Episode 77: On Magic: The Gathering's 2026 Release Schedule

Transcript

This is almost certainly going to be a little scattered, but it's probably not a lot different from most of my episodes, frankly.
But I've talked on this show before that I have a fairly long history with the game Magic the Gathering.
If you're not familiar, I feel like everyone I talk to on some level is familiar, but it doesn't mean that I talk to everybody.
Anyway, if you're not familiar, Magic the Gathering, and I can't say definitively that it was the first trading card game, but it was certainly the first one that really hit mainstream and really stuck around.
And, you know, when people talk about the original trading card game, it's generally Magic that is pointed at.
The idea of a trading card game, or a collectible card game, which I'll talk about in a second.
But the idea of a trading card game is that you're opening randomized booster packs, essentially.
Much like you would open a randomized pack of baseball cards.
You open a randomized pack of cards, which gives you access to the game pieces.
So, different than, like, a board game, where you buy the board game, at least traditionally, and you have all the pieces included.
This is, you get into the game, and you buy more product to flesh out your own collection of stuff, which then lets you build a deck and play the game.
So, it has, like, a built-in, you know, monetization, essentially, inside of it.
And it was really the first game of its type to do this, as far as I know.
Now, maybe there was something obscure before it, but the first one that most people point at.
I've been playing this game, albeit on and off, but I've been playing this game since I was, like, eight years old.
I mean, it was way back in mid-elementary school that I first picked up a set of these cards and had them in my hand and tried to learn the game.
And I've played on and off throughout my life, right?
I played for a little bit in elementary school.
I stopped for a little while in elementary school.
I picked that back up again, still in elementary school.
I played a bit in middle school.
I played a bit in high school.
I played a bit in college.
I played a bit after college.
I played a bit, you know, I played a bit when my kids were young.
Like, there were many times throughout my life where this game has been a big part of my life.
And for a very long time, I really pointed at Magic as what I considered to be a perfect game.
And what I meant by that is that it was perfect in its imperfections.
Like, there are problems with the game.
By modern day standards, there are better ways to make a game in terms of, like, game theory.
But it's also very hard to argue with a game that has been around as long as it has been.
Which at this point is over 30 years and still going very strong.
By all indications that I've seen, you know, it's owned by Wizards of the Coast and Wizards of the Coast is owned by Mattel.
So, and I've heard a lot that, at the very least, Magic is the cash cow for Wizards of the Coast.
This game is pulling a lot of weight in terms of its company structure.
So, my point in saying all that is that it's not like there's just a small handful of people who are still holding on to some old artifact of a game.
This is a game that is going very strong.
Recently, they, the company, Wizards, released it, well, it rolled out its release schedule for the expansion, you know, sets for 2026.
And I'm not sure I can give all the background and explain everything here because the episode will go on for like five hours.
But let's just say it has been met with middling community response at best.
The complaints are really twofold.
I mean, there are many, but a lot of it comes down to two things.
One, they're releasing too many sets.
Like, there's going to be a lot of sets released into the competitive gameplay in a single year.
And that, that number has been ramping up.
This is sort of the new apex.
This is the new high point of how many they're going to roll out.
But in reality, they have been rolling out more and more sets year after year after year.
Because they're, well, I'll get into that in a second.
I keep saying that, but I'll get into that in a second.
The other big complaint is that a lot of what they're rolling out is not their own intellectual property.
So again, for those not familiar with the game, Magic has its own intellectual property, its own world, its own characters.
And for decades, it survived off of those.
Now, it was not the strongest IP.
And they have tried time and time again to write books, but they always kind of sucked.
And, you know, probably just mostly a writing issue.
The overarching plots are actually kind of cool, but the writing itself has always been just god-awful.
But they've made books.
They tried with some video games.
They tried, I think they tried to get a TV show off the ground on, like, Netflix or something, particularly on the heels of the League of Legends show on Netflix.
That didn't go anywhere.
Or maybe it did and no one cared.
I'm not really sure.
But overall, their IP, although they have had it and there have been true fans of it, it was never that great.
So what they started doing a few years back was incorporating other IP, licensing other IP.
So they had, like, a Lord of the Rings set.
Recently, they had a Spider-Man set.
They had a bunch of other things along the way.
But they had a Final Fantasy VII, or Final Fantasy in general, I guess, not just VII, but Final Fantasy set.
But more and more over the last five years or so, they have been ramping up with the frequency of how much they're using external IP versus their own.
And this has kind of brought it all to a head.
There was also some company promises along the way that while they were making stuff with external IP, it wasn't going to be part of the main game.
And now it is and blah, blah, blah.
So overall, at least from my read on things, there's really two big complaints.
It's too many sets and not enough of their own IP.
I've spoken on this show before as well how I've kind of fallen out with Magic over the years.
And the big thing that did it for me is a complaint that falls into one of these categories.
