I am in this weird space where Magic used to be my primary hobby, but because of the many numerous problems with the game I am playing it less and less, but I have not found adequate hobbies to fully replace it, so Magic still continues to live 'rent free' in my head even though I don't like it.
I've been trying Warhammer 40k as a hobby replacement. I really enjoy painting models, but it is a solitary activity. There is a bit of a hurdle before I can graduate to actually playing 40k and get into the social aspect of it.
Kinda the same for me, I started brainstorming ideas for TTRPGs, TCGs and board games and to get more experience I started trying out games. Most of the times I go for games with good 2 player mode to play with my wife (my favorite so far is Res Arcanum, it even has a draft mode if you want that). Alternatively go play online some TCGs on digital clients (I did play pretty much all digital CCGs in my lifetime, I revisited some but nothing is what I am looking for. elder scroll legends was great when it released, eternal had also a great draft mode). MTGA is actually free if you are good at drafting. Or play some good solo deckbuilder games like slay the spire.
As someone who has played paper yugioh where every 3rd core set is essentially a horizons tier rotation to the meta, its really important for people to getting into the game for there to be the aggressive reprint policy that yugioh has in order for them to actually be able to onboard to the game. Every set from the previous year is guaranteed to be reprinted in a much more affordable and easy to acquire version, usually also including format staples or tech options from previous sets. While you wont be on the cutting edge of meta, most deck archetypes released will still be able to compete at a local or regional level if teched for the meta, and if you fall too far behind with a deck you like, the current meta will be reprinted within a year or so. While this does have the unfortunate effect that yugioh cards hold next to no value, being able to play the game in the first place should take precedence over abstract market forces keeping new players priced out of the metagame.
"being able to play the game in the first place should take precedence over abstract market forces keeping new players priced out of the metagame." You hit the nail on the head here, the financebros of MTG are what drove me away from playing the game (aside from the PInkerton incident). I want to play Legacy and Vintage, I want to play premodern, what I don't want to do is pay thousands of dollars for cards from what are in essence scalpers.
@@priinceoftiime daily reminder that Force of Will costs less than 10 bucks on mtgo. Digital legacy is not expensive, only the paper version is kinda pricey (and even then, I'd argue very comparable to higher power edh).
I remember reading a post from MaRo saying that gameplay/rules complexity is the biggest impediment for new players to gen into MTG and I wholeheartedly disagree; IMO how expensive competitive decks are is the biggest hurdle. P.S. don't pay for EDH staples, proxy them.
Don't you dare cite Yugioh as doing anything right in the area of card prices. Konami operates on an even more perverse level of FOMO than WotC. They make sure the only cards that will actually see play are printed in such small quantities that they become Sheoldred tier expensive, ban out the older cards that compete with the new stuff to enforce a meta, and reprint the card in such massive quantities that the people who put in their $300 per playset can recoup maybe $30 if they're lucky. Yugioh's only format is essentially working like Modern but the only cards entering the format are coming from standard core sets that have no way of really being played with each other. There will be maybe an archetype or one major card that will enter the format in any playable capacity and it will be printed as high as it possibly can be. Every time. And there's no format for the weaker stuff so everyone is pressured to play the busted new stuff to compete. And let's not forget how every deck is essentially Nadu combo already. TL;DR: Yugioh is much, MUCH worse than Magic.
As LoR's strongest soldier (yes I know, zombie game player) it's interesting to compare what were generally considered "bad' periods in the game's short 4 year life to the problem trends outlined here. Some trends include: -curve out gameplay was generally considered boring both to play and play against. Players hated when a deck's optimal gameplay was "1 drop on T1, 2 drop on T2, 3 drop on T3" etc -players really disliked decks which were primarily collections of generically good independently strong "above rate" cards which don't meaningfully interface with the other cards -players didn't like decks with extremely narrow or specific wincons, because it made games against them feel samey. A good example of this was how every game against Trundle Lissandra Control boiled down to "T8 Ice pillar into matron into Watcher" and only that -players don't like when one player takes an egregiously larger amount of game actions and spend large portions of time waiting, regardless of whether they are winning or losing -aggro versus control matchups are well received when aggro has hail mary plays lategame, and badly received when the matchup was entirely defined by if the aggro player ran out of gas before winning. It was very important who was on the beatdown switched several times a game. -players liked when decks' card economy ebbed and flowed and tended to not like decks which simply either won or ran out of gas and never got more -players liked routinely seeing most of the cards in their deck even if they didn't play all of them, and disliked when they'd only see less than half of the cards in their deck (keep in mind LoR had no true tutors) -players really don't like when a card effect has been worded in a particular way to exclude it from interacting with other cards, especially when it clearly wouldn't be a balance problem either. -some of the most well regarded cards were cards which could be threats or answers to threats or answers to answers, especially if they could conditionally be more than one at the same time. -complex cards are well liked as long as the abilities are related to each other -games where the two decks played on different axis were generally disappointing, like if a match was a board based combat deck versus a spell based combo deck Obviously LoR is a different game than MtG, but it's interesting to see it in comparison to the game that many of its dev decisions are a direct response to.
I continue to be baffled as to why there isn’t a concerted “revolt” by players of Real Modern (2011-2021). Why not start organizing unsanctioned Horizonless Modern tournaments and pushing Horizonless Modern everywhere, refusing to play in sanctioned Modern events, etc. from players to force WotC’s hand on the subject? Horizonless Modern is the only path forward, but sheer complacency and refusal to fight stands between it and us. They just keep eating the pigslop when they could easily do something about the problem. Even just refusing to play Modern and playing Pioneer instead would be SOMETHING, but no, Modern is somehow doing better than both Standard AND Pioneer both in paper and MODO. I just want people to stop being broken bucks about Horizons. Complacency is the great enemy. You guys are totally off base in regards to the comment at 3:37:46, btw. Core sets (from M10 onwards) and three-set blocks were great. Did all of the issues you've talked about in these podcasts exist back when we had those? No? Then you see the point. The art since 2015 has leaned heavily into this dull Artstation photorealism (often including outright photobashing) - this has partially been ameliorated by a the glut of variant artwork lately, but it’s still an issue. This isn't about cartoony stuff like Foglio - they could never do a set with visual aesthetics like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor these days. The game should look like classic fantasy artwork, not a Marvel movie.
This is a fascinating video, but i do wish there was slightly more discussion of the "ideal" game play pattern to accompany the problematic mechanics discussion. For instance, blood moon is clearly a feels bad mechanic, but it also seems to be a card that serves as a middle ground between mass land destruction and a game where "uninteractable" lands take over. Just feels like the discussion is missing an additional layer of detail to consider which effects are "bad" but necessary versus effects that are just unfun versus effects that can just become too strong, etc... Excellent video.
We've touched on "ideal" game play patterns before and unfortunately an explanation would be very long, so to briefly discuss this: I think the most important thing is player agency; does it feel like your wins/losses are a result of skill or making mistakes, rather than randomness. Obviously the game has variance and sometimes you lose purely as a result of luck, so it's about striking a good balance. I believe competitive MTG has moved way too far into gameplay where you need specific, narrow answers at exactly the right moment, too early, sometimes multiple times a match (Ragavan, Blood Moon, etc.) or where you literally can't do anything (e.g. vs. Scam on the draw).
A number of these concerns are simply not present in the Pauper format. Though I disagree on which specific mechanics or patterns are horrible or unfun (big fan of draw-go myself) I do agree that there is a big pile of BS in many of WotC's game upkeep choices. I play Pauper as a way to enjoy most aspects of competitive magic, while still disengaging from the majority of decisions that Wizards makes with their game. The majority of new cards don't affect me. The majority of stupid decisions (The One Ring being legal, not aggressive enough bans, money cards destroying the format) typically don't matter to me. Cards are typically cheap enough that even when there is a soft rotation, values are left unchanged. Most of your cards have no resale value, they are just game pieces, as it should be.
To be clear, some of these concerns are still present. I'm just saying that the negatives are mitigated greatly by the fact that individual cards are typically cheap.
As an outsider I like the idea of pauper but I feel like it's getting too popular. The idea that there are "pauper staples" and commons going up in price due to pauper seems to defeat the purpose of it.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist I think that's going to happen to any format where there is demand. Look at commander for the same effect. Unremarkable cards like wayfarers bauble were $2 each a t a point Pauper cards that rise in price rarely hit double digits. The only exception tends to be reserved list cards which is its own issue or cards that are established in other formats eg lotus petal or Cabal ritual.
The biggest problems keeping me from continuing to play Pauper are some obnoxious cards I think should be banned (with All That Glitters and Name Sticker Goblin recently going away being a big positive). The worst ones are all of the Monarch/Initiative cards.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist Staples are kind of the point of a competitive format. As for the prices remark, its still far less expensive. If Pauper (most expensive cards are about ~$10, typical cards are around $0.25 or less) is too expensive then I don't think playing with non-proxies is what you want. Play non-competitive formats with proxies and you get to never deal with any of this, I did say it still had some problems.
Stack Interaction in other colors exists with cards like Tamiyo’s Safekeeping. The issue is that those cards are usually not good enough to see maindeck play unless they’re Veil of Summer good or you’re building a linear combo deck.
I’d also argue that going over someone extending an advantage with lethal burn spells is stack interaction. I get that you don’t like burn, but price of progress -> fireblast on your own end step bc your opponent activated something is great gameplay.
To explain the stupid three year rotation: They have to get rid of a bunch of overstock from currently (soon to be eight sets) that did Draft-set boosters.
Im about an hour in commenting. I never fully agree wirh what you and danny say in these longform videos, but I always learn something by hearing from players who have been entrenched for a long time and have worked in game stores before. I don't really understand the overwhelming negativity you get in the comments, when you're clearly putting in the effort to share your perspectives beyond "old magic good new magic bad" and even ideating on solutions to the issues you bring up.
people waste a lot of money on magic. people devote their life and time to magic. people don't like the truth. the majority of what is in this podcast is the truth. the truth can hurt.
people waste a lot of money on magic. people devote their life and time to magic. people don't like the truth. the majority of what is in this podcast is the truth. the truth can hurt.
