Retrospective: Magic's Hits and Misses in 2025

Today is the last day of the year. A time for reflection for those who believe in solstices and rites of passage, a time for delicious food for those who prefer to gather with their families, and a time for unforgettable moments for those who are with their friends. A time for deepening introspection for those who look to the past and reflect on the future, and, above all, a time for celebration for having spent another year here.

The new year is also a time for retrospection. To evaluate how the things we love have changed, succeeded, and failed during the year. To consider how we can, collectively, be better within our communities and what relationships—whether with people or brands—we are cultivating. This also applies to card games and Magic: The Gathering.

It's been a busy few days. Lots of discussion on social media about many things, several pleasant surprises and others not so much; it all culminated in a series of hits and misses for the card game that many still view with passion and others simply as products — and in this article, we evaluate how the year of Magic: The Gathering went, considering its successes, mistakes, and promises made by Wizards of the Coast for 2026.

Spider-Man

In our Review of the sets released in 2025, we named Marvel’s Spider-Man as the worst set of the year — on our YouTube channel, we went so far as to claim that the set was the worst Magic release of all time for a dozen reasons: unoriginal mechanics, excessive characterization of Spider-Men while neglecting important characters from the Spider-Verse, and setting a dangerous precedent for the future of Magic with the Through the Omenpaths series.

From every point of view, Spider-Man was a mistake. Fans of the franchise deserved the same care and treatment that Magic has given to other major expansion collaborations like The Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and more recently, Avatar: The Last Airbender — instead, they received a product with a series of thematic and design problems, severely marked by the sudden change in development, given that the set was originally planned to be a mini-set.

The Excess of Universes Beyond

During the end of 2024 and much of this year, I argued that there are good reasons for Universes Beyond to enter Standard, but I also reinforced that increasing the number of UB sets to three per year was too much and would cause the product to lose the essence of celebration between two brands that, in the end, makes the series special.

In 2025, we had three major releases of Universes Beyond, and while Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender were widely well-received—Final Fantasy became the best-selling Magic expansion of all time—Spider-Man, as demonstrated above, was a failure and showed that not every partnership will be a huge success.

The problem, however, is that Magic wasn't content with just those releases: Secret Lair collaborations were abundant throughout 2025, with crossovers ranging from Sonic The Hedgehog to The Office, passing through Sony IPs, bands like Iron Maiden — which, by the way, is another precedent for the potential K-Pop partnerships that Hasbro's CEO mentioned at a shareholder meeting in the first half of the year — and even brands within Hasbro itself, like Furby; it's too many partnerships, and some of them may even be fun and inspiring, but others simply make Magic look like a caricature of itself.

Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has a pattern of quadrupling the bet on everything that works and reproducing a pattern ad infinitum until the public gets tired of it or stops seeing it as something special: it happened with Surge Foils, Collector Boosters, Full-Art Lands, and a series of other Magic novelties in recent years, and now it seems to be Universes Beyond's turn to suffer the same fate instead of being treated as something special.

This excess of Universes Beyond also affects public perception and the care taken in the production and interpretation of partnerships with the card game: the Secret Lair x Monster Hunter had to be canceled and remade because its cards were inconsistent with the lore of the Capcom game series and even had misspellings on card names. Furthermore, 2026 will have four Universes Beyond Standard-legal sets, and while the hype surrounding some of them is understandable, most of the community has already decided—months before release—that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn't worth the effort and attention because it doesn't fit with the overall aesthetic of Magic, leaving a bad impression due to the failure of Spider-Man.

The World Championship's Coverage

In an ideal world, Magic would use the formula it's using with Universes Beyond to reinforce its own brand and influence in mainstream culture through audiovisual productions and captivating stories easily grasped by a wider audience, as well as investing in making its game interesting to watch both in person and on live streams. In practice, however, there doesn't seem to be a specific direction for where the game wants to go, and regarding the competitive scene, the situation is a bit worse.

One cannot deny the merit of the Spotlight Series — a reskin of the old Grand Prix — in providing inviting environments for those who can participate and interesting viewing for those who cannot, but when it depends exclusively on Wizards of the Coast, the quality of broadcasting and providing a good gaming experience falls apart, and nothing proves this better than the last World Championship.

Much has been said about the misplays and take-backs that champion Seth Manfield made during the Top 8, but the real problem with the World Championship goes far beyond the technicalities and rules of Magic: The Gathering — there is no spectacle.

