I think this is a fantastic idea and I agree regarding keeping the good memories. I put together a Portal cube a few years ago and have now started to put a collection of Tribal decks together in each color. These are all only including cards Pre-Horizons as well.

what is the actual player retention rate from these sets?

I would love to see this too. It’s like a company that doesn’t care about retaining any customers, just using the new customer data to show growth. The bottom falls out of that because any company/game/etc needs a core group of repeat and engaged long-term customers/users to keep it alive. That same group kept Magic alive for 30 years and they’re now being told the game isn’t for them anymore.

I think they truly think of Magic like Fortnite, and just as a joke, but in that they don’t really care if someone plays for 2 weeks or 2 years, they just want as many people in the “system” as possible, thinking they will come and go throughout their lives. Maybe they see a new set that interests them and they come back in for a few months or years.

I don’t think they care about or want to support the interests of players who play EVERY set and try to collect every card. I think that ship has sailed and it’s now just all about casting a much wider net of peripheral customers and perhaps that can keep them showing growth for a while.

However, this all hinges on a couple very flimsy assumptions – (1) that UB sets will never lose appeal as In-Universe sets supposedly have, and (2) that there are enough of this type of customer-player. What happens when UB sets are scraping tier 2 and tier 3 properties and sales go down? What happens when there’s no more in-store in-person standard at all? At what point do they have to scale this back and return to “Classic Magic” to regain what was lost and try to grow the company again? What happens after 2 consecutive down-growth quarters for WoTC?

This is really well written and definitely echoes exactly what I’ve been feeling. Such a frustrating time right now.

No Pioneer RCQ season is the most insane thing to me. Just starts to get really good with the Amalia and Sorin bans, good enough to convince me to buy into the format after staying out of constructed for 6 years and then this rug pull. No clue what they’re thinking here.

most players I know were into at least partially to avoid UB sets

This was why I bought in. I don’t want a rotating format and this was the only non-rotating format without UB.

I didn’t read the whole thing, mostly because I’m kinda scared to, but if this means UB sets are floating in through Standard and Pioneer than I think I’m done with the game for a little while. Pioneer was the last thing I was interested in and just bought into it in paper simply because it wasn’t on Arena and wasn’t part of the UB system but this changes that entirely for me. I don’t know what the heck they’re thinking here.

Yea I agree w/ all that. I was actually very excited and bought into LTR but these future UB sets are just not close enough to the in-game lore imo.

DSK seems like it has some fervent draft fans but I also think it’s not a very interesting or fun set. The set’s setting and lore also seem at odds with Magic historically.

I don’t think it’s the volume of sets that will suffer, but the quality of the set design in those sets. I feel like if resources are allocated more towards the UB cards we’ll see all the cool and interesting mechanics and cards printed in those sets and then Standard becomes the afterthought.

Thank you for posting this, I think I definitely would have forgotten this was starting tomorrow.

I think this is just unfortunately where the game is going. They’ll put more and more money and set design effort into these and less into the standard sets.

I just really am not very interested nor do I see what the crossover appeal is for the Marvel Universe. These cards look kinda neat but Marvel already has Snap as a game. Also, is this basically a preview of the upcoming two Marvel UB sets that are to be released?

Occulus is honestly taking off right now. Unfortunate that this wasn’t printed at rare.

I think this was the most important part of why Commander grew so big in the first place. Having WoTC/Hasbro decidedly NOT involved in the governing of the format was what allowed it to become and stay fun.

Yeah I completely agree. There is so much context with all the cards that I don’t know how they do this. It’s really just four different ban lists they’re now managing. And that I think sucks so much fun out of the decks that it almost becomes what’s the point even.

Here’s the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we’ll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.

Ok… I’m listening 🤔

In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards.

This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.

For example, if Ancient Tomb is a bracket-four card, your deck would generally be considered a four. But if it’s part of a Tomb-themed deck, the conversation may be “My deck is a four with Ancient Tomb but a two without it. Is that okay with everyone?”

This seems kinda gnarly to me. Perhaps it can work though by farming this decision out to every single play group.

Ty that is a good explanation of that, that makes sense

Sad but necessary for the Professor to spend the first 7 minutes telling magic players to not harass or threaten people online anonymously.

But onto the video - I have to disagree with the Professor entirely on this:

[08:57] I was much more in favor of reasonably reprinting these cards so that they became affordable

He first says that Commander will be more fun in 3 months, and then says he thinks WoTC should have just re-printed the problem cards to make them more available. I can’t understand how any entrenched player could believe this. Especially given just how long and how many reprints were needed for Sol Ring to get the cost down.

But beyond that, if you first agree that the format is better without the cards, how and why are you suggesting to first reprint them to oblivion? There is a clear problem with fast mana in commander (and tutors and other things) and there’s no amount of reprinting that will ever solve this.

