In the past, Magic: The Gathering scrapped a product idea that involved putting stickers on cards, head designer Mark Rosewater has revealed. Seemingly inspired by Legacy board games like Risk and Pandemic Legacy, this version of ‘Legacy Magic’ had players popping stickers onto their cards and permanently changing them for future games.
However, the idea never came to fruition because Wizards of the Coast’s market research showed it was unpopular. “Players were pretty adamant about not wanting to permanently ‘harm’ cards,” Rosewater explains, in a post on his Tumblr ‘Blogatog’ blog.
In light of that, it’s pretty interesting that the stickers idea came back with a vengeance in MTG Unfinity. Unfinity’s stickers, which are also legal in Commander, certainly stick out (ha) as one of the strangest parts of the set.
Wizards of the Coast and Rosewater were very clear during Unfinity’s spoiler season that the unset’s stickers use a “very light glue” that “won’t harm the card it’s stickered onto”. Perhaps they took pains to mention this upfront as a result of that past market research. (Though, and perhaps we’re speaking with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty obvious that MTG fans would be precious about their precious cards.)
Magic Legacy is one of many potential products Wizards has tossed out in the ideas phase. “We’ve done numerous Hackathons to create new product ideas that we scrapped because we didn’t think they were viable,” Rosewater explained on Sunday.
Rosewater says some of their scrapped product ideas include Universes Beyond crossovers. “There are IPs we decided wouldn’t work well as a Magic product,” he says. Soothing words for anyone worried Wizards will throw whatever IPs it can find at the wall and see what sticks.
Source: Wargamer
