Number of Releases and Frequency

[Cyberium]

I'm half hoping WotC to see this thread, and I'm likely not the only one who's concerned with the pace of MtG products in recent years.

There are way too many products and they come way too frequently. In the past where sets were designed for their respective formats we could usually skip most of them, now every set has something cater to EDH. I haven't even finished decks base on Kamigawa themes and New Capenna is already out here raining down even more stuff, then Baldur's Gate, then Warhammer, Dominaria, Bothers' War... it's nonstop and exhausting.

I understand WotC is a company and a company needs to make money, but there's only so much time and brain cells to spare between sets and real life, I just wish they could give us a month or two before dropping more stuff. And, because of how rapidly sets come out these days, there are also a bulk of repetitive deck themes. Not every set needs to be as innovative as Strixhaven, all the more reason why WotC should slow down and focus on new designs than rehashing old ones.

[RxPhantom]

I definitely have product fatigue. As much as I hate to say it though, very little in 2022 has me excited at all. Neon Dynasty was one of the best sets of all time. It reinvigorated my interest in Magic. New Capenna is fine. I strongly dislike D&D in Magic so Baldur's Gate is a pass, I'm even less interested in Warhammer, and Double Masters 2 will cost way too much. And that last one is the kicker. How much do they really think they can squeeze out of us during this next year or two? We're entering a recession and the pandemic is ongoing. I feel burnt out by it all even though I'm sitting out until at least Dominaria United. I think the need to ease up or the audience is going to flame out.

[Serenade]

I'll still look for synergistic stuff in new releases (

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), but yeah, I'm not interested in Warhammer or D&D.

I did grab the Universes Within Stranger Things cards because I eventually want a clues deck, and I find the cards interesting (I like ST as well but hated the art and the idea of having real people adorn my cards instead of MTG characters).

[Sinis]

It's not you, it's really happening. Products are released at a breakneck pace. I have scaled back my purchases a ton. Between the inception of commander products and Ikoria, I bought everything. I often bought boxes, too. But, it's just all too much. I bought about 10 cards out of Capenna, because I know Commander Legends 2 is going to have cards I want in it. And after that, probably less.

NB, this tweet is 6 months old, but if I were a betting man, I'd say that there has only been more product.

[TheGildedGoose]

Line goes up.

[Cyberium]

It's not you, it's really happening. Products are released at a breakneck pace. I have scaled back my purchases a ton. Between the inception of commander products and Ikoria, I bought everything. I often bought boxes, too. But, it's just all too much. I bought about 10 cards out of Capenna, because I know Commander Legends 2 is going to have cards I want in it. And after that, probably less.

NB, this tweet is 6 months old, but if I were a betting man, I'd say that there has only been more product.

Curious that WotC said two years ago was the year of commanders, then last year and this year become even MORE commander than ever.

I don't mind more products as long as they're more diverse. Not everything has to be EDH related. The game of MtG is more than EDH.

[folding_music]

I wish some of these expansions were online only x3 I don't think that every expansion needs a concurrent Commander deck either, it's become way too much, plus if yr chasing this stuff the price of certain staples is going up at the same time. i bought nothing out of Capenna and am in general just buying cards from decades ago to make particular decks. i'll gnever get to the point where I'm at the edge of the envelope and improving an otherwise perfect deck, there's ALREADY too much stuff

[Sinis]

Curious that WotC said two years ago was the year of commanders, then last year and this year become even MORE commander than ever.

I don't mind more products as long as they're more diverse. Not everything has to be EDH related. The game of MtG is more than EDH.

Contrariwise, they did not say that the following years would not be the year of commander.

It turns out, their marketing department believes every year should be the year of commander until that well is dry.

[Dunharrow]

They will adjust based on the input they get (sales figures). I stopped buying commander precons for the most part, I used to buy every precon.
IMO they have too many precons per year. I think since they design for Commander with every product, the interest in precons will drop. There aren't even any good reprints anymore.

I think they have reached a point where they can't make more products, and most likely there will be an adjustment in the future.

I imagine that in 3-4 years, our annual outlook will be something like this:
4 Premier Sets (standard sets) with set boosters and collectors boosters and apparently Jumpstart Boosters
2 or 3 commander precons (probably one that is Universes Beyond)
1 Universes Beyond draftable set (with set boosters and collector boosters)
2 additional supplementary products - probably a Masters or Horizons and a Commander Legends / Un-set, though I wouldn't mind Conspiracy coming back. (collector boosters with these)
Secret Lairs will probably become more frequent.

