In May 2023, Magic: The Gathering's main format Standard was flagging. Wizards of the Coast leaped into the fray, releasing an explanation for what had gone wrong, and outlining the first stage in a coordinated, concerted plan to right the ship and get paper players back into the main 60-card version of the game.
The first part of this initiative was extending Standard to a three-year rotation. This would give cards more longevity, and make players less cautious about investing in the physical game. More changes would follow.
But now, in late 2025, Standard is in a worse place than ever. In terms of gameplay, it's been a complete disaster for basically the entire year, and all talk of building the playerbase seems to have been buried under endless announcements about what crossover set is coming out next. We haven't heard a peep about the plan from Aaron Forsythe and Billy Jensen for over a year.
That's not to say that Wizards didn't roll out some strong ideas. Increasing the number of events and Standard pro tours was an obvious step, and as a result by December 2024 Mark Rosewater was able to say that "tabletop Standard sanctioned play is way up". Whether or not this had a knock-on effect on casual play is more debatable…
I also think Foundations was a genius move. Some might see it as 'yet another version of core sets', but a large Magic: The Gathering set full of classic cards would serve as an on-ramp for new players and provide a base of eternally-legal Standard cards players could always be confident in. This was good for paper Standard for multiple reasons.
However, Wizards is bailing out water on one side of the boat and splashing it back in on the other. Any moves that might've helped fix Standard have been counteracted by other changes that weren't made with Standard in mind. The signal is drowned out by the noise.
In particular, the change to Standard rotation made sense when it was announced, but it's much more questionable in hindsight, given the way the MTG release schedule has warped to accommodate the UB-offensive.
Wizards wanted to make the crossover sets that attract new players work with the most new-player-friendly Constructed format, which makes sense. But it didn't want to slow down its machine gun fire rate of releases.
Now everything Wizards of the Coast puts out is Standard-legal, and we get six or seven new Standard sets per year. Combine that with the extended Standard rotation, and it's easy to see how the number of cards in Standard at any one time has ballooned.
There's lots of knock-on effects of this. More Standard sets leads inevitably to more power-creep, as each one needs to have something strong to entice fans to crack packs. The power level of the format as a whole has grown too: players have more options, and it makes sense that only the best win out.
As a result of the increased power level and constant releases, I believe Standard has gotten more difficult for Wizards to balance. Things have definitely felt out of kilter this year, as we've bounced from the Gruul Aggro and Beanstalk decks right into the current Izzet Cauldron catastrophe.
Constant set churn means it's hard to gauge the state of the format at any one time, too. We're always waiting to see where things settle or waiting to see how the set that's about to drop will affect things. This gives WotC an evergreen excuse to avoid adding cards to the MTG banlist - something it's famously reticent about at the best of times. And so busted cards and broken play patterns persist.
Keeping up with Standard has become more of a chore as set fatigue sets in. Fans have complained about this since before I began playing Magic, but it's always seemed like something people just liked to get together and have a good moan about, rather than something that was seriously killing Magic.
True it was annoying that spoiler seasons were so close together, but if you were a Constructed player not every set was for you, and if you played Commander you only really had to pay attention to the five cards in each release that would actually affect your decks.
On the flipside, Standard players really do have to pay attention to everything, and it's honestly exhausting. It's driven me to take a hiatus from Arena, and I can't imagine it's been good for the physical players, either. And if the big obstacle to paper Standard is players not wanting their cards to become worthless with time, then I don't think a big meta shift every month-and-a-half is going to help.
One bright spot amidst all this ranting is that Wizards has done a good job using the longer rotation to seed archetypes and mechanics over multiple sets. This was something that was mentioned in the original 'Revitalizing Standard' article, and I'll give them this: the midrange good stuff soup decks that dominated for so long and were so tragically dull appear to be a thing of the past. Perhaps it's just because Sheoldred rotated.
Without hard data to look at, even gauging how popular an MTG format is is hard, let alone working out why, but this is the narrative that makes the most sense to me.
Wizards earnestly wanted to fix Standard and had some good ways to do so, but even if it could have pulled this off, it couldn't do it while also strongly motivated by profit to make other changes that made matters worse. It needed to commit hard if it was going to move the needle.
But perhaps WotC could never have saved paper Standard. The convenience of MTG Arena and the rise of EDH are two massive factors that have forever changed the way Magic: The Gathering is played, and it would take a lot to counteract them.
It could be that, even if Wizards had done absolutely everything it could to get fans back into its 'premier' format, made every decision with Standard on the brain, not much would have changed. And then it would look really silly.
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