The Problem With Masters Sets

The Professor has a pretty solid overview of Masters sets vs Battlebond, outlining why the Battlebond set had so much more excitement generated than the past few Masters sets.

And while I think he's about 95% correct, the issue he doesn't address is one of the motivation for producing sets: Selling packs via draft.

Wizards focuses on this over other formats because it's the one that directly impacts their bottom line. Makes sense, right? The secondary market doesn't have a direct line to their profits, and from a corporate head view, selling packs has to be the justification.

So: once Modern Masters was successful, I'm betting that future Masters-level sets couldn't be justified just 'because'. WotC has said they cannot consider the secondary market when they make sets and at least publicly, that has to be true. So now they have to pitch the next set.

Which means one would have difficulty justifying said set-even a set that sells well-with statements like 'the cost of Liliana of the Veil is so high, we cannot retain players so we need to print more' and have to be worked into statements such as: 'we can sell more product via draft if we create this environment'.

And perhaps it only is when you get the really offbeat stuff like Conspiracy (which hasn't taken big chances in my opinion) or Battlebond (a deliberate call to the casual market) that they can take certain risks because the product is unproven.

While the Professor is correct to call out the weakness of those draft environments, there's still the business aspect and I don't see him take that into consideration. That is to say: He's right, these sets need to be better and cheaper but 1) they cannot make a power-Cube level set every time without repeating themselves, creating boring environments and 2) how do they justify these sets to the higher ups without making balanced draft environments? Because those higher ups understand "Sell more packs make more money" and draft does that.

What might also be the case and is never mentioned is the amount of time that is put into creating said environment. Battlebond was something that they worked on for two+ years, because this is a new environment with new product. I'd bet the time to create Conspiracy was similar, at least the first time around. The really great Commander decks? Same thinking.

Masters sets are all reprints and almost certainly have less people working on them for shorter periods of time. How can they possibly make a truly great environment without people to test them, while also including those high powered cards that don't make drafting that format a miserable 'I opened super broken rare and that was it' experiences?

Because those experiences sour people on draft and doing so means less people buy packs.

Then again, that's the problem they're having with the audience right now, so they'd better do something to fix the Masters product and on this count I'm with the Professor: turning them into 'theme' sets isn't it.