Hi Mark:
"I like cheesecake, and I like spaghetti. But I don't want cheesecake in my spaghetti."
The Professor at Tolarian Community College
The Command Zone (citing The Professor at Tolarian Community College)
Respectfully, I completely disagree with the focus on UB, and the recent videos of the Professor and the Command Zone very much resonate with me, and almost everyone I know personally who is a Magic player.
Thanks.
Instead of answering this with my same talking points, I’m going to try a different approach.
Who gets to decide what Magic is as a game? Me and my fellow designers? Not really. We get to experiment and push boundaries. We get to pitch ideas of what Magic could be, but in the end it’s the players that dictate what stays and what goes.
The earliest toe dipping of the concept that would become Universes Beyond was us experimenting as usual. It was in silver-bordered cards (both in separate releases and within Unstable).
That was popular enough that we tried skinning existing cards with alternate versions in another property (Godzilla). That was successful enough that it encouraged us to try a whole set in another property. We started with Dungeons & Dragons as it was close in tone to Magic and was an internal property to Wizards.
D&D’s success had us experimenting with Secret Lairs with original content. The success of that led to making Commander decks. The success of those led us to making a whole set in an outside property (Lord of the Rings).
That set became the best-selling set of all time. Which of course prompted us to increase our volume of releases.
The point of all of this is we didn’t get to where we are by ignoring the desires of the players. It’s literally the exact opposite.
And if the players, as a group, feel we’ve overextended, we’ll get that feedback and we’ll adapt. It’s what we do. Magic only gets to be what the players want it to be.
I’m very open to the concept that one day we’ll push things too far (and maybe we’re already there - I’m not denying that possibility). Historically speaking, it’s how we learn. Go in the direction of the feedback until you get different feedback.
But just as I have to acknowledge that we might have gone too far, all of you need to acknowledge, that maybe we haven’t. Maybe where we are is what the Magic playing audience, as a whole, wants.
Maybe cheesecake and spaghetti tastes good together, but you never thought to try.
The conflation of sales numbers with player popularity is very funny when you remember that MTG has a thriving secondary sales and collectors' market, and a not-insignificant portion of those sales are, to put it bluntly, player-agnostic.
Magic cards have been collectible commodities as much as game pieces for a while now, and with the overwhelming push for Universes Beyond products in all game formats, we HAVE seen a noticeable drop in the quality and consistency of the game side of the product.
The power level of the game has risen out of balance with itself, there are absurd numbers of bans in standard AND an absurd number of sets active concurrently, complicated by pressure from the various external IP-holders, especially the fumbling of rights to marvel characters in digital formats, and it seems like it's going to get far worse before it gets better, but none of that matters, because the game is not the product.
The product is the product. And the most reliable way to grow a product is not retention of existing fans, it's expansion. And when you're expanding into markets that are unfamiliar with the previous incarnation of your product, quality is less important than novelty.
Universes Beyond are designed to sell magic cards to people who don't play magic. Whether they use those cards to play magic doesn't matter, because the draw isn't the game, it's the IP. It's "here's blorbo from your shows on a shiny rectangle!" But Mark still calls them players here. They're buyers. Maybe "collectors" would be a better term.
Note that i'm not saying this won't increase the player base of the game, which would be a good thing if it were undertaken sustainably. I'm saying that increasing the player base of a game that's actively compromising its quality to expand beyond its borders will lead to the game aspect dying and the collectible aspect remaining the only relevant one, and that's a shame.
Magic will become funko pops. To Hasbro, and to Wizards of The Coast, "players" don't exist. Buyers do.
This is largely my feeling. MtG has started to Fortnite. And I hate that that's become a trend among entertainment companies.
It's the inevitable consequence of infinite-growth business. The shareholders demand infinite growth, the boardroom demands expansion of the customer base, the product must become a universal draw, and in so doing, lose all individuality.
You can see it similarly in the way the majority of Lego's product ratio has slowly crept farther and farther into premium nostalgia cash-ins at higher and higher IP markups rather than original properties or more neutral products. Another death star. The delorean. The house from the big bang theory. Not for play or for rebuilding, products to build once and display.
