Despite Magic: The Gathering being the most popular trading card game in North America, it certainly makes a lot of mistakes. Mistakes need to be made to learn from to improve anything, but the sheer size of the mistakes made by a billion-dollar brand sometimes has us shaking our heads. While 2024 seems to have fared much better than other recent years, there is still a share of concerns that caused a lot of MTG fans’ grief this year.
4 | Commander Bans
In many players’ opinions, the Commander bans may have been the biggest mistake MTG mistake made in 2024. Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that the bans themselves were a mistake. What I am convinced of, however, is that the circumstances surrounding the bans were a major misstep. For that reason, this ranks fourth on our list.
These are the first Commander bans that MTG players have seen in three years. Because multiple $90+ cards were involved in the bans, millions of dollars were lost, angering players. There is always a risk with owning expensive MTG cards from this perspective, but a lack of communication is where the ban ran into problems.
Problematically, there was no indication that a Commander ban was coming and no indication that it would be massive in scale. For other formats, we know when ban announcements are coming up and can therefore speculate about what cards could be on the chopping block. The Commander bans were a complete blindside. If any of the parties involved made it clear that a Commander ban was coming, players would have had an opportunity to get rid of any cards they couldn’t afford to tank in value.
Once the ban occurred, things got a lot worse. Bad actors sent threats to Commander Advisory Group members, leading to multiple resignations. Ultimately, the situation got so bad that the CAG was disbanded and Wizards took over ownership of the Commander format.
This shift is an incredibly controversial one that has a lot of players worried. When the fate of the Commander ban list was in the hands of passionate community leaders, we knew that the format would come first. Wizards of the Coast, however, is a business before anything else, so changes in the ban list, or lack thereof, may be in the interest of making money instead of in the interest of the Commander format.
Fortunately, Wizards has clarified that the community is still a big part of Commander. A similar group to the Commander Advisory Group to act as consultants for major Commander changes has been built. Wizards will now have the last word, but Gavin Verhey has made it very clear that the consultation group will have considerable sway over the decisions that are ultimately made. It’s tough to know how much sway the community will continue to have over the state of Commander. At a minimum, Wizards of the Coast fully controlling the ban list should allow a massive improvement in communication to players.
3 | Slow Ban Announcements
2024 had its share of problematic cards, and believe me, we’re going to talk about those deeper in this article, but the actual ban list announcements were also problematic. Namely, the rigid nature of the bans created by Wizards of the Coast trying to increase announcement clarity slowed down bans egregiously. This caused multiple MTG formats to sit in problematic states for far too long.
It all began when Nadu, Winged Wisdom, was legal for months after it became apparent that the card had to leave the Modern format. The deck was on another level compared to the rest of the format, and its play patterns were absolutely disgusting, tedious, and unenjoyable.
When Nadu was eventually banned, Wizards of the Coast also banned Grief in the Legacy format, something that players wanted gone months before that. Because Nadu and Grief took so long to ban, other problems in Modern and Legacy that should have reared their ugly heads months before became problems for way longer than they should have been. It’s now clear that The One Ring needs to go in Modern, and something out of the Dimir Reanimator deck still needs to get banned. Grief was not enough.
Fortunately, the next MTG ban announcement is on December 16th. This should hopefully help clean up some MTG formats that desperately need repair. That, sadly, doesn’t change the fact that these awful format states could have been cleaned up a while ago.
While the late MTG bans ruined some formats for the latter half of 2024, Wizards of the Coast has learned from their mistake and changed their ban list timing. Future decks that warp formats should be put in check much earlier, as a result.
2 | Secret Lairs Becoming Limited Print
At the beginning of 2024, Wizards of the Coast revealed a massive change to the Secret Lair franchise. In an effort to speed up egregiously slow shipping times, Secret Lairs would be shifting away from a print-to-demand strategy to a limited print one. Secret Lairs would be prepared ahead of time for players to maximize shipping speeds, but whenever the pre-printed product sold out, that was the last of the Secret Lairs.
Sadly, this creates a paradise for scalpers. Not only are millions of MTG players trying to gain access to a rather limited supply of products, but scalpers looking to flip them for a profit have now added to the demand for them. This is great for selling Secret Lairs, but it’s pretty awful for customers.
As a result, popular Secret Lairs routinely sold out in hours. The Marvel Secret Lair sale is the most infamous example of this. Players who lined up seconds after inputting their choices had to wait up to five hours to confirm their purchase. By the time they finally got to cash out, most, if not all, of their desired Secret Lairs were already sold out.
This particular sale had even more issues than the average Secret Lair drop. Scalpers discovered a back door that could skip the queue. This allowed them to purchase tons of products that they flipped for a ridiculous amount of money. While Secret Lairs are now undeniably successful, more so than ever, the trade-off certainly leaves a bad taste in players’ mouths. Hey, at least the shipping times are good.
While the current state of affairs for Secret Lairs drops is controversial, at best, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Wizards of the Coast has started trialing a hybrid model that offers the best of both worlds. For the Extra Life charity Secret Lair this year, Wizards pre-printed this drop before switching to print-to-demand once copies sold out. While this helped alleviate demand concerns while providing speedy shipping, Wizards hasn’t fully implemented this printing model everywhere.
Additionally, Wizards is trying to adjust print quantities of Secret Lairs to meet demand as closely as possible. This could solve the problems that are arising due to a demand that far outweighs the printed supply of a Secret Lair product.
1 | Nadu, Winged Wisdom
Nadu, Winged Wisdom was certainly Wizards of the Coast’s biggest ‘oops’ of the year. Thanks to a lack of playtesting and a last-second change, Nadu, Winged Wisdom went on to break multiple formats. This caused the card to be banned in Modern and Commander. Nadu, Winged Wisdom continues to be one of the best things to do in the Legacy format, but the Bird Wizard seems to fit in with the rest of the ridiculousness that pervades that format.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Nadu’s story was that this card was not intended to affect competitive formats. Nadu, Winged Wisdom was a card intended for Commander in a set about Modern. That already had a lot of players mad.
As Wizards revealed in a detailed article all about Nadu, the card’s initial design was believed to be somewhat overpowered. Given Nadu was just meant to be a fun new Commander option, rather than a dominant force, their abilities were dramatically changed. Unfortunately, the way Modern Horizons 3 was playtested meant this new version didn’t get the scrutiny it deserved.
In their article, Michael Majors stated they simply missed the interaction with zero-mana abilities like Shuko. This allowed the unintended combo to cause havoc once released, dominating and warping the modern metagame. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Wizards themselves have stated outright that “Nadu, Winged Wisdom was a design mistake.”
Thankfully, while Wizards did make this mistake, they’ve also learned from it. New policies for card design and play testing have been implemented to catch potential errors like this going forward. Subsequently, we hopefully won’t have to deal with another Nadu situation ever again.
