When did the decline of Magic begin?

>>95969570 (OP)
When fortnite got popular

>>95969570 (OP)
For me, personally, it was Black Summer. That was when casual play shifted into being seen as practice for competitive play.
8th-edition is seen by a lot of other old fuckers lime me as another cutoff point, as it signifies that WotC was no longer interested in Magic as anything but new big thing sell more sell more.
I stopped buying and playing outside of my draft cube during Worldwake. That's when the power creep got too noticeable to work around.

>>95969570 (OP)

Fucking Thrones of Eldraine. And I'll die on that hill.

>>95969570 (OP)
when Garfield quit

>>95969570 (OP)
lorwyn

>>95969846
I'd argue that the "haha recognize THING" school of design really crystalized around Theros(itself a response to the success of Innistrad), but it was definitely a slow boil over many years.
I distinctly remember reading an article where Rosewater was explaining they needed to do the movie version of Greek myth because of the "resonance" for Modern Audiences, and how the creative team committed to avoiding anything that was too original, too complex, or too much of a deep cut.

>>95969570 (OP)
Depends on what you mean by decline.
As >>95969696 put it could be when WOTC shifted how they made magic and all. Or when they started all that Woke shit. I would say was when they stop caring about the story and lore they were pushing and just used the story to showcase cards and their characters. As beforehand I saw the books like how cartoons were in the 80s. Make great cartoons and even if it's a bit of a lost. The kids will buy the shirts and toys. However once they treated all cartoons as toy commercials unless they were for their side. (Like Captain Planet and all.) It started drying up and fully dependent on ads to be funded. I think MTG is going to end up like Lego and their own IP will die and every set will a Universe Beyond

>>95969937
Theros was the most checklist set they had made up until then. Everything was a half-assed 1-to-1 of some Greek myth, everything was by the numbers, with the only breakaways being movie references.

>>95969570 (OP)
Anything after 7th Edition was a mistake.

>>95969570 (OP)
When Planeswalkers went from being the framing device of the game to just another card type representing WotC's super special OCs.

>>95969570 (OP)
Post origins, when standard had smaller blocks, rotated sets faster and wizards decided to cash in on EDH fags

>>95970800
I forgot to add that wizards also started going back to old planes even more frequently for quick money at this point too

Accidentally posted this in the MTG general:

I would say I noticed a decline in quality ideas and unnecessary increase bloat around the release of the Tempest block of expansions.

Game has been shit for over two decades, approaching

When they decided that commander should be the One True Format above all others and started designing everything for how it should interact in commander.

>>95969570 (OP)
2003 when Mirrodin was released

>>95969570 (OP)
When they surrendered to capitalism in its most disgraceful state.

>>95969570 (OP)
It's been in decline for awhile but the true final nail in the coffin was the walking dead secret lair in 2020 because it basically affirmed to every single suit working at Hasbro that recognizable IPs are the easiest way to make quick sales, thus opening up the floodgates to all of this shit we have going on right now.

I’m so bummed. I specifically picked magic over like pokemon and yugioh as a teenager because it was the cool fantasy game. Now it’s sponge bob and sonic and anime waifu cards. Not only that, but the in universe sets are trash. Not just the cards, but also the art and story. I stopped playing standard when they introduced fire design. I stopped playing modern when they printed mh2 and lotrs. I play commander once a week. It really feels like I enjoy the game less every year. People at my lgs are excited for Avatar. I want to sell out and switch to the next high fantasy tcg that comes out. I kind of regret not jumping on the Flesh and Blood train.

Theros is where it all started to go to shit
Ravnica and Innistrad were great sets and the MTG team decided to slow the game to a crawl and add a bunch of boring mechanics to the game, which in itself weren’t the worst thing ever but it set the tone for all releases afterwards and each release got worse and worse since then. Now the cards are barely legible when they say shit like “when you discover 3, assemble 1 then create 2 treasure tokens”

I know it wasn't the start but the introduction of collector boosters was the beginning of my own personal declining interest.

