Magic The Gathering

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I'mma real anime gurl said:
Is there any more spoilers for Dr.Who because Eldraine decided to pull what Strixhaven did but with enchantments
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Oh geez! They made the Fluxx a card! I was trying to forget!!

Hang on. I just realized something...

On cards like Yasmin Khan...
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ok, but...
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The Doctor isn't a title, or a creature type, or even a word in the textbox. Most we get is...
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How badly are the rules documents going to be on this? Think there will just be a full list in the rules of what counts as "the Doctor"? (I guess it just bugs me after the whole "oh we're going to rename poisonous to toxic" thing. - I really can't tell what their rules policy is any more.)
 
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Flexo said:
Hang on. I just realized something...

On cards like Yasmin Khan...
View attachment 5239387

ok, but...
View attachment 5239388

The Doctor isn't a title, or a creature type, or even a word in the textbox. Most we get is...
View attachment 5239390

How badly are the rules documents going to be on this? Think there will just be a full list in the rules of what counts as "the Doctor"? (I guess it just bugs me after the whole "oh we're going to rename poisonous to toxic" thing. - I really can't tell what their rules policy is any more.)
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Yawgmoth is kind of The Doctor given that he is really the first real Doctor in MTG.
 
Well White is getting their own craterhoof behemoth.
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Eldraine is doing an entire full art reprint of classic cards... in anime!
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Finally, everyone has a chance to play the power 9 finally!
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There's so many fun possibilities you can pair with FoB as a commander!
 
Flexo said:
How badly are the rules documents going to be on this?
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As much as I hate this Universes Beyond stuff, it definitely works. My partner is a Who fan up to the 11th (I think, whenever the Doctor became a woman actress) season, and at least had interest in looking at this. It's what WotC would want to attract new players, but it's disenfranchising long-term players. ESPECIALLY when I have to deal with these retarded mechanics in competitive constructed formats (I swear the guy signing up with the fucking sticker goblin deck is just trying to make everyone hate him).

So at this rate, everything will be a creature type. "Time" is now going to count. It's going to get as bad as the gender identity spectrum soon enough.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
Is this actually true? Is this shit working to bring in New Players...as a long term player?
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I was in a story the other day and overheard a young couple talking about how this LotR magic stuff interested them and they were curious about this "commander" game they heard about. They wanted to just watch it played or try and experience a bit of it that night before really diving in.

Whether they stay long term or LotR ends up being their only product I don't know. I suspect sometimes that this universes beyond stuff is more like a sugar rush to the system, giving them a brief spike as players get a few things but I doubt folks really stick around indefinitely. Heck today was commander game-day and I can say that if much of our group played outside it they would probably quit as they just don't care for some of the more degenerate plays out there. I would be some of these newbies might buy packs of that LotR set, but many beyond that? (heck I'm a seasoned player and even I have trouble keeping straight all of the pack options nowadays - I can't even imagine what it would be like for a n00b.)

(I still say WotC screwed up letting Brawl get labeled as "standard commander" instead of "intro-commander." )
 
Flexo said:
(I still say WotC screwed up letting Brawl get labeled as "standard commander" instead of "intro-commander." )
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Meh, Brawl is nothing like commander is the issue. It's singleton with a companion. It doesn't introduce people to commander it's because the unique parts people like about commander (politics, the possibility people will ignore you while you assemble some retarded 5 piece combo under their noses) don't exist.
 
Oddjob OTP said:
Meh, Brawl is nothing like commander is the issue. It's singleton with a companion. It doesn't introduce people to commander it's because the unique parts people like about commander (politics, the possibility people will ignore you while you assemble some retarded 5 piece combo under their noses) don't exist.
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Multiplayer Brawl is an okay commander-lite format.

1 v 1 Brawl is faggotry and WOTC are retards for making Arena a 1v1 only client.
 
It's finally here! My favorite time of year...

MaRo's state of design article!

Highlights from it. Pun intended because in his sections MaRo has the year overall and each set divided by "highlights" - the good stuff - and "lessons" - the mistakes.

