Magic: The Gathering has come under a lot of fire from long-time fans in recent years following the explosion in licensed sets featuring everything from Transformers to The Lord of the Rings. Contrary to those critics, the card game’s head designer says “a quick buck” is not the driving principle behind decisions like these and player research tells a different story than angry online fans.
“We are always forward facing,” Mark Rosewater, who’s been working on MTG at Wizards of the Coast for nearly 30 years, told IGN in an interview. “Our goal is not to make the quickest buck we can and call it a day.” He continued, “Magic is 31 years old, we plan to be here as long as we can. And so we are constantly forward thinking in how we do things.”
A particular sore spot for some fans of the game has been its Universes Beyond sets which are branded crossovers that have featured everything from Warhammer 40,000 and Dungeons & Dragons to Monty Python and Hatsune Miku. In addition to taking the spotlight away from the core iconography and world building of MTG’s own lore, the relentless cadence of new releases and sought-after rarities to chase on the second-hand market has left some players feeling burnt out.
Back in 2022, a Bank of America analyst specifically called this out in a report to investors. “The primary concern is that Hasbro has been overproducing Magic cards which has propped up Hasbro’s recent results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand,” he wrote at the time. An influx of speculators during the pandemic years and a volatile secondhand market built around min-maxing profits from reselling the most valuable cards in between reprints has also hurt morale around the game for some.
Rosewater told IGN these bad vibes aren’t necessarily born out in the data that Wizards gets from market research and customer responses in the aggregate. “People just wanna attribute–I don’t know, it’s the nature of the internet of, like, ‘they’re up to no good,’ or, ‘they don’t have our our issues in mind,’” he said, citing the Lord of the Rings set from last year as it’s most “successful” ever. “We very much care what players think. We do surveys and everything, we do market research. We don’t wanna just make something, we wanna make something we honestly believe that the players to their core will enjoy, and that drives our decisions.”
The interview was published this week but conducted prior to the latest controversy to hit MTG: the banning of several powerful cards in its popular Commander format. Following an online harassment campaign targeting some members of the volunteer-staffed Rules Committee which issued the bans, Wizards of the Coast announced the group would be dissolved and the decisions would be taken back in-house to shield people from abuse. It’s still not clear how that will all ultimately play out.
In the meantime, however, two Universes Beyond sets that might end up among the most popular yet are due out next year: cards based around both the Final Fantasy games and on Marvel comic book heroes.