My background

At some point in the '90s I received a Fourth Edition starter kit as a gift. I didn’t know anybody else who played Magic: The Gathering yet, so I sat on my floor and played both sides of the game against myself. My favorite card was Yotian Soldier. What kind of country was Yotia? What was their process for making mechanical soldiers? I assumed that I would find out in time.

In college, my roommates and I drafted our entire collection into five-color, several-hundred-card monstrosities, because we didn’t know yet that the norm was to build focused 60-card decks. Our games lasted for hours. Today we still get together to play Magic about once a month (our decks are more coherent now).

For years I spent my Saturdays hosting a Pauper player-run event on Magic Online, in the days before Pauper became an officially sanctioned format. And I spent the rest of the week participating in Pauper PREs that other people hosted, and chatting on Pauper message boards.

I wrote articles for a vendor that ran a network of buying & selling bots on MTGO. The pay was peanuts; I would get maybe $15 in store credit for an article thousands of words in length. But the truth is I would have done it for free and been grateful for the platform. That’s just how excited I was to talk about deckbuilding and card design.

When I wanted to start hosting Magic drafts for my friends at my house, I wrote my own web site to manage the brackets. I’ve made my own tokens and deckboxes.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was going to Friday Night Magic at my local game store roughly every other week, and driving to any Grand Prix or similarly large tournament within about five hours of home. During the pandemic, I installed Lutris so I could play Arena on my Linux computer, and I’ve been a near-daily player for the last couple of years. I also started ordering a draft booster box of most Standard-legal sets from my LGS.

Most days for the past few years, I’ve watched gameplay videos from creators like SaffronOlive or PowrDragn while I ate lunch. And you can look back over my posting history here to get a sense of how much Magic has been on my mind.

I haven’t been playing Magic continuously for its whole 30-year span. I’ve taken breaks that have sometimes lasted years. But I’ve kept coming back. Now, I’m going away again, and I can’t see a path back. The announcement that future Universes Beyond cards will be legal in Standard leaves me unable to find any type of Magic that I’m still interested in playing. I’m sad about that, so I wrote this post to vent my feelings.

What does “dropping” Magic mean?

I said that I play Magic once a month with my friends, and I’m not going to stop hanging out with them because of a decision that Wizards of the Coast made. If I’m lucky I may be able to Rule-0 UB cards out of that metagame. I probably won’t put much effort into building or upgrading my decks anymore, and if I do, I’ll use proxies for the costlier cards (something I hadn’t considered until recently).

I plan to continue playing Standard on Arena until the first UB set enters the format, after which I’ll uninstall Arena, and stop buying boxes of new Magic sets.

I’ve already started selling off many of my valuable paper cards.

Why I don’t like Universes Beyond

I think @Fluid put it most succinctly:

I don’t wanna play pop culture soup, I wanna play magic.

And if that clears things up for you, you can close your browser tab now. But I am much too verbose to leave it at that.

The bottom-line answer to why I don’t like UB is that I have a visceral negative reaction when I look at UB cards or think about playing games with them. But of course that reaction comes from somewhere. Let’s unpack it.

The story matters

Many people devote similar amounts of time and energy to chess or poker – venerable games of strategy and skill with worldwide followings and well-established governing bodies. But I’m not as interested in those games. One of the big things Magic has that they don’t is its story: a rich backdrop that exists in a two-way relationship with the game mechanics, both informing them and making them feel more real. A world that players can engage with, even in ways that don’t involve playing the game (such as fan art or cosplay). A sense that the spells you “cast” aren’t mere rules, that they come from some context, and have some life to them: you could imagine how a wizard might use them to solve a problem, or resort to them in a moment of desperation.

