When I became head designer for Magic, one of the things I started doing was writing an annual column that looked back at the previous Magic “year” with a critical eye, examining what worked and what didn’t work. I called it the State of Design article as I modeled it after the US president’s State of the Union Speech. While I had become head designer in 2003, the first State of Design column wasn’t until 2005 when the first year of sets I had overseen was released.

Here are the links to the last twenty State of Design articles:

As always, I will start by looking back at the year as a whole, examining the highlights and lessons of the year. I will then talk about each booster release with new content, examining the highlights and lessons of each set. There is an amazing amount of great design work outside of the booster releases, but I am but one man with one column, so I’m going to talk today about the booster releases. Note that this article is more focused on big picture design issues than individual card-by-card notes. This column will cover Bloomburrow through Magic: The Gathering®—FINAL FANTASY™.

I’ll begin with the same question I start with every year: how was the last year of Magic design?

I believe it was excellent, some of the best design work we’ve ever done. The sets, save maybe Aetherdrift, were all well received. In all the feedback I got this year, every set had multiple people call it their favorite, and not just of the year. This all coincides with Magic being at its all-time high for players. More people are playing Magic today than have ever played at any other point in the game’s 32-year history. We have a number of metrics we use to measure the game’s health, and all the metrics are the highest we’ve seen. Magic is currently at the top of its game, and I believe a lot of that is due to how fun Magic is to play, which is due in part to the hard work of all the designers.

I should point out that there’s a huge amount of work that goes into making Magic great beyond game design. But as this is a design column, I’m focusing on the design, however all that other work is also a significant part of the game’s success.

That doesn’t mean we did everything right. Each release had some lessons, which I’ll get to today, and there are some larger trends that some players aren’t happy with, which I’ll also touch upon. I do believe, though, that design is in a healthy place, and that we’re continuing to improve our ability to make awesome Magic sets.

Overall Magic Design

Highlights

We did a good job at finding our roots.

One of the big lessons of the prior Magic year was that Magic sets needed to feel a little more Magic-y. This year did a good job of addressing that. Both Foundations and Tarkir: Dragonstorm were lauded for how much they felt like sets of old, diving into the qualities that are quintessentially Magic. It’s important to show we haven’t forgotten our roots, and that in this era of Universes Beyond playing a larger role, Magic’s settings and, more importantly, the essence of what makes the game special as a property, continues to be imbued in sets.

We made new settings that felt deep and immersive.

Another complaint we saw was that some of the sets felt too thin, especially sets introducing a new world or theme. Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror, while radically different in tone, both showed Magic’s ability to create new things that still felt ingrained in the Multiverse in an organic way.

We found a lot of valuable design space in tweaking known things.

We made a lot of new mechanics, like offspring, valiant, manifest dread, eerie, impending, omen, exhaust, harmonize, mobilize, renew, flurry, endure, behold, Saga creatures, and job select. This year was full of a lot of mechanics that were things Magic had done before, but tweaked. Maybe we were trying to improve upon the earlier mechanic, maybe we were adapting it for a new flavor, or we found cool new gameplay out of making a tiny change. This year’s design got a lot of good work out of mining the game’s past.

We also found some new things to do.

Gifting, Rooms, and start your engines! were core elements of the sets they appeared in. Each of those mechanics explored a new space, doing things we hadn’t done before. Magic design should always use the tools in our toolbox when making new sets, but it’s okay to make new tools as we need them.

We’re getting pretty good at making Limited environments.

A common response from the sets this year was how much players enjoyed the Limited environments of these sets. We’re constantly adapting and improving our technology to make fun Limited environments, and I feel this last year was part of an upward trend in this area.

Lessons

Magic is at its best when we recontextualize the tropes we’re working with.

Resonance is an important part of design. When we explore new themes, there are certain expectations that it’s important for us to hit in our card designs, but we need to be careful that we’re doing our take on the trope and not just repeating it without any filter. Universes Beyond sets are where we should do straight allusions, and not in-Multiverse sets. Both Duskmourn: House of Horror and Aetherdrift suffered from being a bit too on the nose with some of our references.

We need to be better at supporting our themes downstream of our designs.