Seems like a lot but I think this eliminates about 2 commander precons from the rotation, and also cuts products like Double Feature.
I would like to see commander precons go down to two per year, one that is UB and one that has a theme deck from each of the 4 premier sets.
This still seems like a lot of product, but the schedule would make more sense for a calendar year:

Premier set 1
Supp 1
Premier set 2
UB set
Premier set 3
Supp 2
Premier set 4
Commander set
UB Commander Set

Still a lot, but IMO more manageable.

[Dragonlover]

They're gonna keep doing precons with new sets. Their data shows commander is how the highest proportion of new players learn, so that's why they do it so there's always an easy way for new players to get hold of a precon.

Dragonlover

[PrimevalCommander]

Rant on: Product fatigue is setting in heavy with me. New Capenna spoilers started before, or just days after Kamigawa's release. I don't even have time to find places for new cards in my decks before yet more new cards come out. Prices never have time to level out and the secondary market is a mad dash for chase rares before the next big thing takes it's place. The perpetual hype engine makes it extremely difficult to keep up, and they don't let a set be in print long enough to really allow the market to settle down on many of the sought after cards. Even modest power cards are seeing high prices over $30+ just because the attention span of the player base is so short that everyone must have it NOW. Demand spikes, and supply never catches up because the next product sucks the attention of everyone immediately after the release of the previous set. Plus they can never hope to reprint all the needed cards that end up $60+ due to unique mechanics and flavor reasons. So cards like The Great Henge are just stuck at high prices with little hope for relief. I sorely miss the days when they released product in a block and we had 2-3 months of a set to mature in the market. Good cards were affordable, and only the most competitive Mythic's broke $20. Rant off

[Magiqmaster]

I have seen people mentioning product fatigue to Maro. He always replies the same thing: "Not every product is for everyone, so you don't need to buy everything... yada yada...".

Since Hasbro bought WotC, I noticed that upwards trend and I don't see any end in the near future. Get used to it,

[Treamayne]

I am so sick of the "Not every product is for everyone" mantra, that I've decided this game isn't for me anymore. I miss the days of Core sets being bi-annual and having 1 block per year (even if it wasn't "calendar year"). I'll play some and I plan to keep a few decks in paper (and maybe 1/2 of my MTGO collection); but I'm divesting the rest.

More importantly, WotC hasn't gotten a dollar of my money since SL:TWD. . .

[The N82O Molecule]

edh killed magic . . .there I said it hahahaha

but seriously

hehe

the amount of commander and the fact that they print individual cards for each one. I pulled a Anhelo, the Painter from a set booster and that sorta axed my vibe about that deck. but im still missing out on the other solo cards.

when the decks first came out they were like 20-30 dollars. I would get all 5. now I find the 2 or one I want and I spend 100$. seems like the math is working out for hasbro. but man the fomo of watching cards pass by cause I can't afford it. maybe im part of the problem.

as far as baldurs gate I am really turned off by most of the cards and knowing they only work in edh its super meh. most of the time I like a good ol 60 card and if a theme hits to hard go to 100. but like the planes walkers only seem meh powerful. how happy am I going to be after getting the 10th charcoal diamond. also I guess this is telling me that I don't like going all new and id rather prefer a set that helps develop old magic ideas. that's why im team baldurs gate the land and I hope the gate cycle wins and now my 60 card mazes end deck can go 100? idk like where are the ninjas, more eldrazi. . .like give me a fourth eldrazi. etal

[DirkGently]

I am so sick of the "Not every product is for everyone" mantra, that I've decided this game isn't for me anymore. I miss the days of Core sets being bi-annual and having 1 block per year (even if it wasn't "calendar year"). I'll play some and I plan to keep a few decks in paper (and maybe 1/2 of my MTGO collection); but I'm divesting the rest.

More importantly, WotC hasn't gotten a dollar of my money since SL:TWD. . .

Damn, good on you for holding out.

The "not every product is for everyone" is kinda BS, at least as far as commander is concerned. If you play standard only, congrats, you can completely skip commander legends, modern horizons, commander precons, etc. If you play exclusively modern, you can grab the 1-2 cards per standard set that make a significant impact in modern and you're good. But wotc ain't letting that commander $$$ walk away. Every set is always packed with commander stuff, and most of the secret lairs are targeting us hard too, on top of piles and piles and piles of precons. Whenever they're nervous that a product won't sell well enough, like the game nights box, just shove some commander cards in there. Commander is absolutely the WotC cocaine fund right now, and they just keep pushing the number of products for us up and up and up to see if there's a limit, and so far the answer seems to be "no".