But good (or even just okay) backstories don’t come free. You can’t just babble some nonsense peppered with words like “sword” and “spirit” and say you built a fantasy world. You have to pay attention to things like plausibility and consistency and balance. You have to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Wizards of the Coast has historically done a good job cultivating Magic’s story, although it must be said that they’ve slacked off a bit over the years. (Gone are the days when they’d commission entire novels to accompany new sets.) Universes Beyond isn’t merely the latest step in a slow decline, however. It’s an abdication of any attempt to maintain a consistent story. It’s saying, “actually no, all of these spells and abilities are just game rules, to be applied to whatever makes us money” – even to franchises like Fallout or The Walking Dead where nothing you could really call “magic” is part of the setting. Universes Beyond releases don’t have to be, and aren’t, woven into “Universes Within” in any way; their fiction doesn’t have to be reconcilable with Magic’s. Mechanical compatibility of the cards is all that matters, now. This 1/1 creature and this 1/1 creature can trade off in combat and – I was going to say “we’re asked to believe that there’s any reason to it”, but actually that’s not so. The real shame is that we’re not asked to believe anything about it, anymore. Whether you or I can imagine that confrontation, or what we think of it if we do, are no longer matters of pertinence.

In introducing Universes Beyond cards to sanctioned formats, WotC is banking on the assumption that most players never actually cared about Magic’s backstory, that they only care about its rule set. And no doubt that’s true, for some. But it isn’t for me.

You’re paying to read ads

The second big problem with Universes Beyond is that it’s blatantly commercial. It amounts to Wizards of the Coast allowing other companies to use Magic for advertising, the way one might sell space on a billboard, or the side of a bus, or a divider stick at the grocery store checkout.

Advertising on something is not a sign of honor or affection. I know most of us are inured to the constant presence of ads in our lives, but just because something awful is normal now doesn’t make it less awful.

I have to look at myself in the mirror

And partly it’s a matter of self-respect. Wizards of the Coast told us for a long time not to worry about Universes Beyond cards because they would only be optional extras, and now they’re changing their tune and they expect most of us to just fall in line. And I need to know, for myself, that I’m not the kind of person who will. That I don’t just shrug and play along when someone gulls me. That I’m not on call to help Hasbro advertise for Marvel or Ubisoft whenever they want me to.

Et cetera

Those are the main reasons why I personally dislike UB, but there are plenty of other good reasons that may be significant to other people. For one, it sounds like UB sets impair Magic’s (already underpaid) artists’ ability to make money on on the secondary market. This seems like a pretty foreseeable consequence of WotC creating a situation where they don’t own the intellectual properties that appear on some Magic cards. Copyright law sure is a mess, huh? Alone, this might not be enough of a reason to abandon UB entirely, but it does seem like if they cared about the not-so-little people, they could maybe have limited it to a once-in-a-while thing instead of expanding it to encompass half of all new sets.

In his video on this subject, The Professor said that he’s not going to let his frustration about Universes Beyond stop him from enjoying Magic or from playing the game with people who want to use UB cards. That’s a great sentiment, and I’m happy for him that he can still find joy in the game. But I don’t feel that way myself. I don’t want to play Magic: The Grocerystick and, well, you can’t make me. I don’t have any sort of responsibility to get over my aversion in the name of being an “ambassador for the game” or whatever. Prof and other content creators are in a difficult position because their careers are intertwined with Magic, and walking away would be a daunting proposition even if they wanted to (and I don’t mean to speak for them as to whether or not they do). But as for me, zero percent of my livelihood has ever come directly or indirectly from Wizards, unless you count that one time when I opened a Mana Crypt.

A tangent about power creep

Magic’s runaway power creep (that is, the tendency for new cards to obsolete old ones by being stronger or more efficient than them) isn’t related to Universes Beyond, but I can’t talk about quitting without mentioning it.

I’ve been playing long enough to remember when Savannah Lions was considered an exceptionally strong card. Last year in Duskmourn we got Veteran Survivor, which is Savannah Lions plus two beneficial abilities, and nobody’s even playing it in tournaments because so many of the cards that get printed these days are even more broken.

