Me, last year: "Personally, I think WotC should just start offering Print on Demand Magic cards, priced per rarity. If they really want to defy the accusations that booster packs are gambling and ignore the secondary market, this would be a good way to do it, and would increase access for all players. Also, no card should ever cost more than $20, excepting premium aesthetic versions of the card."
WotC, last year: "We're announcing a new product! It's called Secret Lairs! They'll be available on our website, with 24 hour duration drops for each! Each one will have special new art for classic and beloved cards!"
So... in December of 2019, WotC announced a new kind of product, Secret Lairs. They're boxes that contain some number of cards, with special new art, and the number and style of art differ from box to box. They generally run $30-$40 but outliers exist. I
believe the cards are almost always foils, but I'm not sure.
This started in Dec 2019 with the announcement of the following:
- Bitterblossom Dreams (1 Bitterblossom and four matching tokens, which form a panorama when placed next to each other)
- Eldraine Wonderland (1 each foil Snow-covered basic land with Eldraine setting art)
- Restless in Peace (1 each Bloodghast, Golgari Thug and Life from the Loam in new art)
- Seeing Visions (four foil copies of Serum Visions, each with new art)
- "<explosion sounds>" (one each Goblin Bushwhacker, Goblin Sharpshooter, Goblin King, Goblin Lackey, and Goblin Piledriver, in a cartoon-y style)
- Kaleidoscope Killers (1 each foil Reaper King, Sliver Overlord and Ur Dragon, each in a sort of psychedelic style, but Justine Jones)
- OMG KITTIES! (one each Leonin Warleader, Regal Caracal, Qasali Slingers, Aharbo, Roar of the World, and Mirrir, Weatherlight Duelist in foil, and 2 Cat tokens, all in a cartoon-y style)
Each one would drop for 24 hours, consecutively, from 12-3 to 12-9. Kaleidoscope Killers and OMG KITTIES! cost $39.99 each, while the others cost $29.99.
This was followed by Year of the Rat, this past January, which contained one each special art versions of Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni; Marrow-Gnawer; Pack Rat; and five copies of Rat Colony. There were no tokens, despite Marrow-Gnawer creating tokens, and there being something of a trend of including tokens with token generator cards. The set sold for $39.99. All were foil
Then, there was the Theros Stargazing sets, vols I-V. Each volume contained one major Theros god and two minor gods, sharing the major god's color. So Vol I contains Heliod, God of the Sun, and Karametra, God of Harvests and Iroas, God of Victory. These all dropped on Feb 14, for $39.99 each, or you could buy them as a bundle of all five for $149.99. All were foil.
March 8 brought the International Women's Day secret lair, containing one each Captain Sisay; Meren of Clan Nel Toth; Narset, Enlightened Master; Oona, Queen of the Fae; and Saskia the Unyielding; for $49.99. All were foil and borderless. On the 12th, there was the Thalia--Beyond the Helvault secret lair for $29.99, which contained four foil Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, each with different art.
This month, dropped on May 7, there was a Godzilla Lands Secret Lair, which contains one each foil, full art basic land, with art depicting Godzilla (because the newset set, Ikoria, has a tie-in with the Godzilla franchise, because it's about giant monsters). This was $29.99, and the very hyped, very special "Secret Lair: Ultimate Edition," containing one each alternate art Marsh Flats, Scalding Tarn, Verdant Catacombs, Arid Mesa and Misty Rainforest. Each depicts a different plane, Lorwyn, Shiv on Dominaria, Innistrad, Amonkhet and Ixalan, respectively. When it was announced, it was ostensibly supposed to sell for "somewhere above $165" and be available through local game stores instead of on WotC's site on May 29. Then Covid happened, and this was postponed for June 12. In this time, it was revealed most stores only received four or five SLUEs, and the price was going to be anywhere from $275-500.
Finally, just today, WotC announced five Secret Lairs for June--
- Full Sleeves (one each Spell Pierce, Blood Artist, Eternal Witness, Pithing Needle and Inkmoth Nexus with traditional American flash tattoo style art), $29.99
- "Can You Feel With a Heart of Steel!" (one each foil full art Arcbound Ravager, Darksteel Colossus, and Walking Ballista, in a sort of comic book-y art style) $?
- Mountain, Go (four Lightning Bolts, each full art and foil, with different art) $?
- The Path Not Travelled (one each Ajani Steadfast, looking like he's from an X Force comic; Domri Rade, looking like a cowboy; Tamiyo, Field Resercher, looking like a pulp detective; and Vraska, Golgari Queen, dressed like high school dance royalty) All Foil $?
- Ornithological Studies (one each Swan Song, Birds of Paradise, Gilded Goose, Baleful Strix, and Dovescape, all with very realistic birds in the cards. Possible depicting actual real life birds as each of these creatures, but I don't know) $?
So... in 7 months, we've gotten 21 special premium sets, most of which are not any more accessible or affordable than just buying the singles on the secondary market. Almost none of which are announced enough in advance that people could actually budget for them, which means they are de facto intended for people with large amounts of discretionary money they can drop at nearly a moments notice on Magic cards. ie, the MTG Finance Whales.
Oh, and on April 1st, they announced the April Fools Secret Lair, containing Squire, Storm Crow, Goblin Snowman and Mudhole, each with new foil full art. It was announced as an April Fools joke, but was also said that at "some point in the future, after the COVID crisis, they would produce these cards and distribute them to WPN stores to use at their discretion.
