A rant about the state of the game

I hate how MtG has slowly morphed away from the game that I was introduced to and fell in love with in high school. Sets like Ixalan, War of the Spark, and Return to Ravnica (x2) were memes at the time in the fanbase, but at least they were original and creative.

I can't say that anymore about this game. Everything in the game now just feels like an ad for something else. Universes Beyond is completely ruining the game and is turning it into a Funko-pop like IP, where it is just a conglomeration of other pop-culture zeitgeists. I can say I didn't mind it first when it was just a The Walking Dead secret lair or the D&D crossover sets. The secret lair was in fact, a few exclusive cards that had to be ordered from wotc themselves, and weren't legal in any format except commander and vintage. Even then, public sentiment was so negative on them and the power level of those cards was so low that it was easy to rule 0 them out of the conversation.

The D&D crossover set felt acceptable because it was another wotc property after all, and D&D had been given MtG themed content books before, so why not the reverse? It was keeping both properties in house.

The problem for me started with the LoTR set. I know general nerd culture adores LoTR and that LoTR is so iconic that it has seeped into the setting of general fantasy in many ways. I however, have never read or watched LoTR so the set wasn't "for me" to quote wotc themselves. This is when the narrative from wotc themselves started to shift from "it's maybe a once a year thing, and none of it will be standard legal" to "if you don't like it, it isn't for you". After LoTR a barrage of new IPs became the norm of set releases. Every new set from Ixalan to Brother's War now had to include rare Jurassic Park and Transformers cards. Universes Beyond became entire Assassin's Creed sets and will soon be Marvel, Final Fantasy, and IPs that are nowhere close to MtG-adjacent properties.

When I first got into MtG, new sets were released around 3~4x a year. Typically it was a core set, 1 or 2 sets from a block, and the yearly commander set. Now there's 6+ releases a year, and new commander decks come with every set. And with the release of more product, there has been insane levels of power creep to keep fan interest high. Wotc, or at least hasbro, knows that their fans love having the best, most powerful cards to play with and put in their decks. So it's only natural that with more sets comes more powerful cards, and with more powerful cards there comes power creep.

I have only been playing for 8 years now and it seems like all of the cards that came out when I got into MtG have either become $10+ staples like Aetherflux Reservoir or Smothering Tithe, or they have been powercrept out of the format entirely.

Wotc released an announcement a couple weeks ago that Universes Beyond will now make up 50%- half- of all MtG releases in a year. Half of all MtG product in coming years won't even be Magic: the Gathering focused anymore. In addition to that, a lot of the sets lately like Duskmourn or Thunder Junction seem to genuinely be parodies of what a good MtG set used to be. It's all just "new commanders", and old beloved characters wearing cowboy hats or in an 80s slasher movie.

I started feeling the effects of this change a few years ago and it drove me to start buying up older cards so I can enjoy the feeling of how the game was when it had it's own identity. I started buying cards solely based on a certain printing or art and chose to leave the chaos of the new releases behind. At this point, I think that Foundations, a set that seems to share that ideas but with a new twist, isn't going to be a new way of thinking about MtG. I think it's going to be the last dying gasp of the game I once loved before it becomes something completely unrecognizable from what it once was.