Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1382: What Went Wrong – March of the Machine: The Aftermath

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

This is the start of a new series I'll do from time to time called "What Went Wrong?" In it, I examine something we made that didn't work out. I'll explain why we made it and examine the problems it had. I begin by discussing March of the Machine: The Aftermath.

I'm pulling in my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to have their drive to work. Okay. So I'm going to start a new series today, something that I'll be doing every once in a while, called What Went Wrong? The idea is I will pick something that didn't go well.

So the idea of is I will start by explaining what it is, why we did it, and then what I think went wrong, why it went wrong. And so it's a chance to me to explore mistakes, things that ended up not doing well. So I decided for the very first episode of what went wrong, I'm going to do something that went about as wrong as things go after math boosters. So let me walk through what aftermath boosters are and what they were trying to be. And then we'll get into what went wrong. See, one of the clues of the series is, you know it went wrong when I start.

Although, hopefully I'm doing things you do know went wrong. Okay, so the idea of an aftermath booster. So originally we did them for March of the Machine. So the idea was March of Machine was a big final, you know, capstone event set. It was like, oh, we were wrapping up the story. And, you know, this was sort of a way to show, what happened after, the aftermath

of the giant story. That's why I was called an aftermath booster. And the original idea, well, we were exploring a couple different things. I'll get into that, but what was? Okay. So, it was a booster pack

that came with five cards in it, although it costed close to what a normal booster pack cost, normal premier booster pack. In the there were 50 possible cards you could open, 15 uncommonds, 25 rairs, 10 mythic rairs. There were 180 alternate version, so a lot of different alternate versions of the cards.

When you open up the bootchaback, of the five cards you opened, one to three of the cards would be rare or higher, and two to four of the cards would be uncommon. Of the five, the cards, one to two would be foils. We also made a collector boosted version of it, which was six cards. and one DFC token in foil. And of the six cards, four cards were of any rarity, two were uncommon, and five to six. So almost all the cards were foil. There were occasionally ones that weren't foil, but mostly they were foil.

Okay. So let me explain what the thought process, what we were trying to do here. We were trying to do a couple different things. The aftermath part of it was, often we tell a story. One of the challenges of telling a story in a trading card game is we don't control the order

by which you see the pieces. Normally, if you go to see a movie or watch a TV show or read a book, like the person who wrote it, put it in order. I mean, there are some stories where they chop off the order, but still, you're seeing it in the order

you're supposed to see it in. That, you know, normally, if a story has, you know, part one, two, three, you see them in order part one, two, three. The challenge with a trading card game is we don't control the order you see them. The very first card you see might be the climax of the story. And so one of the things we realize is tricky is it's hard for us to show after the fact.

Because in the set that the story is happening, it feels like that after the fact is itself part of the story. So first and foremost, we were like, oh, it's kind of hard. Like, in the example here, we were showing the Frexon Wars. So March of the Machine was about the Phrexian War, where the phrexians attacked most of the planes that you know of. In a way that was very fundamental. And the idea was, while the good guys won in the end, Frexians lost, a lot of damage got done by the Phrexians.

The ramifications of the Frixian War were big and sweeping. And that's hard to convey within the set where actually the event itself happens. Another thing we were looking at is we had some data. that said that a lot of players don't play limited. The majority of people who open a booster packs don't play limited with it. It's where the idea of set boosters came from. And we're like, okay, well, maybe if we weren't beholding to limited, we could craft a slightly different booster

and that we could make things a little different, that we weren't beholden to have to worry about limited concerns. Also, the idea was, you know, when people buy, especially in franchise players, buy packs. The commons, you know, the commons matter early on, but pretty quickly you get to the point

where you're not even paying attention to the comments. What if we just didn't pay attention to the comments? There's a lot of those cards. What if we just made uncommon's rairs and mythic rairs? You know, what if we scaled things down and made a slightly smaller booster pack? That was kind of the mindset

