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
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
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.
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.
Don’t think I’ve seen a fandom self-destruct like this in a while.
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
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.
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 this is not the case). 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 like those too. they’re kind of the opposite of the licensed ip content in that they’re creative, cute and clever
https://awful.systems/comment/5154463