It's coming from the fact that there's little-to-no data actually being shown when some claims are made about huge swathes of the game. Claims like "emblems are bad for the game because they are permanents that you can't interact with in a game about permanents and how they interact with each other and the players" or "the less mana a tutor costs, the more problematic it is" are totally defensible opinions to have, because they are self evident or can be proven with evidence. In short, they can be empirically argued for or against, if not proven outright. Claims like "ask an EDH player which types of cards aren't fun to play against; they'll tell you land destruction or draw-go magic" are not. Anecdotes are not data, they are the starting point of the difficult process of collecting data and the more difficult process of interpreting that data. For instance, destroying all the lands on the board only sucks if the game keeps going. If someone destroys all mana sources and then immediately wins, that's no different than attacking for lethal or winning with thoracle. Let me show you the difference in practice using a single claim argued in both ways. "Scute Swarm is a badly designed card because people don't like playing against it." - Anecdote that many people probably identify with that relies on "gut feelings". "Scute Swarm is a badly designed card because exponential triggers in a card game are difficult to perform and keep track of, the calculations are prone to error and takes considerable in-game time to do, and requires all parties at the table to do them at all times." - The same point, made with defensible arguments that can be backed up/disproven with data from games that have been played.
I don't think it's super unreasonable for some people to come in and have a negative impression of the video, 10 mins in were them list how a ton of strategies and cards effects should no longer be printed. Chances are there are a ton of players that these strats are the reason that they play, the feedback may also sound strange depending on your level of play. Like I'm a standard player, and unblockable cards are not a problem. While wandering emperor is one of the best white cards in the format, it is only super effective vr aggro. In spite of that, aggro and creature based decks are still really good in standard. Lest face it, there's no shortage of negativity in mtg. For me, it can be a little exhausting at times. I personally do not think magic as a game needs "fixing" or saving, and content like this can't help but come off as "yet another video of old players griping about a game that left them behind" With that said I'll still listen to them cus it is good to know why people are this upset. Why would a player make a 4 hours video about a game that's not for them anymore over playing a better game?
@@nextbigdizzmanthey made the video because a vast majority of players have a huge problem with magic. there's 2 camps of those people. those who accept the game being destroyed and still try and have fun, and those who care a lot and want the game to be good again. the rest of the magic players fall into 2 other camps. those who don't know any better or are new, and those that eat the slop that WOTC feeds them because they are just mindless herd animals that go with the narrative.
The mtgo apologism is insane. The client is the ultimate of ultimate spaghetti code and it's wizards fault for hiring incompetent people at below rate salaries. It's not hard to code card game rules outside of very rare corner cases if you design the codebase properly from the ground up.
5:55 I'd like to see a source for "most players don't like the play pattern of control." If you want to address problems in a game based of mathematics, you need statistics, not vibes. There is certainly an amount of players that don't like playing against control, sure. But you could easily say the same of aggro or burn decks, a la "red deck wins". Or mana ramp decks that push out over-statted creatures way ahead of curve. Or token decks. Or *insert any deck archetype here*. Magic requires checks and balances to function, not every player liking the play pattern of every type of deck. I fear that this video will essentially boil down to the apocryphal "Jund midrange is the only playstyle WotC should support, because Jund is fair Magic" sentiment that has been floating around for some time.
Ummm Id like to see a source which states that not being able to play the game is not enjoyable 🤓🤓🤓🤓 and you need to prove it mathematically or it doesn't count
bro... Aint no way you are trying to compare any type of archetype to control on 'this isn't fun'. If you start a game you expect to play the god dawn game. Control is 1 step before stax and thats why people hate playing against it. Think of any character in a video game that has a similar effect and say you enjoyed playing against them EG: revenenat from Apex legends or Sombra from Overwatch. You don't need 'statistics' for this kind of thing it is just common sense.
@@CrazygamingSM270 See my response to LittleMushroomGuy. Also, I've not played either of those games, so your examples mean nothing to me. "Common sense" is what a group of people believe to be true about something, not what's actually true. In the past, it was common sense that deities were the cause of natural disasters and that the way to combat these things were to slaughter livestock or other humans. Richard Garfield, the original designer of MtG, was a mathematician. Statistics very much do matter when discussing it.
@@LittleMushroomGuy Ah, you're one of those. Usually I'd ignore people like you, but I'm feeling frisky this morning. 1. That is not how the burden of proof works. I did not make the claim, I do not have to provide the proof (but I do provide proof for my counterclaim; see below). 2. If you think that playing against control means "I never get to play the game", you fundamentally do not understand how resources in Magic work. Control is limited by cards in hand and mana. Here is a community run survey of around 100 (varies by question answered) Arena players (from Reddit, yuck) I found in 10 seconds (search MTG Arena Deck Archetype Survey Results Reddit in Google; I tried to link it and TH-cam deleted the comment). Of the people that that did the survey, 98 responded to the question of "what is your least favorite archetype to play against?" Of those 98, 38.8% percent said playing against control was their least favorite matchup, which is 38 of the respondents. Notably, in that same survey, when asked to list all the types of decks people liked playing against, 101 people answered, with 50 of them saying they liked playing against control. So, statistically, a bit more than a third players hate playing against control and about half of Arena players enjoy playing against control, which, in no way, can be construed as "most players don't like playing against control". I have disproven your counterpoint mathematically with a 10-second google search.
I've talked to people about play/draw fixes and here's what we came up with: Player 2 starts with a land token that you can tap and sacrifice to make 1 of any color. The fact that it's a token means you don't need to bring a special "real card" to play and you don't get a land in your graveyard. The fact that it's a land fixes using a treasure, so that artifcat synergies don't get messed up. You only get the ramp effect once, and so the effect is that non-games are less likely from crazy turn 0 plays from the person on the play. It almost makes scam a reasonable deck to play against, because now you can have a 1 mana answer and not just auto-lose the game before you get to play a land.
In regards to the counterspell discussion and moving non-"hard counters" to other colors, I personally would prefer if the other colors got some more stack interaction at a bare minimum. This is mostly in relation to EDH, but there is nothing worse than wanting to build a mono-color deck for the funsies and getting blown out because you've got 3 cops at the table with counterspells that theyll shoot at the nearest thing that moves. I think red has received this the most with additional non-creature removal like Wild Magic Surge, Tybalt's, more redirect spells, etc. but white getting more Mana Tithe / Repreive effects would certainly be a boon in its favor. I prefer those Repreive / remand style effects for white particularly because it plays into the "get more while having less" style of play that white has had since Land Tax. I really just think that the Stack is where the heart of magic lies, and if only one color gets to play with it regularly then why play other colors? For 2-for-1 and creatures, i feel like there is no good answer since creatures need to be powerful enough removal, but if removal is too good then creatures become bad again. No matter what, everyone loses.
Just got around to finishing the video. In regards to art, while the general art on the cards might convey an action or an image that should be depicted for the card to make sense, modern magic has (on average) the most soulless art I have seen. Strixhaven, regardless of how you felt about their alternative arts, at least provided some variety compared to "generic fantasy counter spell magic". There was at least something visually unique with these cards, there was a style unique to the artist conveyed there. And while certain artists may get the blessing of WotC to actually show their incredible skills, I cannot tell you how many artists I will never learn the name of purely because they are producing art to the generic template.
If you look at the original art for Force of Will, it's an angry dude on fire denying a spell through sheer determination. FoW was meant to be a red card and it's the perfect mechanic for red stack interaction : sacrificing card advantage for a counterspell (or anything really) is *definitely not* in blue's color identity but it makes total sense for red. It's only a blue card because the designers back then were nerds who thought that blue should be the coolest color and have all of the cool spells. The staple blue counterspell should be remand. In the same vein, spell pierce/mana leak and stuff like dress down should be staple white cards and black should have access to something like countering non-creature spells (not sure about that one, black color identity is a mystery at this point, it's completely all over the place. I guess sacrificing creatures for counterspells would be ok thematically but then again who knows). I guess hate bears are already in white and they're kinda like mana tithe already but it's so cringe that everything has to be on a creature nowadays. Green not being able to interact with the stack is ok to me as an obvious drawback to the color but since Mark Rosewater somehow still has a job at wotc and his pet color can do everything now, so realistically they'll find a way to give it the best stack interaction (on top of the best draw, the best self mill, the best gy interaction and the best creatures). Explore should be white thematically; civilization expanding through the wilderness but who cares at this point.
@@garak55Force of Will was never going to be a red card, it's just that they were having her draw the art for a red card and then used it on Force of Will
@@jadegrace1312 It's even more cringe. I thought they had had a good idea but decided against it and now I just learned they never even had a good idea of what to do with their game. Sad and cringe.
I hate to be that guy but the point about foil curling is mostly wrong in comparison to other games. Pokemon and Yugioh cards have full layers of foil layered onto the card stock just like Magic's normal foils. Literally all of them use a cardstock layer, glue layer, foil layer, and ink masks. You can take acetone to any foil from any game and see the foil layer underneath the ink layer. Really only Magic's etched foils work differently since they use a special reflective ink layer. All TCGs have had issues with curling at some point, mostly starting around the same time due to using the same factories. There was a set from Yugioh called Fists of the Gadgets in 2019 which was an all foil set and literally all NA cards came curled because of poor manufacturing humidity control during the set's run. The reason we notice Japanese cards don't seem to curl as much is because their quality control right off the line is much tighter. Having tight quality control at the printing stage matters a lot because, like you said, the worst curling happens when the card is freshly manufactured. I have very few Shadowverse Evolve cards that are curled. I own thousands of foils. The only cards that have curled have been ones coming from a friend who didn't store them properly. The game is produced in Japan under their strict quality control and that makes the difference. And no, curled foils are absolutely not near mint for the vast majority of players. I'm perfectly willing to uncurl some of my big money and gameplay staple cards with humidity packets but not everyone should have to do this. Curling is a reality for sure but one that can be severely mitigated by the manufacturer. WotC needs to crack the whip on their printing contractors and either pay more for better quality or invest in them to keep their quality more consistent since it's negatively affecting the product for most consumers. Pokemon got sick of quality control being out of their hands so they built their own printing factory. Quality has been perfect ever since.
I feel like magics just a new game, and you gotta either play a fan created format (pre-dh/premodern) or forget the game it used to be. Like rnd really focuses on removing feelsbad and increasing speed. Every deck should have an answer to everything, no card should ever be dead. etc. Which really sucks for the more interesting slowerpaced games that really would show off what magic has to offer.