was, could we make something that was a little bit different that excited you guys, and I, as I will get into, there are definitely for some assumptions that went horribly wrong. I'm just trying to explain the thought process. The thought process was, could we make something a little bit different, something that doesn't have as many cards in it, something that is aimed at a slightly different audience,

or at least not aimed at, you know, not worrying about limited. I mean, there's a lot of ideas in it that had their core in something interesting. But they would combine in such a way to make a pretty disastrous product. So that's the idea. That's the idea of, I mean, it wasn't just the aftermath booster itself. The real concept was that we were trying to make a smaller booster. That Magic has its big full-size booster, but was there a model, a shape that made sense for a smaller booster

that might excite players? And like I said, because it wasn't about limited, It didn't have to have the commons in it. It could just be focused. And because it was less cards, we could do more with it. We could have more variance. You know, we could sort of have a lot of what you normally would experience in a collector booster, but experience it in a normal booster.

Just more variance in the kind of different things you could get. That was the thought process. What could go wrong? Okay, so let's, now let me get into how we know it went horribly wrong. and then we'll get into what went wrong. Okay, so we do market research on all our products, meaning we go out, we find magic players, and there's a couple different ways we do this,

but the end result is we find magic players, we say to them, what did you think of this set, and we ask them a lot of questions. One of the questions we ask is, did you like the set? Let's grade this set. On a scale of one to five, one being you really did not like the set. To five being, you really liked the set.

How did you feel about this? The five scale is really important. It allows people to sort of hit it neutral, which is three, and go above or below. And in market research, if you get too much radiation, it gets hard for people to sort of... But the idea of, is it neutral? Did you like a little? Did you like it a lot? Do you hate it a little?

They hate it a lot. or dislike it, I guess. I hate my big strong word. So the idea is, how did you feel about it? Now, there's a thing we call the top two box score. And the answer basically is how many people rated it positively? Above neutral, like, I liked it. It was good.

If the top two box score is, like, in the 90s, you have a bona fide hit. Like, you have a smash hit. If 90% of people will say, I like this product, above average, I like the, I mean, either they thought it was good or great, you are golden. That is, that is amazing. You dream of being in the 90s. If you're in the 80s, it's good. You shouldn't be unhappy.

80s means it's still, you know, it's not, it's not 90, but it's, it's, it's, you should be happy. If you have something in the 80s, you should walk away happy from that experience. You didn't knock it out of the park, but you did, you did a good, solid job. You know, you should be happy. 70s like okay 70s is kind of a lowest where you're like well you know it didn't go horribly

you know 70s is like there was room for improvement but it went it went okay 50s and 60s like you had a bad product if only half the people are like hey I like this product

that went badly that was you need to go back you need to figure what went wrong something went pretty wrong that was not a good experience if you're in the 3rd 30s, 40s, oh my goodness, like this went horribly wrong. Like, you did, like, oh, we got to go, we got to search our soul.

What went wrong with this product? 20, which is the lowest we had ever seen, that 25 was our record, was abysmal. Like, it's embarrassing to talk about how bad this set went. And 25 was our record. We had never seen anything below 25. So what did the aftermath, March of the Machine, Aftermath Booster get? Of five. We had never seen anything that low.

I don't know if we even thought it could go that low. Like, that means of everybody we talked to, of everybody who we polled, 95% of the people said it was the absolute worse it could be. And I don't necessarily want to say, well, one is a pretty strong statement. So the fact that 95% of the people, well, side, not one. 95% people said one, two, or three. That's still horrible.

Only 5% of people are like, yeah, that was, I liked that. That is, that is, it's the worst we'd ever seen by 20 points. I mean, it was, to say bad is an understatement. It's really, we need words better than bad. It was an understatement. So it went from a modern sense of us. And the other interesting thing about this, and I will point this out, March of the Machine also introduced bad.

