One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to determine which Magic sets are received with applause and which are met with a shrug. There are people of all tastes in the playerbase and all expansions receive the entire gamut of possible responses – but larger community sentiment and sales numbers don’t lie. Infinite dovetailing reasons combine to cause the success or the failure of a set. I’ve been thinking about one specific factor in modern Magic design that, depending on how it’s done, majorly impacts reception. It’s all about the references – internal and external. Unfortunately, I have become convinced that Magic is at its best when the self-references are kept to a minimum. But the incentives and, weirdly enough, sometimes the employee makeup of the company pushes against this. Join me on this circuitous route of emotions.
Looking Outside Rather than Within
Magic is obviously a master of the direct external reference and even the inferred reference. In the beginning when the beloved game had no distinct flavor of its own, it was the masterful porting of Tolkien-esque high fantasy concepts that created resonance for players to fall in love with. Older players still bemoan a change away from this over time. It’s understandable – it was, on average, well done. External references have returned in force to Magic recently, albeit not in a form loved by the most invested players. Despite this, it’s obvious to the unbiased observer that the designs of Universes Beyond sets are, on average, incredibly well rendered and great at bringing external characters and worlds into the Gathering fold.
Explicit external inspiration has also helped create some of the greatest sets and planes of all time, with the most obvious being the gritty horror-inspired world of Innistrad. More subtle influences come through in the likes of the RPG-world of Zendikar. Top-down sets (called such by Wizards of the Coast because the designs start with the name & art of a card) are some of the most popular and revered for a reason. If a resonant experience is executed well, you get a perfect marriage between the form and function halves that make up Magic: The Gathering. Familiarity breeds excitement. But what if it is not executed well? Or, most importantly, why does it feel like Magic is missing the mark on top-down sets and worlds recently after succeeding for so long? Enter: the self-referential.
Escapism in the Self Referential
Are video games an art form that are becoming more and more inward-looking, obsessed purely with themselves and unconcerned with outside influence? The discussion on my social media timelines for the last week seem to think so – and I can understand why. It’s possibly the only modern form of media where many consumers and creators look largely within for vision and comparison.
Combing through the first 10-20 years of video gaming is to see something so obviously inspired by the life experience and media taste of its creators that it borders on the comic. Designers were continually exploring new spaces being opened up by fresh technology. New input sources and an evolving world around them. Obviously, the tons of slop being released throughout these times have been forgotten, but the outside influence on the most commercially successful games was present and, dare I say, extremely important.
The next several generations of game devs have arrived. Many no longer have the wide swathe of influences prevalent in the medium’s earliest days, but instead are largely inspired by older video games. It makes sense that people who grew up playing video games would like to make video games! At the same time, this interest is often somehow held at an arms length, a sort of disdain for the medium’s history, that results in whatever is brought forward having to be tweaked or mocked, even while reused.
Interestingly enough, and possibly even worse, there are those developers who look only to the past for inspiration, purposefully venerating old video games – and only old video games. It’s hard to find the line between veneration, inspiration, and straight copying.
These varying levels of interest are still more of an investment than many video game creators show towards other forms of media – books, physical art, movies, etc. Sure – you have the occasional indie dev or major producer who have peer influences that they tattoo on their game’ sleve. but they are few and far between. This has held the medium back in quite a few ways. There’s a whole humanity’s history of art out there, why not delve deeply into it actively and always?
Am I being wildly reductive about this? I certainly am. I’m reducing an entire art form full of variety down to its most commercial excesses. The broad brush is easy to paint with. But, I can tell you the key reason that game makers are pushed into this continual self-referential cycle, repeating themes, mechanics, and giving us the same thing over and over – it’s obviously what gamers want. Have you seen how many Balatro clones have come out in the last six months?
Video games are self-referential and repetitive to the purposeful point of escapism, perhaps the only major art form that is held nearly exclusively in this trapping (though as the author and the reader are aware, every piece of media under capitalism is being sucked in this direction). If something is made only for comfort (or for maximizing eyeball time which necessitates extreme comfort), there is no incentive to reach into something else to challenge and excite beyond whatever the player/consumer already may expect.
Obviously, not everyone is happy with this though. A contingent of gamers are always looking for something new and different. It’s been known that even the most comfort-seeking gamer gets bored with the same Call of Duty or Madden game repeated three times in a row. Eventually, they start asking questions.
This is, at long last, the place to bring in Magic back to the discussion. This game is obviously a place that many players look to for familiarity and escapism in its own right – I would venture that this explains some of the reaction to Universes Beyond. Looking for the familiar in one’s hobbies is to be expected, especially when it gives one a life raft to cling on to. It’s not a secret that fairly generic and repetitive fantasy and romance books are popular for those reasons. A movie sequel always wins over executives more easily than a new idea.
When working in the self-referential space, it’s easy to be both lazy and trap yourself while still trying your best to be original. A familiar character seen one too many times becomes a stereotype of themselves. A plane visited for no reason garners an eye roll. A classic design brought back again becomes tiresome rather than eliciting warm recognition. Unfortunately, I believe that Magic has developed (largely out of necessity) a huge obsession with itself that has, sometimes, started to border on parody.
Let’s talk about hat sets.
The Modern Hat Set
Magic has struggled with the “hat set” allegation for well over a decade now. It descriptor levied against expansions and worlds that feel so shallow that it’s as if the game put on a colorful hat rather than the full costume. The most obvious of these in recent memory was the catastrophic run of Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and Aetherdrift. These are all a form of top-down set that missed the mark. Compare them to the very-well-done Bloomburrow and Duskmourne, two flavor-driven sets that instead landed well with consumers and players. But what do I think the core issue with these three sets were? Much of the air in these expansions was taken up via over-indulgent self-referential designs and flavor.