I could write a whole separate essay about power creep, and I’m trying hard not to. Let’s see if we can hit the main points quickly:

• A higher floor on how powerful cards have to be shrinks the design space for new cards.
• People like Magic cards for reasons other than just their power level. Somebody who likes Nyxborn Marauder or Vampiric Spirit for their art, or flavor text, or because they’re friends with the artist, or whatever, shouldn’t have to choose between playing the card they have an affection for or upgrading to the clearly superior Eradicator Valkyrie. I thought Imperiosaur was an interesting build-around when it was released, but now it’s recycling, because zero decks can justify playing it when Bristlebud Farmer and Territorial Allosaurus are available. This opinion may seem quaint, but it didn’t have to – it’s just that by now we’re so used to Wizards disregarding it.
• Even if every color and strategy grows stronger at the same rate, power creep is still a problem because it means games tend to be shorter and more likely to hinge on a single draw or decision that can’t be answered in time. Shorter games are bad because they mean:
  • There are fewer opportunities to see the inter-card synergies and strategic decisions that distinguish Magic from generic games of chance.
  • Once one player gains the upper hand, there’s less time for their opponent(s) to be able to turn the tables. This promotes situations where one player spends the whole game in a losing position, never gets to show off what their deck can do, and is left feeling like their only purpose in the match was to be a punching bag for the winner.
  • The initial die roll, a completely random event, has a greater influence on the outcome of the game.

Would you believe me if I told you that Magic players who won the die roll sometimes used to choose to play second? There were decks and match-ups where +1 card advantage was more important than getting on the board first. When was the last time you did that? It’s probably been most of a decade, for me.

Some amount of power creep is inevitable, and reining it in isn’t easy, especially for non-rotating formats, but there are ways to approach it. Magic’s designers aren’t trying to do it, though, because the deluge of overpowered cards isn’t an accident. There’s probably a whole system of intertwined reasons why WotC is perpetually pushing the power level, but I’ll bet these are among them:

• Each set has to be more powerful than its predecessors in order to sell more packs than them. Power sells not because players necessarily like that the cards are stronger, but rather because using the strongest cards in the format is the only way to remain competitive.
• Shorter games get people out of and back into the tournament queues on MTGO and Arena faster.
• Many of the worst offenders are overloaded legendary creatures like Glissa Sunslayer or Amalia Benavides Aguirre, presumably designed to be attractive to Commander players. (Which seems gratuitous, considering that the format first became popular back when the only legal commanders were the elder dragons from Legends, all of which are laughably underpowered even by the standards of fifteen years ago. I assure you, people would play Commander no matter how weak the commanders were.)

Power creep hasn’t made me quit the game yet, though if you ask me why, I can only mumble something about how I still prefer playing broken Magic to not playing Magic at all. But now that I’ve decided to quit, whenever I see a particularly egregious card hit the table, or have one of those punching-bag games, I think, “Well, at least I won’t have to deal with that nonsense anymore.”

Rebuttals

Following are my responses to all of the criticisms I could think of that someone might level against this post. Please scroll down until you find whichever ones you were going to say.

1) This is a minor issue and I don’t understand why anybody would care so much about it.

Okay, but you understand that I care about it, right?

2) There are way more important things to complain about than this.

True of almost everything anybody’s ever complained about.

3) I’ve never heard of you before. Why should I care if you quit?

To be clear, I’m not claiming to be well known in the world of Magic, nor saying that anybody should be sad to lose me specifically.

I am saying:

1. that Universes Beyond integration might be a big deal if it’s driving a long-term, invested player to quit.
2. that there may be a not-insignificant number of other players who feel the same as I do.
3. that Wizards could have kept me on the hook if they’d put any effort into it.

As for how much you care, that’s up to you.

4) This “I’m leaving if I don’t get my way” attitude is immature and ineffective.

By the time Wizards announced the new policy, it was already too late for me to get my way. They have obligations that they can’t afford to renege on. This is more of an “I’m leaving and explaining why” post.

5) Universes Beyond isn’t a form of advertising; WotC is carefully selecting IPs that they think Magic players will like.

Yeah, that’s how advertising works. A person or business owns some sort of property and thinks that other people or businesses might like to use that property to get a message to potential customers. They gather information on what their audience is like, and then they solicit interest from companies who want to reach that audience.

Advertising doesn’t have to carry an explicit “buy this product” exhortation, and when you pay attention to it you’ll notice that many ads don’t. Often the goal is just to keep the brand in the front of the customer’s mind for whenever they become ready to buy.

