Thoughts about magic the gathering design control – from arabian nights to universes beyond
General forum
Posted on Nov. 22, 2025, 6:05 a.m. by KermitWizard
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I hear lately that Magic the Gathering is ‘selling out’ and ‘out of control’. The diagnoses of these concerns tend to point to too much content, and not enough coherence between aesthetics and themes of universes beyond with magic the gathering’s established high fantasy themes and aesthetics.
In my view, there are a few more issues than theme + rules fit and product volume that complicate MTG’s current issues. MTG has digressed in its overall design control, but a set or two aiming to renew and advance this aspect of design would be an awesome way to move forward. I’ve been playing (on and off) for 30 years, to be transparent about my perspective on this.
Looking back on Arabian Nights, I feel it would be cool if WOTC made a run of classic settings like Arthurian Legends, Grim’s Fairy Tales, and similar public domain folklore. that would be awesome fun and would bring interesting room for mechanical innovation too. Classic fairy tale settings, made as full sets in homage to Arabian Nights, would be so cool to explore. Let’s get Merlin, King Arthur, and so on. There would also on the upside be no need for expensive payments to use the IPs. The cost of making the cards would be reduced, hurray. I would buy huge amounts of that.
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The issue with universes beyond is not just about IP preferences, however; it’s about theme aesthetic + rules fit. I’m hyped for the Hobbit set, for two reasons. Firstly, the Hobbit was the first novel I read on my own cover to cover when I was a kid. Secondly, the Hobbit as a Magic the Gathering set makes sense, as a consistent lattice of fantasy themes and the mechanics and rules of the game. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle set, for example, should probably not be a thing, if it is made without some attempt to integrate magical themes. I read the comics, saw the 1990 movie, of TMNT. There is obscure lore in TMNT with aliens and stuff, but not magical things as such. Star Trek occasionally had wacky stuff in the original series, gods and goofy magic planets, when science became magical. The new IPs chosen for universes beyond since the success of LOTR are decreasingly about fantasy, or even a fun mash up of fantasy and sci fi, however.
Universes beyond should strive to include a fantasy theme. In game design language, theme is sometimes called the ‘skin’ of a game. Universes beyond is breaking the theme of Magic. Lord of the Rings worked. When I told my one of my family members who knows LOTR but doesn’t play magic said that MTG is making LOTR, he replied, ‘That’s sounds like a logical inevitability’. The IP made sense and it worked. Forgotten Realms worked. Final Fantasy, I think worked. An aspect of my feedback for WOTC is to try to make the theme coherent and consistent. If making a SpongeBob set, for example, make him a wizard and give it a fantasy vibe. Adventure Time, would work nicely, by the way.
There is also some tidying up to do in the meta lore and theming of MTG. How all the new planes of the MTG multiverse fit together and potentially bleed into each other needs a little thinking though in terms of lore. Presumably there are planeswalkers with sparks in and travelling to and from these universes beyond? A thought experiment is to ask what the effect on theme would be if WOTC introduced in-universe characters and objects to universes beyond? For example, Chandra shows up in the hobbit, or Mishra meets the Borg, what would that do to the fit between theme and mechanics/rules in the game? Would it make universes beyond less or more jarring?
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But, its not just a meta lore or IP theme preference issue. There are a few reasons why a more coherent use of theme is not enough to tidy and fix things. The issue is about more than aesthetic tastes and subjective preferences fitting with the game. A card does not make sense, when the theme and the rules within the card don’t have an implicit underlying logic. ‘Skin’ of theme must fit the ‘bones’ of mechanics. Take the early printings of Fallen Angel. She has no wings in the art, but has flying in the rules text. This is a card that does not make sense. It is jarring. By contrast, Shivan Dragon made so much sense, because its rules of one Red for +1 power implicitly evoked the idea of a fire-breathing dragon. Universes beyond cards, quite often in the Spider Man set, for example, frequently don’t make sense as magic cards.
Let me explain. The aesthetic fits rules problem is older than Universes beyond. Somewhere around the time of Weatherlight, magic cards started to become moments in story, instead of representations of magical spells. Take for example Gerrard’s Battlecry https://scryfall.com/card/tpr/15/gerrards-battle-cry This is not a magical spell, (unless we imagine that somehow a wizard could learn to cry like Gerrard, or it’s a magical ability that can be magically enchanted on a creature?). This breaks the theme of magic the gathering, latticing onto mechanics and rules. An alternative more consistent design would rename the card, from Gerrard’s Battlecry to something vaguely magical, like ‘Battle Fury’, which suggests a creature becomes more powerful in battle, rather than a creature that somehow screams like or in the voice of Gerrard. The practice of making a story event a card should be avoided. This does not mean dispensing with story, but keeping its fit between theme and mechanics consistent. I could talk at length on this, but the practice is so entrenched now, that no one seems to have noticed.
