Magic: The Gathering's lead designer Mark Rosewater recently revealed the bottom five MTG sets he led or co-led the design for, out of the 41 he's credited with creating.I thought it would be fun and interesting to go through the list, cross-referencing them with the designer's annual 'state of design' articles to figure out what the big cheese saw as his major mistakes.
5. Ixalan
Ixalan gave us an exciting and pretty popular MTG plane of adventure, dinosaurs, and vampire conquistadors. It was one Wizards would revisit only six years later with Lost Caverns, and Rosewater's SOD piece reveals there was a ton of hype around this set and it's themes.
The main thing making this a bottom five set is the shallow, boring Limited environment. Rosewater's article explains that four tribes with zero overlap made for a repetitive drafting experience, and having unevenly balanced factions (with dinosaurs and pirates in three colors and merfolk and vampires in two) created more headaches than it was worth.
On top of that, WotC had made up a load of design rules for itself to try and reduce complexity at common, but it overcompensated and made this set too simple.
As someone with fond memories of Ixalan, I'm quite surprised that a bad Limited experience is enough to land a whole set on the bottom five list.
4. Murders at Karlov Manor
Over the past few years Wizards has experimented with trying out new themes in existing worlds. It's a concept with some legs, as a way to prevent revisits becoming stale, but Murders at Karlov Manor was a pretty poor execution of the idea. The detective theme was a jarring shift for Ravnica (it would've made way more sense for New Capenna) and was generally too overbearing.
Rosewater's reflections on this set are that it went too all-in on too-narrow a theme, and the murder mystery vibe should've been a smaller portion of the set.
3. Eventide
It was Rosewater's reveal that Eventide was a bottom-five set that prompted players to ask him for the rest of his rankings. In his recent Lorwyn article he calls it "kind of a mess", citing lackluster new mechanics and flipped color pairs from Shadowmoor, which made the combined Limited format messy. It was also one of a series of overcomplicated sets which forced Wizards to change-up its approach to design.
2. Battle for Zendikar
Battle for Zendikar had two main issues: it had few popular mechanics, and it didn't focus on the right part of its titular plane. In what feels like a similar issue to Murders at Karlov Manor, the things people liked about Zendikar (the adventure world aspect) were buried under a wriggling mass of tentacles.
Rosewater now considers the decision to focus this block on a war against the eldrazi as a mistake through and through. As he puts it, "In choosing to return to Zendikar, we picked up the cliffhanger of the original block and then focused on the aspect of the plane that the players liked less."
1. Unhinged
Hailing all the way from 2004, Unhinged came out a year before Mark Rosewater began his State of Design articles, but luckily his 'Lessons Learned' piece gives us similar insights. According to the head designer, Unhinged is clearly the worst of the four unsets he's made, and contains "one of the worst mechanics I've ever made".
That's gotcha, a mechanic that punishes you for saying the wrong thing, and incentivized players not to interact with each other at all. "We never thought about what players would do if they prioritized winning over having fun," Rosewater writes. Rookie mistake!
Unhinged's failure is probably the reason why there was a 13 year gap between it and the next joke set.
It's always more fun to talk about bad things than good things, and Rosewater's gone into more detail on his greatest hits before, but if you're interested, here's his top 5:
- Ravnica: City of Guilds
- Innistrad
- Khans of Tarkir
- Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
- Future Sight
Stone-cold bangers, the lot of 'em!
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