Each set wants to introduce new mechanical themes. Part of the fun of getting the latest set is exploring new possible decks, but while we’re good at creating new places to explore, we need to be a little better at following it up beyond that set. If you built an Otter deck in Bloomburrow or a Vehicle deck in Aetherdrift, for instance, future sets didn’t add much for you to expand the deck with. This kind of set-over-set mechanical cohesion is easier said than done, as there are a lot of new themes to follow up on, and each new set has limitations necessary for it to deliver its own themes, but it is something we should spend more time on.

We need to be aware of complexity creep

While we’ve been working to make sure that individual mechanics are less complex overall, there’s a trend in the last year of us making the sets complex in mechanical interaction. Some of this is in the volume of mechanics we include and some of this is about the choice of mechanics. The tricky part is that we want mechanical synergy—as it leads to better limited gameplay and constructed deck building—but we need to be careful that we don’t make an interconnected web that prevents the average player from being able to track what’s happening.

Bloomburrow

Highlights

The interconnection of the worldbuilding, creative design, game design, and artwork was a homerun.

All of our various teams at Wizards are talented, but sometimes the pieces of a set come together to create something far more powerful than the sum of its parts. Bloomburrow was one such set. All the various choices made from worldbuilding to names to flavor text to art to card mechanics blended seamlessly to make a truly amazing new world, one that both explored things Magic had never done, yet also felt at its core, like something the game could have done thirty years ago. It was a combination of familiarity and innovation, something that’s pretty tricky to pull off well.

The mechanics were flavorful and fun.

The two mechanics that got the most callouts were offspring and gift. Offspring did the perfect job of being useful and synergistic while also being cute and flavorful. We made the choice to have each offspring get its own creature token, and that was a huge hit. Gift was popular for creating a new resource, one that Magic hasn’t done much with. Giving something to another player, alongside being another slam-dunk flavor win, captured the whimsy of the genre, ended up being a very interesting political tool in multiplayer. The animal classes playing into village tropes, the seasons making use of paw prints, the various animal-centric abilities (forage, valiant, and expend) all reinforced the set’s core theme, animals, in a way that made players quite happy.

The mechanical animal themes were beloved.

The Rabbits felt like Rabbits and the Frogs felt like Frogs. Bloomburrow had to deliver animal resonance, and it did in a big way. This might seem like an easy thing to do, but it’s not. You see, typal themes are a thorn in the side of R&D. They’re both widely popular and near impossible to do well. Constructed wants complete linearity in the typal themes, while Limited requires interconnectivity between archetypes. For instance, you want your Rabbit to reward you for playing other Rabbits, while also being a card that players not playing Rabbit typal will draft. Bloomburrow did our best job to date at toeing this line. If you want to draft Rabbits, you can. If you want to not draft a specific animal, you can. Having those two things co-exist, while still capturing the feel of the set, is a huge win.

Lessons

For some, the limited themes were too on rails.

A lot of time and energy were spent in design making sure your Rabbit deck could include a Bird or Frog, but that’s one of the challenges of strong linear themes. It loudly communicates what players are supposed to do, and if enough players follow those cues, it becomes the reality of the draft. While I feel Bloomburrow is the best typal set we’ve designed, that doesn’t mean it’s solved all the problems of typal sets. The number one complaint I got about the set was its draft was too “on rails.” Once you commit to drafting a certain animal, players felt the options available to them lessened too quickly. The big challenge for the next typal set will be how to communicate “play Rabbits” without communicating “play only Rabbits.”

There wasn’t the right mix of animals

For some, ten animals were too many. Ten different factions, each with their own animal, caused a complex web that was too hard to decipher. We should have just had five animal factions. For others, ten animals weren’t enough. The joy of an animal world is the variety of animals. Limiting each archetype to one animal was too limiting. Factions should have been about something that could group together numerous animals. While every animal had its fans, there was always an animal players would have preferred instead. Some would have preferred Badgers instead of Raccoons, Skunks instead of Bats, or Turtles instead of Frogs. The list goes on and on. Some players felt we didn’t need to have Mice, Rats, and Squirrels. A big part of the success of Bloomburrow is the connection so many players have to animals, but the connections people have, while strong, are not consistent.

There was some disappointment with the mechanical execution on some of the animals.