But also im the kinda guy who is pivoting more and more into Cedh and Legacy in opposed to Modern and Pioneer so I like the more unfair things in a fair manner. (And the kinda guy who thought it was dope during early mh2 modern that Ponza was being played again lmao) Like I personally think Trinisphere or Blood Moon are infinitely better designed cards that Toski or Urza's Saga, and toski's not a huge problem anywhere. Its just hes very powerful when he comes down, and his only interaction point is the rare form of removal of exiling. When he is instantly a threat. Whereas Blood Moon is very interactable both on the stack and if you play around it beforehand. Even if it can feel super bad once it comes down. And also if they printed more hate for cards that cannot be countered, like a 3cmc Ashiok's Erasure or something. Also on Play/Draw I think the problem is the double whammie of how strong creatures are, and how powerful card advantage is right now. As that extra card should feel impactful, but way too often ur opponent can just draw 1 on turn 1 or 2 anyway turning that not really into an advantage anymore. And on Time for Rounds I wish that MTG would just introduce a like chess clock as then it becomes on the player to not use their own time. I hate that currently one player can just take up all the time. Maybe this could be a thing that in overtime each player gets 5mins, so that it doesnt become a stressor and hurt every match but just those that go over. On Collectors Boosters: I wish that they never had guaranteed foils, I get that rares/mythics are guaranteed and it does help sometimes keep the mid rares/mythics down. But now those mid rares foils, which are super rare in regular boosters are just sad to pull.
I've been focusing on pauper and pioneer. I have 3 modern decks. At current pricing and rotation from horizons and universes beyond sets, I can't justify spending more on the format. On card quality, the recent assassin's creed cards are the thinest flimsiest cards I have seen yet. Edit: on the subject of cheap entry points into the game, I think wotc wants commander to fill that role. That's why they print 24 precons a year. As players, we have the idea in our heads that standard should be cheap. I don't think wizards agrees with that anymore. In their heads, standard is for people that like rotation and draft.
From what I understand, the goal is that standard is and will stay a magic arena thing. Paper magic is now synonimous with commander and I think that was the plan all along.
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17completely wrong take. there's been so many cards year after year that were oppressive in standard and only standard that ruined the format but were not broken or high power level
@williamharrington3595 standard problems are not based on play patterns but simply there was nothing to gain from playing it. B4 the start of Standard in the rcq season, there was no reason to play standard outside of store championships because of arena. Now standard in paper is much more active because it legitimate gains to play the format in the rcq season
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17I think the reason why noone plays standard is part of their entire discussion..... it's got nothing to do with rcqs or arena.... its because magic is EDH. flat out. modern, pioneer, take your pick, those formats are irrelevant. And it's by design.
I actually have to come back later additionally, to comment about your extremely out of pocket take targeting the designers of the online products? The way you make your point is extremely reductive and makes light of people's entire careers in software for things you dont understand.
@@LittleMushroomGuy every character is a lesbian mulatto with zoomer broccoli hair Every set is an un set I miss when cards had frazetta style paintings on them
02:32:06 it felt awesome losing to both ashlask (ass lick idk the new eldrazi commander) and ulalek at the MODERN horizons 3 pre release and I had no idea you could even open toilet commander cards in the play boosters
My suggestion for leveling out the play draw advantage is that Player 1 does actually get to draw a card on their first turn, but player 2 gets to search their library for a basic land and put it into play untapped before turn 1. This means that you no longer need a free spell to interact with your opponents turn 1 combo because you can cast a 1 mana spell on their turn, but also it means that you get to untap and play a second land and make a 2 drop in response to your opponents 1 drop.
I'm only about halfway throught the video, but most of the problems seem to come down to two problems: (1) WOTC's inability/refusal to acknowledge the secondary market, in paper and digital, and (2) the people at the top marketing and forming the game as one of those trash mobile games where you cater solely to the %1 whales who stick around long enough to uphold the sunk-cost fallacy. To the first point, they need to aggressively reprint cards or figure out something so they don't tank the market as a whole, but they cannot do both. They're trying to walk a line that is not doing the company any good in the long-run. To the second point, Magic has a very very large player base. They cannot treat Magic, especially Arena, as one of those mobile games who's goal is to rope in a small percentage of people who will pay astronomical amounts of money, and not care about the rest. For the health of the game, they need to cater to the wider player-base and not just those that will or can pay hundreds of dollars on a regular schedule without a second thought. I am firmly in the camp that if they made it possible to buy wild cards at a reasonable price, the longevity, sustainability, and financial success of the Arena client would skyrocket. Make commons $.25, uncommons $.50, rares $.75, and mythics $1.00. If they did that, I would play so much more Magic online because I can build all the decks I want, when I want, and I would willingly pay that price for a digital-only product. Magic's design-philosophy and power creep is a whole other beast.
To be fair the little planeswalker symbol is designed to make sure you can't mistake a new print for an old one when some reprints are from old sets and First Printing is worth more to collectors. Don't know if I truly agree, but I don't find it especially egregious
The problem is how easy to is to miss. What's wrong with just changing the set symbol to a "The List" set symbol, ya know, like how _every other set does it._
@AmmiO2 probably because then they'd have to redo the old cards in new border or be and they don't want to. Again, I'm not really in favor of the system, but its worth criticizing accurately
I think the part about programming the cards was misinformed. Keywords ARE trivial to add. But most Magic cards go beyond just having plain keywords. Most of the keywords are prefaced by unique conditions or what have you. I guess consider something like "When you eat a food, do X. Repeat for each food you've eaten while this minion is alive." That's a very simple mechanic but you would need to actually manually create that for that creature, and that's proabably just draft chaff. There's like 20 sets a year and they all have 400 cards. There are way more complicated/unique card examples but I'm too tired to come up with any. Some cards have to be aware about certain states that aren't usually kept track of. And all of this has to work within a long twisted codebase. When they're looking at cards from a set, they can't just choose to ONLY import the simple cards. A set in MtGA has to have packs and the whole nine yards, so it's an all or nothing thing. Nothing about it is particularily IMPOSSIBLE, it just takes a lot of manpower and oversight to check that each card actually behaves exactly as its rules text suggests.
I know this is the last one..... but a video about edh vs Cedh has always been something i wished people talk about. Not about the power level per say. But just how decisions were made in the banlist and what would happen it we had seperate versions. I honestly feel like edh and cedh should just have their own banlists. Cause its really weird that we dont ban certain things when a lot of reasoning is "its not fun." But then smothering tide, ghostly prison, land destruction, the one ring... things that effect the whole play group are allowed... If edh is supposed to be the "FUN, CAREFREE" Format. Why are there so many cards that are unfun to play against FOR THE GROUP. It just doesnt make sense. And putting too much stock in rule 0 is bad.
I've only listened to part but the criticisms have been very reasonable and there's been a lot of credit and benefit of the doubt given to the designers. Never listen to Maro's podcast if this level of constructive criticism of MTG bothers you.
I don’t think they like magic either. I get that the game isn’t perfect but as of late these videos have been more and more complaining about more recent game design than anything else. The latest content has been edh focused which is a tell tale sign of someone going down the dark side of the game when they previously focused on constructed formats. As far as the game itself when going on these rants about what they don’t like and what needs to change, it’s best to think why do you even like the game in the first place? How much have things changed? And is it reasonable to hold on to certain expectations?
On one hand, frustrating to hear a lot of the same sentiments. On the other, I agree with a lot of the sentiments posed by this series analyzing Magic, or at least understand the rationality behind them. I do not have a friend group for Magic, leaving Arena or my store as my main means of play. My local store mainly holds 3-4 competitive events: Commander, CEDH, Modern, and limited (usually prerelease). Standard died off a year ago and Pauper slowly dried up with lackluster weekend attendance. I have no interest in CEDH (proxies or not), Modern is too expensive to keep up with local spikes, and limited is mainly on set releases. That leaves Commander, where the nature of a prize structure pushes decks to primarily be combo decks. As such, the commentary on counterspells in multiple colors was disheartening to hear; a lot of game experiences I have are either racing to kill people who tend to run combo decks, or die within 5 turns....if you do not cave and play a combo deck to race them or play Blue to be able to have stack interaction. Also in agreement on must-kill threats. Even comparatively "fair" decks such as Reanimator are chock-full of the most impactful and back-breaking mythics of recent years (DMU Sheoldred, Toxrill, etc.). They are highly resilient decks that require either immediate responses to try to endure, or a little white flag to wave as you walk away with nothing but shame. In the half-remembered words of a spike: "You can either play to win or play to 'do the thing.' If you try to do the thing, you will not get anywhere here."
Nothing about MH3 on its own said "commander players, this isn't for you." That’s ridiculous. It didn't need to have a lot of legendary creatures or commander decks for commander players to buy it. People are so forgetful that commander used to be where you used whatever cards you had lying around from playing all the other formats. It didn't need official support or 50 legendary creatures every set to be playable, and arguably adding command tower, arcane signet, etc. and all the "staples" made it worse.
Ill build this comment as I listen. We always need to be wary when using "fun" as a reason to ban or change something. You look hard enough, you will find that every aspect of the game is disliked by some people. Draw go control is a great experience. As a player going against it, unless you bring a linear deck, you need to make relevant decisions about how to approach the matchup, or you will lose easily. The same goes for the control player. Your answers need to be used well, or you will lose. The issue is when cards do too much and there are no decisions to make. As yall said, the wandering emperor is the problem. It is removal and a win condition in one, and at flash speed. Furthermore, the way not play into it either leaves you exposed to wipes or gives the control deck more time to dig. Remove the flash speed from TWE, and i have no qualms with the control matchup. I genuinely ask players that dislike facing draw go do they actually like mtg. If combat math is your absolute joy, sure, ill take that. Otherwise, draw go will not win fast, but it also will not play solitaire. Do you want your opponent to not interact with you? I wasnt paying attention when modern descended into two ships passing the night, but pioneer is well on its way there. It was the first 60 card constructed format i tried and the first i quit due to linear play patterns. In that format, a large majority of relevant decks are about cheating mana costs T3, defending the plays that cheat mana, or aiming to do some combo T3-4. If every deck does that, there are no decisions to make. Your mulligans will always be about stopping their thing. Whether or not you could stop the thing, a binary decision - actually, decision is too generous- situation, decides the game. When that is the case, why play coin flips? I disagree on spreading countermagic out because i disagree with the notion that there are no universal answers to big spells. Emergent ultimatum gets stopped by colorless cards anyone can run, easiest example is damping sphere. Choosing to have no answer is on the deck builder. Planeswalkers get answered by pithing needle effects if a player is that concerned about them. The arena economy sucks and i dont know how people support it. It is free, yes, but the system is soooo anti player unless you spend $$$. It caps your earnings unless you gamble with events. If youre going to spend $$$ or risk things, you may as well play MTGO. Then, you can at least sell your cards once you are done. EDH runs design now, obviously. This hurts everyone with product fatigue, broken cards busting 1 v 1 wide open, literal coin flips in sets, etc. EDH has its place, but it should not run design. I hope this gets fixed before it is too late. MtG is just a busted game when it comes to constructed. Wait long enough, they all boil down to do some busted thing as fast as possible. Every format struggles with this issue, even standard with convoke. Decisions rarely matter unless it is a midrange mirror, and even those can feel swingy and snowbally because cards are busted and so many run away with the game on their own. Cant answer bronco, preacher, raffine immediately? Youve probably lost.
