Although it’s been in the works for seemingly nearly three decades, today is the first I’m hearing about Mood Swings, a brand-new strategy trading card game from Magic: The Gathering head designer, Mark Rosewater. And the reason that I, and likely many others, are just now catching wind of this game is because Wizards of the Coast has announced it’ll be publishing Mood Swings as a real product, exclusively through Secret Lair.
This game, which Rosewater has been working on since 1998 (yep) with the idea of creating a more accessible trading card game. A noble idea! Magic: The Gathering is a fantastic game that has done well to keep creating entry points for new fans through different releases and IP crossovers, but there’s no denying that it, and most modern trading card games, are dense in rules and even more so in vast libraries of cards and products.
Contrast to Mood Swings, which is playable right out of the box of 45-randomly selected cards (of 133 with varying rarities) that make up the core product. That’s it, one box, one complete strategy trading card game for 2-4 players.
Rosewater says that games are fast – about 5-10 minutes for two players – but still contain all of the hallmarks of a good trading card game. So that means fun card interactions, adaptive strategies, collecting and trading, but in a game modelled after something you’d more traditionally associate with a standard, French-suited deck of 52 cards. And with these instantly-playable but randomised decks, what you play at home with your set is going to be a recognisable, but probably very different one from what you might play using a friend’s.
The cards themselves, which come in familiar rarities and the same five colours you might know from Magic: The Gathering, and even feature sketches of published art from actual Magic cards, all work on the idea of emotions (hence the name). Cards on the field of play are called Moods, and players compete to amass the most points on the board via each Mood’s assigned point value, naturally modified by a bunch of different card and game effects.
It looks fast, simple, but with plenty of opportunity for devious behaviour and a lot of really valuable parallels to regular Magic play that suit it perfectly as a first TCG, and the card layouts are really nicely-designed to help keep track of the game state. Here’s a video of Mark Rosewater and Ari Zirulnik (creative lead at Magic) playing a demonstration game:
Mood Swings will launch on June 1, 2026, exclusively through Secret Lair. More information is set to be revealed at MagicCon: Las Vegas this weekend.