He also says that Jeweled Lotus should never have been printed, but then says it should not have been banned? And instead just printed MORE? A card that should never have been printed should now be printed more? This makes no sense, and it’s inconsistent, which is very out of character for someone who approaches things very logically.

Also, the comparisons to other formats like Pioneer make no sense to me. There is no comparison with these formats, Commander is completely unique compared to competitive 60-card formats. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s apples and baseballs.

Finally, his suggestion to put the cards on a watchlist as a waiting period does a huge disservice to players who don’t follow news closely. It would create a cash-out event for entrenched players and leave non-entrenched players as the bag-holders. That is nuts to me, and this is yet another reason why I agree with the path they took here.

Crazy how much they raised so far. As of now it’s at $30,000 on a $3,400 original goal.

I don’t fully understand why a public comment about resigning is needed when there is no explanation or reason given for why they’re resigning. I don’t follow the CAG much but is there any significance at all to this?

Can you elaborate on Rusko, Clockmaker?

I’m only referring to Rusko in 1v1 Brawl. I think Rusko is a cool card and must do pretty well in Historic but it’s definitely easier to play against in Historic. In Brawl its oppressive because it’s a guaranteed Midnight Clock on turn 3 or 4 that comes in untapped, and it has a decent wincon built into it. I think it should create the clock on cast only. A 3/3 that ramps, draws cards, and drains life all in one and pretty much removes his commander tax with the clock tokens, that is way too far. Hopefully by now the matchmaker puts Rusko in the hell queue.

I pretty much agree with all of your points, but wanted to add a few more that have gone into me taking a long Arena break:

• All rares are effectively ~$5, and mythics cost even more

One of the greatest aspects of the game pre-Arena was that there were literally thousands of cheap cards (cheap rares/mythics) to make playing off-meta or fun decks affordable. Some are even quite competitive, yet in Arena the cost for every rare and mythic normalizes around the same price. Roughly $6/rare if you buy gems for packs, or about $2.50/rare if you buy rare wildcards directly. However, there is a cap on the direct buy WCs.

Having ALL rares equalized in a rather high price forces everyone to spend their WCs on only the highest performing rares and mythics. If you only have $20 for Arena, you’re not going to spend it all on 4 jank rares for a pet deck, you’re going to use them on the top tier rares in the tier 1 decks.

I believe this has unbelievable consequences in game play all the way to player mental health, and after a while I was looking at just how much I was spending to stay current in Arena and I was sickened by it. Not even kidding here – I never had more than a few hours a week to play, so I was putting in about $200/set! I stopped in January 2024 and haven’t returned but at this point I think it’s essentially impossible for the economy to change.

• Not interested in the play patterns

This is not Arena-specific, but all of the formats available on Arena right now are inundated with play patterns that I don’t find enjoyable. Starting with Timeless, because it’s the most powerful format, I don’t even watch gameplay on Twitch or Youtube anymore because it’s not interesting. That is a huge problem I think, because it doesn’t look fun to play. You have horrible play patterns like the boros energy cards, Grief+Reanimate, all of the silly Alchemy cards like Juggernaut Peddler, and when you combine everything the game is literally decided on turn 2. That is not fun at all, in fact that feels like the opposite of fun to me. I like puzzles and board state and cards that do pretty much one thing, where through the combination of one-things you can create a complex game. We don’t have that right now.

With Standard, often Standard players say the format is healthy or “healthier than it’s ever been” and I contest that with it’s flat out not fun to play and not fun to watch. That’s my experience. Look at the # of Twitch streamers. Look at CovertGoBlue quitting the game because he found Standard to be too unenjoyable. These are the real effects of what WoTC is doing to the format – making it faster and more powerful, more pushed rares and mythics, and way less deck design thought. The fact that Sheoldred is still in standard makes me sick.

I have been getting into Pioneer lately because I think it’s perhaps the only interesting format left to play, and with that I may get into Explorer but I really wish the card pool was equal to Pioneer. I think that’s a huge mistake they’re making in slow-rolling the card releases.

• Brawl is unplayable

If anyone can give me one reason why Nadu isn’t banned in Brawl I’ll concede, but the fact that it hasn’t been banned (as well as Rusko and Baral imo) tells us everything we need to know about Brawl: WoTC. doesn’t. give. a. shit. They don’t care at all, and the lack of not only meaningful but ANY updates at all to queuing or banlist is enough of a reason to hard avoid it all together.

This is a format where players just auto-concede to certain commanders that they don’t want to play. Imagine managing a popular game where tons of your playerbase hates aspects of it so much that they just concede to take a loss when they see a set of cards you design to be fun. This is the opposite of fun to me, and again I think it non-trivially contributes to negative player mental health.

I could go on but this has gotten long already. I appreciate the post because some of this stuff I have been thinking about for a long time.