But, again, fixing theme coherence of sets and theme coherence of individual cards is not enough. There is also a general inelegance and lack of control in card design at issue. Magic the Gathering is not only out of control in terms of the volume of product, the lack of publishing artistic design guidelines for fit between theme and sets and cards; Magic the Gathering is also out of control in terms of design complexity control. Overly complex cards lack design elegance. Having an interesting game effect with the minimal amount of rules is design elegance. Memory lapse was Richard Garfield's example of an elegant card, in a recent interview.
Cards with more than two separate effects/entries are inelegant because they have too many rules, making the game tedious, and increasing the risk of mistakes while trying to follow the rules. One or two effects/entry on a single card should be a design rule for mtg. Too many cards have too many rules on them. It is not exactly about the amount of text on a card, so much as the number of rules.
I mean, there should be a design economy of aiming for maximum gameplay depth with the minimum of rules complexity. Designing magic cards, in my view, should aim to have at most one or two simple rules per card, that each produce depth (and have coherence with theme). Card design should be parsimonious, -keep rules to a minimum, while maximizing gameplay depth. In my view, not being a professional designer, but having played this game for 30 odd years, having two abilities should be a rule of thumb. More than that, and it gets tiresome, confusing, and honestly a bit silly. I designed my own custom set once, and I understand there is a lure when designing cards, to pack in more rules, to make the coolest rare cards really cool and open to a wider range of tricky plays, but the art of design in my view is in making elegant designs, with the highest depth, for the lowest complexity, that has consistency with theme. Cards with too many rules often struggle to make sense, in fit between rules and theme, and they tend to be increasingly difficult to play when several are in play.
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MTG can in my view address the general issues today with an overall renewal of design control guidelines. WOTC could create design principle guidelines for control of fit between set IPs and MTG, control for theme and mechanics fit of individual card design, and set limits on the number of rules per card. It could kick this off with one or two new sets, maybe in homage to Arabian Nights.
These are all interesting thoughts and concerns, so please don't take any of my thoughts as saying you're objectively wrong or anything. But I do want to make some points of my own.
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The plane of Eldraine's the Arthurian/Matter of Britain/Grimm's Fairy Tales place right now. Throne of Eldraine was a pretty even mix, and Wilds of Eldraine was heavy on the fairy tales side, to the point where each color pair had an associated well-known fairy tale. I'd like to see an Arthurian-inspired Courts of Eldraine set. On a broader note, the design team has been open to making sets based on certain public domain properties, for pretty much the reasons you mention.
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I've been having a lot of this kind of discussion recently, and I'm learning that I'm pretty permissive with what themes and styles I'm okay with. The way I see it, TMNT + Spider-Man New York is thematically one urbanization and industrialization away from Bloomburrow, with maybe an Omenpath for the humans, goblins, and random weirdness. If I went to Theros, made a tight roll of copper wire, and dropped a chunk of magnetite or lodestone through it, would it make an electric current? Or would I have to make an offering to Keranos for it to work? How about mashing up charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, putting it in a tube with a lead ball, and lighting it on fire? Fantasy shouldn't preclude technology, in my not at all humble opinion. Also, again turning to the designers, there's a strict boundary between Universes Beyond and in-house story. Jace and Chandra won't be meeting Cloud and Aerith. And I completely agree with this--one of my hard lines is that UB stays its own thing and doesn't interact with in-house. If that happens, I'm done with the story.
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How do you feel about cards like Black Knight, or Fog, or Exile, or Festival? These are all simple, nonmagical, yet still evocative names from the early days. If every card is as parsimonious as you suggest, then that almost puts a hard cap on the number of unique and interesting effects that can be made. Complexity creep is definitely a concern, but each new ability or effect that gets made, or each ability or effect that gets interpreted in a new way, will bring additional rules along with it. If the keyword creature ability list was locked into something like flying, haste, trample, first strike, deathtouch, and vigilance, and each creature at most two abilities, you can get just 21 cards out of this list. After that each creature gets at most one of these plus a unique ability, and then you're locked into adjusting the P/T stats. Depending on what you're willing to do with unique abilities, you're going to stretch to get even a thousand creatures. That's about Alpha to Visions. Yeah, there's stuff like Questing Beast, Frenzied Baloth, and Magma Opus, but those come out like once every few years. And some people get excited by big splashy piles of words or weird rules edge cases and try to figure out how to maximize them. I'm still proud of finding (and putting off getting judge confirmation for) a way to use Obeka, Brute Chronologist to lock and take over the game. Weird rules interactions are fun places to explore for a lot of people, including me.
