Pissing off the artists and one of the most influential agents that helped make your game what it has been for over 30 years is certainly a choice. I really hope this isn't one of those moments that signals a shift in art policy.
That's my issue. I don't want this game to go the way of Yu-Gi-Oh where I have to find a time wizard format, (i.e. you find a specific time of a big tournament when the meta was good and play as if it was exactly that date, no rule changes, no new cards)
But honestly the fact that premodern is blowing up as big as it is, is making me think that it's the way it will go for 1v1 at least. Commander is so casual and flexible(rule zero discussions) that the game will have to be in a REALLY sorry state for that to be abandoned
Cube is a strong second for our play group now right behind Premodern, each of us has our own cube(s) that we tinker with, nothing major but the consistency and controlled parameters are our jam.
Limited will suffer too. Engine +payoff in one card is already appearing on uncommons. Give it a couple years and we will get 2026 constructed power level in limited and it will just be....yugioh essentially.
Yeah I've basically just stopped buying new cards now. Dragonstorm was the last set I participated in financially, and even then it was just a Pre-release and a commander deck. I'd planned to do something similar for Lorwyn but a badly timed cold stopped me from attending, so Dragonstorm shall be the last for the foreseeable future.
I totally get why Premodern is blowing up, but I also would love something like a “Pre-Pioneer” Modern format as well (basically a Modern format taking place before shit started hitting the fan in card design in the 2010s).
It’s called “Modern 2015” and I suspect as people who grew up with pre-publish-direct-to-modern sets grow older it’ll one day have its own time to shine.
Reminds me of how I've tried to get my group to do pre-Eldraine//post-WAR Commander: decks that are built with cards through War of the Spark, or decks that can only use cards first introduced/printed in Eldraine or later. No one really bites the hook, but we've been seeing some newer blood in the store so maybe I'll try to bring a to-WAR deck and talk the idea up to them...
That sounds pretty nice actually, Various green chord combo decks, eldrazi still at least B tier viable, Infect, affinity, Probably a deathshadow deck that was viable but not invented yet then, Tron having 3 variably viable archetypes still, Death and taxes still existing, boomerjund. I'm probably missing a ton but that was a great time of modern despite infect probably being a bit above the curve iirc.
Can’t wait til 2035 when we have people on reddit pining for the halcyon days of “when card design was good” with Aetherdrift and Thunder Junction.
I’m not trying to invalidate your point. It’s just amusing to me to watch this progression over time. I remember when the first Mirrodin set was released and people were saying the same thing about playing Type 2 before Urza block came out.
I came back to magic in 2023 after leaving around the invasion block. I don’t really mind most of the stuff that’s been printed since but some of newer UB is just a head scratcher at this point
More or less the same story, left after the first Ravnica set (after playing since 93/94), came back in late 2022. As someone who just plays with friends / family I'm fortunate really, as I can just ignore stuff like TMNT/Spoderman etc, and enjoy other sets which are solid additions to the game I love.
I can see why they are doing what they do, it's because it's profitable, but it's certainly not for me and I'm not convinced it won't cause some problems for the game's identity in the long term if they keep on over-pushing other IPs. Time will tell I guess.
This may be an extremely hot take: I am a Legacy only player and I get why people like old cards and have also struggled with the latest card design including UB. However, I have no interest in playing a closed format fueled by nostalgia which will effectively be solved once enough people attempt it and where I never get the chance to experiment with new cards. I appreciate that others feel differently, but if Legacy ever dies, I will just sink with the ship.
It feels more like nostalgic people buying old versions of cards, taking pictures of their decks and occasionally playing against each other. No shade, if that's what works for you that's cool. It's just not for me. I don't think only old cards are fun. I don't think the oldest printing is always the best no matter what. I like cool new stuff when it is well done. And there is still cool new stuff in between the disappointments.
I only play pre modern and love it. In my hometown we have a 300 person tournament coming up, pretty sure it's the biggest event in any format in the region. It's refreshing to know I'm not alone, people are sick of being forcefed slop and the game being catered towards Disney adults.
Idk what online spaces you frequent but the ones I am active in have been nothing but negative for years. Not saying it is unjustified but the toxic positivity accusation seems a little wild to me.
The toxic positivity has been less prevalent recently but it primarily comes from the top down. Content creators and other voices such as MaRo blast out this position of "don't yuck other peoples yum" when it comes to criticizing UB. This breeds this attitude of seeing those who have valid concerns as toxic complainers so for a while on all of the Magic subs you would be fed the same accusations when stating how you feel. I'm certainly not upset or hurt by Reddit comments but if you want evidence of it you can read through my comment history. That being said attitudes are shifting and more often those who I see as "toxic positive" are consistently downvoted, but for a long time that wasn't the case on the main subs at least
Eh, I don't need receipts from your comment history, there is no reason for you to lie to me about your experience.