And now, given the people who decide mechanics and people decide sort of set structure, different people. But the R&D, because the mechanics is a little more R&D, we said, okay, we're going to do battles. We're not sure they're going to go off. What we're going to do is do battles and then sit back, let's see the audience reaction, really take in what people are saying, and then decide whether or not we want to do battles. Aftermath is sort of, and not just the aftermath, but the idea of the smaller booster. We went all in really fast. In a way that's very funny that March of the Sheen introduced two completely different things

and one we were super cautious about and one we were not remotely cautious about. The one we were cautious about battles in general went quite well. I get asked all the time when we're doing more battles than we are, but I get asked all the time about it. the small booster went horribly wrong, and I mean horribly wrong, and we had stuff in the pipeline that was going to use it. For example, the very next year outlaws the Thunder Junction was our next, the end of the year. Normally, we do a story that sort of caps to the end of the year and then a larger story that caps to the end of three or four years. But we were like, okay, every year we'll do the finale of that year's story and then we'll do an aftermath booster. be how we do a year, how a magic year works.

And we had a scramble. So we ended up making the big score where we took those cards that were going to be in the separate product and rolled them into the product as kind of a bonus sheet. But the point was we were already, we had already commissioned all that and done all the cards. Like it doesn't matter of how to reframe it because it was clear the aftermath of Luce was a problem. And there are other things like there are definitely sets that are a little smaller than they would be Like, one of the lessons we learned from this, and I'll get into this, is players really like the bigger sets. The smaller sets are not nearly as popular as the bigger sets. Okay.

So, we made something. I think our intentions were good, I think. But what went wrong? What went wrong? A lot of went wrong. Okay, let's first talk about this. I'm going to sell you a pack of cards that roughly cost us. the same of a normal pack of cards, but there are five cards in it.

The idea at the time was, we're giving you the stuff that really matters. The commons lose their luster fast. So yeah, yeah, yeah, we're not, you know, isn't, like most people, you know, once you get, like once you get a few packs in, you're not even worrying about comments. What if we just start there? Okay, well, let's go over that. First and foremost, and I remember reading a lot of people can make notes when they review things. So I read some of the notes from the set.

And not just that. It's not as if I interact with the public on social media, on my blog. But people aren't happy. I hear that they're unhappy. The idea that we just sort of took cards away from them was pretty viscerally strong. And so let's walk for that. First and foremost, if we charge you something and give you 14 cards and then we charge you the same amount and give you five cards, okay, that just feels like you just took cards away from me. You just, you're like this idea.

So first and foremost, the commons do matter. I will get to limit in a second, but the commons do matter. When you first open your first booster pack, there's a lot more to look at. You do look at the commons. The commons matter. Yes, there comes a point in which the common stop matter, only because you've seen them. But for the first, I don't know, five to ten packs, like, you haven't seen all the commons, you know. And so you are looking at the commons.

They're not, like, when you first absorb a magic pack, it just there's more to absorb. And absorbing, you know, close to 300 cards is a very different animal than absorbing 50 cards. And so the idea essentially was that we were offering you. you, like, we were making you pay the same amount and just giving you less. So, first and foremost, that went over very badly. This idea that, like, I think what we misunderstood is that it's not that commons always matter all the time. And there are players that will open a lot of cards. And those players, at some point, stop caring about the commons.

So A, it's not that they don't care about the commons. They do. And it makes the first, you know, the beginning of the pack going richer. There's more things going on. And there also is a psychological thing that we have to acknowledge, which is just having more cards. It's more cards. The pack is bigger. There's more to go through.

Even though I'm fanning past them at some point. I am fanning them. I am looking at them. I am seeing them. Like, they are tangible things. And so trying to give you. Less for the same amount just felt, it just felt like we were trying to pull one over on you. And the other thing, so actually real quick, shrinkflation.