>>95969570 (OP)
For me, the decline began in 2018 when UB became a thing and then it was in full swing come 2020 when the coof lock downs brought all the funko pop people and e-celebs to the game.

>>95971742
I left Yu-Gi-Oh for Magic because I grew out of my anime/cartoon phase and I liked the aesthetic of Magic. Now Magic is just like you said: anime and cartoons. At least Yu-Gi-Oh was original though. I'd love to get into Flesh & Blood, but no one in a 100 mile radius plays it which leads to me wonder how the game is doing so good (per the online hypebeasts) if I can't find people to play.

>>95969570 (OP)
August 1993

>>95969570 (OP)
3 years after you got into it because that's how long it takes to learn to hate it.

>>95969570 (OP)
When the cut the cardboard quality

>>95969570 (OP)
My honest opinion? Eldraine. Eldraine, with The Great Henge, Brazen Borrowers, Once Upon a Time, Mystical Dispute, Cauldron Familiar + Witch's Oven, Gilded Goose, Hushbringer, fucking EMBERCLEAVE, and GOD DAMN FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT OKO, THIEF OF CROWNS, TURNING THE ENTIRE FFFFFUCKING GAME INTO A 3/3 ELK.
GOD I HATE ELDRAINE.

>>95969570 (OP)
Late 2000s to mid 2010s , that's when they start all the thing that plague the game today: returning to old plane instead of creating new one (scar of mirrodin), theme park plane (Innistrad and particularly Theros), printing cards directly for commander (commander set), printing card directly to modern (first modern masters), multiplication of products (planechase, conspiracy, from the vault, archenemy, premium deck series)...

>>95972684
>printing card directly to modern (first modern masters),
Modern Masters was strictly reprints, and strictly of cards already legal in Modern. Modern Horizons was the first set to print things directly to Modern, and that was 2019–hardly “mid 2010s”.

In truth, there’s no one cutoff point that will cleanly capture everything that’s wrong with current Magic. Arabian Nights and PTK can be cited as when they first printed cards from outside IPs, Kamigawa could be considered the forerunner of Innistrad and Theros, and Urza’s block could be considered the first time they returned to an old plane instead of creating a new one. Nicol Bolas was introduced in Legends, Nalathni Dragon was a card not available in booster packs, Invasion block broke the rules of the card frame with split cards, et cetera, et cetera.

If you really want a single point for when things became fucked, the obvious conclusion is September 1999, with WotC’s acquisition by Hasbro. The game’s decline has been driven not by the decisions of the design or brand teams, but by accountability to Hasbro’s shareholders.

>>95972803
Invasion block didn't have split frame cards though. Every multicolored card had the same gold frame they'd been using since it was introduced in Legends.

>>95970035
>>95969937
It's actually wild comparing something like innistrad, which whild highly tropish and derivitive, had some actual consideration put into it with the new sets which are family guy manatee ball tier

>>95972803
>Modern Masters was strictly reprints,
Yes, but it was the start of them printing a set directly for modern without going through standard and the evolution of that become "printing new cards directly into modern".
>In truth, there’s no one cutoff point that will cleanly capture everything that’s wrong with current Magic
Of course, but you can still make a cutoff point for when the things start to happens more and more often. Sure Arabian Nights is an adaption from an outside IPs but it was an exception when now it's the rule.
> The game’s decline has been driven not by the decisions of the design or brand teams, but by accountability to Hasbro’s shareholders.
I totally agree with that.

>>95969570 (OP)
When it stopped being about the tournament scene first and foremost.

>Inb4 MALDING kitchen table shitters

Has anyone found any other TCG they like? I want to change, but I’m not a Pokemon or Disney fag and those are the only other two TCG I know.

Alpha

>>95973448
lots but the real problem is finding anywhere that runs anything other than mtg or yugioh

>>95973382
You know that’s actually pretty true. I think the death of good, fun, balanced, competitive standard basically killed all the formats. After fire design killed competitive standard wotc fire designed every other format into the ground with direct prints. Including casual EDH. The stupid brackets are a sign things are fucked beyond repair even for casuals.