Birds, which all flew in this set, had a “nonflying matters” theme, which contradicted the desire for an all-Birds deck. We did it to make the Bird draft archetype work, but it flew in the face of expectations for Bird typal constructed decks. Otters weren’t powerful enough and thus didn’t see constructed play. Mice were too powerful and did see constructed play, but now many players are sick of seeing them. The Rats felt off to some and didn’t play well with many Rats of yesteryear. In general, everyone liked the broad strokes of what was going on in the set, but everyone had quibbles with some details.

Too many of the animals we focused on don’t have enough cards.

Commander is both currently the most popular tabletop format, and the most popular casual format. An animal theme is very appealing to casual players. But too many of the animals in Bloomburrow simply don’t have enough cards to make a viable Commander deck. Some wished we had chosen animals with more backwards compatibility. Others wanted us to focus more on the ones that didn’t have enough cards to allow us to make more. Creating new themes while also supporting a hundred card singleton format is an ongoing challenge that we have to work through. Some of this can be handled over time if we repeat themes, but it’s a long-term answer to a short-term problem.

Duskmourn: House of Horror

Highlights

The overall feel of the plane was big success.

When we first announced the existence of Duskmourn: House of Horror, there was a lot of worry about it. We already had a popular horror plane in Innistrad. What was Duskmourn going to offer that Innistrad didn’t? It also was playing around with more modern tropes. Would that feel like Magic? There was a lot of skepticism, so we made the decision to release the Planeswalker’s Guide earlier than normal, to let players see our concept for a plane that was a haunted house and the evil being that created it. Players loved it. It had its own distinct feel yet felt like an organic part of the Multiverse. There was one big exception to this, which I’ll get to below.

The mechanics led to fun synergies and an amazing Limited format.

The enchantment theme, Rooms, manifest dread, eerie, the return of delirium, impending, glimmers, survival, overlords, and the way it all interacted with the graveyard was a huge success. The set was more bold mechanically than any other set of the year. It had amazing worldbuilding, complemented with outstanding art direction. It all came together to both make what many players called their favorite Limited set of the year, and it had a big impact on Constructed formats.

Also, I should specifically call out Rooms as that’s the mechanical element I got the most compliments on.

The contrast to Bloomburrow showcased what makes Magic so great.

Magic likes to “push the pendulum” as I like to say, that is we like to keep going to places we haven’t just been. One of the exciting parts of being a trading card game like Magic, is our ability to be so many different things. Part of expressing that is our constant change in worlds, but never before have we created a contrast so extreme as Bloomburrow into Duskmourn: House of Horror (leading many to call it Gloomburrow). Many players leaned into this pretty stark shift with glee, and it led to a lot of fun community building. Many called this Magic’s “Barbenheimer” moment.

Lessons

The 80’s horror theme was forced into the set in a way that distracted from the overall vibe.

There’s a fine line between being inspired by something and being a carbon copy of it. While the players mostly loved the haunted house vibe of the world, they were not happy with the allusions to popular horror movies that neither had a Magic take on them nor felt like they fit the larger feel of the plane. The harshest criticisms were for many of the Survivors that felt out of place in the set, most of which were loudly alluding to specific 70’s/80’s horror films. If we could go back, revising about ten to fifteen cards would have alleviated the major concern of the set for most players.

Players have some issues with one of the set’s creative choices.

This set consciously pushed into some space Magic had never gone before. Many were popular, but one area got the most criticism. Players, it seems, are not fans of what I’m going to call “mundane modernity.” Magic has had many sets, such as Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and The Brothers’ War which push into more of a science-fiction feel, with items far more technically advanced than one would normally find in a fantasy story. That doesn’t generally bother many players. Some things Duskmourn: House of Horror did for the first time bothered players, like having characters wearing and using things that we actually use: things like sneakers, or jeans, or a baseball bat. Part of fantasy is the idea that you’re coming to a world that is fundamentally different than your own. Fantasy wants to be inspirational, and seeing everyday objects which are a part of all of our daily lives deflates that.

The set had a little too much going on.

The enchantment theme, Rooms, manifest dread, eerie, the return of delirium, impending, glimmers, survival, overlords, and just the whole way it all interacted with a graveyard theme was a huge success, but it was also a lot. For some players, it was too much, and that’s something we have to be careful with. While I’m not sure what exactly I’d take out if we were doing the set again, I’m pretty sure I’d take at least one thing out. Maybe two.

