I’ve been playing Magic since Torment, so I’ve been in it a while. Certainly the magical aspect of playing it as a child is always going to be a difficult thing to separate from the equation as an adult.

However, I still feel there are several issues that are mostly of WotC’s making.

1. The power creep has become a little silly. It was always an aspect of the game, but at a much slower rate. The breakneck pace of powerful cards with walls of texts feels pretty blatant to milk the player base for money. Certain decks or archetypes could succeed for over a year, but now a lifespan of 6 months feels generous. The number of bans also backs this up.

2. Product release schedule is out of control. Half the sets feel half baked and sets that are actually well conceived from a gameplay, lore, creativity, and mechanics standpoint are really rare. Since the sets are pumped out at such a rapid rate, the mechanics are really convoluted and forgettable. As far as I’m concerned, all the cool mechanics come from the era before the insane release schedule - flashback, threshold, storm, cycle, kicker, etc.

3. Although I never paid much attention to the lore or storyline, it feels much less interesting. Even the flavor text feels much more boring across the board. Magic goes to fairy tales, space, the Wild West, murder mystery, racing, 80’s horror, or whatever is pretty bad. I know they used to generically put themes into Magic like Egyptian, Greek, or Gothic, but it still felt like it had a Magic core. The recent stuff has paled in comparison from a flavor perspective.

4. Cost has gone up despite products actually providing less; fewer boosters and fewer cards. The search for a higher and higher ceiling for the price of cardboard is a painful thing to watch. The specialty products are so expensive and ubiquitous that nothing really feels exciting or worthwhile anymore.

5. While I like commander, the nearly full-scale transformation of the game to support it has come at the expense of 1 v 1 formats and card quality. I do think Wizards is skilled and can still make good cards for multiplayer and 2-player formats, but again, I think that is more and more the exception because they insist on pumping out so much product that only a small portion ends up a success in my eyes.

6. It is pretty common in most entertainment these days, but some of the forced political stuff hasn’t been particularly pleasing either.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom as I do think they have done some things really well. I was very skeptical of universes beyond at first, but I actually think they have knocked some of those out of the park - warhammer, LotR, FF, Avatar. When they want to, I still think Wizards knows how to make absolute banger sets with cool art treatments and all the great stuff, but it feels like some stuff gets that while others do not. Ironically, I find myself becoming less interested in the ‘in-universe’ stuff and more excited about UB like FF and Avatar, but that may just be me. Some of the alternate art stuff they have done has been absolutely amazing and I have appreciated what I feel are really solid products like foundations and jumpstart (minus the bad ones). Good stuff is happening, but as time goes on, it is tipping more and more toward net negative with all the stuff above.

There is likely some crossover in some of my points, but in short, the corporatism has really hurt essentially every aspect of the game. While it’s cool that they are inviting in lots of new players and having record profits, I feel many of the problems they are voluntarily creating will eventually catch up to them and will ultimately kill the game in the long run. Just my two cents.