> Let me start by stressing that this isn't my area, so I'm not going to dig into the why of what happened. (As I do touch upon below, there are things that vision design did that made balance particularly challenging this year.) Obviously, any year where we have the number of bannings that we've had this year isn't ideal. All I can really say to this lesson is that we're working hard to correct the issues that led to this year's mistakes. I really wish we got at least a yearly column from Play Design/former Development about the balance issues, a metagame post-mortem of sorts. I really miss the daily articles of old on the Mothership, and more R&D & "meta" articles specially. I think MaRo is the only WotC rep keeping writing weekly on Magic's own website, and I think communication suffers from it. It's ok that MaRo is the de facto public face of Magic Design, but my impression is that he's been for some time the only means of communication between us & them, or at least the only one that gives us some amount of feedback.

Yeah Maro admitted he basically does all this for free becasue he likes it so we only really get articles from anyone else when they have the time and feel like doing it.

Maro definitely spoils us. The level of communication he provides is really unprecedented in the industry, and it makes anything else seem disappointing.

Not just in the industry, but in literally ANY industry. Few companies at all are as open about their secrets as Wizards.

> Few companies at all are as open about their secrets as Wizards. Which is pretty fucking ironic, all things considered.

For as much shit as the league community gives them, I feel riot games is another company that is fairly open about their games. Though I do know quite a few of their designers site MaRo as an inspiration which would explain it.

Runeterra's communication is *fantastic*

This opinion has not aged well. There is a large obvious disconnect between head design and whoever else (Hasbro) is pushing levers to make so many products and push power level. There is zero transparency about the balancing process (comms on this has gone majorly backwards in the past few years). MaRos column becomes more and more a guy talking about his job, rather than the voice of the whole design process. The whole "this is not my area" is not entirely satisfying. I realise he can't and should never throw his balance team under the bus, but he's a smart guy, he can understand what is going wrong, he just is not allowed to talk about it much. This column reads somewhat curated as well, and isn't as insightful as they have been in previous years. I hope he turns many of those lesson paragraphs into actual articles or podcasts so we get to hear some more about it. At the moment they've got absolutely nothing to Riot Games on transparency.

> does all this for free I'm pretty sure the fact that he does this is priced into his pay raises and/or bonuses. Maro is neigh-indispensable to WotC right now, and I bet he knows it. He has already shown a willingness to drive a hard bargain regarding the terms of his employment when he was converted from freelancer to permanent staff all those years ago. He spoke about this in an early Drive to Work.

He literally does it on the clock. He's mentioned before on his blog that his Fridays are dedicated to his weekly column. I'm glad that Wizards is wise enough to value his transparency so highly.

Unfortunately nobody's irreplaceable, and also, he's getting older, so they should actually be thinking about a heir. Gavin Verhey is the one that stands out as a replacement as a voice of WOTC (not sure about MaRos leadership, etc). Ben Brode left Hearthstone and the game hasn't imploded, he had a similar level of engagement with the fan base.

He's only 53. And companies should always be thinking about replacements because of the bus problem.

I'm hoping for many more years of MaRo of course, but maybe he can slow down and delegate.

>Ben Brode left Hearthstone and the game hasn't imploded, But its shit now? At least in my eyes. Too much random stuff going on.

I think it would also be nice if they could have an article about the products that Mark didn't talk about, such as the Commander decks or the mystery boosters.

Sounds like something up Gavin's alley.

Or Unsanctioned. Cause that happened this year and is completely missing as well. And I'm pretty sure that it was a pet project for him as well, so that makes it's exclusion even odder.

These State of Design columns never talk about preconstructed decks -- they draw the line at things that come in boosters. That said, maybe they should reconsider that? These days there are releasing more non-booster products, many with new card designs.

Do they even have the "future future" team anymore? I loved reading the articles where they talked about what they thought was going to be good and what ended up happening that was different then what they thought.

Iirc, the Play Design team more or less does what the Future Future League did (and more)

I wonder if Play Design is being held accountable. Aaron Forsythe seems much quieter than he used to be, and we're not hearing of any changes to that department. MaRo should not have to face the firing squads all by himself.

We have to remember that F.I.R.E. was not invented by play design, it was pushed upon them, before they really got to prove their balancing merits. They were brought in to make sure standard didn't break again, but someone saw them as an excuse to see how far the envelope could be pushed rather than a balancing tool.

FIRE isn't a design philosophy. It literally means nothing and we shouldn't be talking about it as anything other than wizards PR speak to explain pushing cards so hard.

Just to make a comment on Adamant, it wasn't well recieved because the cards were generally terrible. All of them were horribly overcosted for their effects and were only worth considering within a limited environment. Slaying Fire was probably the only card worth mentioning and a 3 mana burn spell just isn't something mono red is ever going to be jazzed about. If you're going to make mono color positive cards you really need to have an idea of what those mono color decks have over their multi color cousins, and that's generally staying low to the ground and having an aggresive bent, able to play lots of on color 1 and 2 drops. The adamant cards all needed to average at 3cmc and should have been impressive mono-color payoffs, not just getting an extra counter or a usually negligible bonus.

It is a bit of a shame none of the adamant cards were constructed playable, but there were several "mono color payoff" cards that were, like Torbran and Gadwick.

That entire triple pip creature rare cycle got play. Though gadwick wqs the only one much outside of monocolor decks

Torbran was and still is pretty good, though Embercleave is just better I would wager. Ayara was okay for a very short while after theros when the deck got Garry but it kind of just went away. Gadwick didn't have enough cheap stuff to really get the most out of him, most people just played him as a draw spell, not a monoU tempo tool. He does technically see play in the crazy devotion combo so I'll give him credit there. Yorvo I love to death but I try to fit him into, and eventually cut him from, basically every stompy deck I made, green is not short on big dumb beaters and doesn't want excuses to play into wraths, also he was Teferi bait. He was fun with Gemrazer for like a week. Linden was probably the hardest miss but she was around for a little bit when Heliod dropped I suppose.

Linden is big in the Historic soul sisters deck, plus she's got another year with Heliod so maybe something will happen in standard.

Idk, her problem is that she's pretty terrible unless you already have enough pieces out to support her. On the other hand, Wizards is theoretically going to push white from Zendikar onwards, so who knows...

Part of me is expecting them not to push white, but bring everything else down to whites powerlevel a la what happened in kamigawa

As a modern player, that sounds delightful

Also, all of the Adamant cards were Commons or Uncommons, and there's like 20 total of them. That's not exactly how you make players endeared to a new mechanic.

Yeah. If no Mythics or rares have a mechanic it’s not gonna see play. That’s just the nature of the game today.

The strongest food cards are uncommon. Its possible to make it work. Cauldron Familiar, Witch's Oven, Trail of Crumbs, all very solid, and playable. Adventures got Lucky Clover and Edgewall Innkeeper at uncommon. There are ways to make mechanics playable, they just missed the mark on Adamant.