Magic: The Gathering Foundations

Highlights

Foundations was what a core set should be.

As I often talk about, Magic’s greatest challenge is its “barrier to entry”. Getting from being someone that knows nothing about the game to being able to play your first game of Magic with confidence is a pretty big gap. We’ve spent years trying to figure out the secret to creating the best on-ramp to the game. Foundations took a new approach to this, one which players have responded well to. Rather than try to simplify things, to make learning easier, Foundations aspired to excite new players. Yes, this isn’t the easiest game to learn, but Foundations strived to show you why it’s so exciting so that you’ll want to learn.

Foundations did a great job making this sales pitch, using its card selection, reprints and new cards, to show off all the cool things Magic has to offer. This involved highlighting a lot of cool creative elements and deciduous mechanics. It leaned into its complexity as a feature, not a bug. And the response to this has been spectacular.

The set has great card choices.

The Foundations design team asked everyone at Wizards, “what existing cards got you excited most about Magic?” It took all that data and found the reprints that it felt would make the most exciting set. Part of this was also the decision to make Foundations an evergreen set that would be in Standard for at least five years. This resulted in excitement from the fans, and a set that many have dubbed “classic Magic”.

It was “meat-and-potatoes” Magic.

While the set didn’t shy away from the complexity of what Magic has to offer, it did figure out how to make a set that captured the core experience of Magic without being something that would overwhelm new players. The choices leaned into intuition and flavor, allowing the cards to work the way players would expect them to work, making a play experience that is welcoming and comforting.

Lessons

Some players were nervous about certain cards being legal for five years.

While the choice to make Foundations legal for five years did a lot to show our commitment to the new product line, some of our card choices are creating some concern. The two concerns that players communicated to me the most were Llanowar Elves and Omniscience. The former might warp Standard in ways that could cause issues, while the latter might lead to broken decks.

Some players felt the set didn’t go far enough.

While the set has mechanics like kicker and cycling and landfall, there are other deciduous things like Sagas and Vehicles that didn’t make the cut. Some players felt like the set could have pushed a little more in showing off the coolest parts of the game. I’ll admit I’m a little skeptical, as there’s a lot already in the set, but I’m willing for us to examine if there are swaps to be made when we refresh Foundations years from now (Sagas are pretty cool).

The Limited format was a bit tame compared to other drafts.

While we feel all randomized boosters should have a limited environment, Foundations put limited concerns lower on their priority list than most sets. This resulted in a Limited environment that doesn’t have the depth that more enfranchised drafters are used to.

Aetherdrift

Highlights

Players enjoyed having Vehicles as a mechanical focus for a set.

Kaladesh introduced Vehicles as a new artifact subtype. We’d talked about wanting a way to represent vehicles for many years, and we finally found a set where it made sense. They were popular enough, and captured such perfect flavor, that Vehicles did something that doesn’t happen often, it became immediately deciduous, almost evergreen. Many sets these days include at least a Vehicle or two. With the exception of the Kaladesh block, Vehicles have also played a supporting role in sets, so many players enjoyed getting to have a set where Vehicles could shine. They also enjoyed saddle, which brought the feel of Vehicles to Mounts. Saddle had been introduced in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, but Aetherdrift gave saddle, Mounts, and Vehicles a focus.

Start your engines! created an interesting Limited environment.

Innovation gets harder as Magic ages. We’ve done a lot of mechanics, so it’s tricky to find something new to care about that plays well. Start your engines! and speed gave Aetherdrift Limited a focus very uniquely its own, something a lot of Limited players enjoyed. I did get a lot of comments that players wished start your engines! had a more universal name, like accelerate, that would allow it to be used outside the context of a race. Players also wished there were more rewards for reaching lower speed levels.

Getting to see three different planes in one set was nice.

