Do you have any thoughts as as a designer Magic the Gathering becoming a grab bag of IPs? How about as a player of MTG given how often you referenced it in your posts?

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Any given game can be broken up into two major parts - what I call the mechanics (the rules and specifics of the game) and the fiction (the story, characters, lore, and such). Games can vary quite a bit between how important the mechanics are and how important the fiction is. Games like Chess, Tetris, or Basketball have very little to do with any real fiction. Narrative-heavy games like visual novels and immersive simulators lean much more heavily on the fiction than the mechanics. What bringing many crossover IPs does is muddy MtG's fiction without necessarily touching its mechanics.

It's pretty obvious that many players out there have responded positively to these kind of crossovers. Magic is hardly the first - Fortnite has built its entire model on being a platform for crossovers of all kinds, Call of Duty's multiplayer has become a similar world of crossover IPs, and mobile games have had brand IP collaborations for almost as long as we've had mobile games. It's generally a good thing for the business (so far), but it's hard to un-ring that bell once it's been rung especially in formats where all cards are legal.

For those who only care about the fiction, it's not a big deal - they can choose not to play with the fiction they dislike. For those who only care about the mechanics, it's also not a big deal - cards are essentially the mana costs, types, and effects. The art and the characters don't matter, only the efficiency and synergy in the deck. But for those players who care about both, the amount of sadness they'll feel is commensurate with how much they care.

Those who have made Magic The Gathering a large part of their lives growing up are likely to feel the most sorrow about it. I truly sympathize with them, but it's also part of the game's evolution over time (like how Magic is now much more stringent with its art direction than it once was). It's always important for me to maintain some emotional distance with products for this reason. I lament the changes with my friends but, at the of the day, we aren't friends because we play, we're play because we're friends. We can find other games to play, or we can enact house rules, or we can just try continuing on.

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