I am not sure if you touch on it in the video but id love to see you two design a cube. It would be interesting to see the designs you include or how opinions on cards change with respect to the environment. Eg grief being worse without a scam spell
We actually both have cubes. Here's mine: cubecobra.com/cube/overview/86f7325f-2a65-4006-9160-ee7b86aadcca Here's Dylans: cubecobra.com/cube/list/43ec42bf-0088-4801-bbd2-afca6c8a7a27
Wizards should make Standard and Pioneer precons that give strong manabases to new players. These decks should not try to be meta or else they run into the same problems discussed in the video: Auras was instantly irrelevant and Lotus field was scalped for Omniscience Instead of meta, if the precons were based on color pairs or triples, Standard players would have something to 1) Play with right away and 2) Use as a shell for a meta deck It's important that the decks should have 4x cards in the mana base at the very least. And secondarily the decks should be relatively balanced to play against other precons. Even draft chaff for spells would be fine if it meant that these kinds of decks could survive on shelves for new players to get started with 1 purchase If wizards printed Standard Starters like this and put them on the shelf for 20 bucks next to commander precons, maybe I could convince someone to play a game of Magic with me after we swapped out of an hour slog of waiting for my turn and hearing people complain about threat assessment. Because that's all my LGS plays
In regards to the ETB doscussion i think your problen is more with the pushed design of teferi and omnath rathwr than how the ETB interaction works. Without some ability to get vakue off of a creature outside the body itself the tempi pendulum just swings massivly in favor of thw removal palyer ebxause you are trading 1 for 1 and you have a mana advantage because in most cases the removal spell is cheaoer than the bomb creature.
I really wish you would do any amount of research before you make most of the claims you do. All your complaints about foiling get covered in a single Rhystic Studies video, it's not even that deep. Like the comments you make about what is or isn't easy to program undermine all of your arguments and credibility. Don't just make things up on the spot, you literally couldn't name something more complex than trample when trying to explain how coding blocks of rules. You can't complain about how wordy and complex cards are and then talk about how easy they are to code.
Something I think should have been covered more thoroughly here is how much draft has changed too. Sign posting got way more aggressive (2 colour legendary creature signpost uncommon trend for instance) and fixing has been getting so good drafts are stupid flexible. I do disagree with several of the design complaints however. Draw Go isn't inherent bad, otherwise all control decks would be definitionally a design and gameplay failure. I'll admit there are problems with the current iteration of white blue control, but it goes beyond "control unfun". When there's a critical mass of good reactive answers in the game it encourages passive and reactive play when playing cards reactively is already innately advantageous. Draw go is more a failure of incentivizing proactive play and aggression. Sometimes answers are also so good they can't be meaningfully played around, you simply have to play into them and if they have it they have it. I find that the distinction between good variability like the random order of the library and bad variability like CoCo was poorly articulated/unjustified. Unless the problem is simply that even a mathematically optimal deck's chance to whiff on CoCo is too high.
I had a friend download arena because he played a lot of the yugioh app. He loves it and basically only plays arena now but he plays historic and will probably never play paper because he only knows the fake digital formats.
The way the one guy is talking about Nadu at around the 48:00 mark makes it sound like they literally didn't even read the card. I'm sorry, but even reading the card, it sounds incredibly powerful. And it's super easy to go "hmm I wonder if there's something that can break this!" and then a shit ton of people immediately said yeah. There is. I didn't even know that Shuko was a card but I easily would have searched up equipment that have a 0 casting cost and immediately found it out. Not that it's only broken with Shuko since Shuko isn't on arena and Nadu is still tearing up the brawl ladder. But yeah, the idea that they had no idea how their own card worked isn't a better excuse than them not testing it at all. You are assuming a level of incompetence that's frankly worse than what the main guy is suggesting by saying they might've literally not tested the card. I think the most likely thing is they knew it was busted and just released it that way because. It reminds me of Goldspan Dragon. A much less busted card overall, but a card that was clearly pushed for standard. Like, it's a hasty 4/4 5 mana flier. Pretty classic niche for red. But it makes a treasure when targeted by spells for either player, so you can use it to combo or your foe will inadvertenly gift you a treasure if it's targeted. That alone was a good enough ability. But then throwing on a clause that doubled treasures' value when cracked meant that you could very easily cast Goldspan and then when it's targeted you have the 2 mana to cast the counter spell. Nadu takes that same design principle and ratchets it up even further. Did it need to be a 3/4? Did it need to be abilities vs spells? Did it need to trigger both when you target it and when your foe targets it? Did it need to extend to all creatures, including tokens? Did it need to be trigger-able 2ce per creature per turn? Did it need to make the land untapped? Did it need to let you draw the card if it's not a land? All of these things are subtle or large ways they could have altered the card but they didn't. And the designers use all of these things all the time. In fact, the expectation is that most of these limits would be placed on it. They explicitly went out of their way to just keep pushing the card because "Modern is a high power level format an d3-drops need to be pushed and MH sets are meant to be pushed anyway!"
Also, the 2nd guy really fucking hates pro players. "yeah it is cool to ban cards 1 week out from a tournament" "it's fine to have players going up to 20 hours in a day" "it's okay if the majority of players are losing money" All of these things make pursuing a career as a pro player incredibly hostile or just impossible. Sure pros are the best of the best, but that doesn't mean they should have to go through hell to play the game. Moreover, I think most people want MtG to be a healthy game and having a pro tour can really help feed into that. MtG is a huge game compared to most other games so there are casual segments of the base as well as competitive, but having the pro tour as a competitive outlet is generally a good thing and you are actively making it worse. Even a sport as brutal as football has a union that in turn fights for basic rights for the players. There are limits on the number of practices, how long those practices can last, how much contact there can be during practice, etc. We are far away from there being a level of structure to Pro MTG play where there might be a union, but actively encouraging the most hostile conditions possible is a great way to kill off the competitive circuit altogether.
I think you just don't like their attempts at innovation. The game is 30 years old now. They're going to make mistakes when messing with power levels of cards to push the game further. They're not perfect. But it would be nice if they quickly admitted to their mistakes like Nadu and ban them quickly.
they are near perfect. they have multiple experts and analytics to prevent issues. they just want your money and you give it to them. There's not a problem with innovation there's a problem with greed
@@LittleMushroomGuy Your example is false equivalency. That's because the formats are different and their respective rules committee are different. The pauper format panel is made up of 7 people (as of the article Gavin Verhey wrote on the topic in 2022), six of which are high-level players and one of which is a game designer at WotC (Gavin). Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Pioneer, and Standard are directly ruled upon by WotC themselves who have a financial incentive not to ban cards that are selling product. Cranial Ram was banned day one because of its similarity to the--at the time--recently banned All That Glitters. This was decided by a body independent of WotC. Nadu is not similar to any other card in Modern, Vintage, or Legacy, so there was no pre-existing data or precedence to judge the card by, only internal playtesting. Additionally, a Pro-tour event was slated to happen right after Nadu released. Banning a key piece of a deck during a major tournament is bad for its players for obvious reasons. Mushroom, you have some *exceptionally* bad takes in the comment section of this video. And to be clear, yes, I think Nadu should be banned or restricted in Modern.
They say this in the video already. They're okay with experimentation but they want more proactive bans and more playtesting, and they want them to be more careful with certain archetypes, including very old archetypes like blue/white control.
1:07 Don't give counters to other colors dude. The other colors ways of interacting with big spells is "killing the opponent before they can cast them". If people are cheating big spells too easily, well, there is the problem; not the spell itself.
Im at 1 hour, 42 minutes in. So far, I think it's hilarious that the former comp player entirely shut down the idea of every color getting counterspells. That was objectively embarrassing. Secondly, while yes, Sheoldred is very expensive, it's expensive because of how usable it is/was in pioneer, standard, in modern to a certain extent, and most importantly, EDH where people want to cast their wheel effects and make people draw 7 cards and lose 14 life. Sure it should have been reprinted, but unfortunately the price makes a lot of sense. It even technically has EIGHT different versions you can buy! The demand is just THERE.
afaik they use machine learning (aka AI) to code the cards for arena so I'm not convinced that they actually take longer to code than a yugioh card. obviously you'll have to audit and potentially adjust the cards that this spits out, but for any random french vanilla card it should take no effort at all
I am in this weird space where Magic used to be my primary hobby, but because of the many numerous problems with the game I am playing it less and less, but I have not found adequate hobbies to fully replace it, so Magic still continues to live 'rent free' in my head even though I don't like it.
Yes.
Have you guys tried touching grass or having s3x?
Get into a sport. I started ballroom dancing basically for that reason and now have friends who smell good and stuff to do on the weekends.
I've been trying Warhammer 40k as a hobby replacement. I really enjoy painting models, but it is a solitary activity. There is a bit of a hurdle before I can graduate to actually playing 40k and get into the social aspect of it.
Kinda the same for me, I started brainstorming ideas for TTRPGs, TCGs and board games and to get more experience I started trying out games. Most of the times I go for games with good 2 player mode to play with my wife (my favorite so far is Res Arcanum, it even has a draft mode if you want that).
Alternatively go play online some TCGs on digital clients (I did play pretty much all digital CCGs in my lifetime, I revisited some but nothing is what I am looking for. elder scroll legends was great when it released, eternal had also a great draft mode). MTGA is actually free if you are good at drafting.
Or play some good solo deckbuilder games like slay the spire.
As someone who has played paper yugioh where every 3rd core set is essentially a horizons tier rotation to the meta, its really important for people to getting into the game for there to be the aggressive reprint policy that yugioh has in order for them to actually be able to onboard to the game. Every set from the previous year is guaranteed to be reprinted in a much more affordable and easy to acquire version, usually also including format staples or tech options from previous sets. While you wont be on the cutting edge of meta, most deck archetypes released will still be able to compete at a local or regional level if teched for the meta, and if you fall too far behind with a deck you like, the current meta will be reprinted within a year or so. While this does have the unfortunate effect that yugioh cards hold next to no value, being able to play the game in the first place should take precedence over abstract market forces keeping new players priced out of the metagame.
"being able to play the game in the first place should take precedence over abstract market forces keeping new players priced out of the metagame."
You hit the nail on the head here, the financebros of MTG are what drove me away from playing the game (aside from the PInkerton incident). I want to play Legacy and Vintage, I want to play premodern, what I don't want to do is pay thousands of dollars for cards from what are in essence scalpers.
