Was Return to Ravnica a good set or a bad set? Was Edge of Eternities? What about Outlaws of Thunder Junction or Aetherdrift or Marvel’s Spider-Man, or, to gesture to the pressing question of this month, is Reality Fracture?
In one way, these questions should be easy. If the set looks good and plays well, it’s good. Right?
In point of fact, despite the ease with which online commentators toss around quick star ratings for sets, it’s actually incredibly difficult to explain a set in its totality, much less judge it. There are actually a diverse array of possibilities for describing a set—and they depend on how we even conceive what a set is.
And examining some of these idiosyncrasies, I think, can help us expand our rather sparse vocabulary for understanding Magic itself. It might even help us think through one of the most pernicious abstracting judgments of the contemporary Magic era: the “hat set.”
Expansive History and Sets as Events
A deceptively simple definition for a Magic set appears in an article by one Richard Garfield, published in Winter 1994 in The Duelist #1, previewing Arabian Nights:
“Magic: The Gathering — Arabian Nights is the first of Magic expansion sets, additional cards for use with Magic: The Gathering decks. These expansion cards are meant to add new color to your game. A regular infusion of new cards will constantly change the dynamic of the duel, preserving the challenge of trading and deck building. Ideally, the pool of cards upon which players can draw will be so large that there will always be unknown and surprising elements. Expansion sets are also an opportunity to develop the character of Dominia. The multiverse is immense; expansion sets allow game designers and players to explore new parts of it, and discover aspects of the “old” world which new cards can uncover.
To me, this paragraph feels mythic precisely because it’s so pedestrian. Garfield is, in real time, creating a new vocabulary for a phenomenon that has now sunk deep into the mental vocabularies of most Magic players. A set, he explains with absurd self-evident simplicity, is an array of additional cards. A set is made so that a game environment can be kept fresh. A set is made so that the game’s world can keep expanding.
As he frames it, expansion sets—like the tabletop game expansions with which they share their name, like Dungeons and Dragons 1993 module House of Strahd or the 1994 boxed set Planescape—represent an addition to the pool of cards an individual player or playgroup will see in their games. On this basis, it seems easy enough to define whether a set was good or bad: did it introduce enough interesting cards to keep the game fresh and fun, and did it expand Magic’s world in an interesting way?
But here, we begin to run into problems. Consumers buy Magic cards piecemeal (in singles, booster packs, and boxes) instead of all-at-once (Such as a Dungeons & Dragons adventure book; one singular object that contains the entirety of the new material). As a result, few players will have precisely the same experience of playing with any one set: if my playgroup only gets three cards from a new expansion, to what extent am I able to judge it? Even if you’re a regular Limited player, the immense variability of a booster pack means that you’ll rarely be seeing the totality of a set.
More, Garfield’s description omits (for the game was still stumbling from the protozoic ooze) an important fact about how Magic sets circulate: a set is not only a product but also a process. A set contains a finite number of cards, to be certain (in theory, you could gather all of them together and identify them: there is the expansion), but from the perspective of a player, a set comes into being through a cluster of events. The release of marketing materials and story releases in outlets like The Duelist, the unfolding of prerelease tournaments in stores and major venues (the first such event was held for Ice Age in 1995), and the proliferation of atmospheric vibes throughout the places where enfranchised players engaged with the game–these are ways that a Magic set appears to us.
This was already the case in the 90s, but Magic sets came to function even more like events as online media infrastructure expanded. We live in a moment, as McKenzie Wark says, dominated by “vectors,” transmission paths that bring us stuff from far away–which means that media transmission is as much part of life as anything. As the media philosopher Pierre Lévy puts it:
“while [an] event itself is actual, the production and distribution of messages about it constitute a virtualization of the event, one supplied with all the attributes previously associated with virtualization: The event is detached from a specific time and place, becomes public, undergoes heterogenesis. The messages that virtualize the event are at the same time its prolongation; they participate in its accomplishment, its incomplete determination. They become a part of it.”
Let’s say, for example, that an election happens (go register to vote, by the way! I’ll wait here while you do). That’s an actual event: it’s happening physically and locally. But to many people, that event only happens virtually, in the ways they hear about it in the news. That’s not to say that they don’t matter—an election, for example, affects our psychic lives, our future plans, our feelings of safety, any financial investments we might be lucky enough to have. But it’s the mediation of the election, its virtual status, that drives those changes.
This is the case for weird products like Magic: hearing about the thing is part of the thing itself. To the extent that I’ve experienced a new set, it’s not because I’ve played with every single card—it’s because I’ve looked at preview images, engaged with promotional videos, immersed myself in the commentary, read Reddit comments, devoured web fiction, and, finally, let the set play on my imagination. And these virtual events are laminated onto our actual lives. Look no further than the price jumps associated with, say, The Command Zone featuring a certain deck or card.
How, then, could we possibly assess a Magic set? There’s no one answer—certainly too many to discuss in one article—but there’s a particular heuristic that I’ve noticed in the last few years, and one of which I’m quite suspicious.
The Structural Approach; or, the Tragic Tale of the Hat Set
One of the dominant methods for assessing Magic sets is also one of the dominant methods for assessing cultural works generally: from the top down, from idea to execution. By this, I mean attempting to trace some kind of originative cause to a bad work of art. These kinds of critiques often come onto the scene in moments of aesthetic crisis, where people are struggling to identify why they feel a certain way about a certain work and what it means that they do.
The example that always comes to my mind is the abundant discourse about the maligned final season of Game of Thrones. At the time, it felt somehow insufficient to say that the dialogue was worse and the scenes rushed. There had to be some greater force behind the bad. One critic, for example, suggested that the show had become bad not for stylistic reasons but because it shifted from “sociological storytelling” to “psychological storytelling.”
