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
There have been people making posts like this for years.
The Companion screw-up was years ago now.
“This anger” is nothing new. Move along if you want.
I have never up voted something purely on reaction to the title, but I knew what this was going to be as soon as I saw it.
Mtg is dead to me now. I don’t give a fuck about secret lair, I hate playing commander, and I absolutely despise these off-theme universes beyond sets.
I haven’t bought any cards in ages because I just don’t feel like collecting anymore. Nevertheless, the game continues on without me. I am no longer the target demographic, and it sucks, because magic was special.
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.
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.
Don’t think I’ve seen a fandom self-destruct like this in a while.
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”?
While magic has always been exploitative, this feels like ‘there is just too much’. Not sure if that makes sense. But more and more I see these franchises bloat and bloat and bloat with more and more content. And it just shatters any desire I have to even get back into it. And this isn’t just a problem with magic, it is a problem with all these IPs. It feels very late stage superhero comics, where every character had such a long incomprehensive background that it was impossible to follow (and also a lot of 'to understand this storyline completely, you need to also buy a few random comics from a different story line. What do you mean to understand the last star wars movie I need to have played fortnite?).
And you know when the IP’s fill up too much and the sales finally slump they will just kill half the content anyway, to refill it with more slop later (AI is going to be grand for this), or rebrand it, marvel ultimates style (but wait, it is all part of a universe, so it is all true. Eurgh). At least star wars killed their expanded universe so these old storylines no longer intersect (ow wait, they are selectively bringing stuff back of course. But wait, if new Thrawn has not done what old Thrawn has done, how is he cool? He didn’t even throw rocks at people, this is all a scam!)
And don’t take me as some sort of design minimalist btw, I do at times like kitchen sink designs (like nethack/slash’em for example). But this eternal milking and adding more and more to IPs is just too much. And it isn’t just the world building, it is also nothing is just one thing anymore. Everything has the book(*)/videogame/movie/boardgame/bathsoap/mouthwash tiein. Anyway bit of a rant sorry.
*: you know the strange character that was underdeveloped in Rebel Moon (No not that one. The other one)? Well it is worked out better in Rebel Moon the directors cut. You saw that and it actually made the plot worse because of a glaring plot hole? Well that is explained in the book. AAAA
Edit: and it isn’t just IPs who go for more and more. Presenting the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app (amazing how in a way the USA has seen the pillarisation problem of the past Netherlands and thought, we are going to do that but with a lot of capitalism added on top).
E2: More examples comparing somewhat regular outputs with ever expanding IP slops. All of HP Lovecrafts fiction work basically fits into 3 books. Look at the size of the mythos that spawned. But also compared the impressive output of somebody like Charles Stross, he has written about ~45 books (from a quick count of wikipedia, not counting collections/reprints). Compare that to Warhammer 40k’s Horus Heresy, this book series (it is also 2 board games, and a card game) is 64 books long. With the last story, being written over 10 books (and 3 of those 10 are basically a trilogy). That is an insane amount of books, and it is only about a small part of the whole universe. People have to be unemployed to keep up with this kind of shit.
the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app
the worst chicken place[*] has a fucking streaming app? of course it fucking does, chick-fil-a can’t fuck off
[*] if anyone replies to this to kneejerk slobber over chick-fil-a’s nasty fucking chicken: why. which part of it is good. it’s not the sauces or the brine or the breading and it’s definitely not some combination of all those things. why the fuck is this garbage fried chicken popular when literally every other choice is better. please for the love of fuck eat some Church’s or try a local place, you’ll discover the idea of flavor and it’ll astound you
they are pretty good as far as fast food chicken goes. Their chicken sandwiches are well above most places. Sure i could get better at a restaurant but i don’t always have time to do that as those require a decent chunk of time.
The streaming app is fuckin stupid though.
No idea about the chicken as im not american. Just know they are openly bigots or at least celebrated by them. So this felt like a shitty attempt to create a culture war broad brand of crap. Only dress yourself in chickafil crap to show you are not lgbt and watch the unfunny anti lgbt cartoons etc.
Lol at you starting the fast food discussion btw.
when I was in college one of my old high school buddies who kinda fell off the deep end after graduation got really into magic. he would spend most of his pay every week on magic cards and would come to the college campus and hang out at the cafeteria to play magic with a few students. it was seriously disturbing to watch because he was always kind of an outcast and came from a VERY weird family and he got sucked in about as hard as any drug addict.
monkey brain likes to see number go up really hard. gambling, crypto, stock trading, even if you give people meaningless, worthless number like reddit karma or whatever game points you can imagine they’ll still try to make it go up. it is possible to use it for good, but it’s mostly not used so
