I'm here to be a bit of an apologist for it. Not full on, because I think all of the sets have been flawed at best, but I think just declaring it an era of design failure is missing the point. If you want a common thread for this year, this has been a design era of external pressures and how Limited design has navigated them.
Play Boosters
If you asked players what external pressure has been shaping Limited I doubt Play Boosters would be at the top of this list, but we need to start here to get anywhere else. Magic has made some slight adjustments to card design over the last 2 years to accommodate these, but has largely brute forced its way through the swap since Murders at Karlov Manor.
This has largely worked, and I don't think Play Boosters are inherently bad for Limited, but this baseline stress from them adds up with everything else to create a lot of the problems from this year.
Why is this the case? Less of each pack is commons that have been largely reserved in the card file to support Limited. More of each pack is rares and uncommons that need to be tuned to serve other formats, and less control is primarily in the hands of deciding the exact shape of your Nessian Courser equivalent. You boost removal to combat the rares with commons, but that just breaks down other common synergies in an almost two-for-one Aura way, where a stranded common synergy half is a fractional card in a high rarity brawl.
There's ways to make commons and formats that play around that, but there's also a lot of ways to make a set with commons that make sense for 2020 and don't play in 2026.
Lorwyn Eclipse: Kindred Sets
Lorwyn Eclipsed is a fine set to draft. Not phenomenal, but I played a solid amount of it with no regrets.
It also has the highest value-over-replacement of all time, because every other hard kindred set is trash.
Kindred formats default to every drafter getting on an isolated train and hoping it doesn't take them to Garbage Town. Select card with type, ignore all the ones without the type, hope you have 23 good playables and a functional deck. This mostly stems from the fact that half the cards in your colors aren't playable because they don't type match, but it also just comes from how your table opens too few payoffs in the future despite being in the “right lane”.
Lorwyn Eclipsed is... basically still that, but it takes notes from some of the best formats of all time to make a C+ format out of a F-tier baseline. 
A huge win for Kaldheim was overloading on the multicolor payoffs for each color. With sagas, legends, and lands, you ended up with enough designs that you seeded subarchetypes even within the same linear theme. By leaning into a guild structure and extending the roster of each primary type, Lorwyn Eclipsed did the same. It was subtle, but really caring about Midnight Tilling because you had multiple Morcant's Eyes versus wanting Graveshifter more with Morcant's Loyalist was a nice way to cut some of the normal Kindred autopilot.
Seeding the secondary archetypes mostly as different lenses to view the main archetypes was another great trick borrowed from Ikoria. Sometimes you got the right high rarity payoffs and drafted Vigilance in that format or Vivid in this format, but often it was just a case of wanting Prismabasher to work leading you to play a couple extra Changelings. Again, more ways to stop autopilot.
All that stuff I mentioned about commons struggling in Play Booster era is erased by this set. There's the obvious bit of needing every common with the type Elf to make the higher rarity cards work. There's the moderately obvious bit where different types can get away with more or less at common, but there are still effective ways to win games at commons outside of Goblins.
Then there's the less obvious way removal is reduced to a role player. 
To talk this through, Kindred synergies are usually less specific, more cumulative. Killing their Pestermite when they have Splinter Twin breaks it all up. Killing Goober Elf Two and leaving Elf One behind just rewinds them to one generic Elf in play. Even worse, they already might have gotten a turn of Two Elf rewards out of it, so you are down some fractional value. If you had just played Merfolk Two, you would have gotten your own cumulative synergies to pull back. Removal was largely about specific threats being so overwhelming you had to make that exchange, and it rarely felt stifling to the core synergies despite being reasonably prevalent and powerful.
Could Goblins have used a little more? Sure. Was it still a Kindred set where you sometimes just got hit with the type-aligned curve out with nothing to do about it? Yup. Did most packs have 1-3 options to pick once for the last 60% of a draft? Absolutely. But it wasn't pure misery like Ixalan or min-maxed late stage Zendikar Rising
There's a million non-draft reasons to want to return to Lorwyn. Draft wasn't one of them, but this set made sure it wasn't a mark against it in the end.
Small Sets
Now the worst of the year.
These stink. Wizards knows they stink. There's a couple good lessons about why they stink now that we have another 3 examples to go with Coldsnap.
