When you think of Wizards of the Coast and trading card games, you think Magic: The Gathering (or, if you’re old enough, the days when they printed the Pokémon trading card game). That’s probably not going to change any time soon while Magic grows from strength to strength and crossover to crossover, but that’s not going to stop the publisher from finally trying something new.
After much speculation and mystery around a “redacted” preview at this weekend’s upcoming MagicCon in Las Vegas, today Wizards lifted the lid on just what it’ll be about: a brand new trading card game developed by head Magic designer Mark Rosewater called Mood Swings.
“I originally came up with Mood Swings in 1998,” Rosewater recently told io9 and other gathered press at a recent briefing over Zoom. “And for 28 years, I’ve been trying to make this game.”
Magic fans are perhaps no strangers to Mood Swings, conceptually at least, already. Rosewater has spent much of those last three decades not just trying to convince Wizards to make something that isn’t Magic, but teasing players with his vision for a radically different TCG experience from Magic in fits and starts. “Magic is an amazing, amazing game,” Rosewater continued. “But Magic is a complicated game […] we were talking in the pit, which is where [Magic‘s] R&D sits, and we were talking about the idea of complexity in gaming. And the idea is, some games are so complex you kind of have to play them a bunch of times—one time through, you don’t even know what’s going on. Others […] you play it once, you understand the game.”
“It’s a spectrum. I think Richard [Garfield] had three genius ideas when he made Magic. One is the color pie, which I love. One is the mana system. And one is the concept of a trading card game. So I was looking at trading card games, and I said ‘well, obviously Magic‘s on the complicated side. What’s on the other side?”
What’s on the other side, after years of thinking about it on Rosewater’s part, is Mood Swings. A two-to-four-player game (although it can be scaled beyond that), Mood Swings sees rival players cast emotions at each other, counting up their value to see who holds more. Games are designed to go fast, with a first-to-three format that should see them conclude in around five to ten minutes, and are stripped of as many layers of complexity to still be strategic but as quick to pick up by people unfamiliar with TCG mechanics as possible.
“I wanted to make something that’s a little more universal, that was something that everybody could relate to,” Rosewater said of the game’s emotional concept. “My mom is a psychologist. In college I wrote a play called Leggo My Ego, where all the characters were emotions […] there’s a lot of top-down design, the cards represent what they are, and I just liked emotions as being something super universal that—a lot of people know what fantasy is, but everybody knows what happiness is, or sadness, or just, you know, the human experience. That’s another fun part of the game, the game is a little bit lighter [compared to Magic‘s tone].”
Mood Swings has no resource system to track; each deck comes with a single rule card explaining the entire concept of the game, and the game only needs one deck to be played. Every numerical value in the game is measured by a dice motif for simplicity, and each card explains all of its interactions in a sentence or two at most. While a color system exists to group certain kinds of moods together, they are only referred to by color, rather than being given specific names like Magic‘s color pie—it’s perhaps one of only a few of Mood Swings‘ real acknowledgments of the fact that it’s being made by the people behind Magic, outside of the fact that its cards reuse “sketched” versions of artwork from published Magic cards (Rosewater noted that this was done to evoke Mood Swings being in an experimental, prototype state of the game, but future editions could begin using completely original art).
Those are all the ways Mood Swings immediately feels different from a game of Magic: The Gathering. But Mood Swings is still a trading card game—except even how that works takes a different tack than Magic does. There are no Mood Swings boosters to be found or traditional preconstructed decks, and for now, it won’t be purchasable at your local game store: Mood Swings will be sold exclusively through Wizards’ Secret Lair platform, although with much broader availability than that platform’s usual run of limited variant Magic cards. Mood Swings will be sold as a “complete” game in individual decks of 45 cards, but every deck will include a randomized selection of the 133 cards in Mood Swings, broken down as a mix of 23 common-rarity cards (of a possible 48), 14 uncommons (of 40), 6 rares (of 30), and 2 mythics (of 15). So while deck building and trading aren’t as outright necessary as they are in a game like Magic, they still exist within the game for people who want to engage with them.
It’s certainly one of the biggest experiments Wizards has made in trading cards outside of Magic for a very long time. But for Rosewater, Mood Swings represents the beginning of something new and the slow realization of a dream he’s had for years.
“Normally when I make a Magic set, I work about three years ahead of time,” Rosewater said. “It’s very exciting when it comes out, because I’ve been waiting for years for people to see all the work I’ve done. [Mood Swings] has truly been a passion project for me. I came up with it in 1998, and the reason that I didn’t give up on it is that I really, really, to the core of my soul, believed in it.”
“I tried every which way that you could imagine to get the game made. I did not give up on it. Aaron Forsythe, my boss [and vice president of Magic design at Wizards], says that my superpower is persistence-slash-stubbornness. I’m really, really, really excited.”
Mood Swings decks will be available for $25 beginning on June 1 through Secret Lair.
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