Assessments of Magic sets often engage in a similar sort of structural critique, most evident in the criticism of so-called “hat sets.” These sets, the logic goes, are bad because they’re founded on essentially bad or lazy ideas. If Aetherdrift is bad, it’s because it’s based on the bad idea of making a pastiche of one pop culture genre (the racing film); rotten execution is necessarily caused by rotten plans.
This impulse is understandable. If you invest a lot of your psychic life in stories, you’ll want to figure out why one feels good and why one feels bad. What’s more, we live in a fast-moving media ecosystem in which we’re bombarded with so much data at all times—and that same media ecosystem supplies us opportunities to apply ready-made categories to translate vague feelings into concrete aesthetic judgments. I see hundreds of Magic cards on phone apps during preview season, which will necessarily stimulate a whole muddled mixture of emotions, unresolved impulses that need to get out but can’t because there’s so much to see. It makes sense that the mind will reach for a structural explanation, some kind of totalizing truth that might explain the huge array of discrete phenomena that I’m trying to navigate.
Such categories, however, can readily become cliches—regurgitated points divorced from genuine judgment. They might claim to explain the entire world but, in truth, they filter the sedimentary complexity from our experiences.
One such exclusion became evident to me this past summer, when, in the aftermath of the MagicFest Amsterdam 2027 Preview Panel, I found myself twisted into a mental pretzel—salty and malty and full of alienated confusion. For two years, I had been hearing nonstop about hat sets: how ill-conceived they were, how uncreative, how ill-advised to root their entire aesthetic in a single media genre.
But the response to Kamigawa: Titanbreach, a mashup-media-inspiration set in which the kaiju of Ikoria scuffle with the mecha of Kamigawa, was soaring joy. People were exuberantly excited at the mere prospect, complete with a few preview images, of giant robots colliding with giant monsters on Magic cards.
You could chalk this inconsistency up to a few things. Perhaps it’s genuinely qualitative: maybe there are more interesting possibilities in the kaiju/mecha matchup, which is comparatively niche and may thus spawn more creative card designs, than with overdetermined genres like murder mysteries or westerns (I doubt this, though). Perhaps it’s online observational bias: maybe the people excited about Titanbreach are different than the people who hate on hat sets (though what does it mean that both get highly upvoted and widely liked on similar platforms?). Or perhaps sentiment about hypothetical sets will always be more positive than the response to actual sets: maybe a lot of people feel the way I did when Thunder Junction and Aetherdrift previewed—simply excited because more Magic was happening.
Or, perhaps, as I wondered on Bluesky recently, “hat set” was always more of a cliche that momentarily captured vague feelings than a productive aesthetic judgment. Maybe it’s because we don’t really judge a Magic set, or any aesthetic work, on the basis of its idea alone. Perhaps we judge it based on a vague accumulation of momentary impulses. Are there more interesting card designs, good works of art, and fun bits of story than there are dull, bad, and boring ones? Do they create more fun games, more exciting discussions, more favorable integrations with our social life (as writer extraordinaire Rob Bockman remarked to me as I was writing this, Avacyn Restored has a painful enough Limited format, but it also made for more nights when one couldn’t leave “dingy game stores before midnight”).
There are countless acclaimed artworks based on principles that shouldn’t work. We just wouldn’t know it because their creators were talented at line and color or shot composition and editing or paragraph rhythm and vocabulary or whatever. Make a dinky little card game based on fantasy tropes that everyone already knows—are you nuts?
In truth, the relationship between concept and actuality is never direct. It’s true that a bad idea is limiting—not because any idea is deterministically bad, but because any idea or plan will create a set of aesthetic challenges, some of which are easier to respond to than others. It can be easier to make a great art prompt out of a good idea, but it’s not impossible to make do with a bad one—indeed, if anything, weirdness can lead to productive challenges. When someone in Wizards of the Coast posited the idea for a world based on a world-spanning Central European-inspired city with more factions than could fit in a single set, I’m sure the idea sounded odd—but history has borne out that odd ideas can often pose generative creative challenges.
For that matter, assessing a Magic set based on its concept alone misses out on the actual way the game is lived: socially. It’s one thing to judge a work in isolation, formulating a private view that has little to do with anyone else: in those cases, it’s easy to dwell in abstractions, to conflate our disdain for an idea with our disdain for execution. But Magic sets are different because they always appear in reference to other people—those we play with, those we discourse with, perhaps those whose writing and commentary we soak in as we think about the game. How could an idea make a Magic set bad when there are so many great people?
If you need proof, I’ll offer up myself on the sacrificial altar of argumentation. Although I’m reluctant to admit it, I have to share that despite my deep and ongoing suspicions about Reality Fracture’s entire conceit, the set has consistently captivated my attention: mechanically stimulating, aesthetically energizing, and narratively moving. More than that, it’s just fun to have fun with people: to enjoy other players’ excitement over previews, to find fellow minds captivated by the excellent web fiction’s narrative beats, to chat with a podmate who loves callbacks to older Magic cards.
These kinds of experiences are, as I suggest above, as much part of a set as the internal workings of its aesthetic. Because, after all, no Magic set is ever about just one thing—neither its conceptual origin nor specific problem cards nor specific standouts define a set so much as the eclectic experience of living one.
Ryan Carroll (he/him) is a writer and Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature. On Substack as Dominarian Plowshare, he writes about Magic’s art, story, and experience. Outside of Magic, he writes on topics including 19th-century literature, information theory, television politics, and cliche.