Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Today I wanted to talk about an interesting topic in the card game space, and it comes from an interesting place.

Some time late last year, Magic announced that there were going to be six Standard legal sets released this year. This came from adding Universes Beyond products to Standard rather than having them Commander or Modern only, and while people complained about the Universes Beyond aspect, another point that was brought up was that too many sets were coming out in the year.

While I don’t mind Universes Beyond in Magic, a topic for another day, how many sets being released in a year is something that I do find concerning. This had me remember discussions about other card games on how they were releasing too many products, or in some cases not enough.

I wanted to talk a bit about set releases, what makes too many or too few of them, and how to potentially avoid this issue.

Timeline of a Set

Before talking about the number of sets, we need to individually talk about what goes into making a card set.

Magic’s Head Designer Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast is an excellent source of how they do Magic sets, and while it is just about Magic and has changed dramatically over the years, it does provide a baseline of what I’ll be talking about in this section in how a set of cards comes to be.

This is also a very general look at how card games can be made and doesn’t explain how all card games are made and is meant to be a broad example.

Let’s assume that you have your base sets made, you have a series of evergreen mechanics you can pull from, and you have some lore established already for the story of the set (which is a massive aspect of set design, but let’s keep it simple for now), and you are ready to make your set.

The first thing you need to do is figure out some new themes and mechanics for this set to make it different from previous sets and put them on some basic cards to see how they fit.

If the mechanic is too weak or too strong, then it can either be adjusted or put away to use in another set. Meanwhile you need to start filling in the bones of the set by making other cards that will work with the mechanical theme of the set or will help provide some more flavor for the set.

Once the cards are made, then you need to test the cards as they constantly change, making sure that they play well with each other if you have a Draft or Sealed format, or play well with the cards you have available for the format you are designing for, which is a lot harder than people give credit for, but that’s a seperete problem.

Then once the base of the set is made mechanically, then art can be commissioned while the cards are getting fine tuned, and creative can start coming up with names and flavor text.

After all that and an editing pass is done, you get the cards printed to see how they look in paper and then set the orders in for their manufacturers to actually make the cards, hopefully making sure you make enough.

At some point as you are nearing that end portion you begin to hype up the set, ideally once you have all the art ready to go so you can show a few pieces to get people and stores wanting to buy your set. Then you can reveal the set as it gets closer and closer to the set release in any way you see fit, either slowly involving content creators or all at once from your main website or anything in between.

Then you repeat this process for all of your future sets.

Set Numbers

Magic works at least 2 to 3 years in advance for each set, and they have multiple sets being worked on in a year, so they are doing this process for multiple sets simultaneously for years in advance.

For years they used to release three sets in a year and a core set and the occasional supplemental product, but as time has gone on more and more sets and products are being sold.

From format specific products like Commander decks and sets, to Modern Horizons sets, to Remastered sets, to Unsets, to Jumpstart, to Universes Beyond decks and sets all while still doing Standard release sets with Commander decks for each set and it becomes overwhelming for people to keep up with all the product coming out.

While you can pick and choose what to engage with Magic, some people want to see if there is some neat common they can add to a Pauper Cube, or a random card that makes their Commander deck work better, or a new Standard staple could be hidden in the set that you see and no one else does.

Then you look at a game like Lorcana, and I remember people being concerned when the second and third sets of the game were being released and people being worried that they were being released too fast.

Looking at the releases for Lorcana, they are releasing four sets a year like Magic did previously, which is not nearly as fast as some people think. It may have been a combination of hype and early concern that the game may not take off due to availability that was driving these concerns, but as far as I can tell those fears have waned off at this point.

Then we get to something like Sorcery: Contested Realm which only releases one set a year, which allows for the people who make the game to have a good amount of time to make the cards, but have the downside of a limited card pool and limited visibility for newer players.

While Sorcery is not a game for me personally, I still want new card games to succeed, but I also understand the economic logistics of being able to make the cards especially for an independent creator that doesn’t have the history and size like Magic or the well of money like Lorcana has with the Disney IP.

Solutions

Four sets seems like its the cap of what people would want for a card game for a year, but even that seems to be stretching it nowadays.

Star Wars Unlimited, despite its supply issues, seems to have the right idea in releasing three sets a year. The reason for this is that it allows for a new set to have some breathing room in being played, while also making sure that players don’t get bored with the set for too long until the new set arrives.

If as an independent creator you can’t afford to make three sets a year, then you can probably still manage to release two sets a year in order to help keep player interest up, which is the main concern here.

Too many products and your players get tired, too few products and your players get bored, a vicious cycle that doesn’t have any easy answers because people both want more and just enough at the same time.

There is a balance of too much and too few, but even now people are trying to make sure that there is enough to satisfy their player base while also trying to grow it.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual