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Wizards’ revenue in the quarter rose to $406 million, up 118% from $187 million in the same period last year. Its operating profit also grew at an incredible rate to $193 million from $74 million.

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The Mono Red Song - An MTG Parody Song

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New cards vs. reprints each year

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After numerous years, we’ve come to the conclusion that there are three basic types of Magic players. The fancy term for these categories is "psychographic profiles." A psychographic profile separates players into categories based on their psychological make-up. What motivates that player to play? What kind of cards do they like? What kind of things encourages that player to keep on playing?

Because R&D loves naming things, we have given each of these three category types a name: Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. In this column I am going to explain each type and talk about how we came up with the goofy nickname.

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For Arena to succeed in the long term, it needs Historic and, hopefully, eventually other eternal formats as well, not just to exist but to thrive. For non-Standard formats to thrive, Arena needs to fix its economy in general, but especially in regard to supplemental products. Giving players agency to control their own collection with some sort of dusting or trading system is the ideal solution, although this was the obvious and ideal solution back when Magic Arena was created a few years ago, and Wizards chose to go another, much less player-friendly direction, which probably means it's unlikely for Wizards to change course now. If dusting and / or trading is off the table, then at the very least, Wizards needs to expand duplicate protection to cover reprints and either lower the cost of non-Standard sets or greatly increase the amount of free rewards for such sets (rather than reducing them, as we saw with Kaladesh Remastered, where the promo code TryKaladesh only offered a single booster pack, rather than the traditional three).

Arena's Economy Is a Mess, Especially for Supplemental Products like Kaladesh Remastered

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MTG Arena: Standard Temur Kiora with Ali Aintrazi

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Standard is literally piles of cards built around like the 3rd tier of Eldraine bombs.

Daniela Díaz, Not So Young Pyromancer

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In twenty years of playing Magic I have seen few formats as healthy as Standard currently is. Recently there has always been one or two decks that are obviously tier one and warp the rest of the format around them. This made it somewhat easier to choose a deck as you could either play one of those or play a deck that focused on beating them. This is however no longer the case as you are unlikely to face any one deck more than a couple of times in a given tournament. You normally see this happen at the beginning of any format where aggressive decks like Mono-Red or Mono-Green have success in punishing new and untuned lists. Playing aggro early in a format is a strategy as old as Urza himself. The thinking here is that no matter what your opponent is playing you will always have a decent chance of winning because your plan is always the same and somewhat linear. Whereas trying to play a control deck or even a midrange deck that has to be prepared for a wide range of fast, slow or combo-oriented decks is difficult to get right without sufficient information on the meta.

How to Attack an Open Metagame

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