Fear of the DarkFear of the Dark | Art by Sam Wolfe Connelly

Many of you remember your brightest, happiest times as a Magic player. That first booster pack feels like sliding down into an entire new world, while finally getting that chase card puts you in the mood of the warrior or wizard who found the perfect weapon or spellbook. Returning to the plane that you started playing during is nothing short of a magical homecoming.

Other times are not so happy. They can be… downright scary.

A Sudden Invasion: Commander Cards Coming to a Format Near You

For Magic: the Gathering players in 2013, something lurked beyond the stars. A completely alien concept hung high, waiting to swoop in with advanced technology and insane designs. Imagine those players as you would a naïve viewing public staring up at a massive spaceship raining lasers on their nearest monument for scale.

Direct to Commander cards.

Cards being printed into Legacy and Vintage without first going through Standard wasn’t actually new. The Portal sets did this, as well as a few other odd supplemental products like Planechase 2012.

Krond the Dawn-CladKrond the Dawn-Clad didn’t exactly break anything, and most of the Portal cards were just duplicates with different flavor. The crash-landed UFO of the first act, before the real threat emerges.

Then… it came.

Many early Commander products really leaned into the multiplayer aspect of the format. A creature that could totally blank one opponent was cute. The other two opponents won’t have to worry about the dinky little 3/1. In formats where you only had one opponent? Well. It proved problematic.

It wouldn’t be the last time.

Multiplayer mechanics have to contend with the fact that you have three times as many opponents. Sometimes, they do clever workarounds like myriad in Battle Angels of TyrBattle Angels of Tyr. Other times, they just cranked up the value knob… then broke it off.

This goes without digging into Unfinity’s stickers and attractions… the first time an entire category of mechanic has been banned from Legacy and Vintage since ante. Bans have stopped them… for now. Who knows when the next precon will carry with it a creature ready to infect an unprepared format?

Feel free to terrify your playgroups with this control deck that can make use of several of these haunting cards…

Thrill Seeking Goes Wrong: Modern Horizons

Four teenagers sit at a campfire, the same they’ve been doing all summer, telling scary stories. The stories get scarier; but they’re just stories, right? Dares get involved, and suddenly they’re out in the woods.

The fear is there but the danger isn’t. Yet.

They explore too deep, laughs turning into silence into tears. Something finds them. Only three run back out.

The summer isn’t fun anymore.

For Magic players, that was what the first Modern Horizons set felt like. It was a bold premise, and an exciting change. For the first time ever, a set of cards would go straight to the Modern format without going through Standard.

Certain archetypes were promised new toys, and enfranchised players were given a shot at a format as weird and wacky as Time Spiral block.

It gave Modern players interesting new cards like Crashing FootfallsCrashing Footfalls, Seasoned PyromancerSeasoned Pyromancer, and reprints like FlusterstormFlusterstorm. Exciting options that tantalized danger… but then the monsters emerged.

The so-called “Gaak Summer” of 2019 saw the format completely subsumed by the graveyard menace. Modern Horizons would continue, and every one so far has had at least two of its cards banned in its namesake format.

With the current model of six (sometimes seven?) premier sets a year, it seems as though those haunted woods have been taped off. Only time will tell if those teens Wizards can stay out.

If you want to raise the hairs on your opponents’ necks while repeatedly raising Hogaak itself from the graveyard, check out this fun twist on the deck…

Jump Scare: Vorthos Reads War of the Spark

A lovely couple has bought a house. They walked the neighborhood, talked with everyone about it, did their research. A year passed, and they settled in nice and comfy. Then… things started going wrong. Rat traps in the attic were found with rubber mice in them. A whisper in the dark. The man opens the door to the basement, and suddenly–

It’s there.

Massive, frightening, and grotesque.

So too felt the Vorthoses during War of the Spark. Magic's story had always been rocky, with things behind the scenes changing. In 2014, the brand once again dropped novels to fully pursue web fiction. With 2016’s Kaladesh block, Wizards of the Coast kicked off the Nicol Bolas arc, in which the Elder Dragon’s plans would at last come to fruition.

But then… Magic Story changed in 2018, with Dominaria being written entirely by a contract writer. It then changed again with Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance having side stories only and no main story fiction, leaving everyone in the lurch for nearly a year.

Furthermore, the capstone event would be published not as web fiction, but a full novel.

War of the Spark: Ravnica dropped, and it was… mediocre.

…Then War of the Spark: Forsaken came out.

It's no exaggeration to say that the Vorthos community shattered over it. The story team had drastically changed, the written story was strange and off-putting, and it ended on a note so sour that it took years to wash the taste out of our mouths.

Those of us who got away in time, at any rate.

The house is quiet now, and it looks so nice. Maybe we will buy it after all…

Shaken Foundations: An Ever-Shifting Standard

Many, many horror movies are standalone, but the standouts are franchised. The monsters come back time and time again, sometimes terrorizing new victims, other times going after familiar prey.

