Last year’s Magic: The Gathering unset, MTG Unfinity, sold better than any unset before it, but MTG head designer (and leading unset advocate) Mark Rosewater fears he might never get to make another of the light-hearted Magic sets. Rosewater revealed this via his blog on January 1, after a commenter asked “how the wind is blowing” on Unfinity and if a future unset would be a ‘when’ or an ‘if’. Rosewater responded: “Sadly, if.”
It’s not that MTG Unfinity performed badly per se. In fact, Rosewater says it sold better than fan-favourite Magic set Unstable “by a pretty big margin”. However, it seems like that is in large part because “the playerbase has grown considerably since Unstable’s release”.
“Sets have to sell well relevant to sets around it,” Rosewater went on to explain. And “Unfinity, at least out of the gate, didn’t do great… It being delayed and coming out with other products (one coming out the same day also set in space) didn’t help.”
The designer also acknowledged the issue of MTG Unfinity’s stickers, when asked what his biggest takeaway was from the set. “What if we used punch out counters instead of stickers? I loved the gameplay of the stickers. The logistics of using them were the problem,” he mused.
Of course, Rosewater bloody loves his unsets, and he’s not giving up that easily. “‘If’ doesn’t mean I’m not going to do everything in my power to make another one,” he acknowledges. “It just means there are challenges to overcome. I’ll keep making them if they let me.”
He adds that un-sets: “tend to have better ‘legs’, so the product could still come around.”