i haven’t played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you’re not checked in with the game, here’s what’s been going on in recent years: it’s been enshittifying. i’m fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it’s gone down
- the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that’s pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have ever been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata’d it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can’t be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said “ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them.”
- they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn’t playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they’ve been absolutely shredding these people’s wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
- there’s a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven’t got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn’t make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
- they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they’ve just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they’re ‘teasing’ and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they’ve been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
- every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn’t the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
- they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they’ve been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren’t super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.
the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/
something that’s quite interesting to me is how few people i’ve seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i’ve looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:
- they have to put bread on the table
- whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it’s sooooo close to the right level of abuse
- stop being poor
- bro, just vote with your dollar bro
i’ve been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you’re playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don’t really have a group of specific people you’re experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated
unfortunately i don’t see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!
EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076
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The writing has been on the wall since they reprinted Alpha as non playable $250 packs.
It does feel like this was textbook rot economy BS, right? Destroying an (I assume) profitable product in search of increased growth, no matter how unsustainable? I only ever picked it up properly through Arena, which definitely colors my experiences with it. The whole engine seems set up to only support 1v1 play rather than any of the fun play-with-your-friends formats that are really the lifeblood of most players. This is also the reason why StarCraft 2 never fully eclipsed Brood War, even among hardcore professional competitive types. But so many of the set design issues, mechanic failures, and balance issues have also impacted their preferred format (and the Arena main focus), Standard. Like, the Companion mechanic was the last attempt to try and convert Commander players into standard players, and then they gave up. There’s a half-baked 1v1 commander in Arena now (Brawl) which has never been fully supported the way Standard is even though they ostensibly use the same card pool.
While they’ve been fighting their most popular format for control of the game, their other big changes have been similarly half-baked attempts to bring in new outside players. I can’t speak to how well they actually worked, but I don’t know how much of the audience that was brought in by a 40k or Fallout tie-in are going to picking up the game and starting to actually play (or more importantly from WotC’s perspective, buy). I don’t imagine it’s a very large fraction, and it has diluted the MtG brand beyond recognition.
40+ year old unpopular opinion: MTG has always been pay to win.
I was too poor to dump money into the game as a kid and an adult.
Whatever critcisisms about “enshittification” this game was born to enshittify based on being pay to win.
Yeah I started playing magic in 94ish? That was my thought as well.
I stopped playing way back during the Urza block. You needed a $500 deck to be competitive in 1999. I can’t imagine what it costs these days.
i mean i describe it as a gacha game in the third sentence, i’m pretty clear about that. mtg has always been exploitative, they’re just taking it to another level now
I was at Gamestop and saw their CCG wall.
Thirty dollars for a single pack of cardboard.
They’re out of their damn minds.
(Yes, I know that’s the collectors edition nonsense and not representative of the actual pricing and blah blah blah blah, but the fact it exists at all…)
Thirty dollars for a single pack of cardboard.
Old pack? Or collector booster?
What are the names of the cards you are referencing? It’s hard to fully understand it sympathize without the specifics.
too many banned cards to list. the errata’d mechanic is companion. the busted commander card is nadu. the format dissolving card is jeweled lotus. the sticker card is a sort of nameless goblin sometimes referred to as “sticker goblin”
Ahh. Got it. thanks for the details!
Wild shit, actually this is the only thing I wanted to know about MTG since I cashed out like ten years ago because I could break even on all MTG expenses.
In my time Scavenging Ooze was considered a gamebreaking EDH card. What was this one?
https://scryfall.com/card/mh3/193/nadu-winged-wisdom
apply shuko etc as needed
Wow in the command zone too
yeah it’s comical. again, i haven’t played in ages, but from my understanding the worst part is that the usual combos are not perfectly guaranteed, meaning everyone has to sit there watching you flip over the top card of your deck like 40+ times before finding out if you fizzled or not
there’s a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven’t got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn’t make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
now i really wanna know
also, thinking about it, this is shockingly on topic for tech takes
Right, so this is fucking wild and it turns out a shocking number of Magic players are fucking awful.
Back in the late 90s, judges needed a way to pass the time for hours while they waited on calls so they came up with a multiplayer format called Elder Dragon Highlander(EDH). The idea was that you would have a “Commander” which had to be one of the 5 Elder Dragons, and all the cards in your deck had to match the colors of your commander.
The format stayed that way for about a decade, slowly collecting new players before it was decided that you could run any legendary creature as your commander. During that period they needed a way to control cards that were too powerful and formed a body to manage a banlist. This body was the Rules Committee(RC), which was a group of volunteers that kept tabs on the format.