And to add my own thought, it really does break my immersion of a huge, potentially infinite multiverse full of potential and discovery, when it turns out everything is some version of swords and castles and looks like Middle Kingdom Egypt or Age of Exploration Mesoamerica or Jidaigeki Japan or some real-world history. Alara is my favorite plane because it avoids that so hard. Sure, there's some western European + Arabian influence in Bant, and some Mesoamerica in Naya, but Grixis and Esper are pure original fantasy with no real-world counterpart, or at least really worked to hide their sources.
November 22, 2025 1:01 p.m. Edited.
KermitWizard says... #4
Nice, these are good points!
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This is partly what makes Eldraine so cool. Im open to other settings for a relaunch/renaissance set with more control guidelines.
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I agree that tech should work in most if not all planes, and MTG stories have made cool work of integrating magic and tech since the early days. How they combine is the interesting part.
Keeping Universes Beyond and MTG stories separate makes sense, in terms of less messy story telling, but there is a meta lore question about how they do or do not connect and interact if they exist as planes with or without interaction. Marvel is a multiverse, and MTG is a multiverse, so what is going on is the question.
- Nice examples! Fog, for example, for me represents the wizard's/player's ability to magically produce fog. It is a magic spell over a natural thing. Festival, is a cool one too. It represents the player's ability to magically conjure festivities. It is a magical spell over a social thing. These are different from a moment in a story, which I struggle to understand, as a spell.
On the limit of effects on a card, I should clarify keywords can stack up without issue, so I would not cap that. But the number of separate lines of effects, should have control. There is room for exceptions, on a few cards, but overall there should be guidelines for exercising control on the amount of separate effects a card should maximally contain. Finding fun combinations of rules between cards is absolutely one of the fun aspects of the game.
November 22, 2025 2:57 p.m.
The way I would explain cards like Gerrard's Battle Cry or Atraxa's Fall or Heartwarming Redemption or whatever is that you're tapping into the same energy, style, and motivations of the original event. You're not literally calling Gerrard over to inspire your troops, you're capturing the energy and righteousness he must have felt in the moment. You don't literally summon Atraxa just to be shot shot down, you're mimicking the strategy and mechanical action to bring down a big scary flying creature.
There's a reason why history classes often have people learn famous speeches and details of major events. I don't plan to ever be on a magical skyship being chased by another magical skyship and getting ready to fight to the death, but I can learn what inspirational words people say in that situation and apply it when I need to get my team ready and moving on a big challenge.
And in some cases, it might be literal. Dosan's Oldest Chant or Firemind's Research or Doomskar can easily be exactly that.
I don't know if this explanation fits every card that has a story moment attached, All Will Be One is pretty specific, but it works well enough for me.
November 22, 2025 3:26 p.m.
Meant to add this to the last post. There's really no reason why Marvel and M:tG couldn't be part of the same greater or intersecting multiverse, aside from the boundaries that the authors put down. I personally wouldn't like an official story crossover, but in the realm of fanfiction, Doctor Who could definitely stop by New Capenna on his way to Latveria to help Doctor Doom fight off Tyranids. That has a lot of potential to be a fun story.
But in the official storyline, the M:tG is its own discrete thing, separate from other multiverses, and I prefer it that way.
Balaam__ says... #2
Lots of talking points here. I’ll pick the one that resonates most strongly with my own sentiments and leave the rest for others to discuss.
“Card design should be parsimonious, -keep rules to a minimum, while maximizing gameplay depth. In my view, not being a professional designer, but having played this game for 30 odd years, having two abilities should be a rule of thumb. More than that, and it gets tiresome, confusing, and honestly a bit silly.”
^This encapsulates quite nicely one of my biggest complaints with the direction this game has taken over the years (for reference, I’m an OG player like yourself). It’s to the point where I literally dread the next new set and whatever zany, kooky, overly convoluted mechanic it’ll force down our throats. You mentioned the beautiful simplicity of Shivan Dragon’s design language, and I concur 100%. Not every card needs to make a statement for itself; some of my favorite cards from more recent sets have been the mediocre ones that don’t try to wow anyone and just do one simple thing well.
As for abandoning the next Taylor Swift x K-Pop Demon Hunter universes beyond crossover in favor of classic Swords’n’Sorcery public domain fare…while I want that more than anything in the world, I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach the current WotC staff on retinue would George Lucas-ify it and drive it into the ground somehow. The golden age of Arabian Nights era MtG has sadly passed.
November 22, 2025 11:38 a.m.