Magic: The Gathering’s announcement of Standard legal crossover sets last Friday went down like a lead balloon with a portion of the game’s fanbase. These are dramatic changes: Wizards of the Coast is not only putting Universes Beyond tie-ins into every Magic format, it’s also creating more crossovers. The company plans to move to a half and half model where 50% of its sets follow its own original IP and 50% are collaborations with other franchises.
Despite the fact that Universes Beyond has been very profitable for Wizards, Magic’s head designer Mark Rosewater says these changes are “not a ‘cynical money grab’”. Replying to a fan on his Blogatog Tumblr blog on October 27, Rosewater said “I know it’s easy to want to attribute malice to a company’s decisions, but we really are trying to do what we feel is best for the long term health of the game”.
The designer lays out two reasons why putting Universes Beyond MTG sets into Standard may be good for Magic as a whole.
Firstly, straight-to-Modern sets were causing problems. Modern is supposed to be a non-rotating MTG format, but high-powered Modern cards were causing pseudo-rotation, warping the format to such an extent that old decks became unplayable. MTG Lord of the Rings, for instance, was a straight-to-Modern set that brought busted cards like Orcish Bowmasters and the One Ring.
Wizards isn’t confident about its ability to design for Modern without having this effect, “our ability to balance them wasn’t as efficient as premier sets”, and making UB cards at a Standard format power level will presumably have a lower impact on Modern.
Secondly, Wizards has decided that Standard is a better ‘entry ramp’ to players brought into the game by Universes Beyond than Modern (or for that matter Commander). According to MaRo “ this “was a common complaint we were getting from newer players.”
Of course, these justifications only explain the decision to drop Universes Beyond cards into Standard. They will be cold comfort for the fans and content creators who never liked these crossovers in the first place.
And Rosewater is not trying to argue that the decision to print more Universes Beyond sets is not driven by the potential for profits. This would be a ludicrous thing to suggest, given how much evidence there is that UB is an absolute cash cow. For instance, Lord of the Rings quickly became the best-selling Magic set of all time, while the Fallout decks from earlier this year broke the record for Commander precons.
It’s also notable that Wizards’ parent company Hasbro continues to struggle, last week announcing a 15% decline in year-on-year revenue. With the rest of the toy giant sinking into a quagmire, there’s surely pressure for its one continual success story to keep growing.
Amidst all the arguments about the ‘soul’ of Magic and the effect of inviting in other IPs, a potentially more significant change has been a little overlooked. Wizards is now going to be releasing six Standard sets a year rather than four. Combined with the longer rotation time brought in last year, this is going to mean a much larger card pool in the Standard format, which will fundamentally alter the nature of the game.
One constant, however, is that we’ll still be here to deliver the freshest Magic: The Gathering news, tell you about the best MTG Arena decks, and keep you up to date with the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