Then the format started to gain some traction and around 2011 Wizards got involved and released the first batch of product made explicitly for the format, it was a big success and sold well enough to have Wizards make a followup product in 2013.
Somewhere around this period, the Rules Committee started to get into closer talks with Wizards about future products and getting the format onto Magic Online which led to them changing the banlist for the first time entirely removing a batch of cards that were Banned as your commander, but legal in the other 99, to just outright banned. This made a lot of people mad, but ultimately it was a good decision.
Wizards went on to print a new commander product every year after this and it went on to surpass both standard and limited as the most popular format. Wizards then started to cater to the format specifically in sets, printing more and more cards that were really powerful in a multiplayer format, but middling power in 1v1.
With the huge influx of players, the Rules Committee created a new body called the Commander Advisory Group, which consisted of some extra people that could offer their opinions on any changes the RC was going to make
This came to a head with the release of Commander Legends and a card called “Jeweled Lotus”. Jeweled Lotus was a card that was essentially a direct copy of Black Lotus(The rarest, most powerful, most expensive magic card) but it only works in Commander(outside of some specific corner cases). This card was the rarest in the set, but fit into literally every deck in the format. unsurprisingly, the card retailed for ~$100 USD and if you had one your deck was just more optimal than any of the players that didn’t.
The format stayed pretty static at this point for a few years, but last month they issued a new batch of bans, the 2 most contentious were Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt(another very powerful, very expensive card that has been legal since the start of the format). This caused an alarming number of people to send real actual death threats to the Rules Committee and the Commander Advisory Group. The people that managed the commander format were all volunteers and they didn’t have the resources or the desire to deal with that, so they quite understandably relinquished control of the format to Wizards.
The problem with this change is that the RC did not have a profit-motive to ensure that the most recent product stayed legal so that it can sell packs. This is not true of Wizards, and has been shown to be a known problem with The One Ring in Modern(a whole separate debacle that I won’t get into here).
Wizards has also announced a new “power-level” system to help players figure out if the deck they’re playing is a good fit for the rest of the table (which, to be fair, has always been a problem with the format) but they system they have hinted towards has a lot of problems and could lead to some angle shooting from assholes to take advantage of newer players.
Right now, Commander is in some rough waters, and a lot of people don’t have faith in Wizards to properly police it with the goals of making it fun rather than just profitable.
It’s really what it sounds like: the format rules were, mostly, defined by a group of players on a shockingly named rules committee.
They banned some cards, and some of the fedora-wearing stinkbears that play MTG threw a fit, and sent an absolute flood of shit to them, including piles of death threats.
The rules committee decided the $0 they’re paid for doing this isn’t worth this bullshit, and then turned the governance over to WotC, effectively giving the fox the keys to the hen house and probably destroying the last remaining playable form of MTG because some assholes had their fee-fees hurt because they were no longer able to just bullshit steamroller everyone they played against.
TLDR: this is yet another example of why we cannot have nice things.
It’s funny how much nicer the pokemon cards look - the foils and etc. - compared to MTG. The misprints and printing quality have also gone downhill.
I don’t play TCGs much* but I’m fascinated by them and have friends who play, so I hear some of the big controversies.
In my view the Magic player base is looking at the past with rose tinted glasses. Power creep is real, but certainly not new. A median MtG card from 20 or 15 years ago will beat the shit out of the median card from 25 or 30 years ago**. Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?
Knowing the kind of shit that goes on in YGO, Magic’s trajectory seems downright conservative. Then again, a comment Iheard about that game recently that resonated with me was “the only thing more intricate than the OTK combos in this game is the fucking banlist”.
Again comparing MtG and YGO, at least I see a healthy ecosystem of alternate formats in Magic. For the latter, the serious contenders for actually played formats are “standard” and “standard but 20 years ago”. Maybe commander is the main way to play Magic nowadays, but at least it’s not just a choice between two games with the same mechanics (modulo a couple of extra deck summon types) but different banlists.
I might be an outsider, but I quite like the special format cards. The crossovers are mostly meh, but the Secret Lair series includes some really cool cards like these snow lands, the social media goblins, this magnificent goat, and my favourite MtG card art ever.
I don’t doubt that the game has enshittified, but for this one I might hazard a “it took you until now to realize”? At least usual competitive Magic isn’t an eternal format so power creep is not quite so guaranteed.
I don’t meant to defend WotC with any of this. Fuck them and their interpretation of the “open” game license they wrote, but seem to suddenly not like. Just to me it’s a bit funny how fans of the OG trading card game seem to be really late to noticing the problems inherent to the medium.