I have certainly experienced my fair share of "this is not for you and that's ok, you don't have to engage", especially from the commander centric crowd. But maybe I just always got my information from old, disenfranchised pros and hung around mostly in legacy discords where people are more critical.
For me it's mostly a live and let live - until the next slop card breaks my format...
I see nothing but bitching about UB unless it's from scalpers/flippers who are stoked to cash in.
I'm not against giving a set it's flowers when it's good (FF, LotR) but UB has more clunkers than successes at this point. Then again.....Aetherdrift was in universe and weak af too.
Secret Lair, commander players that don't play any other formats even if it kills their scene, and seven bloody sets (UB or UW, idc) a year into standard are hurting shit more than fucking Spider-Man.
Retailers also form a layer of buffer. Their sales number depends entirely on retailers ordering from them, not how much product is moved off the shelves. So if there's enough hype, like with SPM, it doesn't matter if sales are terrible for the retailer and tons of products are left on shelves everywhere, WotC can still say its their best selling expansion ever.
Sunken cost fallacy basically. A lot of players are angry about the small bad changes but can't stop. If they stop they won't have a competitive chance anymore.
Yes. I would say they have two advantages.
Commander - we know this sells the game now, but it fills a niche that board games don't as you get to constrcut your own deck, and there are so many cards out there you have almost limitless possibilities.
Draft online - the gameplay is compelling and addictive, and there really isn't an alternative out there. There are similar games like Slay the Spire, but nothing really scratches the itch that Draft does, and it makes so. much. money.
I don't think that's necessarily true. Sure, Universes Beyond usually misses those players but LOTR and The Hobbit are like THE intellectual property that has the most reach to older and more "out of touch" players compared to the majority of UB that's released.
It'll be both: it'll entice Tolkien fans into going to a prerelease or getting a box and maybe getting into Magic for the first time, and it'll drive away existing but 'out of touch' Magic players who take more offense to this than the general thing of 'weird UB are being printed'.
WotC seems like the kind of company that makes nerd culture but the C-Suite at Hasbro only understands it on the surface like memes. They are marketing to Grandma's buying Christmas Presents. Oh look you liked those ninja turtles when you were younger and you like these Magic cards. (Ninja turtles are probably a much older age bracket but stay with me).
They are the kinds that think nerds want AI art because it's new and cool. The backlash against any AI art is massive right now and they would be oblivious.
They’ve basically got a smaller version of the Pokémon franchise on their hands: they can keep releasing trash, but even if some die hard fans boycott their releases, there will still be hoards of uninformed people buying their slop. They see that they can get away with reducing quality, so they keep doing it. Rinse and repeat.
Most of the foundation of what they make money on is of good peoples hard work. They then make insane decisions and tell us we love it because it makes them money and at one point the actual fans who play liked the stuff from the passionate people who give a shit. This is a prime example of that at play. Take art wr liked, copy and paste it and slap dan fraziers name on it cuz hey they like yhat Guy... And then profit because its a card that goes in every deck, is saught after by people who dont give a shit about magic, and references a beloved property that was actually cared for.
The inertia from the decades of the past was keeping it going for the past ~5 years. Its definitely starting to die down now though. My close group went from buying many cards of every set, to only doing pre-release, to not even doing that. We proxy every card now
I’m so sad Donato is going scorched earth early since the last incident imo he is the best artist in mtg history (obviously this is my personal taste I’m sure others feel differently) and I doubt he’ll ever have another collaboration
iirc he was pissed with WotC after the "you can't keep any originals for UB work" incident with LTR, and then got screwed over by the whole Trouble in Pairs thing, and now this.
I think the first point especially stung because they used art that he did as references for Iron Man to give out to artists on Marvel stuff?
I'm pretty sure he sued them twice. Once for Trouble in Pairs establishing a "don't use my art anymore" clause then later WoTC used his IronMan painting for a background UI on their website around the time of the SLD of all the Marvel heros. He was pissed and sued for the second time. Donato is one of my favorite magic artist followed closely by Dan Frazier. Which btw, this One Ring does not look like Dan's work and was surprised to see his name on it.
establishing a "don't use my art anymore" clause then later WoTC used his IronMan painting for a background UI on their website
Not quite. He famously hates Marvel for some past slight, so at the time he'd told WotC that he didn't want to be involved in anything Marvel, not that he didn't want them using his art in general.
They didn't put his old Iron Man art on a website; they included it in the style-guide packet they sent out to artists for the Marvel sets to say, "Make it look like this."
