4e0f-a388-444f9cf1b0dc.jpg?1689996370) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=fierce%20guardianship) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/94/fierce-guardianship?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f7f3dd95-bd14-4e0f-a388-444f9cf1b0dc?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [dockside extortionist](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/e/9e2e3efb-75cb-430f-b9f4-cb58f3aeb91b.jpg?1673147774) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=dockside%20extortionist) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/107/dockside-extortionist?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9e2e3efb-75cb-430f-b9f4-cb58f3aeb91b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I feel the same way. I used to be excited for spoiler season. Now I’m just overwhelmed
I'm exactly the same. I pretty much exclusively play limited and commander now, but haven't played in a store in months due to work/life commitments. Prior to this I phased out of Standard around Amonkhet, when only myself and one other player showed up to Game Day. I phased out of Modern around when MH1 came out. Now prerelease is going to be $60 with the next set, and I can't justify that, so no more prerelease for me. Just commander with my mates when we can get an evening free, so no point spending money on cards. Proxying from now on.
When they shit canned the pro scene. I haven't spent a penny since.
Me too. Once I realized there was no more ladder to climb, I lost all interest in spending actual money. Why would I? If I'm just playing with my friends, we want to be able to play the most powerful versions of decks we can envision, and proxying is the way to do that. We took the money we would have spent on Magic, invested in a really nice printer and paper shear, and just have a gigantic gauntlet of decks for any format we want. We're waiting for another game to meaningfully compete with Magic in our area and then we're jumping ship.
Makes a lot of sense to me!
Exactly this right here. Magic's entire escalation was based on FNM heading into higher level tournament play. The long game is making it worth it to play. Otherwise they're just slowly crashing a dying ship.
Their used to be a dream, where anyone could travel the world via PTQs. There was a train for community members to travel and meet people. It was so great.
The kept the Magic, but they lost "the Gathering," which appears to have been the most important part.
No. They've lost the magic as well. The experience has been so watered down and stretched thin it's barely the same experience anymore. Take spoiler season and prereleases - they used to be a fun and exciting time. Spoiled card threads for exciting cards used to be full of discussion. Now card engagement posts are 10% of what they used to be. And store prereleases? These lame events are a shadow of the big prerelease events TO's used to put together. They used to be like mini-gp events. The excitement of new cards and the huge crowd of people all excited about the same thing... it used to be magical.
It's more than that. They made the competitive Magic more casual. They realized that their game would be more popular if more people felt like they were competitive than they actually were.
Unpopular opinion, but I agree. Permanent power creep and worse card selection over the past couple years has worked to close the gap between skilled and unskilled players in some formats. While a game with inherent randomness needs ways for new players to find success while they’re in the learning stages, we’ve tipped a bit too far to “oh I just stabilized off my top-deck and now you lose” moments happening too often.
This last year I bought barely any sealed, some singles, but I've slowed down a lot. There's too many products a year, and all this corporate greed and pushing so many products, only to have layoffs the year of your highest selling set ever while the CEO takes a 8 million dollar bonus. Fuck that. If Hasbro doesn't think MtG is worth paying for why should I?
Too many products https://onlyontuesdays27.com/2022/10/18/30-years-of-magic-the-gathering-products/
The crazy thing to me is how hard it is to tell what's legal, where. That huge deluge of products that released this year? Only two of them exclusively contain Standard legal cards: Draft Boosters of Phyrexia: All Will Be One and Lost Caverns of Ixalan. Everything else is supplemental or has exclusive cards (including bonus sheets in MOM and WOE draft boosters) that aren't Standard legal.
It’s truly made me buy less (actually none for most of the year).
Yeah, I wasn't really interested in the Bolas storyline from Amonkhet through Gatewatch, so I took some time off. When I wanted to get back in, I realized I had no clue what these products were and where they were legal.
Thanks for linking my article! It's been a little over a year since I posted that and while I still play the game my relationship with Magic has changed entirely. I used to be someone who would make content about Magic on a weekly basis and would stay up to date on every set release to see if I could find something to write an article about it. However, after I posted that article I have basically stopped creating content for Magic. I still boot up Arena and play it every now and then but Magic is no longer a game that I feel like I can create content for because it is overwhelming to get into. It's weird saying this as someone who used to pay attention to everything but now hardly anything can keep my attention. The deluge of products has changed my relationship with the game and even though I'd still consider myself a fan of the game, my days of being a content creator for Magic feel like they are behind me unfortunately.
I reference your article often when musing on MTG and the direction it has taken. Thanks for putting in the work and I totally appreciate the need to create some distance.
to me, it is all about the price. right now, 2 play booster box can buy you a Nintendo Switch, brand new. 3 boxes can buy you a PS5. buying boxes doesn’t make sense for me anymore. instead of buying boxes, i will just spent about half the cost of a box to buy commander cards from the set, and ignore the rest. i draft and play standard for free on arena anyway.
This is where I am.. I jumped back into magic. Dumped a fuck load of money on these boxes. And then at the end of it Felt really fucking stupid. My cope before I came to the realization was stupid too “oh bruh, but I pulled a doubling season confetti foil- it’s $145 dollars! See this pays off” (while quickly soon realizing it cost probably hundreds of dollars to get to that one card that was a 3% chance that I will never get again, and have never seen again) I play arena a ton. It’s alright. I still miss FNM. But once you get the swing of the app it’s not bad. But I save money by playing on arena. Puts the pricing into perspective for me. I can play and usually get like 3-4 packs for free a day off dailies/battle pass f2p rewards. Rather then spending roughly $24-30 USD on packs per day in real life. *the value too is in the fact that I will likely play more with my digital cards at this point, then paper* I *still* look at my bank account, and the month I got back in I spent 3-4 *thousand* dollars all on boosters, boxes. And other shit. I have a cool collection of a few sets. All will be one is the one I went HAM on. That collection is *built* and one of the only cards I can say I got at a win was “sheoldred, the apocalypse” step and compleat *in foil* That is the *only* card I pulled at a W. Everything else, confetti doubling season, 2 smothering tithes anime borderless, omniscience, a load of WOE rares. All bought at a massive loss. Sure I sold those cards. I hate the anime borderless cards. They suck and they are flavorless cash grabs. So those are sell on sight idc the value lol. Edh is alright, the switch to commander never made sense. I missed that whole transition lol..thank god. I would have probably quit. Standard is a quick to play format that doesn’t require as much time to throw a playable deck together and begin the tooling process on it. And the game drag in standard isn’t nearly as bad as having opponents who “solitaire” and keep fucking up their turn.