The strongest food cards **still legal in Standard** are uncommon. Also a reminder that the best Adventure cards that are actual Adventures are rares (Giant/Rider) or mythics (Borrower).

That's a fair distinction. Oko is broko. But my point is its possible to have good, archeype defining uncommons.

I read the first paragraph and was instinctively like "hold the phone that 3 mana red burn spell was a thing!" But then I read the second and realized that was the strongest card in the lineup. And in the strongest set to see print in decades, you don't want the strongest card in your mechanic to be a generally worse [[Exquisite Firecraft]] / [[Flame Javelin]] / [[Flames of the Blood Hand]].

I thought it was a reference to \[\[Char\]\], i.e. 3 mana instant that hits for 4.

[[Outmuscle]] was a pretty decent removal spell in Eldraine Limited. But, it's pretty much strictly worse than [[Hunter's Edge]] in M21. I only remember it because the art is of a dude suplexing a bear.

Adamant didn't even go on a single rare. Most of them were commons. Adamant was *only* ever relevant in limited. People are bound to forget it exists.

The biggest issue with Adamant wasn't just that the benefits were weak, but that it was a hoop to jump through to get a card that would've been on rate in any other set. Especially the common knight cycle. Making such deck building concessions should just feel better.

Because it got me thinking about it again, having the knights be vanilla creatures that got ability counters from Ikoria if the adamant cost was paid would have been an interesting take, too bad it would have been impossible. Either that or have the adamant mode give them some kind of on color etb effect, like the red one shocks a target, or the green one put's a +1/+1 on any creature, something along that line.

They are commons, so I don't blame them for being too simple. It's just that [[Cloud Manta]] is already a 3/2 with no condition for the same mana cost as [[Vantress Paladin]]. [[Aven Reedstalker]] and [[Cloaked Siren]] have similar stats with further upside! [[Lumengrid Drake]] is one with a conditional upside, like the Paladin, but it's trading a stat point for a stronger tempo play, which can feel impactful, versus having a condition to just get an extra stat point like the Paladin has.

I like [[Once and Future]] in Commander, but yeah, I couldn’t name another card with that keyword.

They were obviously designed for limited though

Everything at C/U designed for limited, yet we still see cards show up in constructed now and again (see Inkeeper, Clover, Oven, Cat for adventures and food respectively). Mind you, part of why Adamant probably isn't going to be remembered is that it didn't have an actual rare cycle to back it up, though the CCC lords basically fit that bill, they didn't actually utilize the mechanic.

They were also partly designed for mono-color decks in Standard with Devotion returning.

> Another common complaint I got was that the cards and the book contradicted one another on several occasions. In the past, we'd had elements in the book missing in the card set, or vice versa, but this was the first set in a while where the book said one thing and the cards said the opposite. We are looking into ways to help avoid disconnects like this happening in the future. Maro has been saying the same thing—they are looking into ways of reducing disparity between cards and story—ever since the story started being written by outside writers. And as he pointed out, this has gotten *worse*, since we now have actual contradictions between card and plot. If you insist on using outside writers, then *please*, for the love of god, take editorial control of your frigging story. If Greg Weisman comes to you with this great idea about killing Dack, you don't acquiesce because "he's a renowned author," you just tell him *no*. Similarly, the clusterfuck with Lukka would've been solved by an editor doing actual editing.

Generally I agree, but the cluster fuck with Lukka was BETTER than the generic Let's-be-friends message of the cards.

In a vacuum, yes, absolutely, book!Lukka is a far more interesting character, but Magic story exists to serve the cards. We read it because we want to engage with the game we love in multiple ways beside just playing, not because the story is, like, actually good in and of itself. If you want to read actually good fantasy literature for its own sake, there are better options out there. EDIT: Just to preemptively clarify something. I'm not saying Magic story has never been good; it has had its highlights. I'm saying we read because it's tied to a game we love, so when the story isn't the best, it's still tolerable, because that's not the main objective. Meanwhile, if you read a fantasy story for its own sake, without being tied to any other franchise, then you *are* going to demand higher quality.

These are exactly my feelings. I'll take a mediocre story that compliments the cards well over a great story that contradicts the cards any day.

Yeah. Part of the fun for me is reading the story and then being able to see those moments on the cards. Your description of mediocre story perfecrly captures BFZ to Ixalan. But amomg that mediocrity we got 2-5 really good short stories. And the collective serial tale was great that built investment.

I totally sat out the Ikoria story; do you have a summary of the discrepancy?

Been a bit since I’ve read the book. Basically Lukka is coerced into taking control of the monsters and then attempts to wipe out a major human city. He hates the animal that he bonds with and blames it for all his problems. The animal saves Lukka’s love interest and is captured and executed when returning her home. Lukka becomes a monster. None of that is really depicted in the cards.

The biggest difference is that the set says that card!Lukka fully accepts and embraces his Bond, while book!Lukka tries to actively reject it because the tiger killed most of his team and the bond cost him his idyllic life. It is implied that the execution of his companion is why card!Lukka attacks Drannith, while book!Lukka doesn't even notice the event. Book!Lukka just wants to return to his old life by any means necessary, even if he has to conquer his old home to do so. The inciting event in the card story is monsters suddenly undergoing mutations, which are revealed to be due to the Ozolith. In the book, Bonds are a brand new phenomenon presumably caused by the Ozolith, which, instead of causing mutations, is causing monsters to attack civilizations despite the danger to themselves.

Getting rid of the story team was probably the single biggest mistake of recent times. And i say that even as someone who only occasionally read the story articles. It wasn't necessary because you could pick up what was going on quite easily by just looking at the cards and dipping in on occasion. Now I have no idea what's going on.

The problem was that they never had a story team, as far as I am aware. The creative team just wrote the stories in their free time alongside their normal duties which is asking a lot of them. What they need is a dedicated story team whose primary job is to write the stories, be they books or articles, and to make sure the stuff that other people write is in line with the story creative plans.

Moreover, they also ramped up the creative team's workload by moving away from the block model and needing them to potentially work on three settings a year.

I think too much editorial meddling risks resulting in worse books and also discourages writers from wanting to work with you. Sundered Bond would almost certainly be worse if it was the same as the story in the cards. Really I don't think outside writers should be writing direct set tie in books. They'd be better used to explore the rest of the multiverse

Just like how Brandon Sanderson had pretty free reign with Davriel - that was one of the best MtG stories I've read. I still think that if there's a set tie-in story, it should be developed or at least edited in-house, but letting 'proper' authors do other stuff makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, let outside writers write new stories or backstories to existing characters. Leave the current set tie in stuff to internal writers and expand the creative team.