One of the upcoming UB sets will focus on Spider-Man. Marvel/Disney doesn’t need there to be inserts in the packs saying “Issue #999 will be on the stands next month!” It’s enough for them if, a year or two down the line, when you’re looking for a movie to watch or comic book to read or video game to play, some subconscious part of you thinks, “Well, I’m a Magic player, so I must like Spider-Man, right?” Or maybe it’s not you, maybe it’s your aunt and uncle thinking along those lines when they’re trying to figure out what to buy you for Christmas.

6) Universes Beyond isn’t advertising because WotC isn’t getting paid for it; they’re paying licensing fees to use the other IPs.

I admit I don’t know which direction the money is flowing here. I would hope Wizards is getting a fee from the other IP owners, but it’s certainly possible that they’re actually paying for the privilege of turning Magic into a TV screen at the gas pump. Whether or not Wizards thinks of it as advertising, I’ll bet Marvel does, and if they’ve figured out how to get other companies to advertise for them and give them money at the same time, I can only imagine how hard they’re laughing.

7) It’s dumb to complain that UB is advertising when trading card games are so inherently capitalist to begin with.

We can’t escape capitalism, but that doesn’t mean we have no choice but to tolerate its excesses.

8) You say you hate ads, but I’ll bet you still see plenty of them when you [do XYZ].

I sure do. That’s the problem. We all see plenty of ads, even if we’re trying to avoid them. Now we even see them embedded in games we’re playing.

9) Allusions are a venerable literary tradition.

Yes, but a little subtlety goes a long way. Candlestick is clever; Commander Mustard is crass.

10) Universes Beyond is “not for you”. Other people like it, and you should let them like things.

I did! For years, WotC has told us that Magic is a big tent, and can accommodate a wide variety of players. Whenever we see a Magic product that we don’t like, we’re supposed to repeat the mantra “this product is not for me”, and go back to playing with the parts that we do like.

• Hmm, Commander is getting all the attention from WotC. It’s a multiplayer format focused on splashy effects where winning is more of an accident than an indicator of skill. Commander is Not For Me, but two-player, 60-card formats are still officially supported, so no big deal, right?
• Hmm, Alchemy on Arena has mechanics with high degrees of randomness that aren’t reproducible in paper. Okay, Alchemy is Not For Me, but that’s fine, they’re not trying to promote it over Standard, it’s probably just an attempt to steal players from Hearthstone or something.
• Hmm, eternal formats allow Universes Beyond cards now. Okay, Modern and Legacy and Vintage are Not For Me, that’s fine, I wasn’t playing them anyway. It’s disappointing that Pauper, the format I helped support in its early years, allows UB cards, but I actually haven’t been able to play Pauper in a while, so I guess I’ll set that complaint aside for now.
• Hmm, three-year Standard is… oh, actually I guess this one is going to have to be for me, since Standard is the only format I can still muster any interest in.

And so it went, over the years, as the part of that “big tent” that was For Me grew smaller and smaller, until finally it’s too small to fit into. And now I wonder if I was a fool. WotC obviously thinks the player base won’t care about this change – did I contribute to that impression by not complaining loudly enough? Did I enable my own marginalization?

I could put up with it, for the sake of other players, when as little as 5% of my hobby was “for me”. But now it’s 0% and I have no leverage to do anything about it.

11) You can still play Magic without Universes Beyond cards, if you want. You just can’t do it in any sanctioned format. Which means most game stores won’t support it. But you can try to convince your casual playgroup to agree to it!

I feel like that one answers itself.

12) Even if you have to play with other people who use UB cards, you can choose not to put any in your own decks.

I don’t think this is a good-faith argument. I mean, it may be okay for casual games, but not if you’re playing in tournaments or leagues or ladders.

Whether we like it or not (and I don’t), some Magic cards are just more powerful than others. There has never been a time when you could deliberately put less powerful cards in your deck and expect it to compete. When Ride’s End was printed, Standard decks that were already running Seized from Slumber upgraded right away. It’s disingenuous to say, “If you don’t like the flavor of Ride’s End, you can still play Seized from Slumber.” Sure, it’s legal for you to do that, but you shouldn’t, because you will lose some number of games that you could have won.