* I have played Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! casually, but mostly in the form of ancient video game adaptations. Also Pokémon TCG, but with a “one booster pack every two weeks” kind of kid’s allowance with no internet access in those days.
** Specifically median because of early broken ass bs like power nine
The crossovers are mostly meh,
Good news! They announced today that fully half the printed cards going forward are going to be crossovers! This has been met with uh, less than overwhelming enthusiasm and support.
Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?
Not really.
If the card is stupidly powerful it gets banned not too long after it’s printed, because, well, that’s when someone figures out how to break it. So, ultimately, you don’t end up with a lot of old cards being banned because if they’re not broken as fuck when new, they’re probably not going to suddenly* become broken as fuck in 10 years.
*Something new could be printed that makes them broken, but that’s not especially common.
The issue is that this is a boiled frog situation: things have slowly gotten worse, and people have grumbled the whole way down, but it’s at the point where WotC is adding the garnish and seasoning to the soup and everyone is suddenly realizing that they’re also the boiled frog, not just people who play insert-format-they-don’t-play-here.
Modern players rolled their eyes as standard got shittified to the point it’s essentially a dead format in paper, and then commander players rolled their eyes as WotC printed super powerful cards into modern and it also shittified to the point that it’s also mostly dead in paper format.
Commander players are now freaking the hell out because they realized they’re absolutely next up on the shit-train to crapsville, but their response was to scream death threats to the one and only independent entity that could have made ANY sort of difference, resulting in said entity giving up and handing over full control to WotC.
As someone who’s been playing this stupid game since 1993, I’m a little sad because it’s both obviously clear that it’s time to sell all my cards, and never think about MTG again because there’s absolutely no way back to what the game was since Hasbro has to milk this cow until dust is coming out the udders because they literally have nothing else of value left to squeeze.
Genuine question: is the fact that banned cards skew towards the newest sets a new phenomenon in Magic?
yes. if I made a chart by year of the number of cards banned, before recent times almost all years would have zero bans, and then there would be big spikes in years where they fucked up. in recent years you’d still have the huge spikes, but you’d also have a substantial base rate of bans.
Knowing the kind of shit that goes on in YGO, Magic’s trajectory seems downright conservative. Then again, a comment Iheard about that game recently that resonated with me was “the only thing more intricate than the OTK combos in this game is the fucking banlist”.
this comparison doesn’t really work because YGO’s typical formats are eternal (for readers: the standard format in mtg includes only relatively recent cards; this keeps the power levels in a place lots of people like. in yu-gi-oh the entire history of cards is allowed). mtg does have eternal formats, but they’ve pretty much been priced to death, so they’re not really in the conversation anymore. but if you include them, you see a playstyle and level of craziness that’s very similar to what YGO offers.
I might be an outsider, but I quite like the special format cards.
I like those too. they’re kind of the opposite of the licensed ip content in that they’re creative, cute and clever
I don’t doubt that the game has enshittified, but for this one I might hazard a “it took you until now to realize”?
never really been massively into playing it myself but anecdata: I recall hearing of some busted-and-banned shit people drooled over in the early 00s, so I’m inclined to guess that there’s a continued structural issue that leads to this consistently happening
Hasbro wants more money and they realized magic and DnD are the ticket
“good thing I’ve never been addicted to a trading card game”, I vocalize, as I chain myself to the radiator so I don’t bring up my favorite non-magic TCG in this thread too
it’s okay, I know how to defuse this
“it’s hearthstone, isn’t it?”
Is it Lorcana?
you’ll never trick me into talking about magic’s cooler brother
netrunner is super not exploitative though!! also god it’s just so very cool and well designed
yes!!! it’s awesome!!! and it’s also interesting to trace its development from Garfield’s original vision of a game with MtG’s same gacha mechanics (and hacking/bluffing and economics rather than combat) but which never reached a critical mass of popularity, to Fantasy Flight’s version with the gacha mechanics scrubbed proving you can do a worthwhile MtG-style game without scarcity, to the current community-run game that’s entirely free
…but the game being free isn’t stopping my brain, raised on the Pokémon TCG, from wanting to impulse buy a print copy of the latest couple expansion packs. weird how that works
and I’m the only one I know who plays it too so reasonably I should just play jinteki (online multiplayer, also community run, also free) but the urge to buy cards isn’t reasonable
The Cyberpunk 2020 supplement Rache Bartmoss’ Brainware Blowout featured rules on using Netrunner cards instead of the RPG’s existing system to simulate netrunning during game sessions.
also, I really need to grab this even though I don’t play Cyberpunk 2020, cause I’ve really wanted to adapt Netrunner into the decking mechanic for an RPG campaign
