Magic: The Gathering fans are tired of references. They’re sick of pop culture allusions, cards that pick the low-hanging fruit of obvious genre tropes. They don’t want so many cards that link to memes or movies, and if you show them a picture of a well-known MTG character wearing novelty headgear, be it a Santa hat or a British bobby’s helmet, they’ll absolutely flip their lid.
According to a recent post by Magic: The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater, Wizards of the Coast is well aware that players are fed up with the number of on the nose associations found in sets like Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and even (to an extent) Duskmourn. But that doesn’t mean we’re not about to get plenty more of them in the next batch of MTG sets.
Because Magic: The Gathering sets are designed months or even years in advance, it takes a long time for audience feedback to have a noticeable effect. As a result, Rosewater says, “I’m not sure much in 2025 was influenced by the audience’s reactions to 2024 sets.”
With that in mind, and since we already know what’s on the MTG release schedule for 2025, we can probably make some educated guesses about the kinds of references and pastiches that are going to show up.
In the Death Race set there’s sure to be a character that’s basically Immortan Joe, and perhaps a turtle racer for a nod to Mario Kart. Meanwhile, in the Space Opera set we anticipate beaming up, setting phasers to stun, and for someone to suddenly turn out to be someone else’s father. Maybe Ashiok is Jace’s dad. Hopefully the returns to Lorwyn and Tarkir haven’t been gummed up with too many pop culture references.
While Rosewater acknowledged in an article published earlier this week that “Murders at Karlov Manor focused too much on the murder mystery theme and not enough on Ravnica”, here the designer does offer some pushback to the idea that the most recent sets are any more reference-filled than older ones. He points to Innistrad and Theros in particular and says “the volume is the same”.
His take is that this feedback has come partly because of the number of top-down sets based on a clear theme that came out in 2024 (all four fit this category). The other reason is because “people treat allusions to newer sources a bit differently than older ones.”
It definitely does seem to be the case that no one is mad about Magic: The Gathering putting its own spin on ancient myths, but folk feel a different way when cards draw from popular movies that came out in the last 50 years.
For more Magic content, check out our guides to the best MTG commanders and all the MTG Arena codes that still work.