When a hobby causes nothing but sorrow, it is time to move on. I hoped that it would never come to this point, but we are long past the point of “a straw breaking the camel’s back”. Magic the Gathering, a card game that I was fond of more than half my life, has become a warped monster driven by a corporation that does not seem to give a rat’s arse about the opinion of its playerbase in the mad drive to find increasingly infuriating ways to make more money. I have been very critical about the changes to the game for quite a while now, but for Mark Rosewater I must be the most unimportant speck on the planet since I am not spending any money on MtG products anymore while also thinking that Universes Beyond is the worst thing that could have happened to the game as a whole. This is one final rant about the absolute state of Magic the Gathering before I call it quits with the hobby for good since my blood pressure will thank me for doing so in the long run. How could it all go so wrong? I mean, I have many fond memories of Magic the Gathering. Back when I was young and just started playing and that one guy in a multiplayer round picked me as the target for “Fact or Fiction“, and while everyone thought this was to increase his chances of getting something good I managed to split the cards in a way that everyone at the table admitted to as the smartest possible choice. Or those times when I managed to fight against the colossi of decks at our local game store, one being a classic “Tooth and Nail” deck, which just weeks before had completely destroyed my artifact affinity deck by using “Mindslaver” and sacrificing all of my board into an “Atog“. Or the mono-Red “Elemental” deck that I had absolutely no chance against when I first played it, and then eventually conquered. A game in which I further cemented my love for the Black-Green Fungus deck that would be infamous enough in the local Magic the Gathering scene that I earned a nickname for it, becoming both the “combo guy” and the “mushroom man”. I have poured thousands of hours of my life working with Magic the Gathering as a hobby, and looking back at it I do not regret doing so. When losing against two random children with a badly optimized deck became one of my fondest Magic the Gathering memories. Even the somewhat bad memories worked out as important lessons for later in life. That one time I got cheated out of a freshly-pulled “Wrath of God” (back when the card went for a tenner) by someone trading me two copies of “Haazda Shield Mate“, which were no where near the value of the card. That guy was careless enough to leave his stuff lying back in the backroom of the local store, and I have to admit that when he came back and found that his entire folder of Rares had been stolen by some young kids who just seemed to see the opportunity, I thought to myself “Well, karma really is a bitch.” This exact scenario is why I stepped in when a player wanted to trade a “Painter’s Servant” from a young player for waaay less than it was worth, and while that guy probably was not all that happy about me spoiling the deal it was just the right thing to do in my mind. I still feel bad about peeking the top card of the opposing deck in a game with a distant friend of mine, who had walked to the counter of the store to ask for something, an action that brought me no benefit but still felt bad because it was cheating in a game with no stakes in play. And I still remember losing against a pair of siblings, both probably no older than twelve, who completely stumped me using “Biorhythm” when they had three creatures ready to attack but I had only one blocker to work with. They wanted to buy a deck box later in the day but did not have enough money, and the game they played earlier impressed me enough to simply make me gift them mine; out of respect, I guess. Why am I writing all this? Well, as you might have noticed, Magic the Gathering has been working, is working, and will keep on working on turning their game to shit as much as possible for the sake of quarterly profits. To say that they sacrificed the game’s massive lore and background for whatever Universes Beyond is would be ingenuine, because that was no ritual sacrifice but simply a messy stabbing with the victim lying on the table for some weird reason. Now, if you watch content creators for Magic the Gathering on Youtube, they are really careful with their words towards WotC’s golden cow, with “Distraction Makers” and “Tolarian Community College” both seeming like they have a certain dislike for Universes Beyond but also constantly trying to work around the issue to still enjoy the game they love. In a way, I admire that standpoint; because I cannot simply ignore how bad the game has gotten anymore. Wizards of the Coast, for all their customer surveys and whatnot, does not seem to give a toss about what the player base is thinking; and you can expect something bad to happen pretty much every week, with them changing booster size to the worse or calling the Pinkertons on someone being only two examples that showcase the idiocy of the entire “Hasbro needs more money”-fiasco. This is a Magic card. It might not look like it, but that seems to be something to get used to. It just keeps piling on. More hat-sets, changed booster packs to milk the collectors out of money, changed display sizes to sell more product for drafts, increased standard format length and more sets in it than ever creating a massive clusterfuck if you want to play traditional Magic, the entire Commander focus as the go-to casual option that neither works with the game nor is particularly interesting once you look at it closer, the article deletion of the Wizard’s homepage, the slipping quality control, the