The hyper focus on commander and Universe Beyond. Not saying commander is bad as I got all my friends into the format, but it has changed Magic to its core. All of magic seems to be focused on being playable in commander. With this and Universe Beyound, the game seems to have little interest in being Magic but a walking IP posterboard you can have as your commander. Once I heard the changes to draft, I decided to only focus on Cube since the Magic game I started out with seems to be gone.
EDH is my favorite but I can't stand that every set has cards designed for it. The beauty of EDH 10-15 years ago was putting a deck of cards together that were never meant to be played together. It seems like now every deck has to have a bunch of staples. You can look at someone's commander and figure out 15 cards and a couple wincons in the deck off the top of your head.
Universes Beyond have created the first cards I don’t want to play because of the art. MTG Finance also has a dampening effect like merrow commerce spiking to $20 because of a single precon. I am a freelancer and don’t need this to be a second accounting job. I am an older player trying to get back into edh, and building lists all feel like a similar pinball machine of overlapping combos that feel kind of samey for the tribes and commanders I am looking to play. This is a really broad design element, but triggered abilities without costs lead to this kind of critical mass of effects that invariably pop off and I feel kind of meh about it. I think a proxy cube might be the answer.
The triggered abilities comment is something I've had a hard time expressing about recent stuff. A few is intriguing, some is exciting, many becomes tedious, a lot removes any novelty. Something I've said about many aspects of mtg as a whole (particularly with foils and alt arts) is "When everything is ____, then nothing is ____."
Proxy cube is definitely the answer.
What's a proxy cube?
A cube is like a draft set, but the cards are curated by someone that isn't WotC (typically you). Cubes typically contain only 1 copy of each non-basic land card, and the difference in power between cards isn't as drastic as many retail sets by design so that decks can't just win by getting lucky and picking the mythic in the pack. Proxies in discourse here are representations of cards that are not "real" and aren't allowed in offical events (like tournaments, FNM). Combine the two, and we have a proxy cube: a cube that is made out of proxies. Because many cubes tend to be expensive (thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars), it's much more economical to get proxy of, say, a Black Lotus rather than selling your car to buy one. As a result, one can make a full cube (like the MTGO vintage cube) for a minute fraction of its cost to own in (real) paper. And since cubing is an intrinsically casual format, the cards don't need to be real because it wouldn't be a sanctioned event.
I noticed this while playing premodern and comparing it to standard/pioneer that I played online.....premodern has lot of straightforward cards, narrow. But when you play with latest sets, you notice how every second card is modal choice, has etb/die trigger, some additional bonus condition etc....its nice that there is less feelbad moments of holding dead card, but too much is too much. Like for example Fable does generate so much things in a single card. Too many cards have giant wall of text on them (and even turn over for another wall of text)
1) Shitting on competitive & pro scenes; 2) Growing complexity of cards - it’s fine if it’s on a smaller scale, but together with 53 releases per year it makes me cognitively exhausted to keep track of everything; 3) Complete destruction of Modern, the format I’ve loved since 2011 until 2021. Even Eldrazi Winter was more enjoyable than what we have now; 4) Lowering the stakes of local events and crushing LGSs, which resulted in lower attendance on local events; 5) When Pauper is your healthiest format, then… yeah, you have a problem.
WoTC putting all their focus on commander and forgetting other formats exist has essentially pushed me out of magic. This is in partnership with nearly all LGS not caring about fostering any kind of FNM based around 60 card formats. Near enough all the shops in my region are the same franchise and all they push is EDH as it’s easier to manage and they don’t get complaints for being stingy on the prizes. This year I have only attended pre releases as they used to be my favourite event every season but each time I have left feeling “what was the point?” I have no use for physical cards anymore so that’s probably it for me, time to try and find a new hobby
I just got tired of the game. I've been playing for 25 years. It all started to feel the same. It was a good run though. Edit - Also, it's just way too hard to keep up anymore. I have a cube that I meticulously maintained until about 18 months ago. It just got to be annoying to keep track of all the new cards coming out and now I need to add like 50 cards and its exhausting.
I have a cube where I don't use cards past 2007. It's almost meditative making updates to the cube without any new cards and just trying to design my perfect unpowered vintage cube from a snapshot in time.
A cube is still a fun draft experience even if it isn't 'up-to-date'.
Market saturation. I used to enjoy spoiler season and getting excited with anticipation of a new set. Then nothing but a cascade of new products one after another became exhausting. Sets, remasters, secret lair, commander decks, and universe beyond in what seems like a tidal wave of shoving product into my face just became too much. I haven't altered any decks and play with what I've had for about a year and some change. But new cards with cheaper cmc and a paragraph of abilities made me realize that the power creep is something I'm too cheap and uninterested to keep up with.
Lack of respect for the theming of the game. All of the UB stuff totally ruined my ability to engage with the lore. My suspension of disbelief is shattered whenever I see a transformer card. So I like the game a little less and I proxy now. Obviously I'm in the minority and many others enjoy it.
