Dark Ascension made it worse instead of better, but at least it let you board into Lost In The Woods + 42 Forests if you wanted a good laugh.
Oh, no, I mean Avatar. There are multiple people giving their takes on the format and I can already tell they're being biased by the fact that people are playing this shit wrong.
I did play in the days when Snappy was $10 and Lili was approaching $110, but I only got to do a 1-of-each draft of it. Otherwise I did a bit of Scars and really got into drafts with RTR.
is that they seem to have no understanding of how to pace themselves
You know how they started shitting out Commander cards everywhere suddenly and started bombarding so much product into the format that they accelerated its decline by years and years? I think this is the modus operandi of people who took charge of the company from that Origins era onwards: corporate-level diktats, quotas for certain shit.
Origins seemed like the testing ground for centering the stories around planeswalkers, and then from BFZ all the way to War of the Spark, they were the driving force and shoved into absolutely everything. I don't think design really liked this idea - since they've really pulled back on the number of planeswalkers per-set.
Commander's ascendancy saw them try out having more legends and legends-matter cards in Dominaria, at which point they started printing a fucking ridiculous amount of legends into everything. Legends are a little clunky at uncommon-level for limited design, so I think this is also a diktat quota.
More-recently, they've latched onto UB and are trying to shove it everywhere - WH40K was the test there, and the smashing success of Lord of the Rings seemed to have solidified it as a money-printer. And so the corporate diktat will be to hit so much UB in a year.
It's a very clunky model that clearly is not sustainable, but to hit Hasbro's targets for growth, they're evidently fine with cannibalizing their core audience. Because the consumer is so retarded, it's going to serve them well for a while, I think, until a credit-crunch takes out that entire class of people.
I also think Battlebond and Conspiracy were both attempts to see if there was interest in 2HG and unique drafting-experience sets, both of which puttered out. Had they been bigger hits, they'd have probably become as overprinted as all that other shit.
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