Aetherdrift was what we called a “travelogue set”. Making use of the Omenpaths, we created an expansion that was set not on one world, but three. Many players enjoyed that it let us catch up with the planes of Avishkar and Amonkhet. There was a lot of worldbuilding done to show how the events of the Phyrexian invasion, among other incidents, reshaped these planes. It also demonstrated how the existence of Omenpaths was impacting how the planes were evolving and interacting with one another. Players also enjoyed that we got to visit a new world, Muraganda, that we’d only seen glimpses of before. I’ve gotten a lot of requests for a new set that takes place exclusively on Muraganda.

Lessons

Players preferred more emphasis on the planes and less on the race.

Players liked seeing the three planes. In fact, the biggest complaint regarding the creative was that not enough time was spent focused on the planes themselves. So much of the set was focused on the race, and the majority of players seemed far less interested in the race than getting a chance to explore Avishkar, Amonkhet, and Muraganda.

Having three planes and ten racing teams, many from other settings, spread things too thin.

This issue was made worse by the fact that so many cards were focused on the racers, many of which were from brand-new settings. Three planes in one set was already stretching things a bit thin, so the addition of all the racing teams muddied things even more. Most players who commented on the race teams wished that we just had race teams from the three planes we were visiting. Others said that if they had to be from other planes than the ones in the race, they should be from places we already knew, so there was less worldbuilding that had to go on in the creative elements of those cards.

The racing theme in general wasn’t well received.

Aetherdrift played into a lot of the criticisms of last year’s sets where the set seemed more about focusing on specific tropes than bringing a world to life. While Duskmourn: House of Horror had some complaints about the survivors and some individual card concepts, the general sense was that the plane still had a lot of space to shine. Aetherdrift was mostly about a race that not enough players cared about. There were a number of players, though, that enjoyed seeing Chandra and Nissa’s story get more focus.

The set was a bit on the weak side and didn’t offer a lot for constructed.

The other big problem with Aetherdrift was the major themes of the set didn’t “land” in Constructed formats. The fault for this wasn’t set design or play design but rather vision design. We were trying something new. Vehicles were always a support mechanic, and we tried making it a focus for a set. It turns out there’s a reason certain themes work better as support. Start your engines! was also us pushing into new space, one that didn’t really end up working out for constructed. I’m not sorry we tried, as part of design’s job is to push into new areas and attempt things we haven’t tried before. But not everything will work out and Aetherdrift ended up being, in my mind, a noble, but failed, experiment.

Tarkir: Dragonstorm

Highlights

We did a good job hitting our theme of “best of both worlds.”

The number one piece of feedback I got about the set was how excited everyone was to be back on Tarkir. It turns out when you take your time returning to a world, a lot of good will gets built up for the return. One of the biggest challenges of this set was we were actually returning to two different worlds (one about wedge clans, and one about Dragons) and it was important we made a set that focused on both those aspects. The feedback was that we did, and we did it well.

We did a great job of flavoring the clans, creatively and mechanically.

A big part of doing that was capturing the clans. Players liked that we refocused them on their center enemy colors, giving the clans a fresh spin. They enjoyed the various clan mechanics. They liked the synergy between the clans. They enjoyed all the work the creative team did give them a new look. They enjoyed the new Spirit Dragons. All in all, we delivered well on Tarkir’s wedge clans.

We’re getting better at doing three-color.

Three-color, like typal, is one of those themes that players enjoy conceptually, that’s just really hard to execute on. The original Khans of Tarkir (due to a lot of work by Erik Lauer) is considered the first time R&D really handled three-color design well. It has become the model all three-color sets have used since. Erik oversaw this set’s vision design (one of his last tasks before retiring) and helped take our three-color design to the next level, making use of design tools like two-brid mana. I got a lot of feedback appreciating the nuance of how the set was built, and the gameplay that resulted from it.

Lessons

Players really wish we had found a way to get the Dragonlords in the set.

When we last left Tarkir, there were Dragonlords ruling over ally-colored factions. Upon our return, we fast forwarded the story to get to three-color clans. A lot of players were sad that we breezed by the story of how two-color clans became three-color clans. How exactly did the Dragonlords fall? Because the set was focused on wedges and the Dragonlords were ally-colored creatures, a misfit for a wedge set (wedge sets use two-color enemy pairs as those overlap two wedges), there wasn’t a good home for them. This upset a lot of players that really wanted us to find a place for them in the set. I’m not sure there’s a good answer for this one, but I want to acknowledge that this was, by far, the number one complaint I got about the set. The fact that we repeated the clan leaders and Spirit Dragons in the Commander decks only reinforced the idea for many that there must have been a way to fit the Dragonlords in.

