Magic: The Gathering might look like the world’s oldest, and one of the most successful, trading card games, but don’t let appearances deceive you. Just ask an MTG fan, and you’ll soon learn it’s on its last legs.
The game is dying, and it’s not natural causes. No, the TCG has been murdered, bumped off by the cynical monsters at Wizards of the Coast.
It’s not the first time it’s happened, either. In fact, consulting the history books, there hardly seems to have been a time, since the very first MTG set Alpha came out in 1993, when Wizards wasn’t doing something that would bring about the death of the game.
Here’s a look back in time, and a long list of just some of the events players thought would spell the end of Magic: The Gathering. It’s survived a surprising number of these.
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- 1993 – Magic: The Gathering begins.
- January 1994 – The freshly minted DCI issues the four-copy rule and changes decks to require 60 cards, putting an end to the true way to play the TCG. The knife is then cruelly twisted with the creation of the MTG banlist, further restricting what cards you’re allowed to play. Magic is officially dead.
- November 1994 – Just as it was beginning to recover, Fallen Empires kills Magic with the weakest set ever released.
- July 1995 – Chronicles obliterates Magic: The Gathering by reprinting lots of highly collectible cards with black borders. Uproar from fans, upset that the cardboard they hoard might cost less, leads to the creation of the Reserved List the next year, which has been killing Magic ever since.
- October 1995 – Homelands kills Magic with the weakest set ever released.
- 1998 – Urza’s Saga throws a curveball, killing Magic with the most powerful set ever released, for a nice change of pace. It’s a long, cold Combo Winter. A load of cards get banned, and the game’s CEO summons the design team to their office, chews them out, and threatens their jobs.
- April 1999 – Sixth Edition comes with the largest overhaul to the Magic: The Gathering ruleset, removing the damage assignment step, replacing Interrupts and Mana Sources with Instants, and generally simplifying many of the game’s concepts while preserving its strategy. These were different to the rules players already knew, which of course, was very bad, potentially fatal, for the health of the game.
- October 1999 – Wizards of the Coast designers, nervous after their meeting with the CEO, ruin Magic with Mercadian Masques, the first in a pitiful block of weak creatures and boring mechanics, where the best cards are really annoying control pieces like Rishadan Port. Props to anyone trying out Monger tribal in 2024, though.
- 2003 – Wizards attempts to kill Magic with an ugly new card frame that fails to capture its classic fantasy feel.
- 2004 – After it barely survived the overpowered shenanigans of Mirrodin, Kamigawa block runs Magic into the ground with some incredibly anemic sets. Fans also respond badly to the strange, almost abstract appearance of the kami, because Magic players have no taste.
- 2007 – The Grand Creature Type Update kills off a lot of unnecessary one-off creature types. But because it also got rid of dinosaurs and dogs, I’m going to go ahead and say that this kills Magic too.
- 2008 – New World Order slays Magic: The Gathering by catering to new players rather than established fans, dumbing down the game by avoiding complexity at common. Fans also respond badly to a more whimsical world without humans in Lorwyn block, because Magic players have no taste.
- 2010 – Magic: The Gathering is killed to death with disastrous rules changes such as removing damage from the stack. Also, no more mana burn!
- 2011 – Innistrad puts Magic on the chopping block with ridiculous Dual Faced Cards that are difficult to use and create memory issues during play.
- 2012 – For Avacyn Restored prerelease, Wizards produces mysterious Helvaults which turn out to be mainly full of cruddy tokens. Some bigger stores get Helvaults with expensive cards inside, creating anger in the community. This prerelease is a flop which probably heralds the final days of Magic.
- 2013 – Slivers? Those aren’t Slivers! Wizards of the Coast has forgotten what the most iconic creatures in its own mythos look like. Magic is doomed!
- 2015 – Battle for Zendikar is a giant whiff, with lackluster mechanics that fail to show the best of either Zendikar or the Eldrazi. It’s a huge letdown for what is supposed to be a climactic battle that was built up over multiple sets. If Wizards makes it out of this mess, this will definitely be the last time it makes that particular mistake…
- 2017 – Amonkhet Invocations look so unlike real Magic cards that it can only confirm everyone’s secret suspicions about Magic dying. And it’s hard to imagine how a Magic: The Gathering card could be any harder to read than this.
- 2019 – War of the Spark mortally wounds Magic: The Gathering’s IP, with a poorly received, ‘decidedly male’ book, and a rushed ending to a climactic battle that had been built up over multiple sets. If Magic somehow survives, it’ll definitely be the last time Wizards makes that particular mistake…
- 2018 – MTG Arena arrives, killing paper Magic by providing a much more accessible and easier way to play online.
- January 2020 – Power creep kills Magic as Simic ramps, draws, and elks out of control.
- May 2020 – Wizards of the Coast releases Companions, an exciting new feature for Limited and also the most broken mechanic ever conceived. Can Magic cling on?
- October 2020 – The Fortnitification of Magic begins with the Walking Dead Secret Lair.
- July 2022 – The Fortnitification of Magic continues with the Fortnite Secret Lair.
- November 2022 – The $999 30th Anniversary Edition releases to general booing. Wizards has really done it this time; no one will even want to touch a Magic card after such a blatant show of greed.
- 2023 – Play Boosters blow up Magic by blending the worst aspects of draft boosters with the worst aspects of set boosters.
- September 23, 2024 – The RC kills Commander, by banning some of the most expensive cards in players’ collections. How could they do this to the format?
- September 30, 2024 – Players kill Commander by piling on the RC until it collapses and asks Wizards to take control. How could they do this to the format?
- October 2024 – Universes Beyond grows larger, swallowing up half the year’s sets. It eyes what remains of Magic IP with a toothy grin, like a pike kept in too small an aquarium.
A great big disclaimer
There’s a flaw (hopefully not a fatal one) in this article. Some of the items on this list were situations where fans had a knee-jerk negative response to change, but others were real mistakes Wizards of the Coast made that made Magic a worse experience for a lot of people. This timeline makes no clear distinction between the two.
A few events were even so bad that they might have killed Magic if allowed to continue. Not every situation was one where Wizards barrelled on regardless and fans eventually got used to it, there were times when Wizards backed down or made course corrections.
I find this fact, as well as looking back at the many, many problems and changes Magic has successfully navigated over the decade, quite reassuring, however. It’s a reminder to me, as we enter a year with six Standard sets, and less original IP than ever, that even if my worst fears are realized, Magic will make it through and out the other side.
In a sense, Magic: The Gathering is always dying, because it’s always on the verge of becoming something new. On the other hand, this changeability ensures it can roll with the times, recover from mistakes, and ultimately survive.
If you’d like to make sure Magic still has a pulse, you can check out everything coming up on next year’s MTG release schedule. Or, for more festive mirth, here are our predictions for the mystery 2025 Universes Beyond set.
Source: Wargamer
