Give me a second avatar jumpstart set that’s all avatar extended universe stuff. Make it happen.

Personally:
Edge of Eternities
Avatar the Last Airbender
Tarkir Dragonstorm
Aetherdrift
Final Fantasy
Spider-Man

One last thing though worth pointing out. They kind of pulled a fast one by saying there was only 6 sets this year. Avatar really was 2 full sets. The standard set, and the jumpstart set. If you count just the new avatar eternal cards, it’s 138 cards still.

Another interesting trend though is we are seeing a pattern starting to form with bigger and then smaller years. Next year looks to hold the pattern true with the TMNT set. A set size that fits exactly in line with the size fluctuations we’ve been seeing.

The big jump coincides with a number of changes. Innovation products pivoted to mostly new cards with Modern Horizons (and now are standard legal), commander sets with every set, and the removal of the core set. So far the pivot to 6 all standard sets hasn’t made a huge jump in the # of cards.

Here this might actually:
2025: 2,019
2024: 2,186
2023: 2,018
2022: 2,433
2021: 1,988
2020: 1,247 (the last year with a core set. Turns out core sets did a lot to lower new card count)
So the number of cards overall doesn’t seem to actually be increasing, so much as it jumped once and is fluctuating

Reality Fracture is mine rn, followed by Strixhaven.

There is no way he isn’t in it right? That’s gotta be what that means.

…what’s the grammar error? How bad is it? I can’t even tell

Just sent you a friend request

You know, fair enough.

Genuine question, why boo? This sounds solid.

Oh I’m sure, but that doesn’t stop players from seeing him repeat that over and over and using it as a cudgel to disagree with basically every change in every format ever.

Okay, I gotta ask. Far-right boot licking? What are you referring to? I haven’t heard anything about that? I see the examples for AI art and advertisements, but not that one.

That wasn’t the right restriction. Sure it forced people to get clever with their shard decks, but it didn’t create a broadly interesting format. Not all restrictions are good. Not all creative output makes good gameplay. Creativity isn’t always equal and it isn’t always good.

Doesn’t magically make all creative output better in every way. It’s the job of the game designer to craft the correct restrictions and provide the correct tools to create a good gameplay experience. That’s why commander doesn’t just use the original 5 elder dragons still.

Okay I kind of have an issue with MaRo just repeating this phrase all the time without context, for exactly this reason. Restrictions breed creativity but they do so in a very specific way. The type of creative output is directly based off the type of restriction. Putting arbitrary restrictions

Player demand. WotC has said it repeatedly. They had been talking about trying it for years but kept not and then every time they experimented with it, it went off phenomenally well.

Called my senators and told them not to cave. No reopening without the ACA subsidies. No "promise for a promise" either.

I am waaaaay more in favor of ZA. I don’t think Pokemon should be pushing towards realism. I’d much prefer they go for a more stylized look (personally I think Let’s Go was actually the best looking 3D Pokémon. Push harder in that direction.

Or slippery slope arguments. Things don’t need to be actively harmful to the format to be worth improving. Just because it has been one way doesn’t inherently mean it wouldn’t be better another way.

There are good arguments. For example, commander is one of the few formats where aesthetics are a major focus, and there is an aesthetic element to this change that is in disagreement to that. But I am strongly opposed to arguement that boil down to don’t change it because it’s not an active problem

Yeah I’m mostly pointing out faulty arguments. I do ultimately think it’s a good change, but it’s also one I have very little stake in. I think it’s a change that would change very very little. I just grow very tired of hearing the same faulty arguments online for why they shouldn’t change it.

They were not designed to do that just for 60 card, they were designed to do that for magic. Obviously commander up till now has decided to restrict them differently, obviously that’s an option. But just because commander players CAN decide to restrict them doesn’t mean it’s better to.

An inherently bad change. There are reasonable reasons to dislike this change, but just because he has been saying it for years doesn’t mean it’s bad.

See, this is a stronger argument (and kind of where I fall into). Do I think this change would technically make things better, probably, but in a really really minor way. It’s not the magic sauce commander is missing. But my point is that just because he has been saying it for years doesn’t make it

Okay but you see how that’s a slippery slope fallacy right? Nobody is saying you can put any card in your deck. They are talking about one very specific change to a small subset of cards that can go into decks because that’s what those cards were designed to do.

Why can’t the inverse be true? Maro and other designers have been saying this for decades. At what point do we say maybe the rules committee got it wrong?

Well yeah, but I think hybrid mana being ruled out by color identity is a pretty extreme line to draw as what makes commander commander. I’d argue the commander in the command zone is a much larger part of it. Or the color identity rule as a whole. That doesn’t stop existing with this change.

I meeean, if his argument is correct, that the format would be more fun with this change, then it kind of is a commander problem? That’s a big if obviously, but that’s the whole point.