>>95969570 (OP)
2008ish.

>>95969570 (OP)
Magic has been declining and dying for 30 years

>>95972849
>Invasion block didn't have split frame cards though.
Anon are you actually retarded?

>>95969570 (OP)
1994
>>95969846
>tfw seeing zoom-zooms losing their whimsy and getting mad at their childhood games
It's sad I remember when millenials went through this phase.

>>95969570 (OP)
When they started releasing commander-specific cards.

>>95969570 (OP)
Right after the Invasion block. It should have ended there since that block was peak kino.

MTG isn't on a decline, its on a rapidly increasing incline. The decline will come pretty soon though, but not before a peak.

>>95974128
It's more that they've pulled a Fortnite. The game is really kept afloat by catering to the reseller market, designing product for it, and having speculators lift it up. I don't think I've met a player in a long time that actually likes what WotC has been doing

>>95974418
Speculators and scalpers are opportunists, they wouldn't be there unless genuine demand for the game was there, otherwise they're stuck with worthless product. My guess is that you either play most of your games online which cuts down the amount of random small talk you make with randoms, or you play with a fairly consistent pod which cuts down the variety of players you talk to.

>>95974418
>I don't think I've met a player in a long time that actually likes what WotC has been doing
commander players do which is what most of their cards are designed in mind with these days

>>95969570 (OP)
For me, Magic died in 2003, when 8E/Mirrodin changed the card frame and artifacts became silver instead of brown. (The first runs were actually too light and looked like white cards, which may be when WOTC got the idea of artifacts with color costs.) I eventually got over my dislike of the new frame thanks to the Steam ports of Magic 2010-2014 XBOX games (gone now, WOTC killed them for Origins, and killed Origins for Arena), though I never really came back to "current" or store/tourney Magic, playing casually with friends. But I only started at the tail end of Saga block, and there were several "breakpoints" when people dropped Magic.

94-95 was first. Card shortage led to Edgar / Summer Magic debacle. Comic book investor panic hit WOTC due to white-border reprints (Chronicles). Reserve List was a compromise, but its necessity is still divisive today. On top of that, The Dark / Fallen Empires / Homelands were generally derided, to the point that WOTC made it a tourney rule that decks had to include cards from every expansion (this was before blocks and formats) which how people learned about Hymn to Tourach, Goblin Grenade, and...uh, Serrated Arrows.

Saga Block was the second. WOTC kept "standardizing" Magic with blocks and collector numbers and colored rarities, but 6E rules turned interrupts into instants (stack vs batch) and some people got upset. Rules themselves got weaponized (Humility vs Opalescence layers in Replenish decks). Some people quit due to a constant speeding up of the game and power level increase (Mirage > Tempest > Saga). WOTC knew this and throttled things down with Masques, even acknowledging it in flavor text (pic). Some people quit because they thought the throttling was too much like The Dark / Fallen Empires and Magic would suck for a while. Some people quit because of Weatherlight story fatigue (prior Magic's story was emergent, not top-down).

2003 also upped power levels: storm, affinity, indestructible helped people quit.

There's really several major points that can be traced as huge declines. I'm not talking about people being unhappy with a set, I mean the big changes. I will try to list them in order, but I haven't played continuously since I started.
The first big change was when they changed the borders. As another anon pointed out, making artifacts go from brown to silver/grey just never quite sat right and people liked the old border designs. A classic case of what wasn't broken being fixed.
I don't know precisely which of these 2 came next as I was not actively playing as they occurred, but Planeswalkers caused a huge uproar. They were a level of powercreep not yet seen and they were only liked by the tryhards that were winning to spend any amount for the best cards. Mythic rarity was another and perhaps the biggest gripe of all. Yeah, people get real giddy when they pull one from a pack, but overall people lamented how much it drove up the price of these cards.
The next big blow was The Walking Dead. Love or hate individual sets of magic, but these cards indicated that things were different. The Universes beyond sets would eventually come and the sad thing is they could have been a positive. If they had been handled as stand alone playable sets, that were just meant to give a franchise a card game in the form of MTG, but while still being separate from MTG, I think people would have been a lot more okay with it. Not everything is big enough to get its own CCG and furthermore, people don't always want to learn a new game. If they had given them the Un-set treatment, it would have been fine. Saying that they're perfectly legal cards though destroys the feel of the game. Sorry, but I don't want my Shivan Dragons and Serra Angels sharing a board with Spongebob, Space Marines, Doctor Who, and whatever else.
Racist practices. Blackwashing Lord of the Rings characters while trying to act virtuous by banning Crusade and Stone Throwing Devils once again got even more people to leave.