So shrinkflation is a phenomenon that's going on right now. It's been going on for a while. Where what retailers realized was that raising prices is pretty sensitive. that if we have something and then we charge you more for it, you get pretty upset. But if we charge you the same amount for something but just give you

a little bit less. So we shrink the bag of potato chips. We give you a few, like, if we sort of don't change the price, but we change what we give you, that people respond better to that.

But, but, but, but it's not as if people like it. They don't. Translation is not something people like. And so this just felt like that on steroid, right? Like I normally get 14 and now I get five. Like you took more than half of it away. And so that, it just really ring bath. Okay, next, let's get into limited play.

So the idea here was most people don't play limited. So maybe we just make a product that doesn't concern stuff with limited. The problem is the most enfranchised players, the people who buy the vast vast majority of the cards very do much like limited play. That one of the cool things about limited play is another value issue, which is if I buy a booster of cards,

if I'm able to do something with those booster cards that have value, which is play a game, it just makes those cards have extra value, right? If before I opened my booster pack, I first play with my booster pack, like a lot of people are like, hey, I'm willing to go play limited and I'm willing to pay money for that.

In fact, online, there's digital versions where you play limited, but don't keep the cards. Meaning, people are willing to, the limited experience itself is worth something. There's value to the limited experience. Again, and I think this is the same sort of connective tissue. You know, when you buy a booster pack, you get this free limited experience along with the cost of the booster. And so we just took that away. And so it was another thing where, hey, here's something that I appreciate. And like I said, not everybody cares about it, but, A, the most enfranchised players,

the players buy the most packs do care about it. And B, even the people that didn't care about it, like, you know, not everybody opens every Boucher Pact play is limited, but there are people that sometimes play limited, and so they lost something. And even the people that never play limited, it still was this reinforcement of, you're just taking things away from me. Even if something I don't do, the fact of the fact that they're not. I can't even choose to do it.

It just felt like it leaned into the theme of you're just taking things away. You're charging me the same amount and giving me less. You're giving me less cards. You're giving me less experience. And so I think that also went quite negative. The other thing about limited, which is important, is that limited give context to things. Like our thought process was, well, you know, commons are mostly made for limited.

So if we don't use limit, if we don't have limited, wow, the commons don't matter. That's sort of a thought. Not only do people skip the commons, so like, well, the commons are really into limited. But that's not true. It is true that commons are more focused on limited and have a limited power level, which means on high and constructed, you see less limited,

I'm sorry, less commons in high and constructed, just because the power level, is different than the power level constructed. But, and this is one of the important lessons we learned long ago, limited also functions as a good substitute for casual play. That there's a lot of people who don't buy a lot of magic cards. You know, a new set comes up, maybe they buy three or four or five packs. And they're going to play with what they open.

That they're not focused on high-end tournament play. they're like, I and my friends are going to play on my kitchen table, and I want to play with the cards I open. In fact, I'm going to play with the cards I open. And so those comments actually have a lot more value. It's not just about limited play. That there is constructed play with them. Not high-level tournament constructed play.

But a lot of people do put those cards. And for a lot of people who are playing, once again, constructed play, the general power levels higher. But casual play, it's close. to limit it, that if you just sort of make a deck out of the cards you own, it's not that different from sort of a well-tuned limited deck. The power level is roughly the same. So the cards you're opening in the pack do have value and do make sense and match what you're playing with. So not only where we're taking kind of the limited cards away, we're also

taking away a lot of the casual cards away. And so there's a lot of people, once you're again, who those extra cards do mean something, that this idea that people skip over the commons, well, well, a very narrow ban at a certain point in the pack opening, stop carrying by the comments. And even those people, which are more franchise players, do tend to be limited, and those cards do matter and limited. So there's really nobody, this idea that there's this group of players that just don't care about commons really isn't true, that there are people who care about, everybody

cares about commons. In different ways, in different formats, in franchisees. players more often care than limited. The casual players more care and constructed, but the limited do have an audience and they do care about them. And just taking them away felt bad. Okay.