If you want your Magic deck to be competitive, you have to build it with the best cards that are available, and from now on, in every format, that’s going to mean including some UB cards. This has long been one of my greatest disappointments with Magic: liking cards is for suckers; the optimal strategy is to avoid forming any attachments to particular cards, so that you can dispassionately play the strongest ones. But that’s the reality, and it would take a pretty radical shift in game design to change it.

13) Oh, you like Magic’s story? Recite everything that ever happened in it.

I’m not a Vorthos. I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Magic lore, and I do value gameplay above flavor. But rich and consistent world-building is an essential component of Magic, not an afterthought. And while I may not know everything about Magic’s story, I’m at least broadly familiar with it. I can tell you which of Ravnica’s guilds I’d belong to (probably Azorius, maybe Izzet). I can tell you that Teferi is my favorite character because of his tragic backstory wherein he’s responsible for the disappearance of his homeland. When I was building a Brawl deck to knock out some Arena achievements recently, I reached for Helga as my commander, primarily because I found her relatable in the fiction. But one of Magic’s great innovations is – was – that even players who don’t actively delve into the lore still absorb a lot of it just in the course of playing. They pick it up from the art and the flavor text and the card names. Over time, they’ll develop a sense of what’s going on in the story without even meaning to. That is, if there is a story.

14) You should give UB a chance, the designs/gameplay are actually good/fun/well balanced.

I’ve seen plenty of the cards and I don’t agree with this assessment, but even if I did, so what? Lots of people do good jobs designing things that I’m not interested in. I’m happy for them but it doesn’t somehow change my interests.

This is an important point, so I want to underscore it: there is no level of quality that Universes Beyond cards could achieve that would change my mind about them. It’s the concept that’s bad; the actual cards are irrelevant.

15) You’ll feel differently when there’s a UB set based on something you like.

I actually like most of the things that have gotten UB treatments so far. Final Fantasy, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout – I’ve played and enjoyed multiple games from each of those franchises. My dad read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to my brother and me as bedtime stories. I have hundreds of Marvel (and other) comics boxed up in my closet (really got to get around to donating those…).

But if Cloud Strife crashed a Brotherhood of Steel base, I wouldn’t think, “Whoa, cool crossover!” I’d think, “What the hell kind of sense does this make?”

And I don’t look at a card like Ezio, Blade of Vengeance and think, “Wow, they really nailed the character.” At best I think, “Okay, if you had to make a Magic card for Ezio, I guess that’s a reasonable set of abilities.” (And also: “Isn’t 5/5 kind of big for one human?”)

Actually, Assassin’s Creed brings up an illustrative point. I played the first few games in that series and really enjoyed them – they had some of the best stealth gameplay ever. Then the series shifted away from stealth and towards action. It wasn’t about “assassins” anymore. It wasn’t what I had come to the franchise looking for, and it was awfully similar to a lot of other video games on the market. So I stopped buying AC games. The series continued to sell by doing something that appealed to a wide audience, but it didn’t deliver the experience that had originally made it stand out. That’s a lot like what’s happening now with Magic.

16) Don’t you ever wonder about stuff like “What if Superman fought the Predator?” UB lets players live out those dreams.

I don’t, and I don’t understand the appeal. Superman and the Predator weren’t designed with each other in mind. Their powers weren’t balanced for it to be a fair or interesting fight. They wouldn’t fit in the same work of fiction.

(Also, UB won’t actually let you play that out. If the Predator’s card is a 4/4 and Superman’s is a 4/5, there’s your answer. No need to play the games.)

17) How do you feel about card alters that reference other IPs?

Alters are totally cool. They’re unique, or at least have few reproductions. A real person, not a company, made or commissioned them because it was something they personally were interested in. And if you don’t like alters, that’s fine; nobody is requiring you to use them if you want to continue playing sanctioned Magic formats. It’s not the same thing at all.

