Hey, lets make a new basic set for the popular game system Magic: the Gathering. You know, the set which forms the basis of Type II tournaments. Well for 5th Edition Wizards of the Coast had a huge net survey and got lots of input for which cards to include and tried hard to balance the set and make it a good limited tournament set by having some creature balance among each color. That was hard work so for 6th, lets ask a group of marketing people who can tell us we need a step up from Portal and they think green packaging will sell more boosters. Then we can get an expert who was at Protour Speed-dial and might have played since then to choose good cards. Then we can eliminate all creatures with more than one word of text other than flavor. By researching the net, we can find all the great combos which have been tried over the years and remove one combo card from each one. Some one in Research and design has noted that only 20 cards from 5th were ever listed in the Dojo list of decks to beat so we can easily remove these cards. Then lets make the foils even more special by not including them in this set.
Finally we need to make this product appeal to a market we do not presently reach. Well, kids like big creatures and hate duplicates so by removing all trampling creatures they will not be bothered by this set and continue to buy Pokémon. Tournament players like playable tournament cards so they will continue to buy the stand alone sets without bothering with 6th. Casual players like a variety of cards from different sets which have complexity so they can create interesting combos, so they will avoid this set like the plague. Thus we have the perfect set full of cards so vanilla they can neither offend nor help any deck, all of which are reprinted, and appealing to no present sector of the magic community.