The next big complaint we got was the point of the aftermath was, so the Phrexians came, they invaded the multiverse, and there's some real ramifications. So ramifications number one is a lot of worlds were very hurt by the phrexians.

We didn't do a great job of showing that off in the boosterbacks. We showed that the king and queen and Eldrain got murdered. That was like our one preview card. And that was the one, like, oh, here's a real consequence. The leaders died of a world. That's a real consequence. A lot of other characters died.

In fact, one of the things that I get complaints all the time is, if you read the stories, there's all sorts of, you know, major maybe the wrong word, but named characters people know that die in the phrexian war and if you didn't read the novel, you have no way of knowing they die. Like, probably what would have been good is, hey, maybe we show a bunch of these characters that are dying in the story and give them one last glimpse so you can see them.

And then in the flavor text, talk about, and this was their last whatever, you know, like let people more aware of what happened. And like I said, as we went back to worlds, we did start getting into the ramifications of what happened. You know, Eldrain, things happen, Ravnika, things that, like things happen that really, impacted things, but it wasn't until we returned to those worlds that we saw that. So we should have seen that up front. Like, if part of the idea of the aftermath is to show that to you, we need to do that. And we didn't do a really good job of showing the aftermath in the ways of what happened. It's ways of what happened to the worlds.

We were very bad about showing who died. And we were very bad at the typical ramifications. We just didn't show that. So part of the idea of the aftermath was we show the aftermath. Eh, we didn't. The other thing that we over-indexed on something, which is, not only did the individual world suffer, but the multiverse itself, there were two major things that happened from a larger story context. The Omen Pass, which means that people are now able, non-planeswalkers could travel between worlds,

which is something that other than plainer portals was not possible in the past. And since the mending, literally nobody could travel other than planeswalkers. So a big deal. And from the story standpoint, it allowed us to get characters that normally couldn't get to another world to another world. And then the disparkening. A lot of Plainswalkers lost their spark. And I won't get too deep into this, but the thought process behind the disbarkening was there were a lot of planeswalkers. Over the years, we really got a giant raft of planeswalkers.

We only show so many each set. And there are so many planeswalkers, we couldn't show them all. And there's this format named commander where people love playing with their favorite characters but you can't play unless we specifically let you you can't play with plainswalkers as your commander so maybe what we need to do

is take a lot of these popular characters in tournament of legends, let people play with them and that we could focus on a smaller pool of plainswalkers that was a thought process and so one of the things that set went really heavy on is showing you a whole bunch of just sparked plainswalkers. In fact that's probably of the 50 cards in the pack,

I think at least 10 of them are dispersed planeswalkers. So that was meant to be a really big thing. Like, oh, look at all these dispersed planeswalkers. And I think the thought at the time was, oh, here's some of your characters you really like.

And now they can be your commander. But instead, the reaction for people was being a plainswalker is something special. This is characters that I really cared about. I liked that they were special. But now that are less special? I don't like that. And so I don't think that the sparkening went over all that well.

So the fact that the product leaned into the sparkening of one of his major things to show off, and the players as a whole didn't like it. That didn't go over well. It's like, oh, the thing we were leaning in, the thing that literally was like one-fifth the set, players were like, well, I'm not happy about that. So that's not, you know, I didn't want to see that.

So the fact that the set leaned on that. We also showed a little bit about the Owen Pass. We probably could have been a little more blunt about that. obviously the only paths have played a bigger role in some of the stories you know next year we have come back out of Titan breech for example and they like it really does become relevant but we did anyway the idea was we were showing you the aftermath it was called aftermath we did not we did not show you the aftermath

not in a way that we should and the parts we did show you some of the time were choices you guys weren't happy that that was the cause of the aftermath so there was that The other big thing was 50 cards is not a lot of cards It's just not a lot of cards You're used to having 300 cards And even though some of those are commons

In a set of 300 80 are common Like there's over 200 that aren't common And so what happened was There just was a lot of repetition I thought the part I'm sure the thought parts At the time was well But there's a lot of different versions of the cards

Maybe you see the same card, but you'll see different versions of the card. But for a lot of players who aren't collecting it, it's like I have the card. I have the version I can play with. I don't need, you know, there's people that do like different versions of it. I'm not saying that is not something people can enjoy. But there was too much repetition that people just saw the same thing too many different times. And that, I mean, when you're opening something, the fact that you so quickly, like I've already seen, like you're not even seeing commons. Like, we took the comments away from you, and you're still seeing things in repetition, right?