The same goes for card sleeves, playmats, deckboxes, or similar paraphernalia that depict non-Magic IPs. I don’t have any objection to any of that; in fact I have some myself. It’s not that different from wearing a t-shirt of your favorite band while you’re playing. But the difference between having those things at the table while you’re playing the game versus having those things be part of the game is significant. (That said, if someone in my playgroup did object to any of those things, I would gladly change to accommodate them.)

18) How is a UB setting any worse than an original plane with a non-fantasy setting, like Thunder Junction or Duskmourn?

I’m not a fan of those settings either, and haven’t spent as much money on them or engaged as much with them as I have with other sets. Any time period past the Industrial Revolution is a bad fit for Magic, in my opinion. I’ve been willing to meet Wizards halfway on these, but I’d definitely prefer it if we stuck to fantasy.

It’s not that I don’t like genres outside of fantasy! I enjoy sci-fi; I’ve finished all the Mass Effect games (even Andromeda); I’m almost done reading The Expanse. You want to know one thing I like about those series? Their internally consistent worldbuilding. You don’t see any robe-wearing wizards show up to cast Fireball in those stories, for the same reason you shouldn’t see their characters in Magic.

19) They used to put Shakespeare quotes on Magic cards; isn’t that a foreign IP?

They stopped doing that because they realized it clashed with the goal of building their own fantasy setting. And they never started doing it again, because it’s the 21st century and nobody thinks they can get rich off Shakespeare.

20) You’re wrong, Magic has never been limited to earlier time periods.

By my reckoning, the first set that unambiguously crossed the boundary was 2022’s Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Some previous sets or cards have had steampunk aesthetics, which is pushing the envelope, but within the boundaries of what I was personally willing to live with.

I don’t know; maybe I was only seeing what I wanted to see. But now things have changed too much, and I can’t make myself see it anymore.

21) Magic isn’t just one story, it’s a canvas for telling an unlimited variety of stories.

This actually hasn’t been true for most of its history, but anyway I might be okay with it as long as those stories had a certain amount of consistency.

22) Magic couldn’t stay stagnant forever. It has to be able to expand, and try new things.

WotC isn’t even close to exhausting all the historical cultures they could base a plane on, and every time they revisit a plane they demonstrate how it’s possible to tell new stories in old settings. You can’t convince me that they were in danger of running out of thematically consistent stories to tell.

P.S., if they do feel like they’re running low on new material, one remedy would be to release sets less frequently, like everyone wants them to.

23) Universes Beyond is bringing in a lot of new players. WotC can’t afford not to do it.

Magic has been Earth’s foremost TCG for three decades. If you live near a large enough city (okay, in a country that WotC actively supports), you should be able to find a small Magic tournament at a game store within reasonable traveling distance at least once a week. Pandemic disruptions aside, there have typically been large tournaments somewhere in the world once or twice a month. Magic has also supported two separate but similar online versions (MTGO and Arena), for years. How many other games are big enough to willingly cannibalize their own audience and survive?

What I’m getting at is that I don’t think Magic’s player base was either small or on the wane. It seemed like there were already a lot of players pre-UB, and from what I saw, they were of a variety of ages and experience levels. I don’t think Wizards was in a position where they desperately had to attract new players or risk the collapse of the game.

It may be true that publicly traded companies have an obligation to make money for their shareholders. (Whether or not that ultimately works to the benefit of their customers or employees is a debate for another time.) Even so, they aren’t compelled to wring every available dime out of the market as quickly as possible. They have some leeway to convince shareholders that long-term stability is more valuable. It is – and we, the public, should insist that it be – acceptable for a company simply to make a good product, and sell it to those who are interested. It may be, in the short term or even in the long term, that there are more people in the world who will buy Magic cards from crossover IPs than people who will buy Magic cards with original IPs, but that doesn’t mean WotC is geased to cater to them. As long as Magic’s numbers stay at a threshold where they can support the game’s infrastructure – and they certainly have seemed to be there – it is okay if not everybody in the world is a Magic player. It is okay if some people like a thing and other people don’t. It is okay, and in fact preferable, if Magic is “merely” a popular game and never becomes an all-encompassing cultural empire.