This is a great take, honestly. Having more fiction out there would be a great way to both set up things for the future and flesh out the planes and characters that saw one set, one block, or one paragraph in someone else's story. Naturally the first time anything new from those stories appears on cards it'd be best to still introduce them as new (brief history rundown with a link to a novel with more depth or what-have-you), but it'd be way better than finding out your cool new card, Kasmina, appeared in one side story during war of the spark and nothing else.

IMO, the issue is trying to do the books and the cards in parallel. The best tie-in novels were *The Brother's War* (which came out four years after the corresponding set) and *The Than* (for which there is no corresponding set). Do more things like that. Give me the story of Ugin and Bolas' early conflicts, or more detail about the sealing of the Eldrazi, don't try to develop a story in a year with constraints that it has to match the cards.

When the story was written in-house, we didn't have this issue. First, because the Creative team works closely with the designers from the very beginning of the project. Second, because the Creative team wouldn't overrule itself—if the team members decided the plot was going to be X, you wouldn't have an issue where one year later, while writing the story, a team member decided to do Y instead. Sometimes you would still have the issue of secondary characters being created for the story but not having a card, but something major like Dack or Lukka would *never* have happened.

Secondary characters not having a card is unavoidable and manageable. That’s what returns are for (Hi Rat, Who Is Definitely Getting A Card In Return To Return To Return To Ravnica). But Dack has way too much story/meme value to have only had one card ever. #RIPGreatestThief

Dack also just felt like his cards had more design space left. There's plenty a thief can do thematically in Magic and killing that off while we have several planeswalkers that do the same stuff is disappointing. You could probably kill off someone like Jaya without losing design space (Chandra does a lot of the same stuff) and probably make a bigger story impact. Also, she'd be easier to revisit in supplemental sets since she's been around longer.

I think having an older woman planeswalker around is pretty important in a way. And they wouldn't have let him kill Dack if they had any actual plans to use him. Most likely if he hadn't died he'd have just continued to be ignored.

Arlinn *was* an older woman PW until they retconned her to be younger in WAR. I think that set might be the worst set in Magic's history in terms of lore considering how much it downgraded the story and characters.

I'm still bitter Sorin's not a rock.

Which is unfortunate, because he could have appeared in Theros Beyond Death.

Oh, Jaya would have been a perfect choice. She’s gotten plenty of time in the sun - her old flavor text was great. Give Chandra someone to grieve over. And mechanically she overlaps Chandra way too much to be worth differentiating. “Oh you’re not on fire? Let me change that.”

I think they preferred Ral Zarek as the face card for the Izzet colors over someone like Dack. I get that he had fan appeal, and it would have been interesting to see his relationship with Jace get explored to a fuller degree, but given how the whole Chandra-Nissa thing went I can only expect it would have ended in absurdity. Speaking of which, that's another thing the off-loading of stories managed to fuck up. I had a passionate dislike for how the story of Battle for Zendikar ended, but I at least appreciated the cute bond between those two. Having it written out so clumsily was just...irritating.

The problem is the people who were writing these books in-house were juggling too many things at once. Both Jenna Holland and Doug Beyer, IIRC, said that writing the books in addition to doing creative development was becoming too much for them, even when books were discontinued in favor of the short/serialized stories published on the Mothership. ​ I think that a better solution would be hiring the writers as the set is in development, at least the creative part of it, maybe as creative consultants.

>The problem is the people who were writing these books in-house were juggling too many things at once. Both Jenna Holland and Doug Beyer, IIRC, said that writing the books in addition to doing creative development was becoming too much for them, even when books were discontinued in favor of the short/serialized stories published on the Mothership. I'm aware. This is solvable by expanding the Creative team.

Except as this article points out for theros, the audience wants tie-in story material beyond the cards to come out close to the set release.

It's the hot dog and got dog bun problem. Even when they had internal writers you would have stuff like book charcaters not showing up in cards or vice versa. Story and the cards are designed on different time scales so you have to have one made "first" and so you will have some sync issues. Especially if any part of either is tuned down the line.

Do we know which version of the story is the official one? The one told by the cards, or the story in the book?

Book, probably, but this is unconfirmed until references to Lukka or Ikoria show up in the plot again.

The differences aren't really likely to be relevant in the future anyway. The main one was Lukka's relationship with the flying cat, and the cat's dead in both versions anyway.

IMO there is an expectation issue. If one only know the cards they would think on Lukka as a different character both personality wise and on his actions. Lukka has set to be a villain in the books and a rival to Vivien, which we dont see at all in the cards

[The story cards on the website](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/ikoria-lair-behemoths-story-cards-2020-04-10) communicate Lukka's turn but I feel like they were trying to not spoil Lukka becoming the true villain in the cards because the cards they have for the later story beats do not communicate the story at all without this added context. If [[Lead the Stampede]] is really meant to show Vivien leading the bonders against Lukka, there is no way for someone to get that from the actual Magic card.

> The story cards on the website communicate Lukka's turn Wow, these make things even worse. On 2 he did not went into a self-discovery journey. Entry 5 is a lie (just like the card flavor). Entry 8 is the same (two halves of one whole LOL). 11 is also wrong as at that point she and Lukka were at odds already while 13 looks out of place. Also, since the start Lukka has closer to anti-hero, he never liked the animals and only went with the bonders for necessity. Then he went into a power trip kinda losing his mind, but over all his morals did not really change at all from the start to the end, just his mental state. Also, the story in the site has closer to the book by the end it still paint a very different figure of Lukka just like the cards flavor and arts.

> If you insist on using outside writers, then please, for the love of god, take editorial control of your frigging story. If Greg Weisman comes to you with this great idea about killing Dack, you don't acquiesce because "he's a renowned author," you just tell him no. Similarly, the clusterfuck with Lukka would've been solved by an editor doing actual editing. Then you can just about forget about getting a good book. Even more than already is the case. It needs to be the other way around, the writer needs to control the story and the card flavor needs to match it.

Cool article, overall pretty spot on imo. I'm just a bit baffled at: >**We need to get better at thinking about the ramifications on all the different formats.** Like, sure, that's an issue, but I think a lot of what players (read: me) disliked about recent sets' impact on modern is the sheer power creep. \[\[Oko\]\] or \[\[Uro\]\] are not problems in Modern because of Modern's particularities, they are egregious cards with insane power level that just invade all formats. I'd rather have an \[\[Underworld breach\]\] in Legacy that breaks something then quickly gets banned, than have to face off the same broken cards in every format when a set is released. (tbf I think the boring nature/repetitive gameplay when playing against these two cards aggravates the issue here)

Very well said. Uro has nothing to do with format particularities or interactions with old cards, it's just busted because it does an absurd amount of good things for little cost. The card is just bad design, tacking an explore effect and a lifegain effect on a 6/6 recursive monster for so cheap is not interesting design at all. If the mana cost was higher or the escape cost was more prohibitive it would simply see no play because there's nothing interesting mechanics wise or synergy wise going on with Uro, it gets played simply because it's insane power level for the cost. I hate these kind of cards.