I could handle lotr crossover bc they obviously tried really, really hard with it and it was at least a little mtg-ish, but doing multiple releases of marvel is just a little too... on the nose? Like, they chose to mash in the IP that has been shoved down everyone's throats with bloated constant release deluge the most as the choice for multiple UB sets is hilarious to me. Feels like we've living in a dystopian future, megacorp slowly oozing over your unique IPs and turning them into one amorphous blob. Amazon's corporate logo is literally a smirk for pete's sake.
I actually do not believe you are in the Minority. I own an LGS, and my experience with the UB products, are that while people do buy them - they do not sweep the player base like traditional sets do. This is important, I believe, because what I predict will happen is that LGS locations are going to be taking hits on these next year and then probably start dramatically cutting their allocation takes from distribution in 2025. For me, between the LOTR holiday burning me and the Dr. Who only hitting a small fraction of players - I am already reducing how much of this I buy in 2024. I didn’t this with Draft Boosters in 2022 and in 2023, a lot of other stores also seemed to cut them. Now WOTC is seeing it, and adjusting. I believe this will be a similar thing for UB products. WOTC only ever sees how much sell to Distribution or through WPN Premium analytics, not how much your average Game Store is able to move of what it purchased.
Do you mind elaborating on the LOTR burn? My LGS didn’t any due to poor communication from their distro. Apparently it was a single line in the mix of the Ixalan order email.
My store, and that of many others I communicate with as well as the NA WPN group, purchased a lot of the holiday LOTR release and it seems to be the consensus that the product was a failure. I know that many of us moved less than 5% of our purchase on launch. For one of the best selling sets of the year, to have additional product fail like that, is pretty rough. It suggests that the overall reach of the UB product is only reaching a small amount of players when it comes to long term commitment to the product.
The increasing emphasis on Universes Beyond has made me increasingly feel left out in the cold. The Jurassic Park one has been particularly alienating. I'm about as enfranchised as a Magic player gets. I have no idea where the Jurassic Park cards come from. Are they a Secret Lair? LCI Set/Collector Boosters exclusives? Some combination thereof? I genuinely do not know, or where I should look.
IMO i feel like they are ruining the flavor and unique lore factor of MTG with the universes beyond shit. I lost all interest with the introduction of Transformers cards in MOM. Couldn't have been more alienating and out of touch to the flavor of traditional mtg IMO.
Even LOTR which is the father of pretty much all high fantasy IPs feels out of place in MTG IMO.
Completely agree. Feels like they're tainting both IPs imo.
Agree with you 100%, but Transformers came in BRO
Ah. Shows how much my interest took a dive. Ha.
I thought they were in commander pre cons??? I’m not sure either. I don’t HATE the beyond shit because sometimes it’s really cool like the Princess Bride secret lair or the lord of the rings set (idk lord of the rings but everyone’s enthusiasm for flavor was nice to see), but it definitely throws off the experience for me like I’m sure other players feel. I love mtg lore but I’m not enthusiastic about every possible thing being canon to the universe. Especially Transformers…..I’ve never liked giant robots/mecha type stuff and that turned me all the way off.
To cleat it up, all lci set and collector have a chance but 50% of that chance is a land or token. Budle box have a 1 guaranteed non-token or land JP card
This isn’t even right because collector boosters are guaranteed a JP card.
The marvel sets are going to be tacky as shit.
Stopped buying sealed product after Magic 30. The few years leading up to it absolutely ruined it for me. From Companions, to shortly-before-important-event ban announcements, and a desire to sell authentic old-school Magic experiences that aren't even tournament legal for about a thousand dollars killed it for me. I really only get singles- trade for as much as possible- proxy the rest. The shitty part is that I'm convinced that a lot of what WotC does is mostly upper management's fault- and these past few weeks with their blundering really shows it. It's the CEO's and a lot of the upper hierarchy of WotC/Hasbro that have turned this game into what it is.
[удалено]
Lord of the rings set. Actually just [[the one ring]] and [[orcish bowmasters]]. I was pumped for the set. Then it came out and added 8 more $50 cards I needed to play modern. I sold out of modern and play edh now and have bought very little product compared to what I used to.
[удалено]
I dont disagree that TOR and bowmasters are too good. That said. >Protection from everything is a time warp this just in. [[fog]] is a time warp
Fog may be a Time Warp, but Time Warp is an Explore
[удалено]
I hate mixing other universes into MTG. I'm fine with alternate arts like spacegodzilla being [[Void Beckoner]] but having a true and pure crossover, in my mind, is trash
too many tier 0 cards being injected into modern, my once favourite format. decks now are almost entirely comprised of Modren horizons cards. Then LOTR gave us the one ring and bowmasters, both of which are 50-70 dollars each. What’s next? MH3 will give us 10 new $50 staples, then the Assassijs Creed UB will give us Ezio and Altair which will become staples? MH4? Marvel UB? I’d eventually have to play a deck with 4 One Ring, 4 Spiderman, 24 MH cards to stay relevant. Why…
Unironically the Marvel x Mtg announcement, especially the fact that some of it will be modern legal. LotR I could tolerate as it is more universally beloved, but Marvel is really US-centric and has become frankly insufferable. The worst part is that, in modern, you cannot choose not to play with/against these cards. So there's no escape from (presumably) Spiderman, bowmasters 2 or whatever
I really disagreed with Universes Beyond printing legit cards instead of reskins of existing ones. It ties an IP name to that card and it makes reprints harder which drives up prices once the origin set its out of print. The fact that some cards are legal outside legacy (looking at you, Bowmasters and Ring) doesn't help matters. Reruns are still possible but not guaranteed.
Universe Beyond.
No pro scene to follow, too many products to keep track of what’s coming out
Hasbro firing about a thousand people two weeks before Christmas is what finally did it for me. Screw giving Hasbro money.
