MTG Cardsmith Community Forums
The Results of my Survey
Hey MTGCS! A couple days ago, I put up a survey so I could figure out how to better cater my set and product designs to the MTGCS community, since you all are the ones who I share my custom card designs, custom sets, and fan products with. I got 30 responses to the survey, which honestly is more than I had hoped for, so I'm super happy about that, and I figured that I'd share some of the results of the survey with you all, especially since some of you have requested it. I'm going to largely pass over the free response questions, since it's hard to share everyone's responses to those and a "bite-sized," easy-to-process manner, and they were more added to provide clarification and give people a chance to explain their answers to the question being posed. I might do a followup to this with better written analysis of the free-response questions (I, of course, have read everything, it's just been a challenge trying to figure out a way to explain everything without word-dumping), but right now I just want to share my findings overall from the survey.
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(The category without a label is Competitive Commander. All the categories below Preleased/Sealed were write-ins from the "other" category on the google form.)
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Tell us how much you agree with the following statement: Fetch Lands (T, Pay 1 life, Sacrifice CARDNAME: Search your library for an [land type] or [land type] card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle your library.) negatively impact the health and enjoyment of standard formats they're included in.
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Tell us how much you agree with the following statement: Standard formats of the past 1-2 years have had at least one reasonable entrance point for new and returning players, whether that be a certain deck or a certain MTG product.
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Tell us how much you agree with the following statement: I think it is important the mechanical identity of MTG colors are continuously explored, shifted, and innovated, even if that results in some risks being taken in card design and an occasional color pie bend/breaks slips through as a result of these risks.
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Here's everything I generally concluded from the survey, both from the free-response questions, and the multiple-choice ones:
1. There is some discontent among the MTGCS community with the color balance in MTG. Namely, a good deal of the community thinks blue and green both have mechanical identities that encroach on the design space that other colors could be using, which causes them to become ubiquitous in a lot of formats. On top of that, most community members seem to agree these are the two colors that R&D pushes the most, not only separately, but especially together. There were references in the free-response questions to Kinnan, Oko, and Uro in particular.
Similarly, the community thinks that white and, to a lesser extent, red are both overshadowed by other colors that can play their roles better, in part due to the sheer amount of design space consumed by blue and green. One participant in the survey pointed out that a lot of green's traditional weaknesses have been negated by the printing of green noncreature spells that counteract them (e.g. Veil of Summer and Heroic Intervention), and another pointed out that one of the reasons for green's recent creep in power is because it is starting to use design space typically taken up by blue (e.g. Efficient card draw and ways to stop spells from resolving).
2. Blue in particular is a very polarizing color. I put this separate from the previous point because I thought it was interesting that blue is simultaneously loved and hated by the MTGCS community. The big kicker is that oftentimes somebody will like blue for the same reason another hates it. For example, some people like blue because of its power and large design space, while others feel the power and large design space detracts from the potential of other colors. Additionally, counterspells seemed to be a hot topic among responses in regards to blue, some saying they really enjoyed blue's control motif and lack of focus on building the board (instead building the hand) and that counterspells were central to that style of play. The detractors, on the other hand, wrote that counterspells led to a lot of "feel bad" moments in gameplay and created an environment that was very unfun.
3. It is almost unanimously agreed white is not in an ideal spot as a color. Of the people who thought there was an underpowered color among the past three years of new cards, all but one of them said that white was an underpowered color. Generally speaking, and as I mentioned in the first point, it is agreed that white's design space is too narrow, and that almost everything white can do another color can do better (e.g. Red is a better aggro color, Blue is a better control color, Black has better removal, etc.). White's lack of card draw was also explicitly referenced multiple times, and I think finding white's space to generate card advantage from the deck is going to be crucial to making more engaging white designs in my future custom sets.
4. Generally speaking, people seem to like "Project Booster Fun," or at least the plethora of alternate-art/alternate-frame cards it has brought. One of the things I was most interested in finding out was whether or not the MTGCS community generally saw the enhancement of booster packs that started in Throne of Eldraine with things like showcase cards and borderless planeswalkers was a good idea, and from what I can tell based on this survey, MTGCS community members largely do like them. Because I'm bound to what frames MSE has available, I'm not sure how capable I will be of creating these special showcase cards for my future custom sets, but I now know it is worth trying.
