This article sums up my feelings precisely. I want to go back to when Magic was Magic and not a hundred other things with no depth. I'm fine with planes like Eldraine where it's "Magic's take on fairy tales", since there was some creativity and depth there, but New Capenna, Karlov Manor, and Thunder Junction all feel really cheap.

Yep. Magic is dead, long live the new magic. A once valuable and unique game with lots of interesting things to say and show, now relegated to a backdrop of mechanics to shill pop culture references in card form. The greed got them in the end, as it always does...

@MysticKetchup I've just had a thought. This "Fortnite-ification" of Magic (alongside many other games like, well, Fortnite but also Call of Duty, Minecraft Bedrock & Destiny 2 as of late) with the intense focus on crossover IPs to make quick easy cash with barely-relevant products that are really just tie-ins...

Does anyone else remember the tie-in shovelware platformers of the early 2000s? Not the good ones, the unforgivably *bad* ones.

Magic is becoming a vector for that same market.

This was a really great article, echoes a lot of what I've thought for a while. I really have disliked sales #s as the sole evaluation criteria for whether something in MtG is a success. Just because something makes more money doesn't mean it's a step in the right direction. This Fortnite-ification of Magic makes it very easy to get in and "play what you like" but I feel like this challenges the entire foundation of the game. The Standard -> Non-rotating format nature of the game and the in-game lore that has been built out and is actually cool and unique, these things are diminishing more and more in favor of the Fortnite-ification and UB stuff.