@@priinceoftiime daily reminder that Force of Will costs less than 10 bucks on mtgo. Digital legacy is not expensive, only the paper version is kinda pricey (and even then, I'd argue very comparable to higher power edh).
Proxy is the way. If you're able find a play group and proxy anything you like to play. I mainly cube, qnd my cubes are 100% proxy. @@priinceoftiime
I remember reading a post from MaRo saying that gameplay/rules complexity is the biggest impediment for new players to gen into MTG and I wholeheartedly disagree; IMO how expensive competitive decks are is the biggest hurdle.
P.S. don't pay for EDH staples, proxy them.
Don't you dare cite Yugioh as doing anything right in the area of card prices. Konami operates on an even more perverse level of FOMO than WotC. They make sure the only cards that will actually see play are printed in such small quantities that they become Sheoldred tier expensive, ban out the older cards that compete with the new stuff to enforce a meta, and reprint the card in such massive quantities that the people who put in their $300 per playset can recoup maybe $30 if they're lucky. Yugioh's only format is essentially working like Modern but the only cards entering the format are coming from standard core sets that have no way of really being played with each other. There will be maybe an archetype or one major card that will enter the format in any playable capacity and it will be printed as high as it possibly can be. Every time. And there's no format for the weaker stuff so everyone is pressured to play the busted new stuff to compete. And let's not forget how every deck is essentially Nadu combo already.
TL;DR: Yugioh is much, MUCH worse than Magic.
As LoR's strongest soldier (yes I know, zombie game player) it's interesting to compare what were generally considered "bad' periods in the game's short 4 year life to the problem trends outlined here. Some trends include:
-curve out gameplay was generally considered boring both to play and play against. Players hated when a deck's optimal gameplay was "1 drop on T1, 2 drop on T2, 3 drop on T3" etc
-players really disliked decks which were primarily collections of generically good independently strong "above rate" cards which don't meaningfully interface with the other cards
-players didn't like decks with extremely narrow or specific wincons, because it made games against them feel samey. A good example of this was how every game against Trundle Lissandra Control boiled down to "T8 Ice pillar into matron into Watcher" and only that
-players don't like when one player takes an egregiously larger amount of game actions and spend large portions of time waiting, regardless of whether they are winning or losing
-aggro versus control matchups are well received when aggro has hail mary plays lategame, and badly received when the matchup was entirely defined by if the aggro player ran out of gas before winning. It was very important who was on the beatdown switched several times a game.
-players liked when decks' card economy ebbed and flowed and tended to not like decks which simply either won or ran out of gas and never got more
-players liked routinely seeing most of the cards in their deck even if they didn't play all of them, and disliked when they'd only see less than half of the cards in their deck (keep in mind LoR had no true tutors)
-players really don't like when a card effect has been worded in a particular way to exclude it from interacting with other cards, especially when it clearly wouldn't be a balance problem either.
-some of the most well regarded cards were cards which could be threats or answers to threats or answers to answers, especially if they could conditionally be more than one at the same time.
-complex cards are well liked as long as the abilities are related to each other
-games where the two decks played on different axis were generally disappointing, like if a match was a board based combat deck versus a spell based combo deck
Obviously LoR is a different game than MtG, but it's interesting to see it in comparison to the game that many of its dev decisions are a direct response to.
I continue to be baffled as to why there isn’t a concerted “revolt” by players of Real Modern (2011-2021). Why not start organizing unsanctioned Horizonless Modern tournaments and pushing Horizonless Modern everywhere, refusing to play in sanctioned Modern events, etc. from players to force WotC’s hand on the subject? Horizonless Modern is the only path forward, but sheer complacency and refusal to fight stands between it and us. They just keep eating the pigslop when they could easily do something about the problem. Even just refusing to play Modern and playing Pioneer instead would be SOMETHING, but no, Modern is somehow doing better than both Standard AND Pioneer both in paper and MODO. I just want people to stop being broken bucks about Horizons. Complacency is the great enemy.
You guys are totally off base in regards to the comment at 3:37:46, btw. Core sets (from M10 onwards) and three-set blocks were great. Did all of the issues you've talked about in these podcasts exist back when we had those? No? Then you see the point. The art since 2015 has leaned heavily into this dull Artstation photorealism (often including outright photobashing) - this has partially been ameliorated by a the glut of variant artwork lately, but it’s still an issue. This isn't about cartoony stuff like Foglio - they could never do a set with visual aesthetics like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor these days. The game should look like classic fantasy artwork, not a Marvel movie.
Perhaps people enjoy modern horizons more than you think
@@jadegrace1312 yes, I’m aware that the wretched demiurge Yaldabaoth has many slaves
This is a fascinating video, but i do wish there was slightly more discussion of the "ideal" game play pattern to accompany the problematic mechanics discussion.
For instance, blood moon is clearly a feels bad mechanic, but it also seems to be a card that serves as a middle ground between mass land destruction and a game where "uninteractable" lands take over.
Just feels like the discussion is missing an additional layer of detail to consider which effects are "bad" but necessary versus effects that are just unfun versus effects that can just become too strong, etc...
Excellent video.
We've touched on "ideal" game play patterns before and unfortunately an explanation would be very long, so to briefly discuss this: I think the most important thing is player agency; does it feel like your wins/losses are a result of skill or making mistakes, rather than randomness. Obviously the game has variance and sometimes you lose purely as a result of luck, so it's about striking a good balance.
I believe competitive MTG has moved way too far into gameplay where you need specific, narrow answers at exactly the right moment, too early, sometimes multiple times a match (Ragavan, Blood Moon, etc.) or where you literally can't do anything (e.g. vs. Scam on the draw).
A number of these concerns are simply not present in the Pauper format. Though I disagree on which specific mechanics or patterns are horrible or unfun (big fan of draw-go myself) I do agree that there is a big pile of BS in many of WotC's game upkeep choices. I play Pauper as a way to enjoy most aspects of competitive magic, while still disengaging from the majority of decisions that Wizards makes with their game. The majority of new cards don't affect me. The majority of stupid decisions (The One Ring being legal, not aggressive enough bans, money cards destroying the format) typically don't matter to me. Cards are typically cheap enough that even when there is a soft rotation, values are left unchanged. Most of your cards have no resale value, they are just game pieces, as it should be.
To be clear, some of these concerns are still present. I'm just saying that the negatives are mitigated greatly by the fact that individual cards are typically cheap.
As an outsider I like the idea of pauper but I feel like it's getting too popular. The idea that there are "pauper staples" and commons going up in price due to pauper seems to defeat the purpose of it.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist I think that's going to happen to any format where there is demand. Look at commander for the same effect. Unremarkable cards like wayfarers bauble were $2 each a t a point
Pauper cards that rise in price rarely hit double digits. The only exception tends to be reserved list cards which is its own issue or cards that are established in other formats eg lotus petal or Cabal ritual.
The biggest problems keeping me from continuing to play Pauper are some obnoxious cards I think should be banned (with All That Glitters and Name Sticker Goblin recently going away being a big positive). The worst ones are all of the Monarch/Initiative cards.
@@TheMinskyTerrorist Staples are kind of the point of a competitive format. As for the prices remark, its still far less expensive. If Pauper (most expensive cards are about ~$10, typical cards are around $0.25 or less) is too expensive then I don't think playing with non-proxies is what you want. Play non-competitive formats with proxies and you get to never deal with any of this, I did say it still had some problems.
4+ hours of RANT?
Yes, let's get ready.
Stack Interaction in other colors exists with cards like Tamiyo’s Safekeeping. The issue is that those cards are usually not good enough to see maindeck play unless they’re Veil of Summer good or you’re building a linear combo deck.
I’d also argue that going over someone extending an advantage with lethal burn spells is stack interaction. I get that you don’t like burn, but price of progress -> fireblast on your own end step bc your opponent activated something is great gameplay.
To explain the stupid three year rotation: They have to get rid of a bunch of overstock from currently (soon to be eight sets) that did Draft-set boosters.
Im about an hour in commenting. I never fully agree wirh what you and danny say in these longform videos, but I always learn something by hearing from players who have been entrenched for a long time and have worked in game stores before.
I don't really understand the overwhelming negativity you get in the comments, when you're clearly putting in the effort to share your perspectives beyond "old magic good new magic bad" and even ideating on solutions to the issues you bring up.
people waste a lot of money on magic. people devote their life and time to magic. people don't like the truth. the majority of what is in this podcast is the truth. the truth can hurt.
people waste a lot of money on magic. people devote their life and time to magic. people don't like the truth. the majority of what is in this podcast is the truth. the truth can hurt.
It's coming from the fact that there's little-to-no data actually being shown when some claims are made about huge swathes of the game.
Claims like "emblems are bad for the game because they are permanents that you can't interact with in a game about permanents and how they interact with each other and the players" or "the less mana a tutor costs, the more problematic it is" are totally defensible opinions to have, because they are self evident or can be proven with evidence. In short, they can be empirically argued for or against, if not proven outright.
Claims like "ask an EDH player which types of cards aren't fun to play against; they'll tell you land destruction or draw-go magic" are not. Anecdotes are not data, they are the starting point of the difficult process of collecting data and the more difficult process of interpreting that data. For instance, destroying all the lands on the board only sucks if the game keeps going. If someone destroys all mana sources and then immediately wins, that's no different than attacking for lethal or winning with thoracle.
Let me show you the difference in practice using a single claim argued in both ways.
"Scute Swarm is a badly designed card because people don't like playing against it." - Anecdote that many people probably identify with that relies on "gut feelings".
"Scute Swarm is a badly designed card because exponential triggers in a card game are difficult to perform and keep track of, the calculations are prone to error and takes considerable in-game time to do, and requires all parties at the table to do them at all times." - The same point, made with defensible arguments that can be backed up/disproven with data from games that have been played.
I don't think it's super unreasonable for some people to come in and have a negative impression of the video, 10 mins in were them list how a ton of strategies and cards effects should no longer be printed. Chances are there are a ton of players that these strats are the reason that they play, the feedback may also sound strange depending on your level of play. Like I'm a standard player, and unblockable cards are not a problem. While wandering emperor is one of the best white cards in the format, it is only super effective vr aggro. In spite of that, aggro and creature based decks are still really good in standard. Lest face it, there's no shortage of negativity in mtg. For me, it can be a little exhausting at times. I personally do not think magic as a game needs "fixing" or saving, and content like this can't help but come off as "yet another video of old players griping about a game that left them behind" With that said I'll still listen to them cus it is good to know why people are this upset. Why would a player make a 4 hours video about a game that's not for them anymore over playing a better game?