It's just that I hit my breaking point earlier.
When I was in college, I had very limited funds.
I was able, though, to keep up with the game where the company produced at that time either three or four sets a year.
There was only a single product line.
You just bought the booster packs.
There weren't like all these specialty booster packs and special this and limited edition that blah, blah, blah.
So if you wanted to keep up with the game and have a few kind of pimped out cards along the way, I could reasonably do that on the budget of a college student, which is not much money.
Fast forward a bunch of years, and as a full-time employee with a reasonably good career and a reasonably good salary, I couldn't keep up with anything anymore.
It was kind of crazy because there were so many sets, and they had produced so many specialty products, which did catch my interest.
Part of what I used to like to do was a combination of having the game pieces to play the game, but also have a few cool-looking ones along the way, which you used to get all from a single product.
And now you have to buy across all these different lines, and they're all really expensive, and the prices are all hiked up.
But my burnout on this game really came from a combination of too many sets combined with too many products and too much inflation within those sets, right?
I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that those in charge of Magic the Gathering, at least at a corporate level, have slanted in the direction of company interest over player interest.
I know I felt that, and that's why I backed out, and my position for several years now, at least three, four years, because I was playing again a bit during kind of COVID lockdown times, and even at that time, it was pretty easy to keep up with the game.
And then at a certain point, maybe around 21, it just spiraled out of control for me, where I just, I couldn't, I couldn't even get the stuff I wanted anymore, because there was too much of it.
I think they saw the success of, like, mobile gacha games, because mobile gacha games rely on what they call the whales.
They're funded primarily by a top echelon of people, one or two percent of players, maybe less, who just spend inordinate amounts of money on the game.
And everybody else might spend a little, but they're almost inconsequential.
And I feel like they went in this direction, and it definitely alienated me.
And now I am seeing it alienating more of the community.
And then when you pair that up with the fact that, I think it's almost like a perfect storm, right?
Because you then pair that up with reducing their own value on their own IP, right?
Their own storylines, their own characters, in favor of just kind of turning out IP slosh from external sources.
I used to, part of what I used to like about it, part of what originally drew me to the game was these kind of unique, quirky characters and cards.
I mean, that's not the main reason I played, but I liked seeing that when I picked up cards.
And I'm talking about, you know, way back, maybe in the first five years worth of the game.
I even found that by, there was kind of a golden era of Magic, in my opinion, right around 2010-ish, like plus or minus a few years.
Where, like, the game was really going strong, organized play was going really well, competitive play.
Like, it was really a good scene.
And even then, I found that the sets were not as quirky or interesting or fun as maybe the ones were way back in the day.
But even then, it was better.
At least it was their own stuff.
I don't know if I would have been drawn in the same way to a game where I could have Spider-Man fighting against some Star Trek character fighting against Frodo.
Like, that's, it's, I like all those things.
Well, I've never been a huge Trekkie, but, you know, I like Lord of the Rings.
I like Spider-Man.
I love Marvel characters.
Like, I like this stuff.
But when you put it all in the same arena, it feels disposable to me.
And I think that's the key, is that, like, as long as they were going with their own characters and their own IP, it felt like they were taking the thing seriously.
And they had their own unique spin on things.
Whereas now, it just feels like a disposable cash grab.
And they're not even trying to hide it anymore.
I don't think the game's going to collapse.
I just think the type of people who play it are changing.
One thing to kind of close this out, because I'm running a little longer than I meant to.
I suppose I just went off on a rant on this one.
But the other thing that happened kind of subtly along the way, and I'm not a huge, like, semantics person, but I think this particular semantic distinction is an important one to understand.
In the beginning of Magic, it was considered a trading card game.
The idea there being, it put emphasis on trading with your friends.
It's a social thing.
And it also helped keep your costs down.
You'd buy a pack.
Maybe one of your friends wanted one of your cards.
You wanted one of theirs.
You don't have to go and buy another pack to get the card you want.
You would trade.
And there was emphasis on that.
Over the years, they changed that vernacular, and it's now considered a collectible card game.
And again, this sort of harkens out to these mobile gacha games, where what they found at some point along the way in gacha games is that people shouldn't be able to trade.
Because as soon as you let players trade, it's worse for the company trying to sell the product.
And along the way, Magic became more of a collector's game than a player's and trading game.
And it's just one more piece that makes it double down on the idea that they're just trying to shovel you product.
And I get it.
They're a company.
They need to make money.
I understand that.
There wouldn't be a game if there was no company.
But I still think there should be more.
They need to watch out for the players.
And I don't think they are.
I don't even think they're trying anymore.
And I find it very upsetting, because this game has been a big part of my life, again, on and off.
And these days, I can't even find it within myself to recommend it to anyone.
Because I just find the state of affairs to be such the antithesis of the game that I grew up knowing and loving and playing and sharing.
And I'm going to make it very well.