In addition, there's been the advent of Box Toppers in booster boxes, special cards that are part of the set they're distributed with, but only available if you buy a booster box, pre-order specials and cosmetics for Arena, the master pass for Arena that costs roughly $25 for each set and if you don't buy it you get very anemic play rewards in Arena for the season, there have been more and more Masters sets which sell for upwards of $8 a pack, Collector's Boosters which sell for, like $20 each, the new Double Masters set which Amazon has up for $16.30 a pack, oh, and the fact that WotC did away with MSRP in Feb 2019.
In short... along with questionable choices in the actual design of sets, color pie decisions which seem arbitrary, the elimination of the Story entries on the WotC site so you have to buy overpriced novels which range from mediocre to outright terrible, or sets with no actual story at all (as happened in the new Theros block), and stories which outright conflict with that being depicted in the set... Magic, as a product, is fucking losing me. The environment of stores tends to be coldly neutral at best, if not actively hostile for some, Mark Rosewater fosters a reputation as being very accessible to the players, but basically is not open to anything which the company isn't already considering and to hell with your arguments. The company tries to portray itself as very progressive and open, but they're literally just trying to cash in with Rainbow Capitalism by producing only Pride products which entail literally the least possible effort (ie, shirts with their brand logos in a rainbow overlay) and will immediately squash any actual representation in their products which endanger their income (Nissa and Chandra becoming a canon WLW couple only to be canonically split up in literally the next novel in the most vomit-inducing comphet terms possible so they didn't endanger China sales, and yes, it's all but confirmed that's the reason, because the apology they issued on their site is literally not available to read from Chinese IPs).
I get it, it's a business. They want to make money, and they.... literally do not owe their customers anything beyond literally what they pay for, I suppose.
But it's incredibly alienating, and while they've gotten my money through Arena pretty reliably over the last few months, including $100 from my stimulus check so I could get the cosmetics for Ikoria, the corporate hand ever digging into my pocket to grab whatever money it can get and slowly growing to threats to grab me by the ankles and try to shake the money out of my pockets is just the start of that.
Actually, I lie. The money thing is the head. Magic's been losing me for a while, mostly because I just don't agree with the creative direction. I don't agree with Black constantly being the villainous color and White constantly being the heroic color, while they constantly claim that no one color is the villain color or hero color, and that every color has good and bad aspects. Magic as a brand invites players to form a connection to the flavor of the worlds they create, and I'm not alone in primarily identifying with Black, and least identifying with White. So that alone feels alienating. And then when people question this, Mark Rosewater will respond with "We've had non-black villains. Nahiri is a villain. The Consulate (from Kaladesh) are villains. Dovin Baan is a villain. And we've had Black heroes. Yahenni is a hero."
Except... Nahiri is not a white character. Sure, her cards are Red White, but they're literally only White because she is a Kor, and Kor are a white race. The Consulate hardly features on page in the Kaladesh story, and it's almost entirely played off as Dovin and Baral are the villains. Dovin is Blue-White, and is probably the best example of a White aligned villain in recent Magic history. But... he is not depicted as a villain in the actual Kaladesh story. Baral is a mono-Blue character, who is... basically prejudice against pyromancers. You could make an argument that he should be Blue-White, because ostensibly he hates pyromancers because he sees them as harmful to others, but honestly, he's a Blue-Black character, because he is entirely motivated by his own hatred and ignores both morality and law to do whatever the fuck he wants, including an actual secret prison. And he's being egged on by Tezzeret, a Blue-Black villain. Oh, and Yahenni is... a Mono-Black vampire Aetherborn (the Black race they made for Kaladesh because they felt Zombies didn't fit), and... very neutral. It's like saying the mercenary you hired to overthrow the capitalist hegemony is a hero because you hired him. And then there's the problem of Aetherborn. I like them! I really do! But they're not Black! They are a short-lived race which spring out of the Aether fully adult, and live in a state of constant hedonism and emotion. They're RED. They're not even undead to justify being Black! Some are just able to drain life force and thus, in the cards, have the Vampire type.
The closest Magic has gotten to an actual White villain in recent history is probably Heliod, the Therosian god of light. Who's... just Zeus minus all the rape. He's arrogant and corrupt and prideful. But sure, there is
a White villain in recent Magic. Compared to roughly 47 million Black villains (ok, I exaggerate, but...)
And
then WotC stopped publishing the story online, and wanted people to buy novels. And the first one to come out was the novel for War of the Spark, written by Greg Weisman, and which handled the giant crossover of 36 different planeswalkers fighting the big climactic Avengers Endgame-level final battle against Nicol Bolas
worse than Endgame handled their's.. Which... goddamned. When your story is worse than Endgame? Oh. And it discarded the vastly popular character development of Jace from the Ixalan story, and it ignored Jace and Vraska's relationship. And it said that Vraska recovered the memories she asked Jace to lock away for her, in a moment of amazing trust between them, denying us the moment that was set up in the Ixalan story, and greatly anticipated, where Jace would literally call out to his captain, Vraska, unlocking her memories from Ixalan, so she could join the fight against Nicol Bolas. It ludicrously depicted characters completely out of character (having the pacifist Karn fighting, for example) or literally just name dropped planeswalkers to jam them into the story that was required to name check 36 goddamned planeswalkers. Oh. And the story picked up pretty much at the moment of Nicol Bolas taking over, rather than showing any of the actual lead up, which, again, we were anticipating.
Then there was the novel's second part, Forsaken. Which featured the one, major, canon gay couple, Nissa and Chandra, breaking up for literally no reason, and Chandra questioning her sexuality, saying she'd always been interested in "Decidedly Male" men (literally the novel's words), like Gideon
who the story has always portrayed as more of a big brother to her.
And
then there was the ever-increasing money-grubbing, making the game cater more and more to the people who are literally the most harmful to it, the MTG Finance people and the Whales.
So... well, it's Wizards. I don't know why I expect anything.