@@nextbigdizzmanthey made the video because a vast majority of players have a huge problem with magic. there's 2 camps of those people. those who accept the game being destroyed and still try and have fun, and those who care a lot and want the game to be good again. the rest of the magic players fall into 2 other camps. those who don't know any better or are new, and those that eat the slop that WOTC feeds them because they are just mindless herd animals that go with the narrative.
The mtgo apologism is insane. The client is the ultimate of ultimate spaghetti code and it's wizards fault for hiring incompetent people at below rate salaries. It's not hard to code card game rules outside of very rare corner cases if you design the codebase properly from the ground up.
MTGO _might_ have a valid excuse since it was created so long ago (2002), but Arena came _after_ they should have known what they were doing.
Based Danny on saying players need to suck it up and just play better
5:55 I'd like to see a source for "most players don't like the play pattern of control." If you want to address problems in a game based of mathematics, you need statistics, not vibes.
There is certainly an amount of players that don't like playing against control, sure. But you could easily say the same of aggro or burn decks, a la "red deck wins". Or mana ramp decks that push out over-statted creatures way ahead of curve. Or token decks. Or *insert any deck archetype here*.
Magic requires checks and balances to function, not every player liking the play pattern of every type of deck. I fear that this video will essentially boil down to the apocryphal "Jund midrange is the only playstyle WotC should support, because Jund is fair Magic" sentiment that has been floating around for some time.
Ummm Id like to see a source which states that not being able to play the game is not enjoyable 🤓🤓🤓🤓 and you need to prove it mathematically or it doesn't count
bro... Aint no way you are trying to compare any type of archetype to control on 'this isn't fun'. If you start a game you expect to play the god dawn game. Control is 1 step before stax and thats why people hate playing against it. Think of any character in a video game that has a similar effect and say you enjoyed playing against them EG: revenenat from Apex legends or Sombra from Overwatch. You don't need 'statistics' for this kind of thing it is just common sense.
@@CrazygamingSM270 See my response to LittleMushroomGuy. Also, I've not played either of those games, so your examples mean nothing to me.
"Common sense" is what a group of people believe to be true about something, not what's actually true. In the past, it was common sense that deities were the cause of natural disasters and that the way to combat these things were to slaughter livestock or other humans.
Richard Garfield, the original designer of MtG, was a mathematician. Statistics very much do matter when discussing it.
@@LittleMushroomGuy Ah, you're one of those. Usually I'd ignore people like you, but I'm feeling frisky this morning.
1. That is not how the burden of proof works. I did not make the claim, I do not have to provide the proof (but I do provide proof for my counterclaim; see below).
2. If you think that playing against control means "I never get to play the game", you fundamentally do not understand how resources in Magic work. Control is limited by cards in hand and mana.
Here is a community run survey of around 100 (varies by question answered) Arena players (from Reddit, yuck) I found in 10 seconds (search MTG Arena Deck Archetype Survey Results Reddit in Google; I tried to link it and TH-cam deleted the comment). Of the people that that did the survey, 98 responded to the question of "what is your least favorite archetype to play against?" Of those 98, 38.8% percent said playing against control was their least favorite matchup, which is 38 of the respondents.
Notably, in that same survey, when asked to list all the types of decks people liked playing against, 101 people answered, with 50 of them saying they liked playing against control.
So, statistically, a bit more than a third players hate playing against control and about half of Arena players enjoy playing against control, which, in no way, can be construed as "most players don't like playing against control".
I have disproven your counterpoint mathematically with a 10-second google search.
control player detected. likely has zero social skills and has no idea on how to interact with other people
I've talked to people about play/draw fixes and here's what we came up with: Player 2 starts with a land token that you can tap and sacrifice to make 1 of any color. The fact that it's a token means you don't need to bring a special "real card" to play and you don't get a land in your graveyard. The fact that it's a land fixes using a treasure, so that artifcat synergies don't get messed up. You only get the ramp effect once, and so the effect is that non-games are less likely from crazy turn 0 plays from the person on the play.
It almost makes scam a reasonable deck to play against, because now you can have a 1 mana answer and not just auto-lose the game before you get to play a land.
In regards to the counterspell discussion and moving non-"hard counters" to other colors, I personally would prefer if the other colors got some more stack interaction at a bare minimum. This is mostly in relation to EDH, but there is nothing worse than wanting to build a mono-color deck for the funsies and getting blown out because you've got 3 cops at the table with counterspells that theyll shoot at the nearest thing that moves. I think red has received this the most with additional non-creature removal like Wild Magic Surge, Tybalt's, more redirect spells, etc. but white getting more Mana Tithe / Repreive effects would certainly be a boon in its favor. I prefer those Repreive / remand style effects for white particularly because it plays into the "get more while having less" style of play that white has had since Land Tax. I really just think that the Stack is where the heart of magic lies, and if only one color gets to play with it regularly then why play other colors?
For 2-for-1 and creatures, i feel like there is no good answer since creatures need to be powerful enough removal, but if removal is too good then creatures become bad again. No matter what, everyone loses.
Just got around to finishing the video. In regards to art, while the general art on the cards might convey an action or an image that should be depicted for the card to make sense, modern magic has (on average) the most soulless art I have seen. Strixhaven, regardless of how you felt about their alternative arts, at least provided some variety compared to "generic fantasy counter spell magic". There was at least something visually unique with these cards, there was a style unique to the artist conveyed there. And while certain artists may get the blessing of WotC to actually show their incredible skills, I cannot tell you how many artists I will never learn the name of purely because they are producing art to the generic template.
If you look at the original art for Force of Will, it's an angry dude on fire denying a spell through sheer determination. FoW was meant to be a red card and it's the perfect mechanic for red stack interaction : sacrificing card advantage for a counterspell (or anything really) is *definitely not* in blue's color identity but it makes total sense for red.
It's only a blue card because the designers back then were nerds who thought that blue should be the coolest color and have all of the cool spells.
The staple blue counterspell should be remand.
In the same vein, spell pierce/mana leak and stuff like dress down should be staple white cards and black should have access to something like countering non-creature spells (not sure about that one, black color identity is a mystery at this point, it's completely all over the place. I guess sacrificing creatures for counterspells would be ok thematically but then again who knows).
I guess hate bears are already in white and they're kinda like mana tithe already but it's so cringe that everything has to be on a creature nowadays.
Green not being able to interact with the stack is ok to me as an obvious drawback to the color but since Mark Rosewater somehow still has a job at wotc and his pet color can do everything now, so realistically they'll find a way to give it the best stack interaction (on top of the best draw, the best self mill, the best gy interaction and the best creatures).
Explore should be white thematically; civilization expanding through the wilderness but who cares at this point.
@@garak55Force of Will was never going to be a red card, it's just that they were having her draw the art for a red card and then used it on Force of Will
@@jadegrace1312 It's even more cringe. I thought they had had a good idea but decided against it and now I just learned they never even had a good idea of what to do with their game. Sad and cringe.
@@garak55 Making a free red counterspell would actually be a bad idea, not a good one
01:05:36 i think a logic knot style counter would be really good and flavorful for black
I hate to be that guy but the point about foil curling is mostly wrong in comparison to other games. Pokemon and Yugioh cards have full layers of foil layered onto the card stock just like Magic's normal foils. Literally all of them use a cardstock layer, glue layer, foil layer, and ink masks. You can take acetone to any foil from any game and see the foil layer underneath the ink layer. Really only Magic's etched foils work differently since they use a special reflective ink layer. All TCGs have had issues with curling at some point, mostly starting around the same time due to using the same factories. There was a set from Yugioh called Fists of the Gadgets in 2019 which was an all foil set and literally all NA cards came curled because of poor manufacturing humidity control during the set's run. The reason we notice Japanese cards don't seem to curl as much is because their quality control right off the line is much tighter. Having tight quality control at the printing stage matters a lot because, like you said, the worst curling happens when the card is freshly manufactured. I have very few Shadowverse Evolve cards that are curled. I own thousands of foils. The only cards that have curled have been ones coming from a friend who didn't store them properly. The game is produced in Japan under their strict quality control and that makes the difference.
And no, curled foils are absolutely not near mint for the vast majority of players. I'm perfectly willing to uncurl some of my big money and gameplay staple cards with humidity packets but not everyone should have to do this. Curling is a reality for sure but one that can be severely mitigated by the manufacturer. WotC needs to crack the whip on their printing contractors and either pay more for better quality or invest in them to keep their quality more consistent since it's negatively affecting the product for most consumers. Pokemon got sick of quality control being out of their hands so they built their own printing factory. Quality has been perfect ever since.
Oh this is gonna be a goodie
I feel like magics just a new game, and you gotta either play a fan created format (pre-dh/premodern) or forget the game it used to be.
Like rnd really focuses on removing feelsbad and increasing speed. Every deck should have an answer to everything, no card should ever be dead. etc.
Which really sucks for the more interesting slowerpaced games that really would show off what magic has to offer.
But also im the kinda guy who is pivoting more and more into Cedh and Legacy in opposed to Modern and Pioneer so I like the more unfair things in a fair manner. (And the kinda guy who thought it was dope during early mh2 modern that Ponza was being played again lmao)
Like I personally think Trinisphere or Blood Moon are infinitely better designed cards that Toski or Urza's Saga, and toski's not a huge problem anywhere. Its just hes very powerful when he comes down, and his only interaction point is the rare form of removal of exiling. When he is instantly a threat. Whereas Blood Moon is very interactable both on the stack and if you play around it beforehand. Even if it can feel super bad once it comes down.
And also if they printed more hate for cards that cannot be countered, like a 3cmc Ashiok's Erasure or something.
Also on Play/Draw I think the problem is the double whammie of how strong creatures are, and how powerful card advantage is right now. As that extra card should feel impactful, but way too often ur opponent can just draw 1 on turn 1 or 2 anyway turning that not really into an advantage anymore.
And on Time for Rounds I wish that MTG would just introduce a like chess clock as then it becomes on the player to not use their own time. I hate that currently one player can just take up all the time. Maybe this could be a thing that in overtime each player gets 5mins, so that it doesnt become a stressor and hurt every match but just those that go over.
On Collectors Boosters: I wish that they never had guaranteed foils, I get that rares/mythics are guaranteed and it does help sometimes keep the mid rares/mythics down. But now those mid rares foils, which are super rare in regular boosters are just sad to pull.
But also I think cards like Blood Moon should not see print again, or if they do they should be less powerful. Sorta like Smokestack -> Doom Foretold.
Excellent analysis!
Babe wake up, new ammio shit on wotc just dropped
I casually play Mtg Arena, but use these to fall asleep regularly. That's a compliment!
I've been focusing on pauper and pioneer. I have 3 modern decks. At current pricing and rotation from horizons and universes beyond sets, I can't justify spending more on the format.
