Wizards Product Pipeline
We’ve had a bit of drama in the last year at least regarding characters not showing up on cards when they had flavor text and stories about them, or Wizards not anticipating the player desire for a UR artificer legend and Kaladesh being the perfect, now missed, opportunity to make it happen.
In response, Mark Rosewater has answered a lot of asks explaining what the process for a set/product going to print actually is and just how difficult it is to answer this stuff. Basically once we see that Kaladesh is coming out or see a character in story and flavor text, the thing is out of R&D’s hands. Here’s what we know:
Design starts about two years prior to release for a large set (source)
A set is finalized six to nine months prior to release (source)(source)(source)
We learn about supplemental products roughly six to nine months before the release--under the old method of telling us about products prior to announcement day at least (source)
The finalization for set names varies greatly (source)
Flavor text occurs after design is finished--characters created in flavor text can’t become a card in that set (source)
Design hands a set off to development 16 months before release (source)
If anybody wants to send in links to additional sources on any of this info or if you can think of other timeline stuff we know about regarding the release of a set, send links to me and I’ll update this post.
The basic problem we’re running into is that Wizards needs to know about what we want at least a year beforehand and that would mean they essentially got lucky and could squeeze that desire into a product at the tail end of development somehow. But we don’t know what they have planned in even vague terms until about 6 to 9 months out, way too late for anything to be done.
And even then, the year out timeline is if things just happened to align perfectly--it’s still terribly unlikely anything could be done.