The monster still draws blood, but after so many visits… doesn’t it get tired?

Twenty-two years ago, Great FurnaceGreat Furnace and friends burned a hole in Standard in conjunction with Disciple of the VaultDisciple of the Vault. Bans happened. The monster was put away.

Fourteen years ago, Jace, the Mind SculptorJace, the Mind Sculptor mind-crushed Standard with the help of Squadron HawkSquadron Hawk. Bans happened. The monster was put away.

Ten years ago, Standard switched to rotating every six months to accommodate two-set blocks. This was widely regarded as a bad move and recanted within the year, sealing the evil away.

Eight years ago, energy and Vehicles popped off with Aetherworks MarvelAetherworks Marvel and Smuggler's CopterSmuggler's Copter. Bans happened. The monster was put away.

Bans would become a yearly tradition (save 2021) from then on, with monsters rising and falling more rapidly.

Two years ago, Standard rotation was changed again – this time to allow sets to stay for up to three years. It's radically changed the format, twisting its face into something not quite recognizable, a horror in and of itself. Whether it's a monster to be put away remains to be seen.

This year, Standard changed in the biggest way yet: six sets a year, half of which are Universes Beyond.

Are you tired, yet?

The ground is still shaky, and there’s no sign of safety. There’s a monster out there. The heart is pumping with adrenaline, the body is trying to stay the course… but the mind is starting to wander.

Hat Sets, Tech Sets, and Space Sets, Oh My: Magic’s Aesthetic Shift

You make a friend in 4th grade, bonding over some random hobby. The two of you grow throughout school, changing and shifting as you both encounter puberty, new experiences, and everything that comes with getting older. You each go to a different college and lose touch for a while, but then you find work in the same city and rekindle that relationship, bright as ever.

Then one day, something shifts. The friend’s smile is a little too wide, their gaze a little too hungry. Was there always so much black in their iris or sharpness in their fingernails?

You’re just imagining things. They’ve always been this way.

In 1993, Magic: the Gathering was a mish-mash of influences, with its mix of Christian angels, D&D-esque monsters cribbed mostly from Greek mythology, and European-adjacent plethora of Knights and Wizards.

There was a tone set with a lot of things that it didn’t choose to say at the time, which it reinforced with over 25 years of not doing them. It might break a rule occasionally, like mechs in the Weatherlight saga, the Portal set with guns, or the Portal set with historical figures, but those were frequently discarded as aberrations.

(...maybe Portal was named like that because it was a portal into the future...)

Altogether, Magic hewed very close to the same aesthetic over time, even if it expressed it within different frameworks or cultures. The first major shift against this was Mirrodin, and even that plane full of metal featured characters using bows and swords, with their giant “robots” being magically-invested constructs.

Then Kaladesh brought trains and motorcycles… but powered by magic, so it was fine?

(Huh, weird… did your friend always move that… stilted?)

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty looked at the dam full of holes and punched the biggest one yet. It had disc jockeys, combining mechas, and a literal Network TerminalNetwork Terminal. This was the tipping point. It was a wildly successful set, and its success was at least partially due to how different it was.

Each set which built on Magic’s normal aesthetic continually advertised to a singular audience. By reaching so far outside the norm, it caught a wider amount of new (and lapsed) players.

(They say they don’t go to pools anymore; that’s fine. Nothing odd about that. They also stopped wearing their grandmother’s necklace, saying it was itchy. That’s… normal. Probably just an allergy.)

And so the aesthetic tripped right beside the slippery slide. Soon, the game was digging up clues, travelling west, going to infinity… and Beyond.

There's an almost jarring difference between Shivan DragonShivan Dragon and The SeriemaThe Seriema, despite how long the journey and how well-paved the road was. The changes were subtle and slow… until they weren’t.

Peppered in amongst more traditional sword-and-sorcery aesthetics like Wilds of Eldraine or Tarkir: Dragonstorm, the game’s core aesthetic… has a much wider range which makes its core feel all the smaller.

(Oh. Huh. Why does your friend’s house smell like that?)

(…What’s in their garden?)

The Times That Make You Quit

The scariest time to be a Magic player is anything that threatens your relationship to the game. Change is inevitable – the game adjusts all new players to change every few months with a new set and a new world. But people can only accept so much.

It’s a massive game with millions of moving parts, and so much of it can be thrown out of balance with the slightest mistake. What gives me enough hope that I’d walk through Duskmourn is that it always grows past that.

Magic could have settled for "good enough" at many, many different points in its evolution and been fine for a while. It could have decided that intentionally bad commons or overly complex uncommons were fine, but they changed things for the better. The world designers could have decided that Magic’s fantasy was to remain shackled to '90s Dungeons & Dragons, but it pushed out.

Neon Dynasty and Edge of Eternities were worth it, even if some sets in-between lacked refining.

The game changes, and it may lose players… for a little while.

There’s always hope for a return.

Just don’t sell your collection in a hurry. That’s the real scariest thing that could happen.