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
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.