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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/kickback-artist on 2025-07-29 03:03:20+00:00.
Hello, all!
Magic: the Gathering is truly a gift that keeps on giving. Like many people here, I am a member of multiple fandoms and communities. In fact, of the fandoms that I am in, I would put Magic: the Gathering about fifth on the list. But this is my second write up of any fandom, and my second for this card game. The reason is simple: ain’t nobody throw a trash fire like Magic: the Gathering.
This is a story about one of the most spectacular belly flops by Wizards of the Coast in recent memory. It is a story about misguided enthusiasm, butchered management, and the Pinkertons.
This is a story about Magic: the Gathering’s least darling set in modern history, March of the Machine: Aftermath.
What is Magic: the Gathering?
If you have a good understanding of Magic, feel free to skip to the last two paragraphs here.
Magic: the Gathering (hereafter referred to as MtG or just capital-M Magic) is a collectible trading card game in which 2-4 players attempt to win a duel with creatures, spells, and combos. It is the single largest trading card game in North America and has a fairly significant presence throughout Europe and South America, and a smaller one throughout Asia (where Yu-Gi-Oh! and the Pokémon TCG typically beat it out). If you have a local comic store, they probably live off of Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons, both owned by Wizards of the Coast (who is, in turn, owned by Hasbro. This will be relevant.).
Magic, unlike some of its competitors, is played in a significant number of rulesets, known as formats. For this story, the particular formats you need to know about are Standard and Limited
In MtG’s Standard format, only cards from the past two to three years are allowed. Every year has a rotation in which the oldest cards leave the format. While the format’s name would have you believe that it is the most popular format to play (and at times, it was), Standard is not the most popular format for physical play1, but attempts have been made recently to revitalize the format and get people back into it. The format’s churn keeps players buying new cards and also keeps strategies from becoming dominant for too long as old key cards rotate out. It also has the lowest power of any of Magic’s official formats, which has its own appeal. Not everyone wants a game decided by a combo on turn 2.
The Limited format is an entirely different beast. For a Limited event, each player will open new packs of cards and construct a deck out of them to play that day in a tournament, either opening a moderate number of packs all themselves or passing cards pick by pick in a drafting environment. Limited’s appeals are pretty self-evident: no one can buy power, you get to really see all of the cards in a set, and games tend to be long enough for you to cast expensive and powerful cards.
The overwhelming majority of cards in Magic’s card pool are built for Limited. Standard and other, non-rotating formats often are built out of the narrowest band of powerful or synergistic cards within the legal card pools. When you open up a pack of MtG cards, generally speaking, there will only be one or two that are usable in Standard, but every card in that pack would go into a Limited player’s deck.
Limited is a boon to the game for many reasons. It keeps people opening packs to put those rare singles out into the market, it helps fill packs with cards that can be interesting in a format without making a power spike mandatory, and it is a great way to teach players about Magic (once you help them build a deck) due to the slower pace of games. Notably, senior designers have stated that the more invested a player is, the more interested they become in Limited, as they start to appreciate how a set comes together.
Designing sets to be played in Limited, however, is not all upside. For one, it can be difficult to print cards that are designed for Standard or other environments because they will warp Limited or just be complete duds, while being powerful or interesting in their intended format. There’s also the obvious waste. If a pack only has a few cards that might be playable, then printing a whole pack of them when most will sit in a binder or be thrown out isn’t just wasteful on the player’s end, but the producer’s: it costs them as much to print a beloved card as a crappy one.
If only there was a way to create cards that would impact Standard without having to worry about that. Maybe shrink the packs to avoid overprinting. And from this line of thinking, the first problems that would destroy this set were born. But we can’t get into March of the Machine: Aftermath just yet. Because first, we need to talk about—
Part Zero: What is March of the Machine?
Most of Magic’s sets are tied to an ongoing storyline. Characters and settings will rotate (and now with the introduction of outside properties, occasionally stall for six months), but the game does tend to follow along individual arcs.
March of the Machine released in late April of 2023. It was the conclusion of the story that formally began in late 2022 (but arguably really started in 2021’s Kaldheim set) dealing with the invasion of the Magic multiverse by Elesh Norn, leader of the Phyrexian army. The Phyrexians are a machine cult of xenophobic aliens that infect both living and nonliving material through their oil, and have been one of the most iconic and long-standing villains in Magic’s 30+ year history. WotC had spent the past year building up that the ending of the story would have massive ramifications on the Magic multiverse going forward, and that anyone could die.
The scope of the set was expansive. The battle against the Phyrexian threat was to take place over the entire multiverse at once, with cards depicting the struggle on each plane, the host of their mechanical monstrosities fighting dragons and angels and wizards and kaiju. Cards depicting team ups between unlikely allies had splashy and powerful effects that combined the effects of two iconic characters into one.
And the set was… like it was fine?
Reception of the cards themselves was mixed. Some were powerful, but many of the most interesting cards failed to impact Standard (to say nothing of more powerful formats). The iconic team up cards were generally unimpressive as anything other than build-arounds in the popular Commander format. But unimpressive cards aren’t often that big of a deal for set reception.
Of a larger concern was how rushed everything felt. The story chapters released online were interesting, but also breezed through everything to get all of the events done in a single set. This was not a fault of the writers, who did what they could, but of a lack of resources available to them2, and was felt by pretty much everyone who read the story.
The ultimate conclusion also left a lot to be desired. The Phyrexians were defeated in a way that definitely left them to come back at some point, which many expected. Very few of the hyped up character deaths actually happened, and none of the “big name” characters involved died.
The most interesting results of the battle were the introduction of Omenpaths, a lingering facet of the invasion that allowed people to cross universes without being Planeswalkers (super wizards who can dimension hop) as well as a massive reduction in the number of Planeswalkers as their magical spark that allowed dimensional travel mysteriously winked out. Between this and the immense amounts of dead across every plane of existence, the sort of wet trumpet finale the set went out on was begging for something to fill it in.
And this is where we get the real star of the show, March of the Machine: Aftermath.
Part One: What is March of the Machine: Aftermath?
Announced before March of the Machine, March of the Machine: Aftermath (hereafter referred to as Aftermath) was envisioned as the flagship launch for a new kind of booster pack, the Epilogue Booster. Instead of the normal 15 cards, each pack would contain 5 cards, with no commons in the set at all, and up to three of them being rares or mythic rares. Instead of sets of 200+ cards, there would only be around 50 cards in the set. The pitch basically broke down to this:
1. Smaller sets without the literally-over-a-hundred filler cards would mean that every pack only contained usable cards for their flagship formats.
2. No support for Limited play meant that they could print cards that were designed to impact Standard and non-rotating formats that would be hard to fit into a Limited environment.
3. The set would be focused on providing narrative resonance and conclusion that would help establish the new normal for the TCG going forward.
4. Packs would be slightly cheaper than normal, around $1 off the standard pack of cards.
I am going to risk a radical statement and say that, objectively, each of these four points is actually a pretty good idea in theory. Smaller sets with a handful of impactful cards means less space on my shelf. Cards that are worthless outside of Limited, colloquially known as “draft chaff”, take up about an entire drawer in my entertainment stand, and the less of that, the better. Some fantastic cards do not play well in Limited, either by being too powerful or, far more often, by being too specific, only working in narrowly focused decks that can take advantage of them. An…
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