Agency in Games: Make Magic Fun For YOU
PROLOGUE - BILL
When I started playing at stores, there was a guy at my local shop named Bill. He was on the older side, and had played card games and board games and role playing games for years before Magic came around. He was a fine Magic player (and indeed came up with the greatest multiplayer format I’ve ever played, more on that in the future) but also collected the game. He’d buy a box or two of every set, and would try to get all the cards from every set assembled in binders. His trade binder had a very neatly printed list of which cards he was missing, and as such he was an excellent trade partner for little shits like me who were obsessed with value-trading. Bill’s type was somewhat common back in those days, folks who played casually but enjoyed keeping up with the sets too.
It’s real tough to be a Bill in this day and age.
THE PROBLEM
Magic released its Marvel Super Heroes set about two and a half weeks ago. And not just the set itself, but Jumpstart product, EDH Decks, the works. Today, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) dropped their first teaser / previews for their Star Trek set which lands at the end of the year, close to the Holiday season. This weekend at the Magic Con / Pro Tour, WotC will provide some teasers for Reality Fracture, which drops at the end of September / beginning of October. And there’s a whole other set that comes out between now and those offerings! And Marvel’s the 4th set this year! The 4th one! There’s 3 left! I know this is a word often used hyperbolically, but that is an insane amount of product in a single year.
Contrast that to when I started playing in stores and becoming an enfranchised player in 2002. There were 3 sets, and 2 of them were small sets! Standard was made up of the 2 most recent Blocks (Big / Small / Small set from that year) + the most recent Core Set. A maximum of 7 sets, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 cards.
Standard today is made up of 16 sets, and all of them are big sets (~275 cards apiece). According to Scryfall’s search for Standard-legal cards, there are 4,702 cards in the available card pool. 4700!!! And 2!!! And there’s gonna be another several hundred from the rest of the sets this year until things start to rotate out. And because they need to get the sets to sell, they juice the set with enticing Mythic Rares and new mechanics to try to get you the faithful consumer (aka helpless addict) to keep forking out the dough. It is nigh-impossible to keep up with.
And that’s just if you’re a Standard enthusiast! If you’re a casual player, keep in mind that every single one of these sets has multiple EDH decks each containing a few dozen new cards jam-packed with power to get you on the hook for those too! We are at the point now - and have been for several years now - where it is simply impossible to keep up with the game for any reasonable player. Bill’s not dead, but if he was he’d be spinning in his grave.
THE SOLUTION
Well, I’m not sure that there’s a single one here. If you’re a Standard player, a really avid one, you’re kinda S.O.L. I’d suggest making a lot of friends so that you can borrow stuff you need, or become really good at playing with the Blue / Red cards since they’ve mostly dominated everything in the past 2 years. Otherwise, bohica.
For the casually inclined, fighting the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) is the biggest problem, no small matter when new exciting cards are coming out every 7 weeks.
I’ve managed a few different tactics; maybe some of these can work for you too dear reader:
Don’t Play Standard! Now, this is a little unfair; I’m pretty sure the last time I played Standard was in 2013 with a borrowed deck to help an 8-Man fire that my buddy was running. The last time I actually put a Standard deck together with intent was sometime in 2009. So this is not a new development. Still, if the sets are coming out too frequently to keep up, figure out a different format!
Figure out a subset of sets that you’re not interested in consuming, either at all or in any significant quantity. For me and my buddy, that’s Universes Beyond sets. We don’t find the flavor of the other licensed properties very compelling for our Casual decks, so we just don’t buy the cards at all. This does make it essentially impossible to play several of the competitive formats like Standard, so you’ll have to modify or ignore this one if Standard has appeal. But for the two of us, it’s been incredibly freeing.
Self-Made or Community Run formats. This is the big one! Remember, you have agency as a player! You can live whatever dream you want with the cards, and I cannot recommend exploring these options enough. For me, the Planeswalker Deck Project has been an incredibly satisfying project to start and maintain. My buddy has built a few different Set Cubes, trying to distill a specific Limited format down to an endlessly repeatable experience. Premodern has really taken off over the past couple years as a way to fire up the nostalgic experience with older cards. Same with Pauper where you can only play with Commons. More than one friend has a Battle Box, a collection of cards on a similar power level where each player is given a set of 10 lands - 5 basics and 5 enters-tapped dual lands - and they draw off of the same deck, emphasizing their ability to sequence land drops and tricks and navigate combat. I’ve been trying to figure out something with the Vanguard set since I impulse bought it 12 years ago. The point is that you do not have to be married to whatever formats WotC advertises. The game is very open with what you can do! Try some stuff out!
In that vein, keep an open mind when someone else offers or asks to try something new or different. That’s not to say that you then need to be slavishly devoted to something else! Feel free to dismiss after a rep or two if it doesn’t hit the spot, but if you try something you don’t like I’d recommend providing some feedback that might help you get to a better place. Remember that the most popular way to play the game right now (Commander / EDH) got popular because players and judges at events used to play it and it drew crowds. Draft as we know it developed because the Pro Tour players used to draft for money and cards after the events and it was there that every piece of contemporary Limited was innovated (drafting creatures on a mana curve, prioritizing cheap cards and tricks, evasive creatures, sticking to a few colors, sending and receiving signals for open colors, etc).
Magic can feel like a LOT these days. And because of Magic’s status as WotC’s - and therefore parent company Hasbro’s - Cash Cow, they will not stop printing sets while there’s revenue growth targets to hit. For you, the consumer, that can feel tough. But please, dear reader, remember that Magic is a fantastic game. Maybe the best one ever made! And you can engage with it in new and novel ways that don’t even require buying new cards. You’ve got agency as a player! Don’t ever feel afraid to exercise it and figure out how Magic can be fun for you. You’re the one shuffling the cards, not the other way around, no matter how it can feel sometimes. And who knows? Maybe the way you like to play the game ends up being so fun and popular that WotC changes the whole paradigm to suit it! It’s happened before, it could happen again. Go out there and blaze some trails. In the future, we’ll go over a couple options to see if any of them scratch your itch.