The big thing is how much the reduced common pool changes the predictive math on commons. 
Consider Return to the Sewers from TMNT. Great common, best blue common by far, but significant diminishing returns as a four cost card.
In normal sets, running into that overkill Return-equivalent in a draft is an oddity. In TMNT, it wasn't. If blue was open, you would probably see a pile of them. My general TMNT heuristic was always take an uncommon or rare if it was in the pack, and that extended to even Return to the Sewers just because you could count on the next copies showing up.
Extend that to The Hobbit where the blue commons are good and drive a theme. You go into drafts with the expectation that if the color is open, you should always see multiple Lakeshore Apothecary. Whether thats three or four or five, it doesn't matter. Every time you should be drafting blue, you should be an Apothecary deck. In a normal set, there's often contingencies for a different blue deck when you only have one Apothecary, or the color is modulated by the gamble of Apothecary showing up. But small sets ruin that and homogenize decks, to the point that even if I loved the games of The Hobbit I didn't engage because of the draft being reduced to a loading screen for which precon you ended up in. 
Coldsnap skipped right through that by pushing for the design of getting five Surging Sentinels, reintroducing the uncertainty on getting enough copies of a common. Possibly on accident, possibly because of Eric Lauer, who knows.
Now we know all the levels, and we never have to make the mistake again.
I'll give a quick mention to Crude Bent Blade as an interesting topic for another time. It's a novel mistake that gives the opponent agency in playing the warped game it presents. And in the context of a format with multiple token generating keywords I get how you end up here.
You could also call Winter Orb a novel mistake that makes decisions in a warped game, and the idea of “interesting failure modes” sits in this weird middle ground of being important in keeping the game fresh and being an excuse for some of the most egregious designs.
But like a said, different exploration for a different time.
Regrading 2026
So if you eliminate the two small sets dragging things down, is 2026 still bad?
It's not good, but it's not really that bad.
I won't go through the whole list, but I did a check of the first 3 full size, non-Core sets of 2026 against every other year of the decade.
2026 was in the bottom half, but it wasn't last place or even second to last. But 2025 was a hell of a year for draft, and regressing to the mean might be the biggest gap between years making it seem worse than it was.
Marvel: the Universes Beyond Problems
If you asked players what external pressure has been shaping Magic, I don't doubt you would hear a lot of Universes Beyond. I don't think that has been true in the past, but in the case of Marvel it sure is true.
This has been discussed a lot, but you get away with a lot of Universes Beyond if playing generic commons naturally feels like the IP. Your Sahagin versus Fat Chocobo game doesn't need Cloud to feel Final Fantasy.
Your Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D vs. Red Room Recruit game needs Wolverine to feel Marvel, and that's a problem.
So you make a set warped around rares, where big flying superheros are supposed to dominate the games. Basically Dragons, and we have seen this before a number of times. 
Going back a long ways, the fun part of Fate Reforged was how every game dominating rare was broken in its own way. You could die to a big dragon, or you could end up in weirdo Palace Siege games on either side. If you had one rare and they had another, there was often a novel asymmetry as both players got to live their unique dream.
Marvel lacks the variety it needs in this department. It's almost all Dragons and Dragon-equivalents, and the games are just pointing removal at them or dying. And they tend to kill you in combat in ways that negate blocking, so the counterplay is just binary kill them or die. Even the Sagas are fairly flat in experience, some form of overblown Ravenous Chupacabra.
It ends up in this spot where the problem inverts on itself. Your highlight cards all feel the same, don't spend a lot of time in play, and deliver the same lopsided experience. Is it worse to have players not want to play Iron Man because it's bad, or have them not want to participate in the games involving it because the games are bad?
There are some uncommons that can carry back, but they also failed and didn't allocate the power to the namesake ones. It's the VS System “Wolverine is unplayable, C-tier Green Lantern villain Doctor Light has to be banned” issue once you scrape off the rares, to most players winning with Kazar is the same bland taste as winning with an unnamed hench-Common.
I'm being a bit harsh on the set, because some people really do just want to play with their favorite superheroes, but it fails to deliver a good version of that for draft.
Secrets of Strixhaven: Guild Sets
Yup, this was a five guild set. It wasn't in the Ravnica Allegiance best-of tier, honestly maybe even a bit worse than the original Strixhaven, but that still puts it as a fine draft set and on the good side of all guild sets.