Also, as The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ hasn't released at the time of my writing this article, I'll be talking about it in next year's "State of Design" column.
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That should be interesting. "We sold of ton of cards! And now the one ring is breaking formats!"

From "lessons" for the year:
  • There needs to be more synergy between sets.
This has been an ongoing theme ever since blocks went away. We want consecutive sets to have mechanical overlap so you can continue to update a deck as new sets come out. We did have some mechanical themes (artifacts, Phyrexians, etc.) run through multiple sets this year, but we also had other themes that were too linear, too focused on a single set. I'll admit that this is a hard problem to solve, as each set has so many different factors that it has to address, but it's something we need to learn to do better in the world of each set being played in Limited by itself.
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Aka "We had a problem with blocks."
-Gets rid of blocks.-
"Well now we have new problems without them!"

Unfinity has this moment...
  • Some players appreciated that over half of the cards were Eternal legal.
This was a very divisive topic, but numerous players seemed excited by the fact that a portion of the cards in the set could be played in eternal formats. One of the biggest liabilities of previous Un- sets was that they weren't legal in the most-played formats. Many fans of Un- sets were excited that they could play the cards in formats they formerly couldn't, especially Commander.

LESSONS​

  • Other players greatly disliked that there were Eternal-legal cards in the set.
The Eternal legality of over half the cards was a big point of contention. Many players felt it turned them off the product. Regardless of whether you liked them, there was a general agreement that players would have preferred the non-legal ones to be in a silver border. The acorn was hard to see and made it trickier to tell what was Eternal legal and what was not.
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Also this could be understatement of the year...
  • Stickers had several logistical issues.
The stickers were small. They were easy to lose. The glue didn't hold out well, so the stickers would quickly lose their stickiness when reused. The stickers didn't stick back on their sheet well once you removed them. This all combined to create a barrier to play. It also led to a lot of players complaining that most of the sticker cards were Eternal legal.
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Remember the old days when a mechanic would be tried out in the wacky "un" set as a kind of testing before being made eternal legal? Pepperidge farm remembers.

Lessons from Brother's War:
  • The set was hard to connect to if you didn't know the source material.
For long-time fans who have talked about the Brothers' War for years, the set was an exciting opportunity to finally see things they'd heard of come to life in card form. But if you weren't familiar with the story, it was hard to connect with the set since driving force of its structure matched the story. Many less enfranchised players reported they were a bit lost and had trouble connecting with the set.
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Yeah no duh. But I also want to smack him for this because you know what's also neat about the set? It gives newbie players a chance to kind of connect with the veterans. As someone who has had a lot of friends kind of drift into MTG lately they often ask me about how things used to be (or at least humor my old man ramblings). So yeah, a set that has a lot of callbacks to the past is a chance for the n00bs to go "hey old fag, why is this person important?"

  • The Transformer cards felt out of place.
Transformer as an overlay made some sense because the set was about giant robots, but the core of the set for many players was nostalgia. These players felt seeing cards of a different IP flew in the face of that.
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Nothing to add here.

March of the machine lessons.

LESSONS​

  • The story was too big for one set.
While players generally loved the scope, many felt we had bitten off too much for just one set. The common reply was that they wished this had been two sets (with some suggesting that it should have been more than that). There was just too much going on to do it justice with the number of cards available.

  • The Phyrexians were too easily defeated.
This complaint is connected to the last one. As the invasion and the response to the invasion all had to be done in a single set, it felt as if the Phyrexians lost almost instantaneously upon attacking. The Phyrexian threat had been built up for over a decade, so the quick defeat felt frustrating for the many fans of the Phyrexians. If we had two sets, we could have made the Phyrexians successful in the first set and included a surprise victory for our heroes in the second set.
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Now the best part...

MARCH OF THE MACHINE: AFTERMATH​

HIGHLIGHTS​

  • Players liked that Wizards of the Coast was experimenting.
Some players have asked us for years to produce sets without Limited in mind. Others just liked the fact that we were willing to think of products in a different way, as it might allow us to do things we normally couldn't.

