Why do I even feel that I need to announce this?

That’s an easy answer. I have written many pro-MtG articles on this blog and I have written many anti-MtG articles during the last few years and while I’ve tried, at times, to be positive about the game, what’s been going on with the game is just terrible. So, so terrible.

The final straw: The announcement that Universes Beyond are going to be half the major releases going forwards and they are all going to be standard legal, but this is just, as I said, the last straw. The combination of greed, laziness and incompetence in the leadership at WotC, which obviosly trickles down to everyone else, who are now living in fear of their jobs, as Hasbro keeps making cuts to the only thing that is still making them money.

Where my animosity really started was actually M30. A few years back, they decided that they are going to sell cards, that can’t be played, because they have a different back, at $250 for a pack of 20 cards. Of course, these were just basically gambling, as you are trying to open a Black Lotus or (a bit surprisingly) [scylink]Shivan Dragon[/scrylink], because there isn’t many valuable cards in those packs. Also, again, not legal in actual tournament play.

They actually had to stop the sale, because it was going so badly, and decided to send out the remaining stock to LGSs. The price of the boosters and the boxes (which only held four boosters anyhow), has actually come down from the initial price, instead of becoming coveted collector items.

This was a watershed moment. You just knew that now they have made the decision to go for the short-term rather than cultivating good will for the game. The smart side of my brain told me at this point that I should just leave the game then and there. However, humans don’t always follow the smart side of their brain. Mind you, I have not spent much money on the game since that time. There was a time, when I used a few hundred euros every month on cards and drafts, but since the M30, I’ve only drafted with friends a couple of times a year, and I have not paid anything into Arena. I have bought a few Lilianas during that period, though, but when they released the baseball card Liliana, I could allow myself to stop buying those as well. It’s weird how the brain works.

So, why didn’t I just give up?

It’s called “escalation of commitment”. In economics, it’s called the sunk-cost fallacy, although it is possible that an economist might come in, fix their glasses and correct me on this, but they are close enough concepts for me to use them interchangably in this context.

I had a bunch of cards (and still do), huge chunks of my personal network I’ve met through playing the game and I there was a time when I was actually a good player as well as deckbuilder. So, by leaving the game, I’m also leaving behind those things, so I’m losing the utility of the cards, I risk losing parts of my personal network and I won’t be as good a player in the future (although, as I said, I’m not nearly as good now as I was at my best). So, I want to protect my “investment” by investing more into it.

And this is tough. I even realized that this is what I’m doing, but I was still finding it hard to just leave the game. Which brings me to my next point.

The game sucks now, but I kept hoping it would be good again. There’s some positives and there’s negatives, but the negatives outweight the positives massively.

In a way, the draft environments are better. However, since they only test those environments with commons and uncommons, and there’s more rares in the packs now, so many games of limited end with one player playing their bomb rare and that’s it. The game just ends or, worse yet, it doesn’t end, but is over in practice. Some party just tries to force a win out of the situation, even though their real chance of winning is miniscule.

And I’m not into that. I don’t like it when the games are decided by either bombs or just snowballing out of hand. I like there to be some back and forth where decisions matter. Now, that seems to be gone, because they want to make their game feel like Heatthstone or something. Yes, I just kept thinking that I will get those interesting games, but they just keep happening less and less frequently.

This is partly, because I mostly played on Arena. So many people on there like to have decks they can get random wins with. There’s so many powerful cards that you can win with a lot of different decks as long as you just draw the right cards. Sure, you might still have a 60+ win percentage against these decks, but it still doesn’t feel good to get steamrolled randomly by a turn two win, because you just stumbled a little bit and they had that perfect combination. But the game was more and more about this. Even Standard, which is supposed to be less powerful, but you can often just take your Standard deck and have a decent run in Pioneer now, because the decks are built in such a way that sometimes you just luck out. And sometimes when they don’t they get salty and just leave you there sitting until all their time extensions are gone.

It feels like they’ve just given up. They don’t care anymore. They throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks and then just shrug their shoulders when things don’t go as expected. Like, one of the problems right now is that they print a lot of powerful cards in uncommon, but apparently they don’t really test those for constructed play, because the rares and mythics are for that.

And of course, Commander players don’t really want them to design for them, because they still don’t know how to (after over 10 years), but when they do, you are kind of obligated to play those, because otherwise you would just be behind. How much they emphasize Commander is hard to say right now, but we also hear tales of them tinkering with cards, because they want them to work in Commander. This is the reason me and my whole playgroup gave up on Commander many years ago now. It just became too stupid and from what I see online, it has just become worse since then.

Also, I don’t even recognize the cards anymore. As the game has tried to become more collectible in the last few years, you can’t identify many of the cards from the art anymore, so you have to keep checking what card is what. This is also a problem for the aesthetics of the game. First break was a small set of Walking Dead cards many years ago now, but that’s just the beginning. They started to add more and more different IPs into the game and at the same time they started to break the aesthetics of their own IPs as well. Last year we got a set where most of the humans wear sneakers for fucks sake.

And I’m not waiting for Spider-Man to come into the game. While I’m more about the gameplay, I would hope the aesthetics work as well, but now we are in a situation where they have made an active decision that you can’t escape back into the fantasy worlds they are supposed to represent, because, again, half the cards going forwards are going to be different IPs, you might not have any interest in. Maybe you like Spongebob Squarepants as a kid, but I have never seen it, so I really don’t want those cards in my game in the same way I don’t want to play Arkham Asylum and stumble on Homer Simpson just randomly.

This is just late-stage capitalism. I was going to say “at it’s worst”, but at least MtG isn’t actively or passively killing anyone. However, just from a pure principled position, I should really try to avoid products that are this toxic (if only figuratively). I don’t like capitalism, but I have to be part of it. Yet, I do have choices within that system.

So, I finally pulled the plug. I uninstalled Magic Arena, sold off any cards that had any value (outside of my Liliana’s) and unsubscribed from the MtG YouTube channels I was subscribed to. I’ll probably still draft with friends at some point and I still have a few booster boxes to do it with.