Mark, I would like to voice a grievance I, and presumably a lot of people, have with your blog as of late. It seems to me like you keep dismissing the feelings people have towards the very dense spoiler season as a result of the new 6 standard sets a year paradigm with the argument that we actually went down sets, not up.
I think this narrative is disingenous and takes away from the point: yes, there are TECHNICALLY 2 less sets this year than last year. But this doesn't really matter for anyone that plays Standard or Pioneer or Limited, and not just Commander, because those sets were reprint sets, commander precon sets, innovations sets and whatnot.
You used to be able to tune out of those spoilers if you were not a commander player, but now there are 50% more premiere sets, and half of them have huge marketing pushes, associated beginner products, and more. There is simply no way not to engage with them and they are constantly coming.
This is why I ask you to be more honest in how you address those concerns: it's not about raw set quantity, it's about density.
You're right. Pointing out that we've gone down in sets is missing the larger issue, so let me dive into that. I think R&D, over the last decade, has significantly shifted in how it thinks about the players' interaction with the game. Magic, by its very definition, is a game "bigger than the box". The game has over 30,000+ cards. No one person can possibly absorb it all.
For many years, our solution was to carve out a lot of sub-groupings. Here's a way to play Magic with a much smaller card pool. This way you can just focus on those cards, and that will be something you can wrap your mind around.
Then came Commander, which seemed to completely fly in the face of this whole philosophy. The format basically gives the players access to every card (okay, almost). This means you are exposed to all the cards, all the mechanics, all the sets, all the things we've done over the years. It's the exact opposite of limiting access.
And Commander took on a level of popularity we'd never seen before. What if the correct way to handle the immensity of the information wasn't to chop it down to bite-size? What if we just embraced the complexity? Let the players have access to it all (or at least, a lot of it) and let them sort through it in whatever way works best for them.
In other words, we stopped prioritizing the mind set of players being able to absorb it all. Interestingly, it kind of ties into Richard Garfield's original vision of Magic. He purposefully didn't want players to know everything. In the early days, Wizards didn't provide a list of the cards. The idea was you would learn about them as you played.
The Internet then came along and made it impossible to hide information. But now, thirty plus years in, the sheer scope of the information has actually allowed us to do the thing that Richard originally wanted. You can't learn it all.
Embracing this philosophy has affected many things. It changed how we built Commander decks. It allowed us to raise the complexity level of sets (although we still have limits). It let us make cameo cards, to bring back popular old mechanics in smaller doses. It let us increase the size of Standard both in time and number of sets.
The challenge is there are players who are accustomed to the old ways, who are used to being able to grok everything at once, and this new system does not make that easy. In fact, it's near impossible. I get that this change over is a bit disorienting, but we believe once people get used to the new status quo, to the idea that no one person is supposed to absorb everything, that it will lead to a richer, more enjoyable means of interacting with the game.
Burning out the player base? Sure, what could possibly go wrong ?