Like, you're used to seeing the commons in repetition, but seeing the uncommonds, and it just, it got repetitive pretty fast. And finally, I think the, another big mistake we made is, we didn't make the, the cards just in general weren't good enough. Like, we had 50 cards, and like, what are you excited to open? You know, there just wasn't enough there that you wanted to open the card. And so, I mean, one of the things we find a lot sometimes is we try something new. If we're trying to get you to experience something new, normally we want to make sure that the power level is at least at the normal levels it needs to be at. So there's just exciting things there.

And I think this, once again, we relied a little bit too much on the Deep Park, Planes Walkers for excitement. And in general, just overall, the general balance wasn't good enough. And so the net result. of this is, okay, we took a booster pack. People like booster packs. We gave you less cards. We took away limited. We sort of made a creative promise we didn't deliver on. The experience itself, there wasn't enough to be excited. There wasn't enough to be excited about, and then the repetition was too high. Like, it's just on every possible, I mean, the reason it got rated so low is

what was there, like, part of it is we leaned to some things that ended up being mistakes. We made some choices at more mistakes. But in the reality, and like I said, the reason that this got rid so low. And it's hard to voice how low 5%. It's hard. It is hard. It is so low. I mean, we reverse course immediately.

That is not just players didn't like it. That is players hated it with a burning fury. And I heard this. People talk to me. It just, in some ways, the reason I started with this. product was, it's the perfect storm of just bad decisions. Like, almost every decision about this product was a bad decision. I mean, like, sometimes we do things, and the idea behind it's really good, and we make all the

bad decision. And sometimes, like, you'll see when I do other versions of this, sometimes what went wrong is not lots of bad decisions. There was one really bad decision, but a lot of other decisions might have been good decisions. I think this set is kind of key in that almost every decision. Like, it is, it's hard. for me to look at something and go, oh, that clearly was the right thing we should be doing.

And the thing I will acknowledge is there are some component pieces of this that aren't inherently bad. I do believe there is an audience that doesn't care about limited, and there's an audience that would like, you know, I don't know, I mean, there's some elements we were trying here that maybe there's pieces of it. The problem, though, is it went so horribly bad that at least scared us off, a lot of this for the for the time being um and so anyway that my friends is aftermath boosters uh then like i said the reason i started with that is it is a lot of a lot of bad decisions in close proximity to each other in a way that in the way that i think is the reason i think it's got

some blistering numbers is i think the average player doesn't understand what we were up to like sometimes we do something you're like well you didn't do it well but at least i admire the concept. And this was just like, why are you doing this? I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Can I rate this lower possible? The other thing I didn't get into, by the way, is not only was it 5% in the top two,

it probably had the highest percentage of ones we've ever had. Like, not only did people hate it, but when you get outside of how many didn't vote a thing they liked, how many voted a thing they hated was super high too. Anyway, it was a very good example of a product making a lot of bold decisions that almost across the board were bad decisions. So anyway, guys, that is episode one. This is not a consecutive series, by the way. I'll just do it from time to time.

But I thought it's fun to sort of look at things that, I mean, magic has done a lot right. There's a lot of awesome things about magic. But we occasionally do things that do not go well. And so I thought that would be a fun series. So I will do more what went wrong. If you have suggestions for things you'd like to me hear about what went wrong, I'm happy to take suggestions. And I will be doing future issues, issues, future episodes of this.

Anyway, guys, I'm now at work, so we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.