  • There were a bunch of fun individual designs.
Most of the positive comments on the set came down to card-by-card reviews. There were numerous fun designs. We were called out on one group of cards in particular: the legendary creatures that had formerly gotten planeswalker cards. There were many Commander players who enjoyed that some of their favorite characters could now be commanders.

LESSONS​

  • The set was too small.
Fifty cards just isn't enough for a whole set. There was too much duplication when opening a box, and there just wasn't enough in the set to explore.

  • Most players didn't like paying the same amount for fewer cards.
This was probably the loudest complaint. We experimented with selling boosters without the commons, and it didn't go well. The notes I got were either "give us the same number of cards as normal" or "charge less."

  • The set was sold as story focused, but not much happened story-wise in the set.
The premise of the set was that it was going to tell the aftermath of the latest Phyrexian war. Yes, many Planeswalkers lost their sparks and King Kenrith and Queen Linden were killed, but not much else was told through the cards. Players expected story spotlights and more online stories. The set should have delivered more on its premise of showing the aftermath of the war.

  • Many players seemed unhappy with the Planeswalkers losing their sparks.
Planeswalkers have always been the special characters of Magic. Many players didn't understand why we had decided to remove their sparks. The game has plenty of legendary creatures, so why did we turn what was the most unique group of characters into something more mundane? Also, the fact that there wasn't a definitive list meant players would have to wait and worry about the fate of their favorite Planeswalkers.
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It is fitting that aftermath had 4 lessons while every other set had only 3 - but boy you should have had so many more. Aftermath was almost as embarrassing as 30th and something's wrong in corporate if it went through all of production without someone going, "wait, this may not be a good idea."
 
Biggest problem with Aftermath is that most of the cards are unplayable in every format other then low powered EDH. Nissa is a good card in older formats, Calix is a good card in standard, I guess Pia and Ob Nixlis are 4 ofs in a pioneer aggro deck and a T3 standard combo deck and there's an uncommon that sees play in humans but everything else is commander chaff or 1 ofs in standard.
 
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Where the fuck does he find these players to cover his ass when he pushes for stupid, retarded things? He did the same fucking thing with Companion - somehow there was a crop of people who "loved" the mechanic despite the fact that casuals have no fucking idea what a sideboard is or that companions even exist, and everyone even mildly peripheral to a constructed format hates the fuck out of that retarded, aborted mechanic? (Which was anyways an idea they stole from hearthstone lel)

Who the fuck likes that Un-cards are eternal playable? Every single person I know that plays in the competitive formats where those cards are legal fucking hates them because they're so out of place and you can't counterplay a random card effect. I have never seen a single one of them appear in an EDH game, and anyways I have not met a casual playgroup that had an issue with the silver-bordered cards as long as they weren't some of the onerous ones that make the game take 30x longer. Maro imagined a problem that didn't exist - Unstable sold like fucking hotcakes and none of those cards were playable anywhere - and created a set that no-one liked, no-one bought, and no-one gave a rat's ass about the legality of. Meaning he, yet again, imagined a demand that wasn't there and created a product no-one wanted. A lot like "standard commander" either in the form of brawl or in the form of companions as a mechanic.

Who the hell cares about planeswalkers and sparks? These are characters that most people have gotten tired of because they're all flat, boring characters who will get dramatically retconned at a moment's notice that have been shoved around nonstop for like a decade now. Going back to the way it was back in the earlier days of Planeswalkers, when people still generally found them cool because there were 1-2 at most in a set, seems like it'd be a great idea.

And then the fact that Brother's War should have been 2 sets, March of the Machine should have been 2-3 sets, and Aftermath was a confusing jumble - was he really surprised by any of this? Look, storytelling has never been magic's forte, but compare how the Alara block handled its big plot device to anything recent. It still baffles me that they... are so adamant about this choice, but so often flirt with going back to two-block sets. Who pushed for the one-block shit? Was it Maro?
 
  • There needs to be more synergy between sets.
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This retard faggot says it every year, and nothing is ever done to fix it.

