While we won’t see the final revenue numbers for Magic: the Gathering from Hasbro until their annual report is released February, based on what we do know, it’s clear that 2023 will be the most successful in the game’s 30-year history. Although this did not happen without significant controversy, looking at the draft formats released this calendar year, it’s not a surprising turn of events.

However, with such a large, diverse, and dispersed community of players, it’s hard to see trends that occur at a larger scale than in a local scene. There’s no definitive accounting of what Magic players think as a whole, no way to holistically recap what the tens of millions of us who crack booster packs each year around a table think. It may not feel this way if you’re on Magic Twitter or in the comments section of a YouTube video, but Magic players don’t always have opportunities to share our thoughts. 

To remedy this, the team here at Cardboard by the Numbers endeavored to survey the limited Magic community about the state of limited Magic in 2023. We used prizes and paid media to try to reach the broadest possible audiences, and while we only received roughly 210 legitimate responses (about half that from our previous survey), we found the results to still be more than compelling, and to mostly match up with trends we’ve seen across the Magic: the Gathering online landscape — with some fascinating wrinkles to boot. We hope you’ll enjoy digging through these as much as we did!

With a median of 99 drafts and/or sealed events, to put it mildly, our cohort for this survey was quite the committed group of limited grinders: for context, Magic Arena tells me that I’m in the top 50% most active drafters for a new expansion if I play four or five times. The typical drafter here gave each premiere expansion between 20-25 runs on average, though that was spread out across platforms. The kind of player willing to take this survey was understandably much more enfranchised than normal.

Happily, the geographical break-down more-or-less matches the English-speaking Magic player base at large. With under 60% of the respondents located in North America, the game is much more international than it may seem from coverage. Due to only creating the survey in English and promoting it on English-language channels, we were not able to get the full breadth of international players, but hope to address that in future surveys by partnering with local stores and community figures.

Magic Arena was the most popular way to play the game at 90% of players, compared to 15% for Magic Online and 5% for Spelltable or third-party software. Compared to what we’ve been able to estimate for active player bases, this is actually a higher ratio of MODO players than the community at large, again representing the heavily-indoctrinated skew of our sample. An impressive 26% of respondents played exclusively online, and a higher percentage than I would’ve estimated myself draft at a private home: nearly 50%. 

We asked players to provide their all-time favorite limited environments for context, and the most telling thing about it was how biased it was towards expansions released in the last five years, representing the massive growth in the game during this time period. Unsurprisingly, then, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty was the undisputed top choice, with nearly 40% of respondents citing it as one of their top formats. This survey was conducted from November 11th through the 30th, though based on discourse online surrounding the recent re-release of the set on Arena, I imagine Khans of Tarkir would not retain its #3 placement — even if it’s exactly as fun as I remember.

The most exciting note about this chart is how this year’s March of the Machine is already regarded as a modern masterpiece. I’m curious to see if it retains this level of fondness from the community — surpassing that of even the original Innistrad! — in the years to come. LSV is one of the game’s most prolific and successful drafters and considers it one of the best, so I have a feeling it’s not recency bias driving its #4 placement on the charts.

It’s clear: March of the Machine is the favorite of the year, winning the hearts of 36% of respondents with an average rating of 7.5 on a scale of 0 – 10: nearly a half-point higher than second-place Wilds of Eldraine. This favorability is also represented in the most favorited new cards, with MOM cards taking half of the top six slots, as well as in players’ favorite archetypes, where half of the most-cited decks were from the format. 

What’s also clear is that the podcast Limited Resources had a profound effect on respondents of this survey. For example, LSV-favorite Hatching Plans is a lovely card, but its place as the most popular card of the year on the survey is wholly counter to its pick and play-rate according to 17Lands. LR co-host Marshall Sutcliffe was a similarly big Preening Champion defender, although that card’s ratings were more in-line with his advocacy. 

The audience who participated in this survey is less likely to be as Commander-focused than the typical Magic player, given that Commander is the most popular format in the game. However, only 17% of draft-heavy respondents playing even a single game of Commander Masters speaks to its lack of appeal at the price point. Price was something that nearly a fifth of all respondents cited as the biggest negative trend in limited Magic for the year, and the issue is only going to get worse with Play Boosters starting with Murders at Karlov Manor in February.