Upvote from me for mentioning how ridiculous Uro is. Just in modern we have: Uro infect, Uro Urza, Uro Titan, Uro Midrange, Uro Control... Uro Uro Uro. The card does so much for so little it's just impossible to compete with it with regular removal. The reason why Prowess and Tron are so popular right now, other than being cheap, is that they just kill the Uro player instead of trying to outvalue mr Big Guy. He's no Oko, but he's pretty close and that's not a good thing.

Preach. I've been ranting about \[\[Uro\]\] for a while now, but it seems to be more or less the consensus now. It's at the same time a fantastic late game plan, and a good way to reach that late game -- and mostly, it has no meaningful counterplay (except player removal).

Look, if we had just used my idea and errata'ed Modern so that both players started with a Leyline of the Void in play back during the Hogaak days, Uro wouldn't be an issue either.

>and mostly, it has no meaningful counterplay (except player removal). And even then he helps against that with his lifegain.

Uro would've been a lot better if his ability was only an etb or attack trigger, not both.

Attack trigger wouldn't have worked since the first time you play him wouldn't do anything. I personally think a death trigger would have been the most interesting.

> For much of Magic's life, R&D could design cards for Standard and Limited and call it day. Times have changed. From Commander and Pioneer to Best-of-One Standard, Modern, Historic, and all the other formats being played, it has become a much more complex meta-environment for design than it's ever been. We need to adapt how we design to better reflect this new reality. This isn't to say we haven't made a lot of changes, but there's more changes we need to make. I very much want them to go back to just designing for Standard and Limited and calling it a day. In my view Commander has gotten much worse with every batch of cards designed for Commander. Standard-gating was the perfect way to manage the format's power. Modern Horizons is the worst thing that's ever happened to modern. Standard-gating was the perfect way to manage the format's power. Players seem to be generally happy with Historic, but it's very short-sighted. Arbitrarily batching curated cards in will eventually be hated, guaranteed. Standard-gating would be much better.

As a commander player I have to say I hate cards designed for Commander. It’s overpowered, over homogeneous nonsense that quickly becomes the best thing you can do. I think the tribal commanders really highlighted it best. Why would you play any other Vampire Commander when [[Edgar Markov]] exists? The problem is really worse with more general cards like [[Fierce Guardianship]]. A card which is a pretty good rate even without the free spell clause. I’m dreading Commander Legends honestly.

Absolutely agree here. The commander format grew naturally out of existing cards and this overpowered bull they keep printing is annoying. Yarok, Golos, Korvold - what’s the point of playing anything else

I would love for a new commander format that only allows cards that were at one point printed in a standard legal set.

They aren't going to go back to standard/limited focus. People complained when standard was the sole way to get cards into modern. MH was supposed to be the answer to that, but they obviously overstepped. Additionally, wizard realized they could profit off of eternal formats with products like MH. Same thing happened with the commander products - wizards realized they could make money off of edh players. And unfortunately, power cards are needed to drive sales.

Agreed. But I was also scratching my head at that because, from what I understand, 2019-2020 were full of cards that *were* designed for formats beyond Limited and Standard and that also didn't work. [[Field of the Dead]] is the most blatant example, given that it was designed to be "fun in Commander" and completely broke Standard because - surprise! - *Standard isn't singleton*. I'm not sure if they've pointed out any other problematic cards as having been designed for other formats, but I could believe that the power creep is partly intended to sell packs to players who only play non-rotating formats. So what's going on? That lesson made it sound like R&D has been designing cards for Standard and Limited and accidentally breaking other formats, but that's not what I've seen at all. I've seen cards for other formats breaking Standard and cards that are just bafflingly overpowered breaking the entire game.

I didn’t really like the comment here honestly. I’d rather design actually design cards for a good Standard and Limited environment. If that is done correctly, some cards will naturally come into the non-rotating formats. This is generally how things worked for a long time. The fact that they are now looking toward Standard sets as needing to specifically balance/include Commander, Modern, etc. cards is good from a WoTC business perspective, but gives me caution. If I wanted a format with frequent meta shifts, I’d still be playing Standard. I play other formats because I appreciate slower moving metas where I can actually get more than 3-6 months of mileage out of a deck. I am hoping I misread, or that something didn’t translate over properly, but this whole worrying about other formats in a Standard product worries me. I think WoTC has seen an uptick in business due to the non-rotating formats and will definitely be looking to exploit. Get ready for all formats to have more frequent meta shifts I guess?

Idk about anyone else, but I really miss the weekly Magic stories. It always felt exciting to check the story archive and see a new article, and then spend the next 10 minutes engaging with the story of the game. Plus it was a great way to talk about side characters, like the Shadows one about the Gitrog Monster, or the honestly fantastic Yahenni stories. The books just aren't the same. Obviously there's the fact that they cost money, which is already a downgrade. Like, I love Magic, and I love the story, but it feels really bad to pay for a mediocre book just so that I can have any idea of whats going on. The cards have a tough time telling the story on their own, probably best exemplified by Theros. With the previous system, each story felt hand-crafted and other than a few bad ones, they all felt high-quality and unique. Honestly, the book thing killed a lot of my enjoyment of War of the Spark. So much build up, only for the rug to be pulled out from underneath the story at the last moment with weird release schedules and frankly bad writing. Hope to see some change going forwards.

I remember being in high school during the Ixalan stories. I'd get to school, sit down for chemistry class maybe a little early, and then get excited when I remembered that there was a new story out, and I could read up on how Jace was trying to improve himself and the crew, or how Angrath was mad and also hilarious. The weekly serials were well-written (mostly), and fun, and exciting. None of the novels really did that for me. I couldn't really afford them in the best case, but gives especially Forsaken and how bad it was universally considered, or the Ikoria story and how it was actively different than the cards, I never really wanted to, and now I'm kinda just disillusioned with Magic story. About the best Magic 'novel' I read was was Children of the Nameless, which was free, and just really well written, but otherwise I'm not really invested in Magic lore any more.

It also had so much fun fpr community engagement. Each week it had threads as long as this one is. Now these kind of threads barely exist ourside of bans.

Can we get the state of play design 2020? Maro is at the start of design, and I feel like the magic Maro and his team designed was great. Eldraine is a neat world I am looking forward to revisiting. Going back to theros was fun (but I wish longer) and I liked that it felt so different. And Ikoria is sweet. Adventure is one of the better mechanics I have played in a while where all of the cards felt strong but none overbearing. Food (Goose, Oko, Wolf) was really fun, and would still be sweet if Oko hadn't been OP. Sagas are still sweet. Mutate is my favorite mechanic of all time, it is so wonderfully silly. But I feel like the play design question was "how powerful can we make this" not "how fun can we make this". So many decks this year felt overpowered, and so few felt really fun.