>>95975262
Con't.
Product Overload. There are simply too many ways to by MTG now. It used to be you had packs and starter decks and that was it. Now there packs, and premium packs, bundles, pre-made decks, and special edition limited run sets; nobody can keep up with it all. It creates a massive FOMO feeling for people, which will get people to buy in the short term, but eventually, people get burned out by FOMO and leave the game. The people that leave the game because of this reason are the ones most likely to never return, as they tend to feel deep relief at no longer chasing the FOMO, and so will never return to the game, no matter what changes happen with it.
Commander format. This is probably the biggest one of all though. Commander format started as fanmade for people to just mess around with cards they normally never used. The goal really was fun and to just put down cards which likely never got put into a deck otherwise. Commander was still just a minor secondary way to play the game back then, but as MTG declined, more people preferred to play Commander instead. Once Commander became "normal", MTG was no longer even the same game. Cards being designed specifically for the mode and a whole new level of powercreep being introduced. Banlists and tryhard combos which leaves 1 person playing solitaire while 3 sit there waiting to take another turn in 10 minutes. The 4-way FFA format also leads to people creating political alliances. The game is no longer about MTG, it's politicking and it's all just so bad.

So yeah, lots of reasons. Anyway that wants to point to sales, I don't care. We're talking about the quality of the game and the quality of a hobby usually tanks as it becomes more popular and mainstream. MTG is no exception.

>>95971206
Hasbro acquisition.

>>95969846
Yeah it was in decline before then but Eldraine was the real total collapse.

>>95969570 (OP)
Around Mirrodin, I'd say. It was probably in effect before then, but that entire set getting banned was a pretty huge wake up call to any kind of balancing being a joke. It was glaringly obvious it was bad when they decided to release yearly editions though just to mitigate all the bullshit getting through constantly.

>>95969696
Yeah, Mirrodin was part of 8th edition so that tracks.

When Plains walkers became the hot shit and everything was about them, when they stopped building the lore around the plains themselves and stopped having novels per block. Old MTG has loads of books and a fair few of them are great! Now it's just popslop and secret lair shit

>>95971839
Do you not have a local gaming group? Where I live we got a good pool of players and we get into new games on a whim quite often

>>95969570 (OP)
You could argue that the cracks have been there, slowly working their magic even pre-Mirrodin, but I'd say everything started falling apart around the Gatewatch Era. It showed that they had gone from their own stories to chasing trends. Yes their own lore was some C-tier comic book tier storytelling before that, but at least it was original. Gatewatch was ''well Marvel is raking billions with this shit, so we gotta do it too''. Then it all spiraled out of control into the ''Hat Set'' era and the rest is, as they say, history.

Funnily enough at this point, it'd probably be for the better if they stick to UB stuff, since their own sets are a complete mess of unbaked ideas.

>>95970754
Don't kid yourself. Planeswalkers were super special ocs from day one.

>>95969570 (OP)
2012
low point was around 2015-2020
has gotten a lot better in the last few years

>>95971749
You forgot ''This ability only triggers once per turn.'' :)

>>95972684
>pic
>encounters something he is not familiar with
>gets confused and distressed instead of interested
>encounters something he already knows
>finds it fascinating
Total normie death when?

