The road to Magic: The Gathering’s March of the Machine: The Aftermath has been a bumpy one. The whole set was leaked, which sucks, and Wizards responded by sending Pinkertons after the leaker, which sucks even harder. The preview season was rammed into just one day, the story was just two short chapters, so people were feeling pretty fed up before the set even launched.
Surely the launch would still have some buzz though, right? Getting your hands on Tyvar the Bellicose or Nahiri, Forged In Fury and seeing how bomb they are would help pick up this set’s rock-bottom reputation? Wrong, because even the Arena launch of The Aftermath has been a disaster.
Problems first arose at the start of the week, when Arena suddenly stopped working on Android devices. The problems were so widespread that Wizards issued 2000 in-game XP for free to all players as an apology, something it only does when facing the most extreme technical difficulties.
By the looks of it, the answer to this problem was to just release Aftermath two days early. Instead of launching on Thursday, it dropped with very little forewarning on Tuesday, and all of a sudden Android was back in the fold. Problem solved, right? Again, as is the case with pretty much everything Aftermath-related, wrong.
There have been lots of upset players, whose plans were upended by the surprise drop of Aftermath. Content creators have had to cancel plans to ensure they’re able to do their job at a moment’s notice. Players bought into drafts and events just minutes before the drop, unaware a whole new set was launching that day. 48 hours early doesn’t seem like a big deal, and normally it wouldn’t be. But after the long list of things Aftermath has already done wrong, it’s hard not to just be exasperated with its Arena rollout.
More importantly than the timing, how the set is available on Arena feels like a kick in the teeth. In paper, you’re able to buy packs of five cards in an Epilogue booster, and all six of them will be from The Aftermath. On Arena, Aftermath boosters are instead a mix of March of the Machine and The Aftermath cards. On my very first pack of The Aftermath, I only got one card from the set. The rest were from March of the Machine, a set I’ve bought many packs for since it arrived on Arena.
The reasoning behind this makes sense – it’s a 50-card set, and with Arena’s duplicate protection it’d be too easy to complete full playsets of the whole thing. But the answer to that really didn’t have to be selling me stuff I already own in packs not clearly labelled as containing older cards. Aftermath has proven that not every Magic product needs to be a booster set, and maybe Arena could have been the perfect venue to experiment with other methods of getting the cards out there, the way Pokemon TCG does with its mini-sets.
Aftermath could have been a non-randomised purchase on Arena, a $50 “get the whole set” deal like the Historic and Explorer Anthologies, or Hearthstone’s mini-sets. It could have been tied into a Mastery Pass instead, with Aftermath packs rewarded for levelling up. It could even have been packs of two or three cards, rather than paper’s five or six. Anything feels less disappointing than opening a new set and getting another bloody Khenra Spellspear.
The set has been in my hands for less than 48 hours, and I’m already worn out with it. With so much controversy before launch, an unsatisfying surprise drop, and then an even weaker product offering, it feels like Aftermath is doomed and Wizards just wants to get it out of the way. Despite the unending hype machine of Magic, I’m happy, just this once, to let Wizards move onto the next thing, just so we can all stop thinking about The Aftermath.