pandering towards other franchises with Universes Beyond and its legality in every format, the list goes on. At the time of writing this paragraph, there have been the first few “Star Trek” spoilers and I can feel the last slither of enthusiasm for this hobby dying. The in-universe sets for 2027 have been revealed, which are Nauctis as a completely under-water plane that leaves me wishing for more, Zhalfir as Mirage 2.0, and a mix of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Ikoria that feels like Pacific Rim and makes me taste bile just thinking about the “mechas and godzilla”-horseshit that will inevitably be the entire set and therefore piling even more shit onto the cybernetic corpse of my once favorite plane. I could probably fill an article with ten-thousand words talking about the current way this game is going, with Mark Rosewater telling people that not every product is meant for every player or coming out with horseshit like “Spiderman is one of the top-ten selling sets of all time“1, which was called “massaging the truth” by Youtuber PleasantKenobi2. I would not be as flowery with my words: Twisting things so that you can state something without it constituting a lie or lying by omission is still something that makes you un-trustworthy; and Mark Rosewater as the mouthpiece that he is with his blog and podcasts has become a very shady figure when it comes to the truth regarding Magic the Gathering, since you can bet that he will block most criticisms on any level with “but it sold well“. Quality control has gone down, unsurprisingly, since more cards need to be printed than ever before to keep up with the crazy schedule of seven sets per year, which is also something no one wants. Or at least, you hear lots of opinions about how people do not want it, but I guess they buy it anyway for some reason. There is this one joke from Dave Chappelle about being pissed on, with the punchline being that if you do not like it, you can get out of the way. The massive hypocrite of a man shitting down your throat and telling you that players like it because his sources (which cannot be revealed) told him so. Mark Rosewater comes up a lot in this type of article, and he has made a rather clear statement about Universes Beyond, and in a way Magic the Gathering as a whole, going forward. In what I want to refer to as the “walk away”-controversy, he has given the three ways forward for all Magic the Gathering players: 1): “Accept the change and learn to see what others love about the new path.“ 2): “Find like-minded people and make a bubble that lets you keep playing the game in the way you love.“ 3): “Walk away.“3 He lists that there are people who would like to have the fourth option of changing the game back to the state it was before Universes Beyond has become a thing, but to quote MaRo himself “Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s just not going back in.” He says that players choosing option three will be missed, but he might as well boot them out the door himself. Yes, I know that he has invested more of his personal time than necessary over the course of many years portraying decision for a job and hobby that he is clearly passionate about, but I cannot help but feel like he has become a corporate puppet that is supposed to make all those changes go down better with player base. Mark Rosewater seems to have an undying fanbase that will defend him even in the most ludicrous of events, but if you are able to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of “some products are not for you” and “if you dislike UB, just walk away from the hobby in its entirety”. Or to say it with the words of a random reddit user: “Its almost like they’re untrustworthy assholes. But that surely couldnt be the case, right…?“4 So, if I do not like the direction we are going, I am meant to simply walk away? Tell you what, Mr. Mark Rosewater, that is exactly what I am going to do. I am tired of getting pissed on by WotC and Hasbro, using a hobby that I have fond memories of as their hostage into bullying me to buy products for frankly ludicrous prices. I hate leaving things unfinished, but I have already decided a few months ago that I would only finish the two “Trash for Treasure” articles that I had still in the works, which was Mirage and Duskmourn: House of Horrors. The rest, if you care to look under the “Magic on a Budget” header, is already crossed out. I decided against looking at any Commander decks way before that, because I am certainly not going to do content for a format that I enjoy as little as Commander, and by the time this article is released I will have done a sizeable amount of the Preconstructed Decks that the game spawned over its lifetime. With that, I draw the final line in the sand. I have stopped playing the infamous Kingmaker campaign back in the day when it became more stress than fun for me, and I do not see any saving for the Magic the Gathering that I came to like back in the day. Perhaps I write some random article saying how much of a clusterfuck future Magic the Gathering has become, but I can say that this hobby is now officially dead to me. Again, I do not like doing this looking back on the good things I remember from Magic the Gathering, but at this point it is more stress seeing the next dumpster fire of a decision than it is worth. https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/810010339618029568/did-eoe-or-spiderman-sell-better ↩︎ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VevAROXRYkU ↩︎ https://www.tumblr.com/markrosewater/822258924150472704/good-evening-mark-this-is-a-response-to-your ↩︎ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1uxpm0y/maro_addresses_players_disenfranchisement_with/ ↩︎