On card quality, the recent assassin's creed cards are the thinest flimsiest cards I have seen yet.
Edit: on the subject of cheap entry points into the game, I think wotc wants commander to fill that role. That's why they print 24 precons a year. As players, we have the idea in our heads that standard should be cheap. I don't think wizards agrees with that anymore. In their heads, standard is for people that like rotation and draft.
From what I understand, the goal is that standard is and will stay a magic arena thing. Paper magic is now synonimous with commander and I think that was the plan all along.
Complaining about the wandering emperor has got to be the wildest thing I've heard in a while lol
You can have a problem with a card's play pattern even if it isn't the most powerful thing in the game.
@@pirakalord55 play pattern is a cop out answer. Problematic cards should be based on actual power level vs vibes
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17completely wrong take. there's been so many cards year after year that were oppressive in standard and only standard that ruined the format but were not broken or high power level
@williamharrington3595 standard problems are not based on play patterns but simply there was nothing to gain from playing it. B4 the start of Standard in the rcq season, there was no reason to play standard outside of store championships because of arena.
Now standard in paper is much more active because it legitimate gains to play the format in the rcq season
@@FreshPrinceOfBelA17I think the reason why noone plays standard is part of their entire discussion..... it's got nothing to do with rcqs or arena.... its because magic is EDH. flat out. modern, pioneer, take your pick, those formats are irrelevant. And it's by design.
I actually have to come back later additionally, to comment about your extremely out of pocket take targeting the designers of the online products? The way you make your point is extremely reductive and makes light of people's entire careers in software for things you dont understand.
Even bigger than the gameplay problems imo is that magic just isn't cool anymore.
Nooooo you NEED to enjoy the hecking cowboys, AssCreed and epic 80s trash horror movie Stranger Things set! Hummm Marvel movies much next?
💯💯💯💯💯💯💯💯
@@LittleMushroomGuy every character is a lesbian mulatto with zoomer broccoli hair
Every set is an un set
I miss when cards had frazetta style paintings on them
magic was cool?
@@bird_admirer it used to appeal aesthetically to it's actual target demo
It used to take itself seriously
Now it's generic slop
godspeed bro i hope you find it in you to spend your time on things you enjoy instead 👍
Most recently sunk over 400 hours into Stardew Valley; that was pretty fun.
02:32:06 it felt awesome losing to both ashlask (ass lick idk the new eldrazi commander) and ulalek at the MODERN horizons 3 pre release and I had no idea you could even open toilet commander cards in the play boosters
My suggestion for leveling out the play draw advantage is that Player 1 does actually get to draw a card on their first turn, but player 2 gets to search their library for a basic land and put it into play untapped before turn 1. This means that you no longer need a free spell to interact with your opponents turn 1 combo because you can cast a 1 mana spell on their turn, but also it means that you get to untap and play a second land and make a 2 drop in response to your opponents 1 drop.
that's extremely insane
no Universe Beyond cards, that's it
Sometimes something goes bad, and it can’t be fixed
dear lord, we're going DEEP ain't we
I'm only about halfway throught the video, but most of the problems seem to come down to two problems: (1) WOTC's inability/refusal to acknowledge the secondary market, in paper and digital, and (2) the people at the top marketing and forming the game as one of those trash mobile games where you cater solely to the %1 whales who stick around long enough to uphold the sunk-cost fallacy.
To the first point, they need to aggressively reprint cards or figure out something so they don't tank the market as a whole, but they cannot do both. They're trying to walk a line that is not doing the company any good in the long-run.
To the second point, Magic has a very very large player base. They cannot treat Magic, especially Arena, as one of those mobile games who's goal is to rope in a small percentage of people who will pay astronomical amounts of money, and not care about the rest. For the health of the game, they need to cater to the wider player-base and not just those that will or can pay hundreds of dollars on a regular schedule without a second thought. I am firmly in the camp that if they made it possible to buy wild cards at a reasonable price, the longevity, sustainability, and financial success of the Arena client would skyrocket. Make commons $.25, uncommons $.50, rares $.75, and mythics $1.00. If they did that, I would play so much more Magic online because I can build all the decks I want, when I want, and I would willingly pay that price for a digital-only product.
Magic's design-philosophy and power creep is a whole other beast.
they have an inability to acknowledge secondary market because of usa gambling laws
To be fair the little planeswalker symbol is designed to make sure you can't mistake a new print for an old one when some reprints are from old sets and First Printing is worth more to collectors. Don't know if I truly agree, but I don't find it especially egregious
The problem is how easy to is to miss. What's wrong with just changing the set symbol to a "The List" set symbol, ya know, like how _every other set does it._
@AmmiO2 probably because then they'd have to redo the old cards in new border or be and they don't want to. Again, I'm not really in favor of the system, but its worth criticizing accurately
I think the part about programming the cards was misinformed. Keywords ARE trivial to add. But most Magic cards go beyond just having plain keywords. Most of the keywords are prefaced by unique conditions or what have you. I guess consider something like "When you eat a food, do X. Repeat for each food you've eaten while this minion is alive." That's a very simple mechanic but you would need to actually manually create that for that creature, and that's proabably just draft chaff. There's like 20 sets a year and they all have 400 cards. There are way more complicated/unique card examples but I'm too tired to come up with any. Some cards have to be aware about certain states that aren't usually kept track of. And all of this has to work within a long twisted codebase. When they're looking at cards from a set, they can't just choose to ONLY import the simple cards. A set in MtGA has to have packs and the whole nine yards, so it's an all or nothing thing. Nothing about it is particularily IMPOSSIBLE, it just takes a lot of manpower and oversight to check that each card actually behaves exactly as its rules text suggests.
Oh hey my comment got read on the podcast. That's cool.
I know this is the last one..... but a video about edh vs Cedh has always been something i wished people talk about. Not about the power level per say. But just how decisions were made in the banlist and what would happen it we had seperate versions.
I honestly feel like edh and cedh should just have their own banlists. Cause its really weird that we dont ban certain things when a lot of reasoning is "its not fun." But then smothering tide, ghostly prison, land destruction, the one ring... things that effect the whole play group are allowed...
If edh is supposed to be the "FUN, CAREFREE" Format. Why are there so many cards that are unfun to play against FOR THE GROUP.
It just doesnt make sense. And putting too much stock in rule 0 is bad.
I think you don't like Magic.
you sound like someone who's never played competitive and you eat WOTC slop and just buys expensive products for fomo to show off to your friends
@@newshrimp you don't make a four hour podcast critiquing something you don't care about
@bidu2331324 don't like isn't the same as don't care about
I've only listened to part but the criticisms have been very reasonable and there's been a lot of credit and benefit of the doubt given to the designers. Never listen to Maro's podcast if this level of constructive criticism of MTG bothers you.
I don’t think they like magic either. I get that the game isn’t perfect but as of late these videos have been more and more complaining about more recent game design than anything else. The latest content has been edh focused which is a tell tale sign of someone going down the dark side of the game when they previously focused on constructed formats. As far as the game itself when going on these rants about what they don’t like and what needs to change, it’s best to think why do you even like the game in the first place? How much have things changed? And is it reasonable to hold on to certain expectations?
03:40:35 they might think of secret lairs and all the far out artwork but i generally agree that magic art has gotten better
you guys struck gold with these podcasts, you should do them more often
Shame it's the last one (maybe).
On one hand, frustrating to hear a lot of the same sentiments. On the other, I agree with a lot of the sentiments posed by this series analyzing Magic, or at least understand the rationality behind them.
I do not have a friend group for Magic, leaving Arena or my store as my main means of play. My local store mainly holds 3-4 competitive events: Commander, CEDH, Modern, and limited (usually prerelease). Standard died off a year ago and Pauper slowly dried up with lackluster weekend attendance. I have no interest in CEDH (proxies or not), Modern is too expensive to keep up with local spikes, and limited is mainly on set releases.
That leaves Commander, where the nature of a prize structure pushes decks to primarily be combo decks. As such, the commentary on counterspells in multiple colors was disheartening to hear; a lot of game experiences I have are either racing to kill people who tend to run combo decks, or die within 5 turns....if you do not cave and play a combo deck to race them or play Blue to be able to have stack interaction.
Also in agreement on must-kill threats. Even comparatively "fair" decks such as Reanimator are chock-full of the most impactful and back-breaking mythics of recent years (DMU Sheoldred, Toxrill, etc.). They are highly resilient decks that require either immediate responses to try to endure, or a little white flag to wave as you walk away with nothing but shame.
In the half-remembered words of a spike: "You can either play to win or play to 'do the thing.' If you try to do the thing, you will not get anywhere here."
Nothing about MH3 on its own said "commander players, this isn't for you." That’s ridiculous. It didn't need to have a lot of legendary creatures or commander decks for commander players to buy it. People are so forgetful that commander used to be where you used whatever cards you had lying around from playing all the other formats. It didn't need official support or 50 legendary creatures every set to be playable, and arguably adding command tower, arcane signet, etc. and all the "staples" made it worse.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us AmmiO
Ill build this comment as I listen.
We always need to be wary when using "fun" as a reason to ban or change something. You look hard enough, you will find that every aspect of the game is disliked by some people.
Draw go control is a great experience. As a player going against it, unless you bring a linear deck, you need to make relevant decisions about how to approach the matchup, or you will lose easily. The same goes for the control player. Your answers need to be used well, or you will lose. The issue is when cards do too much and there are no decisions to make. As yall said, the wandering emperor is the problem. It is removal and a win condition in one, and at flash speed. Furthermore, the way not play into it either leaves you exposed to wipes or gives the control deck more time to dig. Remove the flash speed from TWE, and i have no qualms with the control matchup. I genuinely ask players that dislike facing draw go do they actually like mtg. If combat math is your absolute joy, sure, ill take that. Otherwise, draw go will not win fast, but it also will not play solitaire. Do you want your opponent to not interact with you?
I wasnt paying attention when modern descended into two ships passing the night, but pioneer is well on its way there. It was the first 60 card constructed format i tried and the first i quit due to linear play patterns. In that format, a large majority of relevant decks are about cheating mana costs T3, defending the plays that cheat mana, or aiming to do some combo T3-4. If every deck does that, there are no decisions to make. Your mulligans will always be about stopping their thing. Whether or not you could stop the thing, a binary decision - actually, decision is too generous- situation, decides the game. When that is the case, why play coin flips?
I disagree on spreading countermagic out because i disagree with the notion that there are no universal answers to big spells. Emergent ultimatum gets stopped by colorless cards anyone can run, easiest example is damping sphere. Choosing to have no answer is on the deck builder. Planeswalkers get answered by pithing needle effects if a player is that concerned about them.