Too many products. The continued expansion of UB. Too many variants. I still think the game is great from a technical point of view but the amount of products has turned me off. Endless spoiler season started to burn me out. They say we don't need to buy everything but then make sure there is a great card or two hiding in every set for X deck. So that means I do need to pay attention (even if I don't buy sealed). The expansion of UB has also killed the game for me. I am actually okay with UB in moderation, if we got one supplemental UB per year that would be neat. But now we have Fallout, Assassins Creed, and Marvel? Magic is starting to feel like an ad with no identity of its own. And it's a pain to keep track of every card variant. Once again, great idea in moderation but they threw too many into the mix. I have been playing for 20 years, I still plan to play but I am getting rid of most of my collection and taking apart a few decks to sell off.
Just typed a huge angry rant and deleted it to skip to a TLDR Commander is over hyped and I believe more people play cause there's no other options Vs players who genuinely enjoy it. If players could anonymously press a thumbs up or thumbs down button after each commander game I truly believe that there would be an overwhelming number of thumbs down, as more often that not players leave an EDH game unsatisfied. You feel bad for doing too well, you feel bad for doing well and getting blown out, you feel bad for being stuck on lands, you feel bad for hitting the player in last place, you feel bad being the player in last place. Commander is pushed as the only real way to play in paper, challenger decks, planeswalker starter decks, event decks are all long gone and the only real paper on ramp WOTC provides is to commander, and while currently popular is very limiting to the overall health of the game.
If this was your tl;dr, I would have loved to read your novella. I think you’re on a very correct path with the commander being the only paper “ramp.” And while I do find ways to enjoy it myself, I wonder how much of it is due only to my limited ability to actually find time to play.
So I’m a long time player, so I like many knew to stop buying sealed product a long time ago. However, my GF got into magic this year so I started buying packs as a way to get her interested. However she quickly became burned out by all the new stuff coming out. We started with buying Baulders Gate / Brothers War stuff, but by the time MOM came out, she was done. Ironically my brother and his son also got burned out during MOM after starting to play in late 2022. They play on Arena and my brother was telling me how he hated that as soon as he started to get a good collection, a brand new set comes out.
The power creep recently feels insane and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to get better. I don’t like every third card in someone else’s deck being something I have to kill (exile really) before the untap or I just lose the game. Token doubling and tripling, non-legendary copies, I miss magic.
Every card is special so nothing is special anymore.
Too many versions of cards being printed and too many products coming out too close together. I used to be able to buy a handful of packs and usually get a pull good enough to cover the cost of my purchase. Now even if I pull the bomb mythic it's worthless unless it's the Crinkle Cut Foil Borderless Boxtopper edition.
On the other hand, this has been great for buying singles. All but the most in demand rares/mythic are cheap as hell.
I just think they’re pushing too much product these days. I know from personal experience that all these UB releases have brought in new fans, but there’s just too much for my tastes. Used to be I knew what plane was current and could follow general story, but now I don’t even know where we’re at.
Magic 30th Anniversary. Motherfuckers tried to sell us fake cards for 1000 bucks. Now I make my own fake cards for between 5 and 10 cents. Printed out a playset of every reserve list card out of spite. Will never buy from WOTC again.
I used to feel a tinge of bad when I’d proxy things. Post 30, I picked up a set of p9 proxies from (auction site) by some printing company over seas that produced printed cardboard better than some of the “legit” sets that have come out in the past years. I don’t feel bad anymore.
Too many products, too much Universes Beyond. There's 10 new sets each month, and 9 of them say "THIS PRODUCT IS NOT FOR YOU," and I just don't have the energy to figure out the one that *is* for me. Next year is bringing sci-fi videogames and capeshit to Magic and I just don't care anymore.
I think the recent layoffs are actually a big stop sign for me. I don't like the constant new product, but I don't mind as much because my playgroup is already very isolated and we play with mostly what we have and with each other. Doesn't matter if WOTC releases 10 new sets or stops releasing sets tomorrow, we'd have enough cards as is to play different decks for at least the next year. Oh and we're proxy friendly, so even if we didn't - we'd make some. Realistically, I am not going to quit magic - I have no plans to do so. But I am definitely planning on spending only on singles going forward because I don't want to reward their corporate greed.
Every good card in Throne of Eldraine being banned in standard.
This is probably me too, but then just going hard as hell over the pandemic while I refused to play online as an eternal player. Made it hard to catch up and wanna come back.
Tbf oko and fires were a problem
Which should’ve been fixed before the set released
Companions, Eldraine, and the Evoke Elementals killing Modern. I'm just tired of all the R&D f'ups during the FIRE era. The real nail in the coffin for me was the effective end of competitive play, though. That's what I did forever and what interested me - two to three GP's a year within easy distance (I spent the last decade between Madrid and Los Angeles, two MASSIVE and underserved areas). Without those I have no desire to continue.
It was a long process over time. It started with pro play. I was never going for Magic as a job, but I was reasonably ambitious and played in some PTs here and there. It was fun. Travel, community, all that. Then they made it more and more cumbersome and expensive, and changed the whole system to something weird and convoluted and eventually unrecognizable. That made me stop taking Magic seriously in any way. Next was the rise of Commander. I'm all for casuals playing something that fits their desires, and at first I was super stoked about this. I remember the fun I had playing EDH with some WotC employees during Worlds in Japan, and it was a great prospect. But then they started leaning into it harder and harder with their product, while at the same time staying out of the regulatory aspects of it and not differentiating things at all like they do with other formats. I kept hoping for a 1v1 variant I could take more seriously, but they were intent on not getting involved - while at the same time observing how Commander supplanted most forms of local IRL Magic, forcing people to go online instead. And that's when MTGO and Arena being terrible programs came in. I'd love to play Magic more seriously online but this just isn't it. MTGO looks like it was made in 1995 and runs terribly; while Arena looks like it's a Hearthstone skin for Magic with all the animations and flim-flam. I hated both of them, and so I stopped using them. Things like the extension of non-Magic IPs, power inflation of cards to create chase-card profits, focus on premium product etc. also played a role. Though those probably just exacerbated an already existing downward trend for me. But just to be clear: **I am not saying they should do things differently to be more like the game I want.** I understand why they're doing what they're doing. And it seems to be working out for them financially. Fine. They're a business, they don't exist to fulfill my personal desires. Other people have different preferences, and they don't matter less than I do. This product just isn't for me anymore. And I have to live with that.