In the year that the card game had its most commercially successful expansion in history, Magic didn't bother to offer return to competitive players and its audience regarding the most important tournament of the year: the Top 8 stage remained with the same totems with illustrations from the current release, the lighting was dim, and the broadcast of the matches themselves seemed very uninviting to watch — Magic's layout for its official broadcasts simply isn't fun to follow, and the problem stems from several fronts, but mainly from the lack of interest from those responsible for the event and the coverage of making the Magic World Championship an event that deserves its name.

Compare it to other card games. Watch the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship finals, or the Pokémon TCG World Championship broadcast quality, and you'll notice a clear discrepancy in the treatment, both internally and with the public, regarding how to broadcast their biggest event of the year and how to make it a true celebration of their game.

Magic has never been played so much, Magic has never been talked about so much, and Magic has never been consumed so much—if Magic is growing, it's expected that the quality of everything produced in the game, including broadcasts, will keep pace with that growth. Unfortunately, it appears that Magic has stagnated when it comes to offering an inviting-to-follow professional tournament.

The Ban Window

This year has been relatively troublesome for Magic in terms of the competitive Metagame. An outlier or two along the way is common when we think about a year in the competitive environment. Decks like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis will show up from time to time, and in the worst-case scenario, a new Eldrazi Winter might arrive because a mechanic or card wasn't properly planned considering all environments—the problem in 2025, however, was that there was a recurring delay in addressing unbalanced formats.

Red Aggro dominated Standard for a long time, and several bans were necessary to ensure a more diverse format. Besides that, decks like Izzet Prowess with Cori-Steel Cutter and Vivi Ornitier had to wait until the famous annual maintenance to have their problems solved—only for Vivi Ornitier to break Standard again post-rotation with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron and take many more months to be banned.

It became clear that four seasonal maintenances are not enough for the speed at which Magic has changed this decade and that there is a very delicate line between maintaining the stability of formats and the security of players' investment at the expense of the overall health of their formats—after all, if a competitive scene isn't fun, players won't be interested in it even when there's a good prize pool, as evidenced by one of the last quarter's Spotlight Series.

Letting Pioneer Wither

At this point, Pioneer is dying. Yes, the format still has Challenges and Leagues on Magic Online and even has a wide expansion of cards on Magic Arena, but every step Wizards of the Coast takes regarding the format seems to place it closer to an environment whose importance exists only in the digital realm.

In 2025, there were no large-scale competitive tournaments that featured Pioneer as a format, and in 2026, it appears that the same steps will be followed by Wizards of the Coast. This further damages the format's reputation, which is commonly criticized for being too stale compared to Metagame.

The stars haven't aligned. The consumption pattern of the average Magic player has shifted to the point where stability is no longer an attraction, and without a clear competitive motivation, players won't try to find that new broken deck or potential sleeper for the format because there are no rewards for doing so — Tix is ​​still Tix, and reaching Mythic has no value for most of the player base. If these are the rewards Pioneer offers today, then it has absolutely nothing that motivates creativity and innovation.

Until Wizards puts at least a spotlight on Pioneer, the format will continue to live on the fringes and decline in popularity until it is no longer considered necessary, just as happened with Extended in the last decade.

Universes Beyond Done Right

While Spider-Man was a flop, the same cannot be said of the other Universes Beyond sets in 2025. Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender will be remembered as some of the best Magic releases of all time—both in terms of numbers and design.

Final Fantasy became the best-selling set of all time, mainly due to the already well-established collectible culture in its community, combined with a passion nurtured for almost four decades and—of course—market speculation from scalpers who even received a little gift from Wizards with the Chocobo Bundle, but talking only about the numbers ignores the true beauty of the set: the means to integrate the diverse narratives and character highlights of the Square Enix series into Magic: The Gathering.

Cards like Dion, Bahamut’s Dominant, Aerith Gainsborough, and Emet-Selch, Unsundered are just a few examples of cards whose narrative integration in the games was properly represented in their card mechanics: the knight token that Dion places, for example, refers to Terance, his lover, and the fact that Emet-Selch has a Yawgmoth’s Will on his other side is an excellent reference to his role as Hades, the overseer of the cycle of souls, and his story as an Ascian — several cards in the set received this care and treatment that makes the expansion one of the best-made in Magic's history, and a wonderful tribute and gift for any Final Fantasy fan.