>>95971839
>Flesh & Blood
I, for one, have never seen anyone play that so-called "game" in real life.
The only sensible conclusion is that it's "success" is entirely manufactured by online shills and pyramid scammers. They might claim to have "tournament footage" but these days that can be easily faked with a combination of crisis actors and AI.

The whole thing is very suspicious if you ask me. I'd recommend all anons to stay FAR away from "flesh" and/or "blood".

The amount of sets in standard is too damn high.

>>95976219
Which really shouldn't be card text, just make it a tap ability.

>>95969570 (OP)
which set had the first planeswalkers?

>>95973382
Actual truke sadly.

>>95973505
When the balance shifted from "Win At All Costs" players to casuals is when we got casual slop like EDH, which in turn created a cascade of sales expectations because kitchen table players are bigger than actual players, so now all sets are designed for an unquantifiable reality.

>>95973382
>>95973505
>>95979034
If that's true, then Time Spiral unironically killed Magic. That was the first set that saw tournament attendance spike while sales simultaneously plummeted, leading R&D to realize that the majority of sales went to kitchen table players.

>>95979835
Technically, nothing mentioned in this thread has "killed" Magic. Magic has existed for 30 years, has changed a lot during that time, and continues to change now. You can, subjectively, say that Magic died *for you* at some point, but objectively it is still shambling on.

I've been thinking about "ages" of Magic on and off for a while, after MaRo dropped his interpretation of them. I can't fit all of it here, but I think WOTC has undergone internal changes that don't really get talked about, but which have definitely affected their output. In the beginning (93-95) WOTC was more of a "creative collective" in part because no one knew what Magic was or should be doing with it. In the 90s WOTC became a game company, picking up D&D and "standardizing" Magic (blocks, formats, colored rarity, collector numbers, ads on TV, tournaments on cable). In this millenium WOTC transformed into a (largely independent) division of Hasbro, which was usually allowed to do its own thing (unless sales slacked). Increasingly, WOTC pivoted towards digital stuff - Duels on XBOX and PC, then Origins, then Arena; but also the various digital components of D&D editions. This eventually paid off during pandemic and Hasbro's internal reorganization, with WOTC becoming "Wizards and Digital" which is effectively keeping Hasbro afloat. But in the process of inflating sales for the sake of their own internal importance, WOTC painted itself firmly into the "only sales matter" corner.

So now we have WOTC that is raking in $ from digital and direct sales, under internal pressure to keep numbers going up, and given less time/leeway for design/balance. And the output suffers even as sales continue climbing.

>>95973448
I’ve been on and off of Pokémon since its first re-work in 2010 and it’s been pretty hit-and-miss. Sometimes the format is fun and good, other times it’s complete shit and not worth engaging in. The one thing that has remained consistent is pricing: whenever I have wanted to get back in, it has always been very cheap.

>>95975262
Wasn’t the blackwashing thing a mandate from the Tolkien Estate to WotC? I remember around the same time the first season of Rings of Power came out and each group (Hobbits, elves, humans) looked like they’d all come from LA or London

>>95969570 (OP)
When they started making cards specifically for EDH

>>95973448
YGO, but I kinda prefer Master Duel to the table because it handles a lot of the annoying triggers.

Pokemon seems like the right balance of "actually widely played", relatively low cost of entry, and strategic depth.

>>95981208
>Wasn’t the blackwashing thing a mandate from the Tolkien Estate to WotC?
No that was WOTC trying to shift the blame, the Tolkein estate is still headed by Christopher's second wife.

>>95981234
WOTC and Amazon to clarify. Amazon did hire a tolkein scholar to help write the show but they left due to unannounced disagreements.

>>95981271
I always forgot about that part with Amazon, but to be fair I forgot about Rings after watching it within a few weeks.