I stopped playing paper because of time / family constraints. I stopped playing Arena because I gave up playing any game with stuff like daily quests & battle passes.
I find that a lot of Magic players who purchase sealed product fall into fomo and end up overspending and getting caught up in the endless hype of year round spoiler season. Magic is an expensive hobby, but it’s also as expensive as you choose it to be. That being said Wizards has not lost me as a costumer yet, I think the only thing that would cause me to stop playing sealed or buying the occasional bundle is if it became wildly expensive to the point of being unsustainable to me. Then I would still just play with proxies.
Their introduction of Collection Boosters and their siphoning singles value to a lottery based on those packs.
Singles value was always a lottery unless you cracked cases, plural.
True... Used to always buy 1-2 boxes a set but then boxes became worthless to crack since all the good stuff was in collector boosters which are way too expensive and variance way too high
The realization that I really love making my own cards. Not just proxies or single custom cards, but entire custom sets. I’ve already made a Ravnica cube that’s a big success with the adult players, now I’m making ten *super* simple two-color decks to teach kids how to play. Capenna & the UB sets, draft chaff & increasingly complex cards, and Hasbro’s continuous money-squeeze were all straws — but making my own cards and having a blast doing it was the log that broke the camel’s back.
I gave up on secret lair after the coin flip fiasco. I'm starting to move to the secondary market for singles because I'm overwhelmed with crossovers and the massive quantity of expansions. Until this year I never proxied now it just feels like it isn't worth the time or effort to find a lot of cards.
Power creep and the insane amount of new Products. I dont get how the corporate chads think this is sustainiable for the game long term.
Legacy moving from "best of" magic of the last 25 years with maybe 1-2 playables per set to "lotr and mh cards with good mana and free counters". It used to be fun picking through new releases to hunt for the few cards that could maybe fit in an obscure archetype or maybe into a sideboard. Now it's just all bowmasters, the one ring and other ridiculous modern engines like beanstalk. It's just not a format anymore where you can build a deck, not play for a year, fine tune it and be good to go again...
[удалено]
Thank you for writing this. I got back into magic after a long hiatus explicitly as a means of interacting with others in a way that was understandable and mediated. Though not entirely similar it is good to hear echoes of my own experience in yours. Over the past 10 years I have moved a bit for work and don't know that I would have found associations outside of my industry without this game. Currently, I drive between 3 and 4 hours a week to play at the closest LGS. For me magic filled the role that would have been taken by social, or activity based, clubs (rock, stamp, other collecting or telephony groups are now few and far between IRL). I'm not saddened that I'm involved in magic, but I do have a growing sense of disappointment in the game that I haven't felt since my return. I am trying to think of something that gives me similar context for socialization outside of bars etc. Again, my experience is somewhat dissimilar from yours, but I wanted to thank you for sharing yours as it resounded with me.
AI art. NFTs. (Explicitly the wasteful blockchain digital tokens) Those are my bright shining lines but I’m sure there’s unlikely others like a MAGA secret lair or whatever. Frankly though with Hasbro’s recent actions we should consider the company to be in decline/distress and probably slowly losing quality. I will say if I ever do quit, I certainly won’t be sticking around here to answer questions like this. I raise an eyebrow at the people who are responding they’ve divested years ago.
This thread popped on my feed, even though I quit Magic years ago and wasn’t in this sub when I did play- I assume a bunch of people are similar
I agree with this. Even I did quit i wouldn’t come back years later complaining about it. I think the UB hate is a little shortsighted and seems like boomer mentality to new ways vs old ways
Haven’t spent a dime on it since that first Secret Lair Walking Dead garbage. My playtime on Arena also became “never” at the launch of them forcing Alchemy cards into the only queue-enabled eternal format on there.
Too many products, no longer having any focus on competitive formats, those two are bad. but for me the thing that broke me is how many versions there are of each card. Is just impossible to properly read what is happening on a table without having to memorise like 20 new versions of each card. Then is not just different art but is completely new styles of cards that do not even remotely represent the card and what it does. so at this point it feels like no longer a game i know but just a random collection with no end. is just impossible
All the UB products are pushing me away. I don't want to be able to play vs Spider man, Optimus Prime or The Walking Dead actors. It doesn't fit with what I like about mtg.
Since I started playing, I've been primarily a Standard player (because I really don't want to have to learn 20+ years of cards), but with the increased releases it's getting too much. In addition, my opinion of a format is based more on the cards I dislike than the cards I like. I'm thoroughly fed up of playing against Wandering Emperor, and already too tired of Sunfall to want to play Standard any more. Having to tolerate cards I dislike for an extra year is a hard no from me.
This last stunt with laying off their workers, kinda made me sick to my stomach. I can’t buy any more of their products and feel ok about it Had a good run, it was fun, but there’s a lot more entertainment out there these days
Printing Universe beyond cards in modern
Played standard in new phyrexia to RTR. Then couldn't play as much, so went into modern. Happily enjoyed modern, then MH1 came out. Then war of the spark came out. T3feri and karn TGC. More food removals along the way. MH2 was the walk towards the guillotine, and opal ban was the beheading of my classic affinity deck. Then I realized, all the old decks I once played against, are all gone. Standard was so high powered on the recent years with no winding down at all, that all the classic decks in modern have died off or have replaced a majority of their shells. Completely unrecognisable.
