New World Order

New World Order refers towards Magic R&D's movement towards putting less complexity in the common rarity slot. The concept of New World Order was introduced in 2008 to battle complexity creep.
==Description==
R&D has always tried to make the cards as simple as possible (which is sometimes seen as "dumbing down the game"). At the time of Time Spiral block, Wizards of the Coast had noticed that the number of people who played Magic was going down. R&D identified the following causes: comprehension complexity, board complexity, and strategic complexity.
The solution ended up being a tool that trading card games had always had: rarity. How could R&D get things into the hands of the experienced players without overwhelming the less experienced players? They simply had to keep it out of common. They knew that beginning players bought fewer boosters. This meant that the percentage of relevant cards they own that are common is simply much higher. The theory behind the New World Order was this: they had to be very careful about what they made common. They had to redraw the line for what level of complexity was acceptable. Some complexity at common was allowed, but less than they had used in the past, which meant it was a resource that had to be carefully managed.
To offset the shift of complexity, the New World Order allowed higher rarities, especially uncommon, to tick up in complexity. The goal wasn't to remove complexity but to shift where it was positioned in the game. Once R&D thought of complexity as a limited resource at common, it radically changed how they approached making commons. Because the theme of a set by its nature tends to involve complexity (themes tend to require players to care about something you don't normally care about), it meant that they also had to allocate a certain portion of our common complexity to supporting the theme.
One of the rules of New World Order is that common cards don't affect more than one other card while on the battlefield for simplicity of tracking the board.
===Introduction of Play Boosters===
Although elements of New World Order live on, the introduction of Play Boosters in 2024 meant that R&D had to increase the complexity at common again.
===New New World Order===
An April Fools joke by Wizards of the Coast on April 1, 2013, introduced the concept of New New World Order. It started from a possibly believable premise and then just incrementally got crazier and crazier.
==References==
Category:Wizards of the Coast