The same can be said of Avatar. While it didn't achieve the same sales figures as Final Fantasy, Magic's collaboration with Nickelodeon was full of personality both in terms of gameplay and characterization in the TCG, with notable examples including how Zuko, Conflicted switches sides as it remains in play—a reference to his arc in the Book of Earth—or how Secret of Bloodbending requires a lot of blue mana and Waterbending, given that it's an extremely advanced technique in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Just like Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy and Avatar nailed the way a collaboration should be produced and should serve as a model for future crossovers.

Commander Brackets

In February 2025, the Commander Format Panel—a committee created after the dissolution of the former Commander Regulatory Committee due to controversies involving bans at the end of last year, which even led to threats on social media—released its first proposal for Commander regulation and community communication.

While it was a clear prototype to understand, there were—and still are—many semantic and intent interpretations that are not evidently clear in the system, and the committee has been working to improve communication between players through the Brackets.

Commander is one of the worst formats for expressing intent. For a social format, the individual preferences of each player can create many obstacles to actually being social with other individuals—perhaps you don't like combos, and others don't see any problem with them. Maybe you prefer a game without sweepers, while others consider them necessary to control the pacing, and these are just some of the many nuances that the format, due to its growth and popularity, suffers from.

Having a committee like the Commander Format Panel trying, through the Brackets, to create this clearer communication of intentionality is perhaps the most valuable work that Magic possesses today in the social aspect. In an increasingly digital world where the sense of community has dissipated, card games are a tool for connection, for sharing a common passion for a game with others, and Commander is today the gateway to sharing passions and creating decks in the way you consider most appropriate — having someone make it as clear as possible how to differentiate the goal and gameplay between one and the other is essential for this purpose.

The Return of the Judge Program

While there is still little information on how the new Judge Program will work, the fact that Magic is once again focusing on centralizing its judges around the game is a step forward from a competitive standpoint, especially if this translates into greater accountability in the application of the rules and the need for judges for competitive REL events.

Currently, it is only known that Samantha Harr, from the former Judge Academy, will be the coordinator of the new program, and news should be released during 2026.

Fixing the Ban Window

In the last Banned and Restricted announcement of the year, Wizards of the Coast acknowledged the problem surrounding its intervention window in 2025, mentioning that it intends to expand it to, on average, once for each set release, allowing for more maintenance to deal with troublesome cards at a more acceptable pace for today's consumption standards.

The Spotlight Series

While Wizards of the Coast doesn't seem to give the World Championship the attention it deserves, the same cannot be said about the Spotlight Series. The tournament circuit that replaced the Grand Prix was, for the most part, a success with audiences and offered high-quality broadcasts for viewers while reinforcing the sense of community and competitiveness within the Magic: The Gathering environment.

In addition to the clear highlights of the tournaments, some editions of the Spotlight Series also offered opportunities for themed trophies from the card game's collaborations and faithfully celebrated the union of two major franchises—all within a circuit that anyone (provided they are in the regions) can participate in.

It just remains for Wizards of the Coast to remember that Latin America exists and bring at least one event here in the coming years, right?

The Pauper Format Panel's Autonomy

The Pauper Format Panel may be the target of criticism whenever Affinity is mentioned, but we cannot deny that the regulatory committee has an enviable autonomy compared to other formats.

At the end of March, High Tide — a card preventively banned when Pauper unified the rarities of Magic Online and paper — was released into the format in a "trial unbanning": the plan was to evaluate how players would build decks around the card and what its role and relevance would be in the competitive Metagame. If it became too oppressive, High Tide would return to the banned list — and it did.

Throughout the year, Pauper faced the challenge of adapting to a new combo deck and presenting both answers and challenges to it in the Metagame. As it became increasingly clear that its role was flawed in a more interactive format, the Pauper Format Panel briefly presented enough data to prove that High Tide deserved to be removed from the format again. However, its role was fulfilled: setting a precedent for a committee to experiment with its format.

In 2025, it was High Tide. Tomorrow, it could be other cards aimed at reinforcing certain strategies that become too weak in the future, or even cards that no longer seem to have competitive relevance due to power creep, as happened with Prophetic Prism and Expedition Map.

Having attentive and dedicated eyes on a format offers many benefits to it, and this may also become clear with the Commander Format Panel during the next year — and if a committee has such autonomy as the PFP has, it would be interesting if other competitive formats, especially non-rotating environments, also had their own panels.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thank you for reading!