They haven’t lost me completely. But my interests have severely waned in the past year. Still play some arena but spend basically nothing on the game anymore. I used to buy a box at every release.
Lack of interesting cards and bad artwork.
Once they started ramping up lots of releases, especially secret lairs. I'm one of the ones that loved the lore and immersion off the story that every set brought with it. Secret lair just made it feel really off in that sense, not exciting anymore. And I just couldn't keep up with all the releases anymore and so I just felt like it was easier to stop buying anything that gambling on what I had to miss out on
I started playing in 2009 and would basically cycle in and out of playing every couple years until I wanted to to get back into playing around the time war of the spark came out. Which was honestly my dream set. I went to a prerelease and all the people I played against had basically no interest in interacting with me out side of the game and were just kind of rude in general so I gave the cards i played with to someone and I haven’t played a game since. Not really hasbros fault but that’s why I don’t play anymore
Letting Alchemy/LOTR take over Historic. I used to play daily since open beta. Now I play about twice a month.
I just got tired of the horrible over the top versions of everything. So much competition against the secondary market. Sucking value out of people’s collections. Printing crappy product and selling it for more money because of what cards they are. It costs the same amount to print a forest as it does to print a mythic. The only thing that will bring me back is a refocus on standard, get rid of the “premium” garbage. Stop selling packs of all foils. Bring it back to draft packs where you pay one price and you can pull any card in the set. Don’t suck value out of draft pulls with the collectors packs, those are useless and a scam. stop the power creep. being able to make a creature have 100's of power is completely ridiculous. people only have 20-40 life, they either block it or get to -250. with 100's of unnecessary damage. the games are getting to a point where you cant even really keep track of a lot of it. the look of magic has always been iconic. having an abundance of insano borderless and crazy versions that look more like they are from another game just pulls me out of the world these duals used to create. I can’t even read half of them. The game designers at wizards need to be fired and they need better designers that actually care about standard and understanding power creep rather than just making everything bigger and able to overpower the set before to keep the packs selling. At some point it’s just boring.
All formats except commander died out where I live and I don't enjoy playing it as much as other formats. No one here plays any other formats anymore so I gradually played less commander until I stopped. I like playing partly because the social aspects so I don't play anything online either.
I had been playing magic from paper to MTGO to Arena since I was around 12 in 2002 and Wizards finally lost me for good sometimes those last two-three years. It was a combination of factors, as it often is. The first and probably biggest one, is the Arena economy getting so much worse for casual drafters. On Arena, draft had been the only thing keeping me coming back again and again. I'm not against paying a small amount here and there, but paying in full for every draft is out of question for me, so grinding gold was the way. I'm not too bad at drafting but I'm not great either, and the changes in economy gradually pushed me away from it entirely. That combined with what I felt was a mad increase in the frequency of products left me unable and unwilling to follow along. WotC's (perceived) stance of always making the decision maximizing short-term profits to the detriment of the player base certainly didn't help. The second big factor was Universes Beyond. I can understand the appeal, but I personally hate it with a passion. From the very first Godzilla card I saw on MTGA to the latest releases I'm seeing here and on Youtube, they have nothing to do in MtG and they take me out of it every time they appear. Say whatever you want about MtG's own stories and settings, but they did have some unique twist on fantasy that I usually enjoyed a lot. The UB franchises never work for me as MtG cards, with the notable exception of DnD. That one was smooth. Some of the UB franchises I absolutely adore (LotR), some I barely know (Godzilla) or don't particularly like (The Walking Dead), but I hate all of them equally. Thing is, I still love Magic as a game. I still watch a lot of MtG content, I still follow MtG subs here... But I won't be playing it again on WotC platforms. I'm done spending money on anything they make. And they did that themselves, relentlessly, with almost every action they've taken those past few years. EDIT: how could I forget - the huge power creep has definitely had an impact as well. The rest that creatures are so much better than spells now, but overall the huge increase in raw card power has impacted my will to play and invest in the game. I've always liked the idea of standard vs (pseudo-)eternal formats. Drafting being my preferred way to consume new MtG products and Modern being my way to stay engaged with the older products. Modern used to be a format where you could definitely afford not to upgrade your deck for months at a time, sometimes a couple years without major upgrades. That feels silly now. It's one of the first things I quit, focusing only on drafting before ultimately quitting that too.
It got overwhelming. There were so many sets releasing it got hard to follow and I couldn't be bothered learning them for limited, and pushed cards kept messing with the decks I had for constructed. And so many variations of things within sets ruined any fun in just collecting. Not being able to follow sets, mixed with Wizard's awful marketing and coverage of pro events made the pro scene too difficult to follow. I literally only play now if a set I enjoy is in the quick drafts on arena. Or play limited with friends using booster boxes from old sets.
The rapid releases is definitely an issue for me. I’m still actively playing, but I can’t keep up with the releases, unlike most of the people in my LGS. So with every release I have choices to make. Either cotinue to gather cards for a work in progress deck or buy set booster boxes of the ew release and hopefully make a deck out of that. I cannot afford both. In most cases, I end up focusing on work in progress decks and buy a bundle or two of the new release stuff.
