Curse of Bounty

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we’re talking about a fairly common complaint amongst Magic: the Gathering players: the sheer amount of product that’s being released.

See, in The Before Times(™) we’d see four sets released in a year. That was a complete sentence. In those four sets you could open any of the Rare, Mythic Rare, or foil cards the set had. Heck, in Zendikar (2009) they even put valuable old cards in regular packs. I saw a guy open a Plateau at my local pre-release event!

In 2026, that number will have gone up from four to SEVEN regular sets, each of which will have Play Boosters (regular cards), Collector Boosters (more expensive, special versions of the same cards), and Commander-specific decks that have their own unique cards as well. That’s a huge jump from only having to plan for four sets in a year.

OK, so don’t buy everything. Duh.

(I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening. Marvel’s Spider-Man just dropped a couple of weeks ago and most of the people I’ve interacted with aren’t even that excited.)

While it’s true that playing and collecting things for a niche hobby like Magic is completely optional, this doesn’t mean it’s a great idea to overload your players and potentially drive interest away from wanting to interact with the game they love. Even super-casual players complain about just how much Magic there is these days, and for good reason.

So, math time. Walk with me here: buying a booster box back in the day would cost about $120 USD ($167 CDN), and if a set comes out four times a year that’s one every three months. So 12 weeks. Divide the cost of that up, and players would generally set aside $10 USD/week to make sure they were able to buy a box of every set. Magic: the Gathering product was so easy for stores to buy that they’d even be able to offer discounts to customers who bought whole boxes at a time (which is why I said $120 instead of $144 USD)!

That’s relatively easy to budget for, as far as hobbies are concerned. Even considering that a booster pack’s MSRP has gone up from $4 to $5 USD in recent years, that doesn’t change too much here since the number of packs in a box has dropped from 36 to 30.

Sounds great, grandpa. If not much has changed, why are we having this talk?

Magic isn’t operating on a schedule of 4 sets a year anymore. 2026 will feature 7 sets, which changes everything.

These days, Commander is the most popular way to play Magic, and most (>90% of players) play casually. So let’s assume we’re talking about someone who wants to play just a normal amount of Commander and isn’t trying to collect “chase” Mythic Rares or even buy more than one Commander deck per set.

The same player is now looking at 7 boxes a year instead of four, and we’re looking at $150 USD/box (30 packs x $5/pack). Stores used to be able to give “box discounts” for customers, but with the way buying product works in 2025 that’s a thing of the past. Just finding a box priced at MSRP pricing is a rarity.

So one box per set. On top of that, one Commander deck (that has cards that don’t exist in packs) will also run you about $45 USD, so let’s not forget to add one of those. A grand total of roughly $200 to plan for each set instead of $120 is already a huge jump, but since there’s 7 sets you’re working with less time too: about 7.5 weeks in between sets instead of 12!

Divide $200 by 7.5 weeks, and our casual player is now stuck saving $27/week, almost three times as much as before, just to keep up with the same hobby at a pretty casual level! That’s not considering wanting to play even at a medium power level in Commander, buying singles they may have missed in their one box per set, and it’s definitely not considering playing a constructed format of any kind.

$27/week may not sound like a ton of money, but think about it: multiply that by four weeks in a month, and that’s a cell phone bill. That could be a utility bill. If you’re a single person, that’s probably half of your grocery costs for the month. This stuff adds up.

And that’s just the basic stuff? So what’s the solution here?

Yeah, all of that I mentioned about the price of keeping up with Magic almost tripling was just in regards to the players we consider to be “super casual”. None of that had anything to do with players who want to play constructed formats like Standard or Modern, players who want to play Commander at a competitive level or cEDH (the most competitive of Commander formats), and it certainly doesn’t involve the special versions of cards.

(A Collector booster pack of Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy is $120 USD/$170 CAD! Not a box, a pack!)

Hopefully, the solution Wizards of the Coast arrives at is to simply dial their schedule back down to four very hype but ultimately manageable releases a year. This does a few things for both the competitive and casual player bases:

• Releases will feel more special if there’s not a million of them. Marvel’s Spider-Man not being an exciting drop isn’t exactly a Shocker (I’m not sorry), but it really does say some terrible things about the state of the game.
• A lot of the discourse around “product fatigue” will die, taking out honestly most of the negative conversations we see on the Internet about Magic: the Gathering.
• Us competitive players will have less raw information to sort through, and playtesting teams will have more time to hammer out the really messed up things that currently slip through the cracks and ruin entire formats. With luck, that means slip-ups like Vivi Ornitier and Nadu, Winged Wisdom will happen a lot less often.

I mention these things because Wizards of the Coast has said that they plan on dialing back the releases after 2026, so I’m hoping to have much nicer things to say in the future. Maybe I’ll get to talk about how excited people are for each and every product that drops in 2027, or about how some of my “normie” friends have started asking for lessons in Magic. Until then, content creators like myself will continue to help everyone wade the vast waters that are currently Magic: the Gathering, and I’ll see y’all on the next one!