Complexity Creep is the Real Threat in MTG, and Wizards Knows It

Last updated on August 12, 2025

Laboratory Maniac – art by John Stanko

Mark Rosewater, Magic's Head Designer, published yesterday his annual State of Design article. It's a must-read for anybody that loves reading about the behind-the-scenes of MTG design. Mark publishes it once per year, and covers the lessons learned from the last few Magic sets, in this case from Bloomburrow to Final Fantasy.

He also writes about the weak points of MTG overall, and this year he has highlighted complexity creep.

“While we've been working to make sure that individual mechanics are less complex overall, there's a trend in the last year of us making the sets complex in mechanical interaction,” Mark writes. “Some of this is in the volume of mechanics we include and some of this is about the choice of mechanics.”

And he worries about turning Magic into an interconnected web that prevents the average player from being able to track what's happening.

This Is How Magic Ends

Reanimate – art by Johann Bodin

Years ago, a very well-known (and currently active) Magic designer wrote:

“But for all intents and purposes, Magic as we know it is dead.”

Can you guess who? No, not Mark.

Two clues: The author is the current head of the Commander Format panel. And also head of the Pauper Format panel.

If you guessed “Gavin Verhey,” then congratulations! He wasn't yet an MTG designer when he wrote the above quote, back in 2010, in an article for Star City Games titled “The Day Magic Died” (he'd be hired the following year). He wasn't being overly dramatic: He wrote the piece as a sort of “future obituary” for Magic, and the killer was not power creep.

“What killed Magic was another sort of creep,” Gavin wrote, and pointed fingers directly at complexity.

And he wasn't being too original, either.

“What is the greatest threat to Magic, in my not so humble opinion?” Mark Rosewater had wondered a year before, in his Magic Lessons from June 2009. “We stop getting new players,” he answers, something that was actually happening at that point: Magic was failing to retain players, and WotC knew it.

The Price of Freshness Is Eternal Complexity

Exalted Sunborn – art by makoron

Why does Wizards keep making the game more and more complex, then, if they know it's scary for new players?

“Here’s the core problem,” Mark wrote on his personal blog last year, when a player asked a similar question. “A huge part of Magic is that we keep making new cards. When we do that, the audience wants new mechanics.”

And we Magic players are certainly hungry for new stuff that does cool stuff. Simplicity simply doesn't sell cards well.

As an example, we have the very recent best-selling Magic set of all time, Final Fantasy. It has everything from double-faced cards (which WotC avoids putting in Commander precons since they see them as too complex for rookies), a new type of creatures (creature sagas, that even required a change in the rules), and tons of one-shot ability words to reflect abilities and effects from the videogames.

“If you just like playing eternal formats with all the cards, I think complexity creep comes with the territory,” Mark notes in another blog post. “Magic’s going to keep inventing new things and pushing out to new spaces.”

There’s just no easy answer here, Mark notes, because the things that add complexity are also the things adding novelty and excitement.

Closing

Eternity Vessel – art by John Avon

Power creep can certainly kill a card you love, by making it unable to compete with the powered-up versions. And it can change how Magic formats feel and play: It's a running joke among Modern players that Modern Horizons sets have turned it into a rotating format, since they are so powerful that they make older cards obsolete.

But, if you think that the real danger is Magic turning so complex that new players are just scared stiff and dare not join us, you are not alone: Even WotC thinks this is, at the end of the day, the real Big Bad.

Magic’s designers are juggling a real tension: Keep veterans engaged without requiring rookies to have a PhD in Card Games before they can play. Complexity creep is real, and is in the room with us – and, according to Mark Rosewater, it will be forever here, since it's the nature of an ever-expanding game.