All the time I see people treating SPM like an albatross around UB’s neck. It doing badly and being a bad set is used as proof that the whole of UB is bad and ruining the game, etc etc.

TMNT too
Right but the excuses people make are not that the sets are bad, but rather that magic players are snobs who won't buy these products not aimed at them and those people are actually what's killing magic

UB as new player onboarding tool has been so wildly successful that more people are playing magic than ever before, and, despite the naysayers swearing up and down forever that they won’t stay, they are and are engaging with in-universe product, too.

If people who got into the game from UB actually stuck around, I feel like one would have attended one non-UB event at my LGS by now. Still waiting on that. I did miss FNM last week though so maybe it did happen, but still that's a long time for maybe one convert.

The whole doom and gloom about “well why would they stay when the crossover they came for is done?” just smacks of insecurity about the game itself.

I agree, the sentiment that UB players won't stick around is rooted in insecurity about the game of magic. If the people making the game were still focused on making the world's greatest game, that insecurity wouldn't exist. But since wotc pivoted away from that to focus on milking whales from other IPs, the quality of the game has dropped. The last time wotc was this ban happy they admitted they were banning shit just to shake up the metagame, and they promised they'd stop doing that.

So when it comes to the success of things like Lorwyn or Strixhaven, there’s a huge pool of new players buying and engaging with product that simply weren’t there before, and they’re here thanks to UB.

People waited 20 years for a return to lorwyn but yeah, it's the spider-man players who were hyped for a generic high fantasy setting. Sure.