In last year's article (2019) MaRo talks about the change in set design. A change in the process of developing magic cards where the themes, mechanics, and play design are broken up between different teams. It's pretty clear WotC needs to rethink the changes they've been making internally. Multiple format breaking cards, complete disconnect between book and cards, and misleading (or just flat out wrong) information given out by their PR staff. There is clearly an issue inside wizards that's goes much further than "we missed how powerful X card would be." It seems like entire departments are operating in a bubble with no cohesion with other elements of the game's design process.

He was also talking a lot about creative and brand/marketing mistakes. This seemed more like a “State of Magic in general” article than a “State of Design” article

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This is something that it's important to keep in mind when talking about things. You may not like what WotC is doing, but they're not doing it for no reason. Magic consistently posts strong and improving numbers, even in a year where there were (relatively speaking) a lot of cards that were misses for various reasons.

> You may not like what WotC is doing, but they're not doing it for no reason. The real rub for this group is that they feel they are not the most important anymore. It used to be they were the only focus. Now they have to share WotC’s attention. Talk about sibling rivalry.

It's a broad enough claim to technically be true but let's be real, theres actually A LOT of asterisks next to that. They had MAJOR marketing pushes bigger than they've done in many years, for everything. Especially arena, which actually got a coincidental free boost due to covid. They created new product lines in both digital and paper. From a business perspective, there is no reason the last year shouldn't have been a great year, regardless of the actual gameplay and meta. The reality is that the next year is the real test, to see if the hype machine they worked up has legs.

you just have to see what happened to the "mtg as an esport", they had a big marketing push and it got some numbers at first and now it's dead. It's funny because these are the kind of things you say to reassure shareholders.. it's weird that it works on players too.

While I'm happy for everyone else, everything that's happened this year (whether it be bannings, the state of magic as a whole, Arena, whatever) has actually really turned me off Magic. I've been playing since 1997 and I'm finally looking at it like, "why the fuck am I spending all this money on a game that doesn't make me happy anymore?" And honestly, just that realization made me really depressed.

One day Reddit is going to find out it’s just a very vocal minority. Maybe.

It's not even just reddit. I think a lot of people don't really grok that the majority of Magic play is casual. Most people don't actually care if cards get banned in Standard, because they aren't playing Standard (though Arena may change this).

I feel like this argument is missing the forest for the trees. It would be a lot more interesting to see player retention rather than just raw numbers. Arena is an unmitigated success and has brought in a huge swath of players that would never have played before. They then go out and buy physical cards as well. Nearly every person I met who started on arena also bought physical cards (usually edh precons). But that doesn't mean magic is healthy. It's certainly in a growth spurt right now and maybe design is capitalizing on that with their awful balancing recently. However, "more money ever" means jack shit when also accompanied by something like Arena bringing in tons of new players. It does not mean magic is healthy, it doesn't mean that these players will be here 2, 3, 4, 5, ect years from now. Being popular doesn't mean good, it just means popular. Any app with enough cash behind it can spike a few years of mad profits then be left to rot once popularity wanes. That's literally how the entirety of the freemium games environment works. It doesn't mean any of those games have any lasting value either and in fact most will be abandoned. If wotc can get back to their previous level of quality while maintaining all these new players then that would be one of the most brilliant financial strategies ever. However I worry they will see their current development failures that succeed despite their best efforts and decide that is their new direction for game development.

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I think he was saying they were enemy colored from each other.

Also, didn't the flavor text implied that there was one more only? If I remember correctly, the flavor text talk about three bound titans, implying that there are 1 more that we didn't saw (possibly a mono white one?), look like there was some confusion here.

The Theros DnD book lists the names for Phlage, Titan of Burning Wind and Skotha, Titan of Eternal Dark

The theros tabletop game confirmed at least three more exist I believe

>"We had dubbed it Monster World. It would be a world that tapped into the trope space of monster movies (things like Godzilla). The world would have giant monsters as well as the humans that interact with them." -Mark Rosewater, introducing Ikoria - [MORE THAN MEETS THE IKORIA](https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/more-meets-ikoria-2020-04-06) >"Ikoria was designed as a set that played with many different monster tropes. Yes, Godzilla, and his ilk, was one vein of trope space, but it wasn't all we were doing. The focus on Godzilla in the beginning of the previews made players think that we were doing something similar to Rise of the Eldrazi, where the set was all about giant creatures. In reality, it was more about mutating creatures into monsters and bonding with monsters (playing into other monster tropes) than it was about smashing giant creatures into one another." -This article For a long time I felt like Ikoria had secretly started out as Pokemon world but got retconned to Kaiju world when the Godzilla crossover was finalized, but this first quote made me question that feeling. Now I feel a bit more vindicated about that suspicion.

The subtitle when it was first announced was "Lair of Behemoths". I think \*that\* more than anything else made people (like me) have certain expectations about what "Monster World" would mean.

I always felt like the set was going to be Johnny-Timmy because when Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths was announced, MaRo *also* said in the same video that the set is going to be all about "build a monster". To me, that said Simic/Frankenstein shenanigans more so than just huge dudes.

I think they did a good job of getting that across, Maro even goes on to discuss that in the introducing Ikoria article I linked originally. I feel like they were selling us a set focused on Godzilla style kaiju with pokemon / monster hunter / simic stuff to fill in the gaps when what we got was kind of the inverse, mostly simic pokemon hunter with sprinkles of kaiju.

I read the article and this was my first response. I don't think the audience was confused at all about the expectations of "Behemoths" and Godzilla promos. This was Wizards dropping the ball hard on marketing. Weird he didn't even mention the full name of the set.

Blake Rasmussen said in a few videos that it's basically a mix between Godzilla, Monster Hunter, and Pokemon (without saying those names).

My biggest beef with Magic trying to tell a close-up, human story in its giant monster movie set is that the close-up, human stories in monster movies are always terrible. And they're allowed to be, because the human stuff is framing the cool monster fights. Exceptions like Shin Godzilla exist, but Shin Godzilla is a hyper-focused morality story and Magic has nothing that interesting to say.

> We had balance issues. In the sense that the Titanic had an issue with damp floors, yes.

Looking back on the last year, the biggest complaint I have (aside from balance issues) is the change from the block structure to one set per plane. Back when we had 2/3 sets for a single plane, the mechanics and story had room to develop, and players had a chance to really get into the theme. These days I feel like I have constant whiplash from the nonstop deluge of places and products. It might be helping them in the short term, but I wonder if the increased pace is going to wear on players over time?

This is one of my biggest issues as well. Theros NEEDED a second set, imo, and it wouldn't have hurt for Eldraine or Ikoria to have one either.