Anyway I should go back to scanning through crimson vow for all the commander staples I missed. Anyone see my credit card?

[Yatsufusa]

They're gonna keep doing precons with new sets. Their data shows commander is how the highest proportion of new players learn, so that's why they do it so there's always an easy way for new players to get hold of a precon.

To them now, Commander precons are the successful versions of those 60-card planeswalker (and prior to that, theme) decks they released every set and basically were surplus shelf products unless they had Umezawa's Jitte in them, or aged to "vintage" collectible status.

I'm glad I got sick of having to disassemble and rebuild various decks in 2015 (after 4/5 years of tinkering around between 2011 to 2015) and settled down with my suite of decks. Even during my era of tinkering around I didn't really care for precons (I bought Animar precon to start my EDH journey, the Karador a couple years later because it aligned perfectly with what I wanted later, then the 2014 mono-colored planeswalker ones as the only full set I bought because my justification it's much easier to find a use for mono-colored cards), the idea of buying a set of precons yearly was money better spent improving decks I already knew and loved instead.

Even from 2015, I went from a period lamenting Commander-exclusive cards were not only exclusive, but also exclusively nonfoil, to the point now I don't even care about them even when they're now more accessible from set/collector boosters (and still stupidly enough most of them still can't be foiled, even if foil quality has taken a nosedive). Foils also taking a nosedive in prestige now they're basically equal to the nonfoil in price due to collector boosters sorta sucks, but I like to maintain uniformity (the old foils in the decks still retain their prestige) and with less and less cards I need per set now, honestly I'm sorta glad I can get pretty much most of the singles I want from a set for dirt cheap.

Occasionally something like The Meathook Massacre happens and I either bite the bullet or skip it (I skipped Massacre but I jumped on The Great Henge, for example), but those are rare cases and usually not detrimental to someone like me who's already sitting on a hoard of older cards that likely contain acceptable substitutes to begin with. Other than that, nowadays each set has singles that I really want that amount to less than a set booster or two in cost and even if I loosened up and took in some more cards that are just "fun" for my decks, still less than a collector booster. I have no less fun playing with my old decks with only one or two cards from the past year against the newer players with all the swanky new cards I personally don't care for in my own collection.

Once upon a time when I entered mobile gaming (especially the gacha genre), TCGs taught me a valuable lesson in managing my money over gambling (leave only acceptable losses to chance, buy/spark singles at an optimal rate). Ironically now MTG has sped up so much in a similar vein of those mobile games (which churn out a new shiny to gamble so often), it has gone full circle to those mobile games teaching me not to fall for FOMO in MTG as well.

[Cyberium]

I have seen people mentioning product fatigue to Maro. He always replies the same thing: "Not every product is for everyone, so you don't need to buy everything... yada yada...".

Not every product is for everyone, but they simply design every product to have something to do with the best selling format. >_<

[BlackbirdPlaysMTG]

Wizards releasing so much stuff is the reason I try to limit the amount of EDH decks I have. Sometimes the urge to build with all the cool new stuff becomes strong, but I generally rather grab a few cards from every set to update the EDH decks I already own (four at the moment). That way I keep my MTG spendings within reason.

[RxPhantom]

I used to keep track of spoilers like it was my job. Now, I barely have a handle on anything. There's just too much, I used to get excited about Magic releases. The overload has reduced that enthusiasm to barely more than an awareness that something is happening. It doesn't help that, with the shining exception of Neon Dynasty, the last couple of years have been really, really lackluster.

[Mergatroid_Jones]

Somebody must be buying these commander precons. It's not me, but somebody must be.

I mostly just watch sets go by and wish I could draft them. But hey, my cube still kicks ass.

[Jemolk]

I've definitely checked out quite a bit. Getting fewer and fewer cards from each subsequent set, it seems like. Barely even looked at Neon Dynasty closely enough to get past my initial "blech, cyberpunk but it thinks the dystopia is fine, actually" reaction. I've heard what a good set it is elsewhere too, and I just... don't... care. Not enough to really look closely for anything interesting. Maybe it's there, but whether it is or not, I can't be arsed to find it. And the same mostly goes for New Capenna. You can count on it being true of Battle for Baldur's Gate, too, naturally.