>>95969570 (OP)
When they added Planeswalker cards in Lorwyn

>>95972684
>returning to old plane instead of creating new one (scar of mirrodin)
Mirrodin was Kino and so was new phyrexia and plane-hopping every fucking set now is a big part of why it's cancer cause they run out of ideas so fast. It's only bad when they do it 3x with no actual new story like Zendikar Rising or the 3rd fucking Innistrad Set that was just "lol vampires and werewolves again"

>>95969570 (OP)
Depends on what you mean by decline. To me it's when the first Commander official deck was printed, that paved the way for warping card designs for the FFA 40 life points format that eventually, slowly over time, gave us all the degeneracy of Companions (Commanders in 60card), FIRE design, Universes Beyond, black border unsets, and so on.

>>95973382
As a kitchen table shitter, I agree. Balanced competitive scene ensures that the casual scene doesn't get too out of hand. When my merfolk shitpile can take games off of my friends' Splinter Twin deck he took to the RCQ, purely because i know how to pilot my shitpile, you know the game is good.

>>95969846
Zendikar and innistrad were the last 2 good sets. After that, interesting mtg died. No more control magic decks being possible, counter spells getting worse each set, interaction coming with additional costs while creatures get pushed harder and harder, and the only interesting cards printed were planeswalkers with busted and pushed stats and effects.

>>95969570 (OP)
you'll get plenty of oldhead answers, but as a storyfag, once the story paradigm started shigting from the multiverse as a place of grandeur and disaster and stark heroism in te face of it all to seriously being about how to improve the multiverse as a whole, i stopped caring nearly as much. because of how blooks and sets are structured now, we barely visit a place long enough for me to care what happens there. mechanically, they've much reduced the amount of new mechanics and have leaned on "flavor-heavy" meta-mechanics that don't radically change what happens on the board so much as complicate the casting or resolution of spells, and have reduced the powerlevel between rarities so much that old mythic and even rare cards are impossible to see in standard nowadays because they never make them as potent or useful as then or will ban the ones they do

UB, commander specific cards, FIRE, these are all merely symptoms of a bigger problem; the decline of casual tabletop play of TCGs in general. The most disturbing culture shock I experienced when getting back into magic after almost a decade away was this: "60 card kitchen table? Why would I play a competitive format casually?". That's the beginning and end of it right there. There is absolutely zero good reason for this mindset. The fact that I have to either shell out $350 - $1,500 for a deck that I can only play once a month at a tournament, or accept playing the most convoluted, poorly designed format ever, with 3 other people that don't know what the fucking a lightning bolt is, that's why magic is dying. Because you can't just buy a few packs of cards with a friend and slap down some cardboard on the table in a 60 card 1v1 just for fun. I mean, you can I guess, no one is stopping you, expect for the entirety of WOTC design philosophy and a "community" that hates fun so much they'd force you to play a version with 160 life total just to watch someone play "craterhoof behemoth".

>>95969570 (OP)
MH1 and the murdering of all competitive support of the game. It had been downtreading for a while but it was the final nail in the coffin

>>95976514
You are living under a rock if that is the case. It is one of the better games out there now when it comes to competitive play and is also where a lot of mtg spikes migrated. It regualary has GP style events like magic used to which get 2000 or so people. Game has only been growing more and more as it appeals the the players that were forgotten about by WOTC

>>95971839
Good is really big in areas supported. It's like Yugioh where people simply dont realize how big it is until a store holds a tournament for it and 200 people turn up.

>>95969570 (OP)
There were several markers
Planeswalker introduction
mythic rares
EDH precons
M15
War of the spark
Universes beyond

>>95974128
We are at the rapid incline
Whats going to happen is
>rapid incline, massive normie buyin (You are here)
>plateau, popularity hits a peak, Old audience largely leaves as theyre reppaced by normies
>decline, wizards sees the game dropping off, the normie crowds lesve for greener pastures and only a handful of them stay.
>Continued decline, wizards gets desperate ( "HEY REMEMBER RAVNICA LORWYN DOMIMARIA ZENDIKAR PLEASE COME BACK" )
>new low, game either actually dies as an IP, wotc gets bought out ala TSR (best case scenario), or manages to bounceback.
give it 10-20 years, it will happen.

