The Dark Night Moment
General forum
Posted on Oct. 13, 2025, 5:19 p.m. by Icbrgr
I was on Youtube and saw Distraction Makers video and thought there was a segment that was pretty interesting.
"the game continually reinvents itself. That keeps it from getting boring, but also can often be a challenge to design it. Things that worked for years, all of a sudden, don’t work any more. And how I see the game has to be re-evaluated as the game keeps adapting. There comes a point in many Magic player’s life cycle which I call the Dark Night. It’s when the game starts changing in a way that fundamentally conflicts with how you perceive it..." -MarkRo Tumbler thingy Blogatog
In context of the video they are talking about Universes beyond and its reception to the player base. Mark Rosewater says his "Dark Night Moment" was the general shift to the maintream of EDH and how it impacted card design.
The comment section has a lot to say ranging from Blocks being dropped, story and lore being an afterthought, FIRE design in Standard, How bannings are being handled with Universes beyond vs in univers cards (Vivi still isn’t banned months after breaking Standard; Cori-Steel Cutter got the axe in under 60 days) there is just a lot to unpack.
Do you guys have your own Dark Night Moment in your relationship with Magic?
My Dark Night Moment Show
wallisface says... #3
For me it’s 1000% UB cards. I was fine with them being edh cards, because I don’t play that format, but the more they’ve crept into Modern the more distain I have for the game. At least they’re thankfully directing them at Standard, so minimal UB cards are becoming Modern-relevant, but it still has massively put me off the game as a whole.
My current feeling is i’ll still keep playing Modern while it still keeps feeling like magic, and bow-out of magic entirely once the format feels more like a mess of different IPs
October 13, 2025 6:34 p.m.
Im right there with you wallisface... I may have had my initial issues with Modern Horizons but it was still MAGIC intead of this pop-vinyl/fortnight I.P. mess Chevill, Bane of Monsters came out and it was a flavor/inspired to make you think of the spider-man character "Kraven the Hunter" ...neat im down... then we got an actual Kraven the Hunter... then we got an online Brako, Heartless Hunter due to licensing issues?.
@SaberTech I think your take on the boarders is interesting; just like you i was fine with the Dungeons and Dragons set because "meh its wizards" and it felt in universe/theme enough and i actually felt the same about Lord of the rings because at very least it was still middle earth/medieval/fantasy... or at least thats why/how i tried to justify it at the time and more and more lean to your point about silver boarders being a possible cure/solution.
October 13, 2025 8:03 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #5
I quit a few times; once for when they got rid of mana burn, once for when they made -1/-1 and +1/+1 counters remove one another… there have been a bunch of changes (not the least of which was the introduction of Planeswalkers) that made the game less fun for seemingly dumb reasons. I sincerely love playing the game, though, with the other people who play it. That’s been unchanged since the beginning of the game, and it keeps bringing me back into its orbit. I work very hard at not rolling my eyes or groaning when someone plays a planeswalker or a That Guy From That Movie/TV Show/Game and focus harder on the basic fact that we’re playing that rules-based game that I find enjoyable. Effectively 100% of my money spent on the game is buying rounds of sodas for the table (or something like that), though, and 0% on cards. It sucks, because I love cracking packs as much as anyone else here… but they really don’t make cards for me any more.
October 13, 2025 10:52 p.m.
plakjekaas says... #6
I don't much like the "I don't mind UB as long as it stays out of MY format"-sentiment I'm seeing in this thread... maybe if people cared about all magic instead of their own niche, Wizards would have felt less inclined to make more niches to attract more players...
I wanna fight with the cards, not about them. My most recent Dark Knight moment was when they started spoiling the Ninja Turtles set with both Avatar and Lorwyn still to be (pre)released. I don't like that spoilers run that far ahead, that there's no spotlight for the magic that we can play right now, because the Future is Coming! Nobody actually plays magic in paper anymore, but look what cards you can buy in six months!
I used to want to keep up, but I don't want to brew decks that I can't play for another 6 months, and can't play anymore 2 months later, because the next set is dropping then. I used to enjoy playing 5-set Standard, but there's 7 sets a year now, and more sets in standard than Pioneer started out with. "Limitations breed creativity" and we're in the era of Magic with the least limitations so far, if you ask me.
October 14, 2025 3:46 a.m.
wallisface says... #7
plakjekaas just for transparency, my own sentiment of "I don't mind UB as long as it stays out of MY format" has a few reasons behind it:
-
UB sells, and is here to stay, so it’s going to exist in magic somewhere. I’m just being thankful it’s not currently invading my personal sphere, which is really all I can practically do.
-
I have zero issue of UB cards existing in casual formats. These formats are, in my mind, there to just have a laugh and do nonsense - and I think the silliness of UB fits there. Additionally, casual formats can accomodate a rule-0 to exclude cards people don’t like, which is not a luxury competitive formats have.
-
the comment of ”if people cared about all magic instead of their own niche…” doesn’t really apply - Wotc make decisions based on what gets them money. As someone who isn’t putting cash into those other formats, or playing them, I’m not ever going to be an influence there.
Of course, everyone is free to disagree on all these points and have their own stance - i’m just trying to properly illustrate mine
October 14, 2025 6:06 a.m.
Instead of monopolizing people’s time with a 15 minute manifesto of a read like I often do, I’ll keep this brief. Potentially unpopular opinion: This game started as a Swords’n’Sorcery affair, and that’s the only ‘universe’ I would like it to occupy.
Race cars (Aetherdrift)? Cowboys (Thunder Junction)? Spaceships and aliens (Universes Beyond)? Walk ons by unrelated movies and television shows (Walking Dead, Doctor Who etc)? None of that is the game I grew up with. It’s like an unfortunate twist on the famous Reese’s Peanut Butter commercial—Hey! You got your unrelated themes and tropes that don’t fit with the game’s original design intent in my Swords’n’Sorcery card game!