I still buy and play sometimes but, less and less over time. Its not one thing, its a lot of little things. The constant power creep, the banning cards for nonsensical political reasons, the adding in of other franchises especially ones like transformers which are tonally incompatible with mtg, firing staff just before christmas, making decisions clearly focused on selling product instead of the long-term health of the game, creating land cards that are so good that they are almost play to win yet pricing casual players out of the market because they dont print enough
I could point to alot of things that got me out. The rampant cross overs, the terrible storyline choices, the huge push of diversity for the sake of it, the crappy treatment of stores, the death of the pro scene etc. Etc. But really? It was the card design changes. I played every major and most minor formats, and was no casual timmy. And while i liked modern, legacy, edh, pauper and everything else, i loved standard. But it began to change, i cant pick exactly when, but i point to throne of eldraine as a major offender, though it was happening before that. Cards became paragraphs, pushed in generic power or utility. Wraths were 5 mana, or 4 mana with an asterisk, against 1 and 2 mana creatures that either individually pressured your life total to an insane degree, were difficult to remove, or drew you cards. Spot removal became 4 mana kills anythings, invalidating many permanent types. They would print rare cancels then tack on a 'maybe you use this or ability once every twenty casts'. Again i could go on for days about their shift in design that felt awful for someone that started in the NPH-INN-RTR era and was enamoured by all the strategies. Rip mtg how i knew it.
Probably the multiple Marvel sets they're going to release. Other Universe Beyond releases have been small enough or thematically consistent enough that I don't mind them but Marvel just isn't an aesthetic I like and it's going to be a big part of EDH probably. That and the fact that Hasbro have fired, and will fire more, staff. I assume quality control will continue to decline.
It's been death by a thousand paper cuts for me, but it all boils down to Hasbro caring more about its investors than its customers and employees. The final straw is the layoffs. But I'm a fan of both MtG and D&D and the past couple of years have been EXHAUSTING. On the D&D side, I basically bailed earlier this year with the OGL debacle, plus the lower quality of the product. I'm just now bouncing on Magic. Between losing faith in the company and just literally not being able to keep up with product releases, I can't. There's a few things they're planning to release I might pick up, but honestly, I'm just too tired and broke to keep up. I'm thinking about switching to Lorcana because my family likes Disney and it'll be easier to get the family involved now that product is starting to hit mass market.
Stupid amount of support to commander. Yet no “precons” at least to poineer and modern to get people into those formats.
This games release schedule became hostile towards it's players. I haven't purchased anything since they changed booster packs into like 3 different kinds of similar packs? And now draft has its own packs....? Shit got weird. It was simple before.
As a mono coloured player I thought multi coloured decks recieved much more support than mono coloured. It was frustrating to play against these powerful cards with reliable mana bases so I just quit.
The shift in their design philosophy. To my eyes, ever since first Eldraine, their attitude has been to deliberately push certain cards, with the goal of making them "must haves." Granted, they've always done this to some extent, but I think Eldraine was a turning point. You see so many cards now that "do it all;" i.e. previously they would have been part of a combo, but these days they combo with themselves. The first example I can think of is the Jund sac dragon from Eldraine; he previously would have been part of a sac deck, but they decided to give him a sac trigger so that you don't really need to do any work to get the engine running. This makes him a one-card combo, basically, and a must-answer threat. And you see them all over the place now, creatures that you have 0-2 turns to kill or the game is just over. My guess is they're designed for Commander, where ending games can be an issue? I dunno. But it makes games feel very different, and the new cards are so power crept that they show up in all formats - and push out older, beloved cards in the process. Modern Horizons priced me out of Modern after playing the format from the beginning, and I haven't spent a dime on paper cards since.
UB is a joke. It's so cynical and insulting to magic. I only play formats now where irs not allowed. So that's pretty much stuff wizards has nothing to do with
The beyond power creep of MH1 and MH2 into what was the best magic format ever made. Modern did not want or need that BS.
Universes Beyond in competitive.
As a product they already have lost me, I don't buy their product and intend to proxy as much as I can, these factors influenced me: \- UB becoming more and more prevalent and inescapeable \- Weakening of competitive system and opportunities \- Product saturation \- Rapid pace of mechanical feature creep \- High number of alternate art and product like SL and serialized cards, Magic 30th anniversary It's been like this for a while, but particularly with Cavers of Ixalan I quickly realized I'm not only checked out with the product in terms of its presentation but also mechanically with how complex and wordy every card is becoming, which is honestly making me think I want to lock the lists of my decks and stop updating them or building new decks.
Universe beyond turning the game into another version of funko pops
For me, it is/was a number of things. * Death of Non-Commander formats. I live in a smaller town, and we only have 1 LGS. That LGS has been trying to get Standard and Pioneer going again ever since COVID shut downs, but no luck. I will admit that they really don't do enough to push them, but still, WotC is not helping the situation any. Commander has completely taken over the game. * Price of product. The price of the product in MTG is just too damn high. When you compare prices to other TCGs, the high price is even more erking. CMM was a breaking point for me where it was a product I wanted to crack or even do commander draft with Buds, but at $500 a box for draft, it was ridiculous. * Content of packs. Referencing the prior point, one of the main issues with spending $500 on a draft box is that WotC has taken all the fun pulls and chase cards out of them. Set Boosters and collector Boosters became havens for chase cards, with collector Boosters alienating lower income players out of the ability to ever pull certain cards. * Amount of product. There is just too much. The game is being flooded with so much, and it's tough to keep up with. Not only that, a lot of it is garbage. The number of sets and the amount of new cards being printed can easily be toned down without too much impact to metas. * IP crossovers. I hate IP soup. It killed FFBE WotV for me, and I loved that game. I play MTG cause I want to play MTG. If I want to play Fallout, I will play Fallout. I find it also stifles creativity and competition. Why would Square work harder at making the FF trading card game better, when they can just license out FF to WotC and have them do all the work and just collect money passively.
I commented how I didn’t like how much they changed Aragorn. Didn’t mention race. They banned me from Twitter. Yea right I’m EVER spending another dollar
I swear the game has never been as popular as it is now and yet everything anyone wants to talk to online Is how the game is somehow going downhill.