Thinking about it, the game was always kinda shit and my best memories of it are from the time period where we all just played random jank we found somewhere.

>>95973564
As a /tg/ browser who used to play MTG back in the late 90's/early 2000s ... wtf is this?

>>95992571
It was literally the gimmick of Invasion? They brought back gold cards and made a big deal of it - I recall MaRo/whoever articles about how "we do a thing every 10 sets" and multicolor had been absent for all of Saga/Masques - but then also printed split cards, which were technically two single color cards stapled together. Invasion got allied pairs, Apocalypse (which was centerd around enemy colors cooperating and featured enemy painlands) gave us enemy color split cards. They've done callbacks to that mechanic since, including fuse (play both halves at the same time) and recently rooms (pick a side when you cast, pay the other half later). They're the original double-sided cards, I suppose.

Fire // Ice (they're written like that in online catalogues so browsers don't misread them I guess) is infamous because of pic. Extended became instantly unplayable when Mirrodin dropped. You'd think the best option was to put a Counterspell into the Scepter and counter something every turn, but no, you could Fire anything small and Ice anything big/important while also drawing a card, regardless of what color mana you had available. It was Icy Manipulator on steroids, which helped cement my decision to quit.

it was 2019 thrones of eldraine / MH1 with it's huge power spiked cards, bans, and starting the cycle of needing to buy fomo cards (legal for a month) or lose. All the non-standard players I knew got sick of MH1/2 injecting cards into their formats and their deck of choice getting wiped.
Now it's still popular with collector fags who play commander to flex deck cost and fortnite casuals, but I never hung out with those types so it's been dead to everyone I knew that played it.

>>95969937
I've always been of this mind too

>>95969570 (OP)
About Ice Age.

>>95971188
yes i miss when WOTC was a public service

>>95973534
It's funny to see how few people actually play MtG, and it's startling to consider that means the game is being kept afloat by a small number of addicted retards that can't stop buying product.

If you play MtG in 2025, that's you. You're the retarded addict.

The objectively correct answer is the release Magic Origins. Quality of the product and the decision making of the company after is 100% retarded. It's the nicest line to draw in the sand for me.
>Khans of Tarkir is legitimately a good set and the other 2 sets are fine
>Magic Origins was a wet fart. Shows their dumb and worrying obsession with Le Flip cards and trying to shoehorn the Jacestice League into the game
>Nobody likes BFZ and Oath. Nobody. Indefensible.
>Commander sloppa MASSIVELY ramped up the following years
>most sets after this point were pretty trash with very few exceptions
>it's before the horrible mistakes of Modern Horizons
>it was around the time where WotC was just trying to shoot itself in the foot and clearly had no game plan (uhh return to planes, uhhh change when the rotation is, wait no change it back, wait more lottery cards! actually lottery cards in every set uhhhhhhhh)
>it was before UB crossover slop
>it was before FIRE design retardation
>clear point because they stopped doing 3 set blocks (mistake)
I consider MtG to be a different game from this point. Any quality is a complete accident, rather than by design.

>>95969570 (OP)
>begin
Right after Time Spiral with the introduction of Planeswalkers.
>symptoms start properly showing to observers
Return to Ravnica
>sickness is terminal
abandoning block structure
>crippling tumor sends game into painful crampy spasms
Ikoria
>game dies
March of the Machine
>Weekend at Bernie's
Hat sets
>Funeral trying to remember the good things, Magic as we had imagined it
Final Fantasy

>>95969846
I like this answer, since it really did jump the shark. It was such a weird tonal shift and the fucking mechanics and cards were just complete madness in retrospect.
>>95994506
I like this answer too, since i quit pretty much after BFZ. Had good times in standard.

But i also think the game has had a good phases and bad phases. I dont like the current way of selling products, but i think the game is very flexible and in good state. I play mostly drafts tho, and i've really liked how the formats play today... with few recent stinkers.

>>95981297
You watched it?

>>95969570 (OP)
March 1997, when the deal to buy DnD finally was secured and they've got it all lawyered out.