A lot of fuss was made about how Witherbloom underperformed again and how Quandrix was almost not a deck beyond Converge. A lot of that fuss was just because the average Arena drafter sees a Bogwater Lumaret and pulls an anime nosebleed gag. Some of that was people not appreciating Witherbloom as an anchor for Converge or how good the temp Quandrix decks could be. The other common complaint was the power of Converge, but it was a nice secondary axis that would often come up even in Lorehold.
Or maybe people just don't get there is always going to be a worst deck in a guild set, it's just a matter of making sure it isn't unplayable. Maybe a player will low roll and not see a good seat for the worst archetype over 10 drafts, but they could also low roll and not see a specific lane in a normal set over 20 or 30 drafts too. Or they could fall into a feedback look and drop an entire color in those formats the way you might start to hard ignore Witherbloom if your early experiences went bad. The experience is there if players want to find it, and it holds up to the best of the rest.
I think returning to Mind Sludge and Voices of the Void with Arcane Omens was another instance of the “interesting failure modes” trap I mentioned with Cruel Bent Blade. I have less issue with Snarl Song, it was extremely powerful but I saw enough lone Snarl Songs in a game get bowled over.
I think my real issue was with the design of Silverquill. It did have the best win rate, but so much of that was binary around your own deck's fail rate. Even the Imperious Inkmage style tools to let you “get consistency” don't matter when the rest of the format scales over you so quickly, I would have rather seeded a more paced style of aggression than decks that either bash ahead by Turn 5 or lose. Maybe that doesn't work into Tome Blast, but that's more of a Tome Blast problem.
Solve that, solve the Arcane Omens problem, and the fun floor of the format drastically increases.
Does This Even Matter? Should Drafters Worru?
I've come in here defending a decent amount of 2026 and highlighting successes. I could even go longer about TMNT and The Hobbit being fine once you get past the small set issues, but I'm not passionate about debating D vs D+ vs C- grades.
But even with any defense I can supply of some of these sets, at the end of the day we are looking at a collection of five sets ranging from bad to just fine to draft that all ended up on the shallow side. Even if it wasn't a trash fire of a year for draft, it wasn't good.
The first and obvious macro thing to add to the blame pile is the density of guild sets. None of them live up to Ravnica Allegiance creating whole spectrums of Azorius and Rakdos decks, and everyone's opinions homogenize because cards are just less flexibile. There's no “old nerds can just name draft commons for hours and be happy” because no one has a huge angle about Phantasmal Forces being the secret sauce or how Failed Inspection was a consistent playable.
But really... does this even matter? Almost every issue with these formats was more about external factors than the set itself.
Was it right to return to Lorwyn or Strixhaven? Yes, those are pretty beloved planes and the returns were well executed.
Was it... yea I'm not even going to try to understand Universes Beyond contracts or negotiating the addition of sets to the schedule vs engineering staff ramp up.
Was it worth it to put Thor and The Hulk in packs? Probably, and even if you argue no this is the one set I think they made an unforced error on this year.
Was the problem making people draft small sets too long? Sorta, but neither of these was Spiderman levels of trash. Maybe in a perfect world these sets would be closer to how players would skip Battlebond or Modern Masters draft 10 years ago, but I don't think you can do that with a Standard-legal set. Also, small sets just stink and shouldn't exist.
Was the problem this slate of sets in a row? I think it's really hard to predict Marvel's outcome when lining this up years in advance, and I'm going to ignore small set nonsense, but maybe there's some lesson about back-to-back guild sets? Except nah, we did those in Ravnica sets a bunch of times, it was fine, and you are overriding any monotony by going from creature type guild set to spells guild set.
I think this is broadly to say that once you kick the small set mistake to the curb, which appears to be happening for a pile of reasons, this year wasn't bad for Limited in a way that matters long term. There's lessons to be learned, good and bad, but it's not like a shift in what a set looks like that diminishes draft occurred in January 2026.
This wasn't a 2022 or 2024, where systemic flaws with set design dragged down things that had no reason to fail. If anything, the quality of Lorwyn Eclipsed and the two small sets relative to the handicaps they were dealt has me more excited for what Reality Fracture and the sets beyond have in store without that baggage.
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