Yu-Gi-Oh is a cautionary tale here, where Konami’s run of pushed cards almost caused the game to slip out of their grasp. On the other hand, you don’t want to hit a ceiling and bring everything crumbling down with you. On one hand, you want to keep things fresh and exciting, and give players ways to stay engaged. There’s a delicate balance to be struck as a game ages. “Power Creep” is the concept of new card designs getting progressively more powerful over time. Now that we have those out of the way, let’s look at the things that are more likely to actually happen. If there’s some collapse of civilization like in The Walking Dead, Magic is assuredly going to go with it, alongside a lot of other things we know and love. It’s too much of a risk for Hasbro to take with their most successful product right now.Īlso, we’re not going to talk about Magic ending as a result of a real-world cataclysmic event. We may see more of gold border reprints, but we’re never getting a tournament-legal Black Lotus again. There have been bends in the policy over the years, as recent as the Magic 30th Year Anniversary. This is what people feared happening when Chronicles first saw print in 1995, leading to the creation of the Reserved List in the first place. With a sudden, rapid loss of value in card collections, stores and collectors could abandon the game in droves. It has long been said that a change in Reserved List policy would create a mass destabilization of the card economy. For Part Two, we’ll theorize on what the death of Magic would be like in the real world, and where we’d go from there. For the sake of discussion, I’ll define the “death” of Magic as a point in which Wizards of the Coast stops producing new paper and digital cards. Today we’re looking at what how Magic: The Gathering could end. That’s not to say that it can’t someday happen if the makers of the game aren’t careful. Magic has come close to the cliff but has never slipped off. Despite those bumps in the road, we stand here today with a game more popular than ever.
All were spots in the timeline that created controversy, to the point of having existential discussions. A new set is launched, a screenshot lands on a different server, and the cycle begins anew.įor Magic’s 20-year anniversary, Mark Rosewater put out his famous article, “ Twenty Things That Were Going To Kill Magic.” It talked about everything from the Reserved List, to the modern card frame, to planeswalkers. Seconds after the card image is posted in the spoilers channel, someone confidently replies back: “This is what’s going to kill Magic.” Then a week passes, a month, a year, and nothing happens.
Word spreads fast, but screenshots even faster, until it reaches a Discord server far removed from the front lines. The timing of the announcement and the release of this article is pure coincidence.Ī card image flashes on the screen, Twitch chat explodes with reactions, and Magic fans take in the first look at a new mechanic. Minor tweaks were made after the announcement of Reserve List cards being reprinted with alternate backs, in order to reflect the current news.
A note from the editor: Final edits were made to this piece on the night before the Magic 30th Anniversary Announcement.
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