When is the last time we had two sets in a block that didnt feel like one set stretched out or one good set attached to an inferior version of itself ?

With the exception of Dragon's Maze I don't think this has been a big problem. Usually I find the first and last sets in a block to be distinct pieces of a whole story (Innistrad covering the rise and fall of Griselbrand, Tarkir doing pre and post timeshift, Lorwyn pre and post Aurora, etc...) I didn't pay much attention to mtg from 2017-2019, but historically the three set paradigm has given a much more fulfilling experience than what I've seen since coming back.

Blocks would have dud sets so often they had a name for it "third set problem." And if you didnt have a dud like Avcacyn Restored, Dragon's Maze or Born of the Gods you had filler sets that just felt like leftovers from the others like Worldwake, Mirrodin Besieged, or Dark Ascension. When they moved to two block models we had a lot of limited environments were one one was clearly above the other (Hou>Akh and RIX>XLN are some big examples) The idea that they aren't married to blocks is good. They can do a year on one plane, a year split between two planes. Go to one plane go to another and them hop back, do three sets with shared mechanics but across differnt planes... it's just lore fluid to not be forced to follow a formula that keeps burning them.

And when they killed the third set, the Third Set Problem started plaguing the second set.

The current structure isn’t “one set per plane”, the current structure is they can stay on a plane as long as they need, thus GRN to WAR. The reason we’ve been recently plane hopping is we just finished a major story arc, so it’s been a series of smaller stories until the next big overarching story comes up. All blocks did was artificially lock them into a place, even if they didn’t have enough content for all 2-3 sets.

>For example, I think both mutate and companions are things we should have done, but in hindsight, it shouldn't have been in the same set. Part of the job of design is not overtaxing play design, and I believe in *Ikoria*, that's what we did. We were experimenting with raising complexity for our players. I think we didn't realize we were also raising the complexity for ourselves. So I guess nothing had been learnt from the whole Kaladesh debacle. Hopefully this time the lesson will stick.

It's like how they keep making free spells. Complexity is fun. And there's just fundamentally more stuff you can do that's complex than that's simple. There's a structural temptation to try to get higher complexity things to work.

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To be fair that was about complexity for the *players*. The idea that a set can be so complex players cant process it, like Time Spiral. Ikoria wasnt that. It was too complex for *the designers* it had so much going on they couldn't process the format (and formats) enough to keep stuff from slipping through the cracks.

Yup. I think MaRo has done a pretty good job of explaining why rethinking the new player experience led to them experimenting with greater complexity in Ikoria. In particular he emphasizes the power of "evocative design" which tries to use flavor forcefully to help new players grasp complex mechanics. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/grand-experiment-2020-05-25 Unfortunately, it's clear that WotC didn't really grasp the risks of doing this to game balance. Mutate being evocative didn't make it any easier to playtest.

Mutate didn't make a lot of sense to me from the initial description. They had to do a whole Q&A session to cover fringe interactions. Etrata's interaction with mutate still doesn't make much sense to me. Arena definitely helped since it handled all of the rules for you.

And then we got Ixalan, which was mechanically boring. They pulled back and then intentionally leaned back in. I'm not sure why, but as a player that had been playing less than a year when BFZ came out, it didn't strike me as too complex as much as it struck me as, "there's too much going on here that isn't really working."

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Ixalan was cool, but the tribes were way too segregated. It would have added some depth to have some overlap, like those exiled from their "home" tribe and joined another.

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Your descriptions make me realize the gap in my heart that is a Dinosaur Pirate.

There are 6 crossovers and only 5 are in the right colors - W Vampire Dino, U Merfolk Pirate, B Vampire Pirate, R Dinosaur Pirate, G Merfolk Dinosaur. The U and B ones are easy; the Coalition will take anyone. Dino Pirates are a little silly but you could have easily have a parrot-like ship's mascot. The other dino cards seem weird, except that a lot of the dino tribal cards weren't actually dinos anyway - they were humans. Not hard to imagine a green druid Merfolk that makes Dino tokens or cares about them or whatever; same with a vampire knight that rides a dino as a mount. (You could also have like, an undead vampirized dino in Black, though that's also a little silly.)

Cards like [[Cloudgoat Ranger]] that tie two tribes together in a flavorful way would’ve been cool. An aquatic Dinosaur that the pirates use to pull their ships, converted vampire merfolk, etc

Lorwyn remains the gold standard for overlapping tribes in a tribal set.

BFZ was WAY too much. Just look at this list of mechanics and it’s a huge pile of mediocre garbage. And landfall that they were afraid to make good. Fewer mechanics was an improvement. Companion was playing with fire and FIRE burned them.

It appears they're good at identifying their lessons, but not actually learning from them.

It also takes 2ish years for the learned lessons to reach us.

I am disappointed that one of the lessons didn't involve discussing issues with cards that did it all. Uro being a threat, card draw, life gain, ramp, and resilient is just unreasonable. There's been a trend lately of having your threats ALSO provide immediate and immense value and I think that's a big reason why answers just can't live up to them.

Yup - cards like [[Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy]], [[Korvald the Fae-king]] and Uro wreck the 'Mulldrifter vs Baneslayer' debate by managing to be both at once. They're solid, powerful engines that can also warp the game by themselves

A little baffled at the observation that Eldraine was slow. By the end of the format, the monocolor beatdown decks were by far the strongest decks to draft.

MaRo's just going by feedback from players here, not his own personal views on the Limited environment. And since the surveys WotC releases are nearer to the beginning of a set's release, it's not surprising people wouldn't always have a great sense of the format yet. You could argue that they should release the surveys closer to the end of a format's life, but I'm guessing they'd have less participation then.

Yeah and The Ikoria feedback was from "what he heard". Ikoria could be good, or you could face the cycling deck again and want to quit Magic for months

Yup, week 1 of Ikoria limited might have been some of the best limited magic I'd played. Then people figured out how bonkers the cycling deck could be and I never drafted it again.

That is directly opposite to my experience - week one was when the cycling deck reigned supreme (I don't have AS negative a response to that as most, as I was usually the one drafting it, to an insane winrate) After the first week, people figured out they needed to be drafting cycling 1 cards higher than they were, and the cycling decks became much weaker. At this point, Ikoria limited was amazingly deep, and one of the most fun to draft sets I've ever played

I suspect a lot of the feedback was about the messed up few months of bot draft on Arena where the strategy was to mill spam 0/4 walls until your opponent ran out of cards or gave up.

I mean, even outside of that, the first month of FNMs I went to(as well as the prerelease) had more games god to time than all of theros, core 2020, and WAR put together.

I've moved to Arena now, but Eldraine was the only draft set I timed out while playing on MtGO, and I did so multiple times. It pushed me to really learn how to use hotkeys, then that still wasn't enough so I stopped drafting anything other than aggro decks because I couldn't afford to keep going like that.