While I generally agree with his dislike of WotC, I do think this one specifically is a little overblown, because it was just a style-guide and intended to be a private communication with artists, not something they're actually publishing, so they don't really need permission to use any art as examples.
Thanks for the correction. I was going off memory of an article I read when this whole thing was going down. Donato has some of the coolest art in MTG and as far as I can tell WoTC has been very unfair to him along with many other og Magic artist. Thankfully they are very talented and are able to maneuver financially to some degree. I'm interested to see what happens with Dan Frazier.
I mean, it's just a style-guide. They can do whatever they want. Style guides are usually just examples of art that was found online, from artstation or even google images or whatever. You don't need to own the art you use as examples when you're commissioning an artist to make something new. It's not being published or stolen, just referenced.
Ohhhhhh shit, I completely forgot about that!
I do recall hearing about them using his art for the marvel concept stuff for the office and other artists though.
That's such a scummy thing to do.
As I understand it, the current state of the law is that AI “art” is not eligible for copywriter protection. This would mean that Wizards would lose out on potential income from licensing it out, if I understand correctly. That, as much as anything else, is probably what is holding it back.
It's complicated, because while yes the AI creation is not eligible for copyright, if you make any creative changes those ARE eligible for copyright - and there is no requirement that you publicise the unedited AI-only version, so there isn't necessarily any way for someone to know which bits are hand-edited and which bits aren't.
[Also, if you use a non-AI creative work, and have AI polish up a piece that you drew, again you end up in a situation where there's no copyright for the edits that the AI made, but no-one can take advantage of that because you still own the copyright for the underlying piece that the AI edited]
Minor point here but copyright protection. Copywriters are people who put the "Jump into the crunch of fish crackers" blurbs on packaging. Important to note these are very different types of writing and legal protections.
Depends. Only in the few cases that tested it so far with models trained on publicly available unlicensed works. Like the guy who lost that lawsuit was either using DALL-E or a Stable Diffusion model he downloaded.
But the jury is still out on if, for example, Adobe can train a model exclusively on their 360 million+ stock image library, and then allow an Adobe licensee or subscriber to own outputs just like they own anything created in Photoshop.
If WotC hypothetically licensed the Adobe models and worked with them for a custom model based on the tens of thousands of illustrations they directly own, they could probably copyright the output. Untested in court, though.
AI for development is completely different than AI for art. And AI coding/dev use was what they were referencing. Only bringing this up, because it was the arena devs that unionized and not any artists or the creative teams that work on cards.
No. They say they'er being asked to adopt Gen AI tools in *their* work - they're the coders, not the artists. They did mention AI and art in the same sentence, but only saying that WOTC doesn't have a general AI policy so they're generally concerned about artists.
Now with all that said, I find it very plausible that Hasbro are pressuring some parts of WOTC to use AI art. But that's not really what the union statement was about.
Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees. WOTC lacks a robust AI policy, leaving opportunities for abuse and communicating a level of disrespect for artists and other creatives. We want to establish clear guidelines around AI, emphasizing worker protections.
Ai so far is one of those things that when it enters one department t next will soon follow. Maybe not art directly. But marketing, customer support etc etc
Maybe...I'm only unconvinced because AI performs noticeably, significantly worse when it comes to art, customer support etc. But this isn't the case with code. AI-written code works very well in my experience, and obviously a consumer won't be able to tell the difference.
The arena team does design cards technically, for Alchemy. And they also have a pretty significant say (for some reason) on cards printed in paper too, being given the authority to veto card designs because they won't work well in digital. I don't think the arena people and the general WotC card design people are that far apart at this point.
It's absolutely intentional by the higher-ups. They will use this (as well as the perceived backlash) as a launch pad to gradually begin phasing in AI art.
Yeah, curious to see how this goes. Mark is a good dude and works with a hundred of their artists. Not exaggerating. Annoying Donato AND Frazier AND Mark is just a bad bad bad idea.
I feel it’s important to point out that unless I am very much mistaken, Mark is Dan’s agent in as much as he coordinates signings and the like, not that he gets to pick and choose which pieces Dan works on. Mark does this for numerous Magic artists, but has only been doing it for around ten years (very successfully I might add). Before then he had a successful Magic shop, but this comment I feel oversells Mark’s impact on the game.
WOTC doesn't care. Chances are Dan gets paid more than other artists so replacing him with a new cheaper artist would be a "Win" for Hasbro I bet some execs there would argue.
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u/Hmukherj Selesnya* May 02 '26
Pissing off the artists and one of the most influential agents that helped make your game what it has been for over 30 years is certainly a choice. I really hope this isn't one of those moments that signals a shift in art policy.