State of Design 2025

You can check that out here. Come on back and I'll tell you my thoughts.

First, under the main Lessons "We need to be better at supporting our themes downstream of our designs"

I mean...what's new is old? This comment could've come right after the debacle of Mirrodin/Kamigawa. It even did, as I recall-because they started implementing ways to bridge the sets to they would interact better. It even could have come after Urza's Saga/Mercadian Masques! That's nearly thirty years ago.

However, I don't want to be condescending here; Magic design is one that is constantly changing and it can be extremely difficult to integrate everything into every set every time. They have done some great things with the Limited environments, and they're aware of the complexity going into sets. These are good things!

That said; how often do you need to learn that lesson, my dudes? 

The lessons from Bloomburrow feel...forced. As if they were searching for problems. That is a good thing, I think. When player complaints are "Not the right mix of animals" and not "this play pattern sucked" you're doing something right.

The "on rails" critique is one that I feel could be given to any typal Magic set; focusing on creature types inherently puts a set on rails. So while it isn't an inaccurate criticism, it's not very reasonable. 

The assessment of Duskmorn seems pretty good. I was VERY opposed to the mundane items in that set. And I'm really happy to say that Duskmorn is a cool set that is absolutely worth playing! I'm glad that this is  the big takeaway because I had a lot to say that was negative about the artistic choices. 

Similarly, the Foundations review highlights its strengths as a core set, and I feel like the lessons once again are solutions looking for problems. However, the strain on Foundations may start to show in two more years, when the set is still legal and players are potentially exhausted by it.

Now...Aetherdrift we're going to talk about. I realize that I may be in the minority because vehicles didn't really do it for me, but...if vehicles were exiting to players then why didn't the set hit bigger? So I already disagree with the first highlight, and while we found Start Your Engines to be better than expected, Aetherdrift just did not capture that same sense of fun that I and friends of mine had in the other Limited environments we played. 

Maybe that's just me--because the lessons all hit their marks--and suggests they did something wrong here. If the set is about racing and players end up caring about the locations visited and not the race, that's a mistake. AND this directly contradicts the notion that players enjoyed a set revolving around Vehicles-they may have been hyped for the idea, but the execution not so much.

However, the takeaways for the final lesson I have to support. Magic should try new things, and that means they don't always work. But I support the attempt--I just find some of the explanations to be suspect. 

Dragonstorm's lessons are particularly interesting to me because in all three cases, it's suggested that there may not be a good solution to them. My takeaway is that sometimes you just have to live with the inelegance of certain things. That's hard--but it's also necessary. 

I'm not going to talk about the Final Fantasy set, because I just don't care about Universes Beyond, with one exception:

Money clearly talks, and it says there's going to be more UB sets, and fuck y'all who have critiques about it.