5. COVID-19 has had little impact on how the MTGCS community perceives the game. I asked this question more or less for my own curiosity, because personally my opinions of WotC as a company and MTG as a game have both declined since the start of the pandemic, and I largely attribute that to not being able to play paper magic face-to-face with others, which generally helps me see the positives of this game and brush off qualms and issues I have with WotC and the game. I wanted to see if others shared this sentiment, and evidently they do not. While very few people's opinions of WotC have raised since the start of the pandemic, very few people's opinions have lowered. The effect is more pronounced for MTG as a game, but generally it appears opinions of the game have slightly raised on average since the start of the pandemic. Personally, I'm glad to see, at least within the MTGCS community, spirits around the game are largely staying high even when we can't meet in person to play.
6. The majority of MTGCS community members learned to play the game from a friend, family member, or other peer, and they think others should learn the game from their peers as well. This was among the first pair of free response questions in the survey, and almost everybody who answered mentioned some form of involvement from a friend, family member, school organization, etc. In fact, more people mentioned learning from peers and using the collection those peers had than people who mentioned introductory-level products like Intro Packs, Deckbuilder's Toolkits, and Planeswalker decks. I've been interested in creating a new introductory-level product for a while now, but looking at the results of this survey, it seems like that might not be necessary. New players seem to come into MTG more from word of mouth than they do advertisements or flashy intro products, and it seems more people agree that there's a good entry point to standard currently in the game than there are people who disagree.
7. There's likely space for most dual lands to be uncommon rather than rare. In this survey, I probed a good deal into what people thought about rare lands. With a large percentage of any given standard deck's price currently being in the shocklands that are practically required to be in any 2+ color mana base, and the big controversey/demand for fetchland reprints that are driving up the price of most eternal formats, I wanted to know how people felt about rare dual lands and their impact on the game. While a majority of MTGCS community members think that reprinting fetchlands into standard would negatively impact the format, a majority of MTGCS community members did not think rare duals are critical for the average set's limited format, nor did many MTGCS community members think that rare dual lands couldn't be printed at uncommon. While there wasn't as clear a consensus in either direction as to whether or not rare dual lands hurt MTG more than help, I think there is the potential to experiment with formerly-rare dual land cycles being printed at uncommon in a set designed for standard.
8. Even despite what quarrels and frustrations we may have with the game, we all still love MTG in this community. This survey did a lot of probing into "sore spots" of the game, whether that be people's frustrations with the mechanics of colors or the issues people have with the game's management and distribution. However, despite all that, the MTGCS community overwhelmingly still has a positive opinion of the game, and for most of us our opinion of the game has raised overall since we first started playing. We may have issues, and we may be able to think of a few things WotC could do to improve the MTG community and/or better manage the game, but we think this way and get frustrated with the game because we love this game, and we want it to be the best it can be. Heck, I'd hope that most of us here at MTGCS make custom cards because we love the game and want to show the community what we would do if we had reigns over its design and management, all because we want it to improve. MTG is, for many of us, the best card game in the world, and we want it to stay that way.
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So, what do you all think? Does my analysis of the data seem logical and well-rounded? Were there any outcomes/polls/results that surprised you? I'd love to discuss!
This is my first time doing anything like this, and I thoroughly enjoyed looking everything over and getting a better understanding of what the community thinks of this game and how it's designed and managed. To be clear, I did not partake in the survey and thus I had absolutely no sway over how these polls and charts turned out. If you still wish to participate in the survey, I'd love for you to go on ahead and take it so I can get a larger sample size, and thus a result even better indicative of this community as a whole. I'd like to thank the 30 of you that took time to take this survey already. I know it was long and I asked a lot of questions. If this survey is generally well received, I'm interesting in doing another with a few questions I missed putting on this initial survey as well as followup questions to better clarify and probe results found in this survey. For those of you who read through all this, thank you so much, and I hope you found it interesting!
I know you all were interested in seeing survey results, and here there are!
I wasn't able to post all the survey results and analysis in a single comment due to the character limit on posts and comments. Everything is uploaded now.
Very glad to contribute! I hope Sorcerers of the Shore uses this power for good.