They were criticized for being quite literal hat sets, featuring what felt like entirely disparate Magic characters from throughout history convening upon them wearing… new hats, whether it be a stetson or a fedora. It wasn’t enough for Karlov Manor to be a murder mystery set – it had to be set on Ravnica and contain many of the trappings of the Ravnica sets that people have enjoyed in the past, alongside another Morph mechanic for some reason. It wasn’t enough for the cowboy set to stand on its own, it also had to be Bad Guys driven and those Bad Guys couldn’t be original characters, it had to be almost Every-Single-Mid-Sized Baddie-From-Magic’s-Recent-Past with a design reminiscent of their old card(s). Aetherdrift shoves three fan favorite worlds together into unholy, crowded matrimony where no plane gets its own time and simultaneously are shoved out of the limelight by a parade of Vehicles, a mechanic that has long overstayed its welcome. Every set has to have a damage doubler or an even better Divination (somehow) or a token doubler… or if we’re getting ambitious, maybe even a tripler!
This is the self-referential habit but at its worst, shoving things where they don’t belong. Magic drawing on its thirty-plus years of designs, worlds, and characters works well in small supply or in the right context (I’m looking at you, Dominaria and Foundations). Where it becomes troublesome is when it is used in explicitly top-down designs to patch up holes created by a crunch or a poor initial concept. Why do people react so negatively to it when it should, in theory, feel comforting or be familiar? On average, I think it just feels cheap as opposed to high effort. I think many players are extremely cognizant that every [mtgcard]Geralf, the Fleshwright [/mtgcard] taking up a Rare slot, there could have, maybe, been something more akin to [mtgcard]Hundred-Handed One[/mtgcard], something that grounds us in where we are rather than hoping to elicit an easy pop out of a half-zoned-out audience.
The New Generations & the Pace of Design
Video games borrow from the past because they know what works. If the mechanics and themes are already beloved, surely a new coat of paint on the tried and true classics will go over commercially, right? It’s easy to see how we’ve gotten to the same place with Magic. As the pace of releases have increased, some things have had to change to compensate. Maybe worldbuilding had to be slightly sacrificed for some sets. A potential original character is jettisoned and replaced by Queen Marchesa. Perhaps an early hope to return to Avishkar in proper fashion ended up rolled into a set about racing instead. We already know what works and people like – we’re under time pressure and it’s good enough. Playing the hits and showing people the characters they love is comfortable and even a negative reaction is probably better than a shrug for something unrecognized. It’s even been admitted that most sets have a form of framework for generic designs they try to hit for Limited which has produced great results but makes some elements of each set feel the same… because they are!
Realistically, there may just not be the time to do that extra level of research to find or create the little intricacies that can make a top-down set a little less like Magic wearing a hat, and a bit more like a realized world that Magic is happening within. Multiplying this effect is that each plane or story beat only gets one set now. Every expansion must be 100% self contained following the abandonment of the block model, without any kind of replacement that would thematically and mechanically tie sets together. Rather than a faction or element of a plane getting 70 cards across two sets, we’re reduced to 20 cards in one. It’s harder to communicate the subtly that makes something feel more Lived In® without more breathing room.
I know the people inside the company really, truly care about making sick Magic sets that have unique stuff going on. The broad brush has a way of gliding across the canvas.
However, much like the video game designers mentioned above, I wonder how much of the inclination for the self-referential comes from within the passive experience of the designers themselves. Over time, Wizard’s halls have understandably filled up with people who have had a lifelong dream to work on the game. Maybe they played it professionally, maybe trying to design their own cards was a major hobby or maybe playing and consuming things about it was the major way they spent their time. Also – the first generation of designers who first came in the door with quite literally no game design experience in the first place (as ever, looking at Mark Rosewater) have spent the last 20 to 30 years… designing Magic. The context is and always will be Magic – it’s the everlasting and predominant card game with decades of rich history and designs to pull upon. Why wouldn’t you pull upon it? There just must be the moderation of not pulling on it too much.
Granted, for much of the last six months, Magic seems to have adjusted to a much more reasonable spot. Maybe the problem was the Omenpaths after all.
They’ve Still Got It
You’ve caught me – this article is another opportunity for me to praise Edge of Eternities. Try as people might to label it as a hat set, I refuse to acknowledge them. I can’t say why much better than your-favorite-Magic-writer’s-favorite-Magic-writer Rob Bockman did in his article here on Hipsters: Edge of Tomorrow.
While asking us to put Magic through a massive contextualization shift from high fantasy-ish to crunchy sci-fi, it does it earnestly. The hard work is done the right way. We’re surrounded by a space world that offers new looks at classic Magic races without recycling old concepts. Mechanics pull on familiar strings but also stand on their own. It treats its origins and genre with respect, placing Magic within something that has its own rich history, ideas and stereotypes to work off of. The extra time and space for more stories and side stories helped too, for those of us who read them.
The closest things we have to comforting, direct self-references are found in the likes of Tezzeret being here and also the now way overdone token doubler effect in [mtgcard]Exalted Sunbord[/mtgcard].
If we can still get sets as exciting as Edge of Eternities and Foundations, those that use Magic’s history and characters in the right ways and contexts rather than having it fall out of every saloon and race car, I’ll be a happy guy. As the Omenpaths come to a close and we blast off to wherever we’re going next, I’m looking forward to it.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, DanDan fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack