Magic The Gathering

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Morethanabitfoolish said:
Party is one of those mechanics dedicated to morons like me, who look at terrible cards or mechanics and am compelled to try to force something worthwhile out of them. Given how many humans have "I can fix them" mentality for romantic relationships it's unsurprising to see similar idiots for CCG shit.

It's arduous, annoying and difficult. But the seething faces on people's face when you beat them with shitty decks is great.
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And it's surprising how many of these problems can be fixed with clones or changeling.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
Play more bad cards to make your bad cards work.
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Really it was a mistake for the game to ever print anything after beta.
 
Honka Honka Burning Love said:
Play more bad cards to make your bad cards work.
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There's a decent 2CMC changeling iirc that applies ward 1 to everything, even you. So that's nice. No 1CMC one tho. Buuut
there's also the 1CMC equipment that gives changeling and the Infinigger Engine Maskwood Nexus.

But yeah it doesn't really work if you're trying to make a specific creature that isn't a tribal into a tribal.
 
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You have to be in black though which is not really a great color for party overall but he's at least good at attacking which is important because the payoff for assembling your unstoppable Exodia in party inevitably encourages you to risk it by turning them sideways.
 
Party is not a mechanic that works in constructed because, by its nature, you're talking about a win-more mechanic. In its stint in standard, it was... okay-ish because UW had a concentration of good, aggressive creatures that just happened to be one of the types, and it was running a sometimes-spell-pierce that would catch people off-guard.

It works much better in commander, because you can actually run a payoff card in your command zone. The issue with it in 60-card was that the 'payoff' rewards were dogshit useless unless you had a full party, but if you had a full party... well, you were already basically winning, right? And so your best bet was just to jam luminarch aspirant and linvala - cards that were just good and didn't really meaningfully interact with the party mechanic. It was a dumb, poorly-designed mechanic that isn't even a flavor win: no druids? no bards? no barbarians? etc.

I love it in Commander, it's a real deckbuilding challenge depending on your colors. Nalia offers up immediate advantage (party-future sight) and a big reward if you hit full party. Burakos / Folk Hero offers up steady card advantage and a scaling on-attack ramp trigger which winds up being better than having an 'all-in' full party ability by a landslide.

Burakos / Haunted One creates an utterly insane aristocrats deck, and pushes you to use really bizarre cards that fit the types, particularly warrior. I imagine you don't often see tallyman, titan hunter, or bellowing mauler. (It clicks when you remember that Yawgmoth is a cleric, and that the party tutor can snab and potentially play him for one mana.) Party-Tazri is also kindof interesting, since while RG don't really have good party cards (tajuru paragon is kinda shit, but run it anyways), you get to run some fun cards with access to that - Vizier, Tycoon, Chemister, and a strange pet card of mine Sages of the Anima.
 
All this talk of parties and changelings, reminded me of something from the Doctor Who mechanics.
Each card with Doctor's companion is a legendary creature. In Commander games, you may have two commanders if one of them is a card with Doctor's companion and the other is "The Doctor." That means a legendary Time Lord Doctor creature with no other creature types. So, one of the incarnations of the Doctor from the Doctor Who™ decks and not a legendary creature with changeling. Sorry, Morophon. We see right through you.
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It just amuses me that they invent changeling to smooth things out - and then increasingly have to make cards designed around its existence. (If anything, it convinces me that changeling should have been something like, "choose a type, it becomes that type.")

Oh yeah, the other time was a standard-legal card in unfinity.

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So, the set needed a common green pump spell. Usually that type of spell will boost a creature until end of turn between +2/+2 and +4/+4. As this was an Un- set, I wanted to find a variable to care about that would average in that range. It took a little searching, but I finally found one: words on the type line. Most creatures have the creature card type and then one to three creature subtypes. This worked perfectly. I made the card early in design, and it stayed untouched for a long time.

Flash forward to the conversation about Eternal versus acorn. While we had never counted supertypes, types, and subtypes on a card before, there was nothing about it that the rules couldn't handle. However, the problem came from play design. Most cards only have a handful of words on their type line, but there was one exception. The changeling mechanic (from Lorwyn) had every creature type. The mechanic has been used a few times and is on over 50 cards. Embiggen plus changeling meant enough damage to instantly kill any player in any format. That combination would mean having to make this an acorn card.

