Mark Rosewater explaining Mood Swings at MagicCon Las Vegas (Photo by Nick Wolf)

Mark Rosewater has been trying to sell Mood Swings since 1998.

He played it with colleagues. He played games at lunch with his wife Lora, who served as his sole playtesting partner for years. He made a version with 300 cards handwritten in marker on blank playtest stock. In 2016, he convinced a programmer friend to build a working digital demo. He pitched it, repeatedly, to a company that kept not making it, for reasons that made complete sense at the time and would eventually become irrelevant.

All that's in the past, though. Today, Mood Swings goes on sale at MagicSecretLair.com. The wait is over. It only took 28 years.

"I've been talking about making Mood Swings for almost three decades," Rosewater wrote in the official announcement. "It was a great idea that I simply couldn't give up on. Good gameplay comes from iteration, and I've been fine-tuning this game for 28 years."

What Is Mood Swings?

Mood Swings, put most simply, is a trading card game. Each box contains 45 randomized cards drawn from a full set of 133 — 48 commons, 40 uncommons, 30 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Rosewater estimates that a two-player game takes five to ten minutes and requires 14 cards total, seven per player. Everything you need to play comes in the box.

The cards represent emotions. Not creatures, not spells, not lands — emotions. They use Magic's five colors and score points using dice values displayed on the card face, ranging from zero to six. Players take turns playing one card at a time, and whoever wins three rounds wins the game. The player who loses a round draws a card, keeping some hope alive for anyone in a hole.

For three or four players, a Hurt Feelings card included in every box gives the player in last place an extra card play per turn. It is, mechanically speaking, the exact thing it sounds like.

The art on every card is sketch-stage Magic artwork — the pre-final drawings artists submit before receiving notes and completing a finished piece. Magic fans will recognize the underlying images, but they won't have seen these versions.

Magic fans will recognize the art of Increasing Ambition; it's no accident that specific art was selected for marketing material.

Why It Took 28 Years

The short answer is that the things that made Mood Swings difficult to sell for 28 years are the same things that eventually got it made.

The longer answer starts in 1998, when Rosewater began thinking seriously about what he called the "barrier to entry" in trading card games. Magic, specifically. The gap between knowing nothing and knowing enough to sit down and actually play was, in his view, too wide. He wanted to close it.

His solution was to remove deck building from the equation entirely. You buy the game, you open the game, you play the game. The randomization that defines trading card games is still there — each pack of Mood Swings draw 45 cards from a 133-card pool — but the preparatory layer that Magic demands before you can even start is gone. As Rosewater put it: "If you go to your friend's house and play their copy of Mood Swings, the cards won't all be the same. You'll recognize some of the cards, but others will be new to you."

He compared the experience of Mood Swings to a Magic cube: the person who built it made all the decisions, and everyone else just sits down and plays. Mood Swings, he said, has "all the things I love about trading card games, fun card interactions, adaptability, collecting, and trading, but in the style of a traditional card game, something you could buy off the shelf and play immediately."

During our sit-down with Mark at MagicCon Las Vegas, where EDHREC was able to play a few rounds of Mood Swings with the man himself, he said he "wanted to go wide rather than tall" with the game. "Mood Swings is a game that more people can play, so we could sell to more people. Trading card games are fun, but the only problem right now is most trading card games are just complex. Everyone has the same model — they want you to go really deep. This is more casual. It's a different idea."

The problem, he said, was that "more people can play" is a different sort of sell to a company that historically favors a "fewer people play very deeply" sort of model. The concept of a direct-to-consumer model where you only need to manufacture enough to sell through a single online drop didn't exist in 1998. But the time it did, Rosewater had Mood Swings ready to take advantage of the new option for distribution.

Rosewater said a VP associated with Secret Lair had actually played a Mood Swings prototype eight years ago, the month he joined Wizards. What he remembered, and what eventually got the game scheduled, was precisely the quality that had made it a hard sell for so long. It was different. Direct-to-consumer meant they didn't need to produce at retail scale. They just needed enough.
"All the things that were kind of the negatives for many, many years finally became the positive," Rosewater said. "The thing that I felt held me back all these years finally became the advantage. And then it got made."

The Look of Mood Swings

Art director Colby Nichols, who handled the logo, card back, packaging, and card frame design, described the aesthetic direction as wanting to create something that "felt like it lived in the margins of Mark's time making Magic."

In keeping with that vision, the frames are inspired by zines and craft projects; an aesthetic of hand-drawn rough drafts and playtesting, mid-creation rather than fully produced. The rules text is centered, a callback said Nichols to another "first" set Magic players would recognize in Limited Edition Alpha.

The card back runs Magic's five colors as a gradient, spiraling clockwise from the center. The only foil card in the set is Love, the headliner, which also holds what Nichols described as the record for fastest art ever created for a Magic or Mood Swings card. The artist was Rosewater:

Everything went through several iterations, including the card frames themselves and the packaging that purchasers will receive via Secret Lair, said Nichols:

The People Who Will Never Play Magic

There is a specific pitch Rosewater has been making for Mood Swings that has nothing to do with the people most likely to buy it.

"If you're a fan of Magic and you have friends or loved ones who are just never going to play Magic," he told EDHREC at MagicCon Las Vegas, "this has allowed you to introduce to your friends 'I'm going to share with you my love of trading cards in a way that you understand and enjoy.' Maybe if they play this, now you're a step closer to playing Magic. Now you understand what a trading card game is."

His wife, Lora, is one of those loved ones. She playtested the game with him for years over lunch. She will, by his account, never play Magic. "But this, this is something she'll probably be into," he said.

The game introduces the underlying concepts of a trading card game — randomized cards, card interactions, the idea that each copy of a game is slightly different from every other copy — without the rules overhead that ends many people's interest in Magic before it starts. "We are teaching you things about Magic secretly," Rosewater said. Some of those people might eventually find their way to a Magic table. Most won't, and that's fine too, as long as they had a good time with Mood Swings in the process.

"I think this would make a really good digital game," he added. "It's got very low real estate on the screen. It's fast and it's asynchronous. It'd be a great mobile game." Whether any of that happens depends on how the Secret Lair release performs. "The potential future is very open," he said. "Nothing's off limits."

He called Mood Swings his "love letter to trading card games." It's his attempt to make something that captures everything he loves about the genre and puts it into the hands of people who would otherwise never encounter it. And after 28 years, he's finally able to ship it.

Mood Swings is available today, June 1, 2026, exclusively at MagicSecretLair.com.