  • The set was hard to connect to if you didn't know the source material.
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If maybe you rereleased the source material on the website instead of focusing on taking away context to make Urza look worse than he was in the source material and stupid Nigger Faggot shit?

This complaint is connected to the last one. As the invasion and the response to the invasion all had to be done in a single set, it felt as if the Phyrexians lost almost instantaneously upon attacking. The Phyrexian threat had been built up for over a decade, so the quick defeat felt frustrating for the many fans of the Phyrexians. If we had two sets, we could have made the Phyrexians successful in the first set and included a surprise victory for our heroes in the second set.
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The hilarious part is this is the best writing the set had.

Of course the Phyrexians would get utterly annihilated. EVERY SINGLE PLANE at minimum has a world ending threat on it.

  • The set was sold as story focused, but not much happened story-wise in the set.
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NOTHING EVER HAPPENS STORYWISE, Your stories fucking suck, Magic has written one good plot in the past 15 Years. You useless fucks continue to make the worst soulless slop put out by big corporations amazing in comparison because none of you stupid dipshits can think writing wise beyond "If we put a faggot and a nigger in the forefront we can half ass everything else and get away with it"

Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
Where the fuck does he find these players to cover his ass when he pushes for stupid, retarded things? He did the same fucking thing with Companion - somehow there was a crop of people who "loved" the mechanic despite the fact that casuals have no fucking idea what a sideboard is or that companions even exist, and everyone even mildly peripheral to a constructed format hates the fuck out of that retarded, aborted mechanic? (Which was anyways an idea they stole from hearthstone lel)
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Out of his ass, its a straight up lie.

Maro imagined a problem that didn't exist - Unstable sold like fucking hotcakes and none of those cards were playable anywhere - and created a set that no-one liked, no-one bought, and no-one gave a rat's ass about the legality of. Meaning he, yet again, imagined a demand that wasn't there and created a product no-one wanted. A lot like "standard commander" either in the form of brawl or in the form of companions as a mechanic.
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Because the Unsets are his baby, every single one of them was a thing he pushed to have happen and he used his position to shove them down player's throats because the first two sold like fucking ass so he attaches shitty gimmicks to them like making the third one "draftable" and forcing Sheldon to make silver boarded legal for 2 months when Unstable came out.

Who the hell cares about planeswalkers and sparks? These are characters that most people have gotten tired of because they're all flat, boring characters who will get dramatically retconned at a moment's notice that have been shoved around nonstop for like a decade now. Going back to the way it was back in the earlier days of Planeswalkers, when people still generally found them cool because there were 1-2 at most in a set, seems like it'd be a great idea.
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In a Vacuum people should care about planewalkers and sparks. Going back to "we are printing less planeswalkers" won't solve the writing issues. There were less Planeswalkers in Return to Ravnica and that was still dogshit. Quite frankly I think Saffron Olive is right about why we are gonna get less planeswalkers

"Planeswalkers aren't good in Commander so now they can use Mythic slots on more EDH cards instead of Planeswalkers"

Who pushed for the one-block shit? Was it Maro?
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Yep because 3 set blocks were "UwU twoo hurd for the poor designers"

Mark Rosewater is a retarded, incompetent moron and should have been fired ages ago.
 
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I just want to say I really appreciate how fitting the PFP was for this post. I was totally hearing the whole thing in Rich Evan's voice.

Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
Who pushed for the one-block shit? Was it Maro?
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Well he says "we" but sometimes you wonder how much it was him.
Challenge #2—Small sets

For years we've had three-set blocks with one large set and two small ones (with some later years having two large sets and one small one). Throughout those years, we struggled with the third set. How do we add enough variety to keep the players from getting bored with the world while still making something that played well with the first two sets? The Two-Block Model solved this problem by getting rid of the third small set.

One of the most eye-opening things about the Two-Block Model was realizing that some of the problems we attributed to the third set were in fact about small sets. Giving a small set its own identity that also plays well with the large set is problematic. Change too much and the sets feel disconnected; don't change enough and the new set isn't exciting. The third set hid this problem by making the second set seem better in comparison. By removing it, the second set got more focus.