I asked, "What if I could tweak the card such that we avoided that combination?" The issue was that I had to do it in a way that didn't add a lot of words to the card. It would be better to have a clean acorn version of the card than a convoluted Eternal version. The design team was fine with this being an acorn card, but I had faith that there was a clean answer. After much thought, I found an answer that only involved adding one word to the template. If we targeted a non-[any creature type], then it would hit almost all creatures save Shapeshifters and that one named creature type. But what should that creature type be?

As this is an Un- set, my goal was to have it be the funniest option. What creature type could we reference that would make people smile when they read it even if they didn't understand right away why it was there? My first suggestion was Brushwagg.

Brushwagg had originally shown up in Mirage and had taken on a meme status among the Magic community as a silly one-of creature type, so much so, that we ended up making a second Brushwagg in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. We talked through many other options but kept coming back to Brushwagg until finally we gave up searching. Brushwagg it is! There's also a sticker that needed the same trick, so we used Brushwagg for that as well. Had this problem happened early enough that we could have made art for it, my gut says we would have put a Brushwagg in the set. And that is why Embiggen says "non-Brushwagg."
 
Where, in the text of "Doctor's Companion," would I assume that "the Doctor" implies exclusively a Time Lord Doctor? There's 15 doctors.

If I have fifteen apples, and I will give you a free orange if you buy an apple, I wouldn't tell someone "I'll give you this orange if you buy the Apple." Which apple am I talking about? Either I'm referring to a specific apple, or English is not my first language.

What they should have put in the mechanic was, "the other includes 'The Doctor' in its name." I guess they're squeamish about speaking clearly, though, and prefer a mechanic that does not function the way that it reads. But, well, the inability to distinguish the meaning of simple articles does explain a good bit of modern design, I guess.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
What they should have put in the mechanic was, "the other includes 'The Doctor' in its name." I guess they're squeamish about speaking clearly, though, and prefer a mechanic that does not function the way that it reads. But, well, the inability to distinguish the meaning of simple articles does explain a good bit of modern design, I guess.
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Excellent point, but it looks like they wanted you to be able to pair the companions with The War Doctor too.
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What's even funnier to think about is that "Time Lord" is supposed to be one type. If you want to get autistic about it (and we are playing magic after all) should the above be 3 types in the line? Time, Lord, and Doctor? Or why isn't it "Time" and "Lord Doctor"? :D

I'm just waiting for someone to figure out some insane combination - like Peri + Doc #13 and call it "lesbos crush!"
 
Flexo said:
like Peri + Doc #13 and call it "lesbos crush!"
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And then I make sure to kill them first and say "Dykes Die"

Edit: Also There was a far easier way to attach Doctors to their Companions without having to fucking around with fucking Typelines.

Instead of putting Doctor as a creature type...have The Doctor and Masters have the Creature type "Gallifreyan Time Lord"

And put "THE DOCTOR" as ability text that allows it to be paired with Doctor's Companions.
 
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So after years of reading Maro's articles, I can see he has an incredible gift for getting himself out of problems that he creates. With the average person unable to remember a year or two in the past, no wonder he comes across as the savior of magic to some people.
 
Yeah, I'm sure a non-mono blue Orvar can be trusted. :)

The simic guy who's a 4 mana clone is probably fine as a doctor though. I'd rule 0 it.
 
Flexo said:
Excellent point, but it looks like they wanted you to be able to pair the companions with The War Doctor too.
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But The War Doctor still has The Doctor in the name. Same with The Renegade Doctor. There's of course awkwardness because there's a word or a number between them, but it's far more intuitive than fucking around with creature types. Particularly when the ability doesn't even mention what is, apparently, the full creature type.
Morethanabitfoolish said:
Even by the standards of Commander these Doctor decks look like they're based around a a myriad (lowercase, not a keyword) of abilities.
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The Universes Beyond decks have thusfar had far more... intricate? Designs. The Warhammer ones had a whole host of different stuff they messed around with, though the LoTR ones were a little more down-to-earth. The issue I see here is that they're fucking with suspend and vanishing - I actually like these mechanics being goofed around with, and I love a lot of the designs in these decks, but it's 100% true that these will be anathema to new players.
 
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