>>95995264
Watched it with friends as part of our Friday Night Tabletop games sessions. One friend and I had seen the pics in the lead-up to it and had a gut feelings it was going to suck. So we went into it as if it were a comedy and had an okay time with it (other friends constantly got pissed at us until the last few episodes where they couldn’t defend it anymore). Funnily enough, that same friend and I did the same thing for Rise of Skywalker in 2019 after seeing those leaks too.

>>95994597
what was Bloomburrow?

>>95999543
Good flavor, okay mechanics, pushed powerlevel. I can't completely hate it. It's pretty productive to compare it to Eldraine, which has all that but also very shallow and cynical flavor. It's the closest the game has actually gotten to Lorwyn since, too bad the set is overpowered.

It's worth saying that Return to Ravnica in vacuum also wasn't the worst thing ever, Innistrad-RtR was great standard. But it did perfectly demonstrate WotC's disregard for the longetivity of their game.

>>95999543
Redwall with all the copyrights filed off and still they somehow shoved the Jacetoce League in there god fucking damn it is nothing sacred anymore?

>>95969570 (OP)
when they refused to give us gay bolas

>>95969570 (OP)
Two sets before I stopped playing.

>>95969570 (OP)
There were ups and downs but the inflection point for continuous descent began at Zendikar. Mythic rares lasted one (1) block before they became chase power cards. Frankly you could put the blame on Alara but I feel there they did briefly keep their promise.

Planeswalkers are also bad but Lorwyn was so kino overall I can't fault it too badly, especially when the Jacetice League hadn't taken over the story yet.

>>95970841
fuck you, that was peak magic, and so was Kamigawa.

>>95969570 (OP)
When they decided against changing the name to Magic: Ice Age

>>95969570 (OP)
1: Creatures became the focal point. Magic was first yet somehow was copying Yugioh homework (why the fuck would you ever do that? For that matter just print damn child porn off the dark web for cards it's the same as that anime shit) and we have to consider how in older mtg, non-creature spells were key. You'd never see something like snuff out or force of will printed. Meanwhile it wouldn't be ridiculous for green to get a vanilla 4/4 for 2 mana now.

2: Planeswalkers. It took away from legendary creatures, it took away from the players themselves, and mechanically they're just better enchantments.

3: Word creep. Not power creep necessarily, but again like Yugioh feeling the need to do 5 steps for no God damn reason. Generic 4/4 for 2 mana is power creep, word creep is it's a 2/2 but gains +2/+2 while an opponent has 1 or more instants in grave but less than 4. In most cases it's the same, and even when it is weaker it just slows shit down having to evaluate the board state.

Pokemon Pocket is an example of power creep but not word creep. If anything words have become irrelevant. It's literally big numbers and special conditions which are keywords anyway are a welcome change

>>96014292
>pokemon pocket
actually pretty decent gameplay and it’s nice the cards don’t take forever to fucking read. the actual app is so fucking predatory though. holy fuck mobile games are like playing in a cloud of horse flies.

>>95969570 (OP)
After Return to Ravnica

>>95969570 (OP)
Lorwyn/Shadowmoor or Mirrodin 2 were the last unequivocally good blocks in-and-of themselves, depending on who you ask, but with hindsight it's pretty obvious that the decline began earlier. Basically the problems that >>96014292 described were introduced

>>96014292
>Creatures became the focal point.

Creatures were intended to be the focal point at the start. They were the primary way to do repeatable damage (the primary victory condition) in Alpha and most spells interacted with them. What changed was that the creature/spell design space started to overlap rather than being separate as well as creatures getting powercrept while spells were partially diminished before the started creeping up again.

>we have to consider how in older mtg, non-creature spells were key. You'd never see something like snuff out or force of will printed.

Alpha started with Terror (1B destroy non-black creature it can not be regenerated) and Counterspell (UU Counter target spell). Both of the spells you mentioned were more expensive versions with alternate casting costs (that unexpectedly made them easier to play).