Limited drifted to the two extremes.

As Tarkir draft settled, there ended up being two basic strategies: play red-white aggro or play a green-based four- or five-color strategy. In short, the best thing to do in Limited in this three-color set was not play three colors. This gets back to the core problem of three-color sets. If the mana is too tight, three-color play has too much variance as the power of your hand is based on what land you draw. If the mana is too loose, you play the best cards of every color and end up playing four or five colors. Once you do the latter, it’s hard for any archetype to pick up its own best cards, because so many other drafters are splashing for them.

Omen spells looked too much like Adventure spells.

Players, in general, liked the gameplay of Omens. The biggest note about them is because they looked a lot like Adventures, players wanted to play them as such. The reason Omens shuffle themselves into your library was to allow the designers to make the Dragons stronger, which is important in a set about Dragons. This is another problem without a good solution, as we want to expand with “extra spell” mechanics, but there’s only so much flexibility in card frame design.

Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY

Highlights

The flavor of capturing the FINAL FANTASY video games was a slam dunk.

The number one job of any Universes Beyond set is to capture the flavor of the property it’s presenting. The biggest compliments I got on this set is that it did an amazing job of capturing the essence of FINAL FANTASY. It was clear the designers who made the set loved the video games, and that love and attention to detail is on full display in the set.

The mechanics were evocative and fun.

The set doesn’t just look good. It plays well. The design team did a good job of figuring out how to use Magic mechanics in a way that converted the fun of playing FINAL FANTASY games to Magic. All the mechanics got called out, but the three I heard the most about were Saga creatures, job select, and tiered. Each did an ideal job of capturing the essence of an aspect of FINAL FANTASY.

The Limited environment was super fun, even for players who weren’t fans of the video games.

Another comment I got a lot from players who were unfamiliar with the FINAL FANTASY franchise was that the gameplay, especially in Limited, was just really fun. Even if you didn’t recognize what the cards were referencing, the core gameplay of the set was just entertaining. And there were a lot of cards players wanted to put into their decks.

Lessons

Not everything players wanted in the set got captured.

The biggest complaint I got from fans of FINAL FANTASY was that there was something that they adored from the franchise that didn’t make it to a card. A corollary to this was a common complaint that the sets weren’t even in their distribution of the sixteen games. Some players felt that the four games that got Commander decks should have had fewer cards in the main set.

The creative was less cohesive than other Universes Beyond sets.

The biggest note I got from players who were unfamiliar with the FINAL FANTASY franchise was that the creative design of the set felt less cohesive than other Universes Beyond sets. This was due to the fact that most Universes Beyond sets are presenting a single setting, where FINAL FANTASY was representing sixteen distinct worlds. I did get a lot of compliments that cards said what game they were from.

The bonus sheet had some layout issues.

Players generally liked the bonus sheet as it related to card selection, card availability, and its impact on limited formats, but some had issues with how it was laid out. It was hard to tell what colors many cards were and the print was often difficult to read.

There are ongoing complaints about Universes Beyond sets.

As this is the only randomized Universes Beyond product I’m talking about today (I sadly didn’t have space to discuss Magic: The Gathering® – Assassin’s Creed®), I’m using this section to go over much of the feedback about Universes Beyond in general.

There are still players that don’t like that we’re doing Universes Beyond, although that sentiment continually shrinks over time. For example Magic: The Gathering—FINAL FANTASY is already the best-selling Magic set of all time and it just came out. Some players don’t mind Universes Beyond sets in general, but they feel at home in Magic’s fantasy setting. Some players are unhappy that we’re including Universes Beyond sets in Standard. Some are unhappy that Universes Beyond booster packs cost more on average than Magic Multiverse booster packs.

Another Year Gone By

That wraps up the last year of Magic design. I’m always happy to have a chance to go through it and review all the feedback I received on the last year’s worth of sets. Thanks to everyone who took time to give me feedback. For those that would like to give me even more feedback, I’m curious what you thought of this article and any of the observations I made. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Until then, may you have as much fun playing Magic as we do making it.