(Some may suggest that Wizards of the Coast agrees with me, and it’s their corporate overlords at Hasbro who are to blame for the insistence on growth. I haven’t seen any evidence of Wizards pushing back on any of this, but even if it were so, what difference would it make to me as a player? The final products are what they are.)

24) If there’s money to be made in something, you can’t expect any company to pass it up.

If Wizards really thinks a menagerie of pop-culture crossovers is too lucrative to ignore, they could have pursued that without diluting Magic in the bargain. They could have made a separate card game just to explore those possibilities. Oh wait, somebody already tried that and it didn’t last.

25) My friend only started playing Magic because of a UB set, and now they’re really enjoying it.

I’m happy, genuinely, for you and your friend. But I’m sorry – again, genuinely – to say that I don’t value their enjoyment of my hobby over my own.

26) Most Magic players “really adore” Universes Beyond.

Honestly, this one would be easier to believe if Mark Rosewater didn’t have to keep telling us it’s so.

But let’s say it is. That’s fine for them. Most of the game already catered to them. I just wish that for once, “this is not for you” applied to other people instead of me.

27) I like Universes Beyond. Do you want me to feel bad about that? Do you want me to stop buying it?

No. You should do things you enjoy; you don’t owe it to me to curb your enthusiasm, any more than I owe it to you to revive my own.

If I’m being painfully honest, I kind of want to know that somebody at Wizards feels bad for pushing me out of my longtime hobby. That’s not a sentiment I’m proud of, but there it is. But if you’re a fellow player, you haven’t done anything wrong, and you should spend your money and your leisure time however you want to.

I might suggest that you ask yourself why you’re so willing to buy advertisements. But it’s not up to me how you feel about that.

28) Attracting new players is more important than retaining invested players.

I don’t know if anybody actually holds this opinion, but in case somebody does I’d like to hear the justification. What percentage of those new players are getting involved in all the unpaid or low-paid work that WotC relies on to keep the community alive, like writing articles or managing fan sites or judging tournaments? What percentage of them have to be converted to returning players for WotC to come out ahead financially in the long term, and is that likely? We’re talking about people who knew Magic existed, for decades, but couldn’t be bothered to try it until it was sugar-coated with some other IP that they actually like. And we’re really banking on large numbers of them sticking around?

29) Do you even want to draw in new players, or do you just want to be a grumpy old gatekeeper?

I didn’t spend years running tournaments and writing articles because I hate engaging newcomers. But if the cost of enticing them is that we change the game so much it isn’t itself anymore, we didn’t really accomplish the goal, did we?

30) Oh, okay, so you just hate change.

Magic has seen a lot of changes over the years that I’ve welcomed and still enjoy. I like the modern card border better than the original one. I like alternate art styles and border treatments on cards. I like Battles and Sagas and Adventures and Omens (but not Planeswalkers). I like the London Mulligan.

31) You’re acting entitled. WotC doesn’t owe you anything just because you bought some cards/wrote some articles/ran some tournaments/[insert any other reason here].

Of course not. They put out a product that I liked, and I paid them money and helped to build their community, because we both considered the arrangement to be mutually beneficial. Now they’ve decided that it isn’t, and so neither of us will be doing those things anymore. But I am a little surprised, and disappointed, that they knew that I and many other players felt this way, and deemed those relationships not valuable enough to preserve.

32) If you want a format without UB cards, organize it yourself. That’s how Commander got started.

As discussed in the intro to this post, I did exactly that with Pauper. It’s an exhausting job and I eventually quit Magic cold turkey at the end of a tournament season because I was so burnt out. It was years before I returned. I don’t know if I have it in me to do that again.

If you know of a community initiative along these lines, I’d be interested to hear about it. But even then, the best-case scenario is that I do several times as much work as before, just to carve out a tiny sliver of Magic that I can still enjoy. Wouldn’t that effort be better spent finding a pastime that actually wants me?

33) Rage-quitting never fixes anything.