And that's with the fact that I just ignore Secret Lairs and treat them as though they don't exist. Given all that, I have no idea how this strategy of perpetual deluge could possibly be so overwhelmingly profitable, and I highly doubt it's sustainable.

[Legend]

I own 100 cards.

[Hermes_]

I must have way better self-control than any of you, I haven't bought any new product in years, despite wanting some of the new stuff and I barely buy singles. But I haven't gotten rid or trimmed down my collection since I got the xbox series x back at the start of the year.

[Dragonlover]

I must admit, I do find some of the ways you lot interact with the game fascinating. My approach is as follows:

Check spoilers every day on lunch/when I get home/ at random points/if someone points out they've updated. Probably takes about 15 minutes total out of my day.

Once the full set drops, go through the whole set with an eye to what I might need for my various EDH decks, and also a refresher for the prerelease. Probably takes a few hours, cause itll be alongside someone doing the same thing so conversation happens.

Do 1-5 prerelease events. Anything from an afternoon to a weekend.

Anything I don't open or trade for at the prerelease I'll buy as a single once my store has their stock sorted out, assuming I remember.

So yeah, actively thinking about a new set is at most two or three days of my life, the bulk of which is attending the prerelease that I would have attended anyway. Not exactly a burden.

I've never bought myself a Secret Lair because none have interested me enough, I don't buy all the precons because most of the time they don't interest me (being the new player on boarding ones) and I still manage to maintain my decks and occasionally brew a new one when the mood strikes. I also tend to ignore Masters sets since I'm looking for very specific reprints but only play EDH in terms of constructed, so I'll keep an eye on the spoiler but I'll generally skip the event.

Combine this approach with my agreement with "not every product is for me" as a philosophy, and you can hopefully understand why I just fundamentally don't understand some of the positions put forth in this thread. Other things on the not for me list include Un-sets and ancillary stuff like Spellbooks and Commander Collections, which I treat like Masters sets and Secret Lairs.

Dragonlover

[Rumpy5897]

When you think about it, the core architecture of a Magic year is pretty similar to what it was back in the day. You get your four tentpole standard sets, you get your Commander precons, you get a couple other supplemental sets of stuff peppered in through the year. Picking an arbitrary semi-recent year in 2017, we got two Masters sets and an un-set, plus various duel decks and other stuff of that nature. Thing is, you could ignore all of those if you wanted to as they were reprints only. The product genuinely wasn't for you if you chose for it not to be.

Meanwhile for comparison's sake, there's a new un-set coming out this year, and R&D decided that recent un-cards have been tame as hell so may as well make them black border. And that's where we're gotten. While the actual raw number of sets to come out isn't staggeringly higher than back in the day, pretty much everything has unique cards in it to get people to pay attention. This has already come up in the thread, and it feels like the crux of the issue. No product is not for you if you're a Commander player. If I boycotted Baldur's Gate in protest over them not doing partner, I'd have missed Agent of the Iron Throne, an absolutely crazy card for one of my decks. And those suckers are everywhere now. The old planeswalker deck unique cards were designed to be garbage so you could just tune them out. But now you get scores of EDH-targeted cards in precons that land with every set, and some of those are actually quite good. The New Capenna precons put cards in the majority of my decks. One of these days one of the set booster only cards is going to make its way into one of my decks and I will be mildly annoyed on a conceptual level.

Another factor that's contributing to fatigue is the perpetual hops in scenery. It's pretty easy to rattle off blocks as there was one a year. And then it's still pretty easy to rattle off the mini-blocks. But honestly, I have trouble piecing together the timeline of the tentpole standard sets after WAR because we're suddenly doing four settings a year. Add the current weird super early hype streams where we get tasters of future sets before the current it-thing even starts properly spoiling, and everything becomes this muddled mess of flashing lights and ever-shifting surroundings.

I take in new sets the way I always have. Follow spoilers as they emerge, then do a general sweep once the full gallery goes up to try to make sure I didn't miss anything, pick up singles at some point. And that's pretty much it. I caught myself enjoying the relative quietude of Q1-Q2 2022 and awaited SNC previews with some slight anticipation, until I remembered that there was going to be an un-set crammed in there. An un-set which I'd have to pay attention to because it was going to be black bordered. Dammit.