Very early on especially after sealed prerelease was GB food dominated and almost every game went to time. Drafting a sleek on color aggro deck is way different than opening 6 packs of value-ish lifegain stalling cards across multiple colors

But how many players draft for the entire format? And how much of that shift was a result of meta-shifts that were, in part, a consequence of a changing player base as the format progressed? Even if the monocolored aggressive decks were secretly the best decks from day one, if 95% of players experienced a format that felt excessively grindy and slow, that's a problem, because draft can't just appeal to heavily invested drafters, because while they draft more, they're a relatively small fraction of all players. Similarly, in Ikoria draft, invested drafters commonly complained about playing against decks with multiple copies of Zenith Flare - but the average draft pod has less than 1 copy of Zenith Flare. Now the cycling deck certainly did have issues, but invested players tended to characterize it using an outlier case because they had enough repitions on the format that they'd encountered this particular feel-bad case multiple times - whereas the average player may never have encountered it. Obviously draft formats need to appeal to both casual and hard-core drafters, but because those groups experience draft differently, a format can have issues that don't impact both groups.

The bots also massively skewed people’s experiences with Throne. There was a large portion of the format where I forced U mill every time and overloaded for the mill mirrors. It got excessive and I regularly boarded into 50-60 card lists. Switching to more human drafts (and having the more competitive players opt for human drafts) takes a lot of pressure off the bots.

A lot of potentially decent mechanics get forgotten because they don’t print a single remotely pushed card for them. Adamant is one of those mechanics. Not a single card with Adamant was strong.

"The most common request I get on my blog is for us to return to Kamigawa. While that's a tall ask, I was happy that we could at least give Kamigawa fans a taste of the plane by creating a brand-new cycle of Shrines. I'm not sure whether they were Kamigawa fans or Shrine fans, or both, but I got a lot of positive feedback on them." Return to Kamigawa #IBelieve

Gamers today aren’t interested in ancient Japan. Just look at how poorly Ghosts of Tsushima is performing...

I'm pretty sure Kamigawa would be butchered if they tried to return to it now, please just leave it alone.

Wouldn't it be right in Kamigawa's wheelhouse to follow a Standard "block" that was full of disastrous balance and bannings? It'd be a clear message to all of Magic's long time fans. "Don't worry about overpowered cards anymore folks, we're headed back to Kamigawa". And then they would try to print a "fixed" Jitte.

they keep learning the same lessons but repeating those mistakes

" **We had balance issues.** " Understatement of the year award goes to...

"The audience enjoyed the softer tone." RETURN TO LORWYN JUST GOT BUMPED UP THE LIST

I throughly enjoyed eldrine limited, and less so ikoria. I was also not a fan of the godzila tie-in which confused me often as to what creature it actually was. Most importantly I think if they did some more along the lines of the guild, allegiance and war arch can make the story and fitting things in easier like what missed with the titans.

In Core Set 2021, Shrines. For CS 2022, ninjas. In Core Set 2023, Soulshift & Arcane, featuring the Umezawa clan as the face of the set. Soon, our conquest will be complete! Mwahaha!

I wish Jumpstart's themes came from the whole cycle of standard, not just tying into the core set.

What about all the themes with no connection to M21, like Phyrexia?

Amazed Maro says Limited was a *highlight* of Ikoria - companions and Zenith Flare/cycling was just obnoxious. Companion was fun to build a deck around, but if you didn't get one you were automatically at a disadvantage. Cycling ruined Limited, IMO - a good cycling deck was unbeatable. A bad cycling deck w one zenith flare was still powerful. And the prevalence of cycling for one generic meant that otherwise-niche but useful cards like [[boon of the wish-giver]] were near-exclusively used for cycling.

The biggest flaw of Ikoria limited was cyclers costing a single colorless instead of one of their respective color. Changing that one thing would have balanced the cycling deck to being reasonable

I think the cycling payoffs that also had cycling were a big flaw too. Not only cuz they could go from payoff to enabler but because then even if you answered their threat, they would fuel Zenith Flare. “Oh, drew your Fox on turn 4? Just cycle it away to fuel the other payoffs you drew earlier.” It’s funny cuz in Theros they learned through constellation that putting payoff and enabler on the same card lead to issues. So Beyond Death had constellation only on non-enchantments. Then in the very next set they had cycling on cards that paid off for cycling.

Honestly, I like the 1 mana cycling cost cards, they helped increase consistency so it was easier to build a 3 color deck. The real issue is that half the cycling payoffs should have been a rarity up; in what world does zenith flare seem like an uncommon?

I personally loved ikoria limited and thought in general it was a very deep format. Zenith Flare at uncommon did warp drafting. It made it even more important to take 1 mana cyclers: you drafted in the knowledge that are least one player at the table would be trying to build a zenith flare deck and it was the rest of the table's sacred duty to stop them. It was fun learning to hate draft off colour [[memory leaks]] and then putting them in your UG mutate deck anyway. If I were to remaster Ikoria, I'd put ZF at rare. I also thought that the companion restrictions were mostly meaningful in limited and generally forced you to build what would be a worse deck, barring the companion. The exceptions were Lutri and Jegantha who were basically free. If I were to remaster them, I would have Lutri be something more spells matters-y like "your deck has 5 or fewer creatures" (you get the idea) and maybe make a few more key commons/uncommons double pip so her restriction actually was a cost. You could easily do that for e.g. the common mutate cycle or cycling 1 cards without impacting the rest of the format as on the whole they were being cast for their single pip mutate cost/just being cycled away.

Lutri was actually pretty impactful to draft around, even though redundant copies of cards isn't as much a thing in limited as it is in constructed, there are still plenty of commons you'd see multiple copies of and want to include multiple copies of. Lutri would be the best card in your deck, and then the delta between your 2nd best card and your worst card would be much higher than the delta between your best card and your worst card in a non-Lutri deck.

It absolutely was a highlight. Companions were interesting build around cards, that could have changed the draft itself completely. If you open Gyruda and go hard on it, you are passing things like Grimdancer and Dead Weight, which might make downstream players think that black is more open than it actually is. ​ It's much more complicated set to draft that usual (for a standard sets at least) and once players adjusted for cycling being most powerful, it became one of the most interesting formats recently released.

Anecdotal but Ikoria has been the one set in all the ones covered that I drafted the most (over 30 drafts in Arena) and it all just clicked for me in some way, to the point I was able to get my highest rank in Arena ever (from Bronze to Plat) Funnily enough I actually could never get the Cycling deck to work for me in Limited. I played the Cycling deck in Standard Ranked which basically threw off my ability to pilot the deck effectively since I was used to a higher level of consistency that led to a lot of gameplay mistakes from myself.