Probably not, but sticking around (and, what, making myself play a game I don’t enjoy?) obviously can’t fix anything either. (Also, I don’t think it counts as “rage-quitting” when it’s something I’m planning to do months from now.)

34) Wizards won’t notice that you quit over Universes Beyond, but your local game store will.

This is probably true, and I feel bad about it. The staff at my LGS have never been anything short of friendly and kind to me, and I have very fond memories of going there for Friday Night Magic. But I can’t justify spending money on a product that I don’t like and never intend to use, solely to support somebody else’s business. (As it is, I’ve come pretty close to doing that: all of the booster boxes I’ve bought in recent years remain unopened in my basement. But I still might draft with them one day. Or sell them. Or donate them…)

35) Stop being so cheap, WotC employees have to… oh wait, you didn’t mention the price.

I didn’t, although I know it’s a concern for many players. We know now that even Standard-legal UB sets will “have a higher MSRP”, and honestly that seems like a questionable decision to me, even from a purely mercenary standpoint. What’s the plan for retaining Standard players who only have room in their budgets for normal Standard-priced cards?

As for myself, though: I’ve been content to Not-For-Me the Secret Lairs and Masters Series sets, but I swallowed last year’s increase to the price of draftable Standard boxes, and I would probably do it again – for a product that I actually wanted to buy.

36) This is just sour grapes from someone who probably doesn’t win much.

I’m not a professional, but I’ve been to Mythic a few times. I can play Magic at a competitive level, I just don’t see the appeal anymore.

37) Magic’s gameplay will still be fun even if its narrative backdrop becomes a hodgepodge. Are you really going to quit on principle?

To my shame, I probably would not quit solely on principle. I mean, I clucked my tongue and kept playing when WotC “straight-washed” Chandra or sent the Pinkertons to the house of a fan who hadn’t personally done anything wrong.

But the initial assumption here is untrue. Magic won’t be fun for me with Universes Beyond in it.

38) So it’s really worth leaving an otherwise great hobby over this one thing?

Apparently! But honestly, I would probably not describe Magic as “otherwise great” at this point. After years of power creep in the mechanics and technology creep in the lore, you have to look pretty hard to find the game I used to love buried underneath. So maybe the Universes Beyond thing is just the last straw.

39) Whatever, you’ll be back. They always come back.

Maybe I will! I’m not swearing a blood oath never to play another game of Magic. I would be glad to find a way to play that makes me interested in the game again.

If Wizards repents immediately and doesn’t publish any more UB sets beyond what’s already been announced, Standard could be UB-free as soon as 2028. I’ll check back then.

40) Have you tried [alternative TCG]?

Feel free to make your pitch. But it wasn’t the TCG model that I liked, it was Magic specifically.

41) That’s a lot of whining about a game. You should get a life.

Sorry for caring! Rest assured that I’ll be trying not to let it happen again.

99) Hey wait, isn’t your username a reference to a competing TCG?

1. Nobody would actually ask this question, because nobody besides me remembers that game.
2. Like I said about alters or sleeves: it’s funny when fans do it. It’s gauche when the actual legal owner of the game does it. (Actually, this is sort of the same reason why Wizards shouldn’t be designing for Commander, except replace “funny” with something like “inventive”.)
3. It’s sure feeling less funny now. I looked up whether I can change my Arena username but it seems the answer is no.

MTGZone

This site is great. I really appreciate Andrew and Mike for operating it. It was exactly what I needed after I left Reddit. I like that it has a smaller audience, so I don’t feel like I have to respond to a post within 15 minutes after it goes up or I might as well not bother. It’s been gratifying to learn that other people care about the same things I do. I endorse and encourage the Fediverse model, which is how the internet was always supposed to work. I’ve found that the atmosphere here is pretty congenial relative to most Magic forums. This community has helped me celebrate my successes, and listened to me ramble on endlessly about deckbuilding. In fact, MTGZone may be the only social media site that consistently has a positive effect on my mental health.

I’ve visited every day for the last year-plus, and more times per day than I should probably admit to, at that. It’s helped me feel somewhat connected to other people during these isolated times. But I’ll have less reason to visit now, and I’m sad about that too.