Of course, everyone’s a hypocrite to some extent. I make allowance for the Innistrad sets focused on zombies, Hollywood-adjacent monsters and eldritch horrors, and my only attempt at justification is that both are already associated with the Swords’n’Sorcery subgenre. Magi steeped in necromancy and sorcery is a recurring plot device in many Robert E. Howard stories, and he wove in a few eldritch abominations as an ode to fellow writer H.P. Lovecraft as well. There’s an established literary connection in addition to in-game throwbacks (Zombie Master, Frankenstein’s Monster, Cosmic Horror etc), and that’s enough for me.
As for the rest? It’s not the game I grew up with, and it isn’t anything I’m interested in.
October 14, 2025 8:33 a.m.
I don't feel like I've had a real moment like this. Instead, I had several outside-life experiences all around the same time that ate up my energy and attention, and I drifted away. So now I spend a lot more time talking about it and theory crafting. On the plus side, I'm not spending all my money and time on the game, and I get to dip in and out whenever I want. On the minus side, it's harder to just step into a game whenever I want and understand what's going on.
So no Dark Night Moment. Just a time when I stepped away for a while and never stepped back in as deeply. I'm learning that I'm pretty permissive for what I'll accept in the game. For Universes Beyond, most of them I feel like I can justify as just another plane where, for example, ninja turtles live in the sewers of a major city that's protected by a spider-themed champion. That's like one urbanization away from Bloomburrow. (It helps that I don't really engage with the source material.)
October 14, 2025 12:33 p.m.
Crow_Umbra says... #10
I haven't had this moment quite yet, but there were a couple years immediately after college (2016-18) where I wasn't really playing more than a handful of times per year. My college friends and I moved around, and we wouldn't get together nearly as frequently to play. Although I enjoy Magic, I think I got more into it via EDH around 2018-19 once I moved closer to my friends. My perspectives on formats like Standard and Modern were always from the outside looking in, in large part because my friends and I were more interested in casual table top, and we were broke college students and couldn't really keep up with those formats.
The developments that have been mentioned so far (FIRE Design, Universes Beyond, increase in mainline set releases, Blocks being dropped, Masters and Core sets shelved, etc) were all surprising to different degrees when they were first announced. Given that my friends and I weren't deeply invested in any competitive formats, I think most of those changes didn't really affect us, but we empathized as to why they were concerning.
My friends and I recently sat down and talked about the upcoming slate of releases for next year (for a podcast episode, not a plug) and a lot of our conversation was fairly adjacent to what's being discussed here. None of us have had that Dark Night moment yet. I'm not sure what it would take for me to have it beyond some really egregious IP crossover. I think when I zoom out beyond MtG and look at general trends in adjacent hobby and materialistic industries, I'm not that surprised. I remember when Secret Lairs were announced and thinking to myself that it would only be a matter of time before it had similar access/scalping issues as popular hype sneaker drops. I stopped chasing Jordan drops and switched over to a different brand, which ironically is considered more trendy and fashionable now. I digress, all of that is to say is that I know I can walk away and not buy into the trends that don't interest me.
As much as Universes Beyond is hit or miss, I can decide not to buy into or give more attention to stuff like Spiderman or TMNT than is warranted. The unfortunate thing is that now Standard and Modern players have to pay attention to sets and IPs they would have preferred not be in their formats. I wish stuff like UB was primarily relegated to supplemental sets/products like the Commander decks or something like Conspiracy instead of being main release sets. Personally, I hope that the general Marvel and TMNT sets flop enough to make WotC reconsider those types of set releases and IP inclusions, but I imagine that the success of Final Fantasy, LotR/Hobbit, and D&D will be enough for them to continue onward and cover for the flops.
SaberTech says... #2
For me, I think that it was a combination of WotC getting rid of silver borders and then allowing the LotR set to be legal in Modern.
I understand the business decisions behind WotC trying to use Universes Beyond to draw the attention of other fanbases to the game. It's just that MtG is the franchise that I've enjoyed the most over the years. The storyline behind the game has certainly had its issues but it was still a cohesive fictional setting. I brushed off the D&D sets as still being a WotC intellectual property and that the D&D universe could potentially fit in a corner of MtG's multiverse. They were kind of a novelty. LotR was a step too far for me.
WotC got rid of the silver borders because they had a stigma among casual players as cards that you weren't typically supposed to play in decks except amongst friends if they allow it. Silver border cards also weren't generally allowed in commander, which WotC had recognized as the predominant casual format. WotC made the decision that if they wanted to push Universes Beyond products then they needed casual players to want the cards so they had to get rid of silver borders to try to bury the stigma.
If WotC had kept silver borders and kept the Universes Beyond stuff there, basically creating an "Ultimate Universes Rumble" secondary product line for the game, then I would have had no issues. That wasn't the way for WotC to maximize sales though. So now we have Universes Beyond franchises mixed into the card pool for formats like Standard and Modern, WotC seems to have sidelined the MtG storyline as though they have no idea what to do with it, and even the mainline sets have felt like they've been influenced by the Universes Beyond design ethos with their gimmick themes. Edge of Eternities, with its heavy Sci-Fi aesthetic, was basically an attempt to lessen player resistance to franchises like Star Trek being printed in Universes Beyond down the road.
I'm glad that there are people who are happy to see their favourite franchises translated into the game of MtG. People have been inventing their own MtG versions of characters for most of the game's history. It's a fun creative exercise. I just with that it hadn't come at the cost of diluting MtG's own franchise and dissolving it down to the bones of its game mechanics because Hasbro didn't know how to invest in the game's own identity to increase sales.
October 13, 2025 6:04 p.m.