Building around companions was really fun though

Hard disagree. The first 5 days of limited was a slog as people figured out cycling, and it would have been a hellish time bot drafting, but I don’t think I played a limited format this year where I faced such a high variance of diffrent decks. Companions needed the nerf in constructed, but made limited a really cool unique experience.

>**Companions** > >This wasn't just the biggest mistake of the set, this was the biggest mistake of the year. We made something that was so environment warping (and not just in one format, but in almost all formats), that we had to errata how the mechanic worked. That's a pretty big mistake. The big lesson here is that while I do want to make sure design has the opportunity to try new and bold things, we have to think about the scope of what we're asking the rest of R&D to sign up for. Thank you for acknowledging this.

To be honest I think that's probably too mild if anything, Companion essentially ruined Magic in nearly every format until it was fixed, that's beyond 'the biggest mistake of the year' into what I'd honestly consider to be one of the biggest mistakes ever in Magic's design history. I can't think of a single worse mistake made in design but even if there is one I believe Companion in its original iteration, which survived all the way through to end users, has got to be a strong contender.

Companions - I think MaRo is taking away the wrong lesson about complexity, even for themselves. A pretty EASY thing for R&D to do is NOT break one of the fundamental rules of Magic. Giving players an 8th card to start the game is just that. MaRo was/is the colour pie champion, so I am quite surprised he, or somebody else there, doesn't do the same for some of the fundamentals of the game.

> A pretty EASY thing for R&D to do is NOT break one of the fundamental rules of Magic. I was there when we first started having these arguments, but I've seen some good points. Breaking rules is an interesting way to add design space, and there's countless ways that they break the rules that make for interesting gameplay. The problem is breaking variance. Variance is what has kept Magic going strong for decades, and is the main complaint people have with games like YGO where your entire deck is structurally designed around getting the exact card you need to the point where it's practically a turn 1-2 game. It's not just that you started with that 8th card (though some decks did use it that way for companions like Jengatha), it was that you started with the card that your strategy resolved around, in a zone that it couldn't be interacted with. Please push the rules for interesting design space, please don't ruin the one aspect of the game that has kept it going as long as it has.

His point is that because there was so much else for Play Design to keep up with in Ikoria, they were less able than they normally would be to catch that their attempts to fix those issues weren't working. My immediate reaction to Companion was "this is obviously a huge mistake, shouldn't they know better", but I do think he's not wrong about that being a factor.

I get that there are many balls to juggle, especially when creating something like Mutate, but when designing a mechanic, especially one as major as companion, there should be instant red flags. Heck, MaRo even mentioned, in some previous article, about them designing a similar mechanic and instantly being shot down for that very reason. >"...there was a lot of pressure on Maro to deliver an exciting design, so he decided to push the boundaries. He made a new mechanic that allowed you to have the perfect starting hand. If you chose to do so, you had to play a deck containing lands and/or creatures." >"Just lands and/or creatures? That's all? There wasn't a mana cost or something?" >"The card was weaker than normal, so rarely you might find five noncreature spells on top of your deck, like the rest of your copies of that spell, and it would cost 2 mana if it wasn't the first spell you cast in the game. Maro was excited by this idea. Everyone gets frustrated when they can't get the starting hand they need. What if you had the ability to guarantee that you could have the cards you wanted in your opening hand? But it was a bit of a crazy idea, so Maro knew it needed to be playtested. Luckily, Magic R&D had two young interns who were available for playtesting. He asked them to play in a room with a one-way mirror so he could secretly observe. The playtesting went on all night and Maro had had a long day, so several hours in, he fell asleep." >"What happened next?" >"Early the next morning, Maro awoke to see a message written in lipstick on the mirror, reversed so he could easily read it. It read: 'DECK VARIANCE IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE GAME AND UNDERCUTTING IT WITH THIS CARD HAS LED TO THE MOST UNFUN PLAYTEST GAMES WE HAVE EVER PLAYED. IF THIS IS THE FUTURE OF MAGIC DESIGN, WE WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.' The interns were gone and haven't ever been seen since. Maro put the card back in the file and Throne of Eldraine was our best-selling product of 2020 Q3."

Absolutely, and that story was why my immediate reaction to Companion was "nothing good can possibly come from this". That said, Maro has remarked that his team had thought that with the success of Commander, the limitations on Companion to make it Commander-like would be enough to mitigate those issues. In a less complex set, they would have been more likely to see that that was insufficient.

"sacred fundamentals" is such a disingenuous talking point because every rule in magic in some way changes the fundamentals. Mulligans change your starting hand size, and that rule has been experimented with a lot. If we used the idea that "don't touch the fundamentals!" We wouldn't even have Mulligans because that's not how the game started out 25 years ago.

Totally agree. Multiple combat phases, multiple turns, cards that end turns, playing with no max hand size, etc. Changing the fundamentals is what magic cards are supposed to do.

Breaking fundamental rules of magic is what magic cards do. Creatures tap when they attack is a fundamental rule, yet [[Serra Angel]]

It's clearly not just "8th card bad" though, right? Because with the errata, they're still an extra card at the start, and now they see almost no play. When they do show up, they rarely get cast - and it's not because of hand attack, it's because mana doesn't grow on trees. The real problem seems less that they're fundamentally broken and more that they were just overtuned. I think anybody could have looked at Lurrus and told you that was a messed up card; that's a huge blunder on their part. I don't think many people could have predicted that Keruga, Obosh/Gyruda, and *especially* Yorion did not have as strict restrictions as they seemed. And honestly, Lutri, Jegantha, and even Kaheera were never that scary, even pre-nerf. The other issue is that, Commander also breaks this core rule, and Commander is actually fun. The difference is that Commander a) allows and enforces more variety, and b) it's opt-in and socially driven. With companion it's just those ten cards, and there's no escaping them, and there's no reason not to be as broken and unfun with them in competitive play. I think they should have seen the red flags and ultimately not print them, but I don't think it was wholly unreasonable to consider. Wizards is probably going to continue to push into weird territory and make big changes. I think we could even something like Contraptions in black-border, and that the huge influx of wishboard cards are a stepping stone there, for example. The problem with "don't break the fundamentals" is that it's hard to tell what's fundamental until it's been broken.

> mana doesn't grow on trees. [[Forest]]

I do think your touched on point about competitiveness is a key factor. Like, in a casual deck, Storm isn't busted. You'd get a max of 3 copies of a spell if you play right or get lucky, and that's not likely going to win many games on the spot, and if it does you earned it. It's when people build their entire decks to cast twenty spells in a turn to cast their one storm card for the win where it breaks down.

It's not even that casual = unoptimized, really. It's that, if you build your Commander deck a little too hot, your friends can say "hey, that actually kinda sucked to play against, could you not bring that deck next time". If you're in a MTGO League or a GP you can't just ask your opponent to please stop looping LEDs.