Universes Beyond and the Meaning of Life

Late one afternoon several years ago, my therapist asked me who I was. Specifically, he asked, “who are you without other people’s expectations?” I was completely dumbstruck, unable to find even one answer that didn’t imply external pressure. “I am a student,” I almost said, but after five years it felt more like an obligation. “I am a runner,” but I hate it, and only exercise grudgingly for dubious benefits like long-term health. I had to sleep on it before I could formulate an answer that felt true.

A similar identity crisis has consumed Magic: The Gathering. A crisis sparked, it seems, by the annoucement of new mashup direct-to-consumer Secret Lairs and the 2026 slate of Universes Beyond (UB) booster products, the flames turbocharged by antipathy towards Magic’s Spider-Man set.

Head Magic designer Mark Rosewater has taken on the role of one-man volunteer PR crisis manager, saying on his Tumblr Q&A blog that UB is both inevitable and ultimately good for Magic:¹

Cross-branding is a weirdo phenomenon with a much longer history than just the current trend. The word itself crowds the mind with more products than a Cracker Barrel window display: Coca-Cola Santa tchotchkes and Star Wars Pez dispensers and Snoopy sweaters. An ad hangs on a museum wall, whimsically proclaiming that “Charlie Brown and all his Peanuts® Pals are Ford Salesmen, now!” (Child labor was doing fine in 1959, evidently.)

From a business perspective these are attempts to connect one brand (the ideas and images customers associate with a company’s stuff) with another complementary brand. You don’t cross-brand Coke and Pepsi, because those two things are in direct competition. Instead you cross-brand Star Wars with Coke, because people might buy more sodas to go with their movie tickets (good for Coke), and because folks might be inspired by their groceries to rent a movie (good for Star Wars).

For a bruisingly recent example, take Magic x The Office (NBC). Dwight Schrute, Hay King is, they say, good for Magic because the some The Office fans might be latent gamers, and those who already play Magic will pay extra. Dwight o' Lantern is likewise good for The Office because people who see him in Commander games might tune in to NBC later that evening. Both are ostensibly good for Magic players and The Office watchers because it’s a cross-endorsement for those who haven’t tried one or the other, and it’s a fusion for those who like both already.

But here’s the truth: once we start weighing UB’s success as a co-branded product, we’ve already lost a rigged game. If we accept these premises, then debating Universes Beyond’s dominance of Magic is like arguing which color of lead paint to slather over asbestos-filled walls.

I wish a cartoon like that really existed.² But alas, we live in a world that believes if you can’t sell it, it isn’t valuable. The opposite belief underlies Rosewater’s reasoning for UB: it sells, so it must be good. Michael Sandel writes in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets that

Rosewater’s defense of UB is based on the market’s “nonjudgmental” version of value. Universes Beyond is inevitable, says the Wizard that speaks through Rosewater, because it’s selling well, and its sales will be good for Magic. This is corporate sophistry, and it falls apart once we realize how narrowly this argument defines value and goodness.

High sales do not always indicate a good product. Take cigarettes, which also sell like hotcakes. Though valuable according the the market, cancer-sticks are clearly bad for human communities, and the propaganda machine of the tobacco lobby is a moral travesty. Subprime mortgages also sold really well until mid-2008, but only the most die-hard Chicago-school sycophants would claim that was “valuable.” Crypocurrencies went gangbusters until the fraud and uselessness of the industry became major news.

Universes Beyond is less morally compromised than tobacco, of course, but the market growth of Magic has its own downsides. Seven Standard-legal sets coming in 2026 reduces R&D resources for testing Limited. The pace increases the time and money costs to keep up with Standard, while increasing risk of bans creates further shocks to Standard prices. Magic’s approach to UB’s format legality and overall power level seems to be inspired by Darth Vader – “I’ve altered the deal; pray I don’t alter it further.” Botched rollouts, from Edge of Eternities’ compressed release schedule to Lorwyn Eclipsed getting line-jumped by Spider-Man, further shake players’ faith in WotC’s management of sanctioned formats.

Other drawbacks to Magic’s growth occur outside the local game store. As Magic grows, so too will the flotilla of plastic garbage in the Pacific, which in all likelihood contains a few booster-pack microplastics. That’s not to mention the prison labor that WotC contractor CartaMundi has used to pack boosters, or how WotC has variously paid or signal-boosted white supremacists, TERFs, sex pests, unrepentant misogynists, and countless garden-variety cheaters. Exceptions to Magic’s corporate mission these may be, but I’m not so naïve as to think we’ve already expunged the last noxious grifter who’ll ever profit from Magic. To the contrary, Magic’s increasing profitability is currently lining the pockets of the next as-yet-undiscovered shitheel.

Even if Universes Beyond is ultimately net-positive, it’s not exclusively or objectively good by any metric except shareholder price. Nor is Universes Beyond as inevitable as its proponents claim.

Imagine a Hasbro board meeting, circa 2012. One suit suggests, “hey, what if we nearly doubled the number of Standard-legal sets per year, and made half of them playable advertisements for other properties?” At the time, Standard and Draft were the most-supported formats, while Commander was in its infancy as an official format. The huge shift in tone and content would threaten Magic’s golden geese, which would tank LGSes, which would bring down casual players, too. Heck, one year prior, the now-iconic Innistrad had been seen as a thematic and mechanical black sheep (horror? Humans-matter? two card faces?); you can forget about Bagel and Schmear and Walking Dead Guy. The rest of the C-suite shouts the boat-rocking bigwig down and resumes business as usual.³

It’s not as if Hasbro suits suddenly discovered greed in the intervening years.⁴ What’s changed is that in 2025, Hasbro has fewer backstops against excessive pursuit of growth. There’s a parallel here with author Cory Doctorow’s theory of enshittification, the incentive structure that’s strangling the good ol’ Internet.