We experimented with a bunch of different approaches to help the second set. Oath of the Gatewatch had a huge mechanical differential (the two sets were mechanically more distinct than normal). Eldritch Moon had a giant tonal shift. The block changed from mystery to cosmic horror. Aether Revolt tried keeping things more the same, being additive rather than subtractive. Players were unhappy when mechanics they liked dropped out between sets, yet also complained that we didn't explore new mechanics enough. For example, Eldritch Moon both didn't have investigate and also didn't have enough meld cards.

In addition, there was the Draft problem. There's a consistency with drafting with only large set packs that we can't replicate with the small set. They're not big enough to draft alone, but lining them up to draft smoothly with the large set is tricky. Once again, we want to continue themes so that the two sets play nicely together, but we also want to do something different to give the small set its own identity.

We've made numerous changes to try to fix this problem. We started drafting the new set first. We put in more packs of the newer set. Starting with Oath of the Gatewatch, we even began making the small sets a bit bigger to try to fit in more things to make the draft work. While we've improved things, as the data I talked about above showed, we're still not making drafts with two sets as popular as drafts with one.

Finally, we discovered that some of the third set complaints turned out to be "last set of the block" complaints. There's a fatigue that sets in on any block. We discovered that nine months was too long. For some worlds, it turns out six months is too long.

[snip]

PROBLEM SOLVING 2.0​

Players liked having more change. Players liked having more large sets. Players weren't enjoying the small sets as much as the large sets. This seemed to have a straightforward but bold answer. What if we stopped doing small sets?

Four large sets a year though would be too much—both in number of new cards and in the amount of work we would need to do to produce them. Okay, what if we did three large sets a year? That would work except it would leave a hole in the schedule in the summer. Was there something we could fill it with? How about the product we were sad went away? What if we filled the slot with a core set?

Not exactly a core set, as there were still some problems with core sets to solve, but how about a new product that was similar to a core set? That got us to the right number of cards and, if constructed correctly, could solve a few other outstanding problems.

The next problem was what would three large sets mean for the creative team. Would each be its own separate world? We have the team in place to design two worlds a year; was three a possibility? And did it even want to be three different worlds? Weren't there some worlds that we wanted to spend more than one set on?

We hashed through all of this and arrived with a brand-new model, what I've been calling the Three-and-One Model.
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RE: Planeswalkers not being good in commander that's because standard/injected into modern planeswalkers are never designed for commander. Even a lazy fuck could do it without effecting power level for 1v1 formats.
Example:
Kaito, Dancing Shadow {2}{U}{B}
Legendary Planeswalker — Kaito
Whenever one or more creatures you control deal combat damage to a player, you may return one of them to its owner's hand. If you do, you may activate loyalty abilities of Kaito twice this turn rather than only once.
+1: Up to one target creature can't attack or block until your next turn.
0: Draw a card.
−2: Create a 2/2 colorless Drone artifact creature token with deathtouch and "When this creature leaves the battlefield, each opponent loses 2 life and you gain 2 life."
Loyalty: 3
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Sees some play in standard, I know people have been trying it out in legacy because picking up a Baleful Stirx and drawing a card or two is neat (I imagine bowmasters have completely killed this line but whatever)

God awful in commander though, but if you changed the +1 or -2 to "for each opponent" suddenly it's maybe worth playing since 3 2/2 deathtouch artifacts that drain 2 when anyone sneezes on them isn't a bad investment for 4 mana and the +1 is kind of interesting and you can make some deals or just shit on the stompy player.
 
Oddjob OTP said:
RE: Planeswalkers not being good in commander that's because standard/injected into modern planeswalkers are never designed for commander. Even a lazy fuck could do it without effecting power level for 1v1 formats.
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I mean, its mostly a meme the problem isn't that planeswalkers are bad and get attacked it's that people just shove the "Ones that are good in constructed" into their decks with no thought as to how those planeswalkers actually function in regards to their deck.

I've won off the back of some planeswalkers because they were the right ones played at the right time and not just into a field where they downtick and die.
 
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