No matter how long they’ve been playing the game, everyone has a favorite Magic set. The Ravnica sets are common picks, but so are recent hits like Bloomburrow. Obscure older sets like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor and the original Kamigawa often get nods too. On the other end of the spectrum, some sets are near-universally reviled. I’m talking about major disappointments like Dragon’s Maze and Fallen Empires. Neither of those infamous blunders, however, takes the crown for least popular MTG set.
In a new article posted yesterday titled ‘Odds &Ends 2024: Part 1,’ Mark Rosewater revealed which set has this dubious honor. He also dove into a number of other questions and issues, looking at the state of current Standard and where things are heading in the future. Strap in, folks: there’s a lot to unpack here.
R.I.P. Epilogue Sets
In the Odds & Ends article, Mark Rosewater responded to a question about Epilogue sets. In case you’re unfamiliar, Epilogue sets are smaller sets that develop the story and mechanics of main sets further. We got one example of this in March of the Machine: The Aftermath. After this, the idea was scrapped. The cards from Outlaws of Thunder Junction’s planned Epilogue set, The Big Score, were thrown into the main set as a bonus sheet instead.
Epilogue sets were thrown aside for a number of reasons, but Rosewater’s article gave us more definitive data to work with. As he noted, each set is rated by players on a scale from one to five. The average rating is then used to determine the overall popularity of the set.
“A product with an 80-percent or higher rating is considered a huge success. A rating of 60 to 80 percent is positive, although on the lower side. When a product starts getting around 30 or 40 percent, that means it didn’t do well, and we need to explore what went wrong.”
Mark Rosewater
This makes a lot of sense as a system, even if player surveys are fairly unreliable as a metric. That aside, the score March of the Machine: The Aftermath received is truly shocking.
“March of the Machine: The Aftermath got five percent. It’s the lowest we’ve ever seen by close to fifteen percent. To say players hated it is probably an understatement.”
Mark Rosewater
This is a pretty wild figure. Most players knew that Aftermath was unpopular, but a 5% approval rating is completely abysmal. Rosewater doesn’t reveal the second least popular MTG set, but apparently, even that has a 20% approval rating. Let that serve as a final nail in the coffin for any players holding out hope for another Epilogue set.
Room To Breathe
This brutal revelation wasn’t the only juicy info nugget in Rosewater’s article. He also fielded a question about product fatigue, and if there were any plans to address that in the near future. This is an issue many MTG players have, and one that many are vocal about online. In response to this question, Rosewater gave a mysterious but hopeful answer.
“We have a panel scheduled for MagicCon: Las Vegas in October called “The Foundations of Magic‘s Next Era” where we will discuss issues such as this. The event will be live at MagicCon and recorded for people to watch at home a few days later.”
Mark Rosewater
This response is interesting for a number of reasons. The fact that it’s an answer to a question about product fatigue means there likely are in fact plans to address it soon. Many players had just accepted the huge new volume of products as their new reality, so to know that a solution may be in the works is reassuring.
The title of the panel is also interesting. “The Foundations of Magic’s next era” is both a fun pun on the upcoming core set and a fairly grand promise of big change. Foundations looks like enough of a reset that it really could be the start of a new era of Magic. Perhaps one in which there are fewer sets overall.
That said, I could be looking too much into this. Rosewater’s answer only states that the panel will discuss “issues such as this,” so it could just be a small part of the wider presentation. I think the fact that he chose to reference this panel in response to a product fatigue question makes some big changes in this area likely, however. We already have an idea of what 2025 and 2026 are looking like for Magic, but hopefully, 2027 can slow things down and give the player base room to breathe.
Trends And Tribulations
The rest of the article covered a number of miscellaneous questions. Some of these were quite interesting, however. One question, for example, concerned the kind of ‘Modernity Creep’ Magic is experiencing at the moment. You can see this most clearly in sets like Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Duskmourn, but it’s present in Thunder Junction and Murders at Karlov Manor, too.
“One of Magic‘s key qualities is its ever-growing, ever-adapting state. There was a time where I did think Innistrad was about as modern as we were going to go, but I was wrong. The success of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is one of the bigger factors that has us pushing more into exploring “modern” settings, such as Duskmourn. The other big influence is the popularity of Universes Beyond sets. The more players see and feel comfortable with modernity on cards, the more comfortable we feel exploring it.”
Mark Rosewater
There are a lot of players opposed to Magic proceeding in this direction, but honestly, the logic makes sense. There’s only so much you can do with traditional fantasy, after all. More modern settings will also narrow the tonal gap between regular sets and Universes Beyond products. As a result, cards from both should feel more coherent in decks together. We already know Tennis (Death Race) is coming next year, so I expect we’ll see this trend continue with that set.
Another common thread in the article was recent mechanics, and which ones had been more successful than others. Mechanics are the bedrock of each new Magic set, so it’s not surprising that they took up so much real estate in this article.
“I believe the two trickiest mechanics to balance were plot from Outlaws of Thunder Junction and manifest dread from Duskmourn.”
Mark Rosewater
These mechanics were noted as being difficult due to exploring new design space (In Plot’s case) and being extremely open-ended (In Manifest Dread’s case). Interestingly, the work seems to have been justified for Plot. Later in the article, Rosewater discusses the most successful mechanics of the year and cites Plot as the top performer going by responses from within R&D. Looking at player feedback, Spree and Rooms are more dominant. The latter is particularly interesting since it’s such a new mechanic. There didn’t seem to be much pre-launch hype around Rooms either, but clearly, they play well in practice.
Read More: New Commander Power Level System Has Already Split The MTG Community