Step 1: Magic is good to its players by developing a flavorful, high-quality, fun game. Step 2: Magic makes the player experience slightly worse to lure advertisers. In pursuit of Universes Beyond collaborations, WotC made player experience worse with a Vader-esque legality rollout, bizarre Arena reskins of paper cards, and undercooked Standard staples that require multiple rounds of bans. It’s like Facebook, promising in 2007 never to harvest and sell user data, only to spend 18 years turning the platform into a cesspool of AI memes and targeted ads.

Normally, if a product got bad enough, its users (or players) would leave, “voting with their wallets.”⁵ But in the case of Facebook, users couldn’t leave until it was too late: your grandma doesn’t care how many ads she sees, because it’s her main way to keep up with family, and coordinate food and mobility, and view photos from last Christmas, and see the weather (because Facebook helped kill local news media).

Similarly, Magic players face steep switching costs that, when push comes to shove, keep many of us engaged with a game that’s gotten less fun. For one thing, the expense of the hobby keeps people from selling out – if you can’t afford to buy into another game’s Legacy without selling out of Magic, and the Magic buyer will expect a 40% discount, why sell? Even more important, Magic players stay in the game because that’s where our real-life friends are every week! There’s a social network keeping us at the LGS and in the Discord, just like there is for Grandma on Facebook.

But there are additional factors leading to WotC’s feelings of impunity. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Secret Lair and other collector’s items have grown enormously, which respectively give Hasbro leverage to circumvent the LGS distribution system and insulation against mistakes in Standard and Commander. Moreover, YouTuber SaffronOlive has made a convincing case that Hasbro’s hand might be forced, with quarter-to-quarter growth increasingly resting on Magic alone. All told, UB is far from inevitable, but rather a choice enabled by the particular incentives of locked-in players, rabid collectors, and a precarious parent company.

At this point, we’re ready to unite fans and haters of Universes Beyond under a single philosophy.

Fans say, “Just let me enjoy this.” As Kate Wagner writes, this response can often stems from an authoritarian insecurity, but charitably, let’s say it boils down to “this makes me happy, and that’s subjectively good.” This position is identical to that of the UB hater with the difference of one half-empty cup. The UB hater says, “This used to make me happier than it does now, and that’s subjectively bad.” Both camps agree on the basic premise, that buying or owning Magic cards can create subjective happiness, which is a good thing to seek.

I don’t disagree, but neither can I be content to stop there. These positions both define goodness as subjective happiness, rather than market value, but they still profoundly limit the definition of happiness to something only obtained through the market.

The distinction matters because products will always end up disappointing us. Cards bend and tear. Game engines lose their appeal. Gaming groups move away or have kids. Gaming companies hire one too many shitheels. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, then it will soon. I know this because all the UB haters started out like you, never believing they had a limit until WotC blew past it. And what happens then, if your sense of self dissolves along with your ability to derive happiness from Magic? This is the rigged game, the poisonous paint on toxic walls. The game plays out all over mass culture, with Swifties who think Showgirl is hack work, with Star Wars sequel haters, with any Clipper fans who thought having a billionaire owner was a good idea.

To transcend the ever-circular debate of Magic gossip requires a rejection of consumerism. We must discover what brings us meaning in the absence of buying or owning.

I return to my therapy appointment. Who am I without others’ expectations? Who am I in the absence of something to buy and display and use up?

I am curious. I find joy in a well-made sentence. I don’t care that I am a mediocre bird-watcher, because neither do the birds. I am a loving and supportive friend and partner. I like to gather with friends in the magic circle of gameplay, capital-M Magic included.

Game designer Patrick Sullivan recalls a Magic tournament where a high-ranking player went home right before the title match, walking away from fame and money. Onlookers cried out in disbelief, but the player explained himself simply, saying, “Sometimes you have to show the cards who shuffles who.” I laughed when I heard this, but since then it has become like a mantra to me.

Showing the cards who shuffles whom has, for me, taken the form of selling off an unused deck. Muting a Discord channel during spoiler season. Building a cube that won’t rotate and is immune to any aesthetic I dislike. Or, for an existing cube, intentionally taking a hiatus from set-by-set updates.

But we can go further. The ethicist Michael Sandel doesn’t only diagnose the ills of market values, but suggests a positive alternative: “Altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish.”

The exercise of altruism, generosity, and solidarity is the best immunization I’ve found from the empty logic of the market. Instead of asserting political beliefs through purchases, we can exert political agency by attending a rally or protest, like the nationwide No Kings rallies coming up on October 18. We can seek out challenging new ideas.⁶ Volunteer at a local homeless shelter. Spend a week’s Magic budget filling a community pantry. Invite the Cube or Commander group to a dinner party or a movie night, no Magic talk allowed. Talk about our identities beyond capitalism with friends.

Heck, we can even bring it up in therapy – just don’t go to Lucy Van Pelt for therapeutic help. She’ll either slap you, or try to sell you a Ford Falcon.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to my brother H. for useful discussion and sources. May you find universes of meaning and value far beyond what is available for purchase.