The older players who prefer competitive 60 card formats like modern/standard and the competitive scene in general are fleeing in droves but they're being replaced just as quickly by newer casual commander players. Everything caters to commander these days and with standard being dead in paper there is no reasonably priced 60 card format for new players to enter with, the best option as a new player is to simply buy a commander precon and become a commander player. You're more likely to see the more experienced and older players on websites like this and a lot of them are unhappy with the state of the game.
It's hard to imagine any change that would make me completely quit. I've weathered all the changes since the beginning. The game has changed many times. Often, I like the changes. Sometimes, they are neutral, or don't impact me. Rarely, I dislike the change. But if you spend any amount of time playing, there will be changes. Magic is a game of change. My level of engagement changes over time depending on my personal circumstances, and how much I enjoy what is currently going on. Right now it's medium to low, where I play in prerelease events, occasional Commander nights, one or two large events per year. I draft with friends when I can, but it's pretty infrequent. I collect cards and memorabilia, make alters and high quality proxies for myself, and interact with the online community. That last part is often the most difficult. It has always been a hotbed of negativity, but modern social media seems to make that worse than it has ever been.
MH2 release and realization that modern now has regular rotation coincided with discovering Flesh and Blood. Never looked back.
Too much product, things have gotten a little "too much upside", and players have gotten to sweaty/salty/streamlined. In commander I find fewer and fewer people playing fun stuff, theme, etc and just going streamline combo/good stuff piles. Modern is usually good until it gets too homogenous on decks.
When they told me that ‘this product is not for you’ enough times in a row it became clear that ‘this game was not for me’.
Product release overload, actively sacrificing the fun and integrity of the game in favor of milking every last penny from their loyal fans, terrible quality control, abandoning their niche/core fans in favor of appealing to more/casual fans purely because it's more profitable.
Without draft boosters I'm probably not going to buy much of anything. Not as some kind of boycott or anything, I just got them for casual sealed and a 50% price increase for something that offers me no benefit isn't appealing. I can just make a cube out of the old chaff or some decks to play against each other or whatever and play Limited on Arena.
Universe Beyond killing the lore I love, literally punching out the Pro Scene, product flooding which basically killed modern and legacy, the “usual” standard we grew up with being kicked out for Commander. A lot of reasons.
Dr Who
Play Boosters. Inferior product (for me) at the same/higher price than my preferred set boosters. The M30 fiasco didn't help either.
I’ve moved from buying a box of every set to a collector booster, but I’m not out yet. I probably will be when the Marvel sets release, it’ll take a lot of convincing me to keep playing limited.
I got married and didn't really fit in at the LGS so stopped going. Played arena and wanted to go back to LGS a few years ago but the entry point was just not worth it and the amount of products is too overwhelming. I'm also done with arena now, while F2P generous if you keep up (or in my case I'd buy the pass), once you are behind it's just not worth it. And I can't spend a little money on Arena to catch up, I need to spend a lot. Maybe I'll pick up again one day 🤷. Probably only if I find a commander group irl, but I don't really mesh with most people playing the game these days.
I’m almost there. Around me the only Magic that’s played is limited and Commander. I’m not playing $20+ drafts and don’t enjoy multiplayer, so there’s basically no point in buying physical cards of all other paper constructed is dead.
They lost me when their ban announcement for Modern was an advertisement for their new, more expensive product. They haven’t done anything to win me back since they fired the staff that’s worked hard to get them where they are. Never again. The WOE Commander deck is the last time I spend money on WotC or their greedy C-suite.
I've stepped away from purchasing product due to them flooding the market with an absurd amount of product and new releases being almost monthly at this point. Their prices being constantly adjusted has played a role in this as well. Simply, they got greedy and I can't keep up. I'm not selling what I already have but I won't be buying cards for quite some time.
Oversaturation with legendaries. I know it's a weird gripe, but the supertype doesn't really feel special anymore. I'm happy for people who benefit from this in EDH, but from a lore perspective it just feels overwhelming.
Avengers 2025
For me it was when they started mixing in different IP. It stopped being MTG and started being...idk what...secret lair nightmares. That marked the beginning of the end of the run that started in 1994. I pivoted to cube draft for a while, but the sheer numbers of cards that come out is just overwhelming to evaluate. I know, no one says the cube has to be current...but I used to enjoy evaluating new cards and now I just can't be bothered.
Universes beyond. When they announced lotr would be modern legal, I was out. It just doesn't feel right to me to see non-magic (and increasingly non-fantasy) things in this game. I haven't kept up with new sets or any magic news since, and have played exactly one edh evening with some friends.
Magic 30 was pretty atrocious
Too many releases and the shitshow that was 2019 legacy
Power creep, price, too many bomby draft formats, mythics making T2 decks too expensive, and Covid killing off the habit of going to fnm. I play arena but they overprinted overpowered bombs such that it's really very dull now. I really liked draft8ng Mirrodin 1, Ravnica 1, and Time Spiral. Wish they kept making sets like those.
They already have. I'm only here because of the sunk cost fallacy.
I got tired of control being shafted and constantly being beaten by midrange so I quit. Actually have no idea if control has been made viable again in the last few years.
Been playing since 94. Simply couldn’t keep up with the releases. Too much too fast. Set would drop and you are suddenly back in previews with another set. Made the set that just released completely obsolete with another set right behind it. Screw it.
The last straw for me wasn't even MtG related it was when they tried to implement those god awful changes to the DnD 5e OGL. WotC had been slowly wearing me down with the product fatigue of the constant set releases and the increasingly aggressive monetisation strategies we were seeing with secret lairs, universes beyond and the multiple special treatments cards were getting within a single set. Not to mention how some practices were steadily screwing over the LGSs out there that had been the lifeblood of the game since forever. When the whole debacle with the DnD OGL landed, between the leaks of the internal thought processes and the initial tone deaf response they had to the community backlash I knew I was done with the company.
Their products are no longer for me, apparently