The remastered sets for the year were in-line with another in terms of play-rate and number of drafts, with the paper-only Dominaria Remastered and the Arena-only Shadows Over Innistrad Remastered both getting the attention of about half of our respondents. For our most devoted drafters, there’s about a quarter as much interest in playing with classic sets / remasters as there is in the newest draft environments, and that lines up pretty well with conventional wisdom.

Based on the kinds of respondents who filled out this survey, I would imagine that the audience who drafted expansions from previous years, engaged in chaos drafts, or played a Cube of any kind are vastly overrepresented compared to the typical player. However, as a Cube evangelist, I was pleased to see high marks all the same. As I’ve said many times on this site, Cube is the best way to play Magic. 

The trends on a set-by-set basis were fairly consistent, and this is where the sample’s biased towards the most-enfranchised players is a boon: these players have mostly played every major set of the year, and have a lot of reps in with each. They may be influenced by strong voices in the community, but they have a wealth of their own experience to validate their perspectives. As such, these scores are likely going to be lower across the board than the Magic-playing population at large (as this crowd tends to be the most critical), but will be more representative of the strengths and weaknesses of the format as well.

The unpopularity of Phyrexia: All Will Be One is typically pegged to its unforgiving speed and its resulting inability to support archetypes beyond aggro. March of the Machine was lauded for its diversity of options, splashy games, and removal strong enough to keep up with bombs. Tales From Middle-earth was regarded an elevated core-set. Wilds of Eldraine was generally favored, even if its speed and bonus sheet were not. The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, though possibly too fresh at the time of the survey to get the complete picture, was not as well received as I would’ve anticipated, with comments regarding the set’s complexity and color imbalance being the most common. 

While it may seem at first like much of the feedback is mixed, 45% of respondents to the survey said that “this year is better than most” in terms of limited play, with two players citing it as the game’s best ever. A solid 28% considered the quality of the limited sets this year to be on par with prior years, and only 14% had a negative opinion on  the matter. Overall, while there may be complaints about some aspects of the various draft environments, the modern design skeleton that underpins each new major expansion means that the floor is quite high — it was challenging to have a broadly unpleasant set for sealed or draft in 2023.

In terms of specific feedback, the most frequent positive trend in limited Magic this year was the bonus sheets, found in both March of the Machine and Wilds of Eldraine. Particularly in MOM’s “Multiverse Legends”, the amount of one-off build-arounds and compelling bombs found in the bonus slot of each deck created significantly more diversity in deck construction than a typical retail expansion, and the power-level that came with these cards helped drafting MOM feel closer to a Masters set than your usual Standard fare. More than 20% of participants in the survey specifically mentioned these bonus sheets as a positive trend for the year, roughly quadruple the runner-up, Battles — a new card type from the same set that inspired so many players to call bonus sheets their favorite trend of 2023.  The only other trends mentioned with frequency was the strength of commons. By increasing the average power of a card, we’ve had a wealth of playables this year in our draft pools this year, giving us more flexibility in making a deck that can achieve our goals.

In regards to negative trends in 2023’s limited formats, there was less unanimity as to what the key issues were. The escalated speed of formats and the increased (and soon-to-be-increasing) price of playing were tied for first, with about 10% of the survey’s participants calling them out each. The heightened release cadence, the strong impact of bonus sheets, and a general distaste of Universes Beyond were not far behind. The elevated importance of one-drops was called out a dozen times as well, which ties back into the speed of formats, but is interestingly just as popular as it was disliked. 

While we did examine quite a few cross-tabs for additional insights, with the sample size of this survey, none of our other findings were significant enough for us to share them here. That said, if you are interested to understand why people who own their own Cubes are much more likely to play chaos drafts or want to know (with a very low confidence interval) if the Italians or the French are more likely to hate Phyrexia: All Will Be One, feel free to leave a comment here or on our social channels and we’d be happy to run the numbers for you.

Cardboard by the Numbers is hoping to do more surveys like this in the future. If you’d like to participate in our next one, please sign up for our newsletter to make sure you don’t miss the call for responses, and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Threads! Thanks so much for reading. We have basic land coverage on the regular as well as new Magic: the Gathering infographics and analysis every week, so we look forward to seeing you again soon!

Miles Atherton is the editor-in-chief of “Cardboard by the Numbers” and has been playing Magic since 2006. Since studying Agricultural Economics at UC Davis, he’s built a career as an award-winning marketing executive in the entertainment industry with a love of data journalism. He’s also written for Anime Buscience and Crunchyroll News, serving as Executive Editor of the latter from 2016 to 2021.