The arena economy sucks and i dont know how people support it. It is free, yes, but the system is soooo anti player unless you spend $$$. It caps your earnings unless you gamble with events. If youre going to spend $$$ or risk things, you may as well play MTGO. Then, you can at least sell your cards once you are done.
EDH runs design now, obviously. This hurts everyone with product fatigue, broken cards busting 1 v 1 wide open, literal coin flips in sets, etc. EDH has its place, but it should not run design. I hope this gets fixed before it is too late.
MtG is just a busted game when it comes to constructed. Wait long enough, they all boil down to do some busted thing as fast as possible. Every format struggles with this issue, even standard with convoke. Decisions rarely matter unless it is a midrange mirror, and even those can feel swingy and snowbally because cards are busted and so many run away with the game on their own. Cant answer bronco, preacher, raffine immediately? Youve probably lost.
I am not sure if you touch on it in the video but id love to see you two design a cube. It would be interesting to see the designs you include or how opinions on cards change with respect to the environment. Eg grief being worse without a scam spell
We actually both have cubes.
Here's mine:
cubecobra.com/cube/overview/86f7325f-2a65-4006-9160-ee7b86aadcca
Here's Dylans:
cubecobra.com/cube/list/43ec42bf-0088-4801-bbd2-afca6c8a7a27
oh boy another 2hr plus ammi video
Wizards should make Standard and Pioneer precons that give strong manabases to new players.
These decks should not try to be meta or else they run into the same problems discussed in the video: Auras was instantly irrelevant and Lotus field was scalped for Omniscience
Instead of meta, if the precons were based on color pairs or triples, Standard players would have something to 1) Play with right away and 2) Use as a shell for a meta deck
It's important that the decks should have 4x cards in the mana base at the very least. And secondarily the decks should be relatively balanced to play against other precons. Even draft chaff for spells would be fine if it meant that these kinds of decks could survive on shelves for new players to get started with 1 purchase
If wizards printed Standard Starters like this and put them on the shelf for 20 bucks next to commander precons, maybe I could convince someone to play a game of Magic with me after we swapped out of an hour slog of waiting for my turn and hearing people complain about threat assessment. Because that's all my LGS plays
In regards to the ETB doscussion i think your problen is more with the pushed design of teferi and omnath rathwr than how the ETB interaction works. Without some ability to get vakue off of a creature outside the body itself the tempi pendulum just swings massivly in favor of thw removal palyer ebxause you are trading 1 for 1 and you have a mana advantage because in most cases the removal spell is cheaoer than the bomb creature.
I probably should have elaborated more but yes, I don't have a problem ETBs such as Kitchen Finks. The problem is that ETBs are now incredibly pushed.
The cards that "should be banned" are a bit ridiculous
Like. I have probkems with the game. But the issues you list are just not it.
I really wish you would do any amount of research before you make most of the claims you do. All your complaints about foiling get covered in a single Rhystic Studies video, it's not even that deep. Like the comments you make about what is or isn't easy to program undermine all of your arguments and credibility. Don't just make things up on the spot, you literally couldn't name something more complex than trample when trying to explain how coding blocks of rules. You can't complain about how wordy and complex cards are and then talk about how easy they are to code.
?
say you like insane midrange slop without saying you like insane midrange slop
Because Horizons Block Constructed is such a fun and skill-intensive format in comparison to classic Modern!
Something I think should have been covered more thoroughly here is how much draft has changed too. Sign posting got way more aggressive (2 colour legendary creature signpost uncommon trend for instance) and fixing has been getting so good drafts are stupid flexible.
I do disagree with several of the design complaints however. Draw Go isn't inherent bad, otherwise all control decks would be definitionally a design and gameplay failure. I'll admit there are problems with the current iteration of white blue control, but it goes beyond "control unfun". When there's a critical mass of good reactive answers in the game it encourages passive and reactive play when playing cards reactively is already innately advantageous. Draw go is more a failure of incentivizing proactive play and aggression. Sometimes answers are also so good they can't be meaningfully played around, you simply have to play into them and if they have it they have it.
I find that the distinction between good variability like the random order of the library and bad variability like CoCo was poorly articulated/unjustified. Unless the problem is simply that even a mathematically optimal deck's chance to whiff on CoCo is too high.
Previous episodes were cool, but this one is just a 4-hour remix of them with nothing new
01:32:17 most corporate way to say hey don't play our game then
I had a friend download arena because he played a lot of the yugioh app. He loves it and basically only plays arena now but he plays historic and will probably never play paper because he only knows the fake digital formats.
The way the one guy is talking about Nadu at around the 48:00 mark makes it sound like they literally didn't even read the card. I'm sorry, but even reading the card, it sounds incredibly powerful. And it's super easy to go "hmm I wonder if there's something that can break this!" and then a shit ton of people immediately said yeah. There is. I didn't even know that Shuko was a card but I easily would have searched up equipment that have a 0 casting cost and immediately found it out. Not that it's only broken with Shuko since Shuko isn't on arena and Nadu is still tearing up the brawl ladder.
But yeah, the idea that they had no idea how their own card worked isn't a better excuse than them not testing it at all. You are assuming a level of incompetence that's frankly worse than what the main guy is suggesting by saying they might've literally not tested the card. I think the most likely thing is they knew it was busted and just released it that way because.
It reminds me of Goldspan Dragon. A much less busted card overall, but a card that was clearly pushed for standard. Like, it's a hasty 4/4 5 mana flier. Pretty classic niche for red. But it makes a treasure when targeted by spells for either player, so you can use it to combo or your foe will inadvertenly gift you a treasure if it's targeted. That alone was a good enough ability. But then throwing on a clause that doubled treasures' value when cracked meant that you could very easily cast Goldspan and then when it's targeted you have the 2 mana to cast the counter spell. Nadu takes that same design principle and ratchets it up even further. Did it need to be a 3/4? Did it need to be abilities vs spells? Did it need to trigger both when you target it and when your foe targets it? Did it need to extend to all creatures, including tokens? Did it need to be trigger-able 2ce per creature per turn? Did it need to make the land untapped? Did it need to let you draw the card if it's not a land? All of these things are subtle or large ways they could have altered the card but they didn't. And the designers use all of these things all the time. In fact, the expectation is that most of these limits would be placed on it. They explicitly went out of their way to just keep pushing the card because "Modern is a high power level format an d3-drops need to be pushed and MH sets are meant to be pushed anyway!"
Also, the 2nd guy really fucking hates pro players. "yeah it is cool to ban cards 1 week out from a tournament" "it's fine to have players going up to 20 hours in a day" "it's okay if the majority of players are losing money"
All of these things make pursuing a career as a pro player incredibly hostile or just impossible. Sure pros are the best of the best, but that doesn't mean they should have to go through hell to play the game. Moreover, I think most people want MtG to be a healthy game and having a pro tour can really help feed into that. MtG is a huge game compared to most other games so there are casual segments of the base as well as competitive, but having the pro tour as a competitive outlet is generally a good thing and you are actively making it worse.
Even a sport as brutal as football has a union that in turn fights for basic rights for the players. There are limits on the number of practices, how long those practices can last, how much contact there can be during practice, etc. We are far away from there being a level of structure to Pro MTG play where there might be a union, but actively encouraging the most hostile conditions possible is a great way to kill off the competitive circuit altogether.
I think you just don't like their attempts at innovation. The game is 30 years old now. They're going to make mistakes when messing with power levels of cards to push the game further. They're not perfect. But it would be nice if they quickly admitted to their mistakes like Nadu and ban them quickly.
They ban cranial ram (a fun card) in pauper day zero, but they will allow Nadu to slug along for a while
they are near perfect. they have multiple experts and analytics to prevent issues. they just want your money and you give it to them. There's not a problem with innovation there's a problem with greed
@@LittleMushroomGuy Your example is false equivalency.
That's because the formats are different and their respective rules committee are different. The pauper format panel is made up of 7 people (as of the article Gavin Verhey wrote on the topic in 2022), six of which are high-level players and one of which is a game designer at WotC (Gavin). Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Pioneer, and Standard are directly ruled upon by WotC themselves who have a financial incentive not to ban cards that are selling product.
Cranial Ram was banned day one because of its similarity to the--at the time--recently banned All That Glitters. This was decided by a body independent of WotC. Nadu is not similar to any other card in Modern, Vintage, or Legacy, so there was no pre-existing data or precedence to judge the card by, only internal playtesting. Additionally, a Pro-tour event was slated to happen right after Nadu released. Banning a key piece of a deck during a major tournament is bad for its players for obvious reasons.
Mushroom, you have some *exceptionally* bad takes in the comment section of this video.
And to be clear, yes, I think Nadu should be banned or restricted in Modern.
Everything they have done was stolen from duel masters
They say this in the video already. They're okay with experimentation but they want more proactive bans and more playtesting, and they want them to be more careful with certain archetypes, including very old archetypes like blue/white control.
1:07 Don't give counters to other colors dude. The other colors ways of interacting with big spells is "killing the opponent before they can cast them". If people are cheating big spells too easily, well, there is the problem; not the spell itself.
You guys lost me on the art thing, the art is hideous
Turn it into duel masters
was this scripted or just talking points
The topics and many of their lead-ins were prepared in advance, but the discussion itself was conversational.
I dont listen to political podcasts so this is my go-to when i want to depretion spiral /j
Ban grief
time to play a new game..
For me it's been Shadowverse Evolve. Both Magic and Yugioh have systemic rot and it's made me find alternatives.
Im at 1 hour, 42 minutes in.
So far, I think it's hilarious that the former comp player entirely shut down the idea of every color getting counterspells. That was objectively embarrassing. Secondly, while yes, Sheoldred is very expensive, it's expensive because of how usable it is/was in pioneer, standard, in modern to a certain extent, and most importantly, EDH where people want to cast their wheel effects and make people draw 7 cards and lose 14 life. Sure it should have been reprinted, but unfortunately the price makes a lot of sense. It even technically has EIGHT different versions you can buy! The demand is just THERE.
afaik they use machine learning (aka AI) to code the cards for arena so I'm not convinced that they actually take longer to code than a yugioh card.
obviously you'll have to audit and potentially adjust the cards that this spits out, but for any random french vanilla card it should take no effort at all
Citation needed, because if you knew anything about software you'd know this is not possible
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All Magic players ever: "THIS INHERENTLY EXPLOITATIVE GAME IS EXPLOITING ME AGAIN!! WHAAAAA!! WHAAAAA!!!! 🍼🍼🍼🍼🍼🍼🍼😭😭😭😭😭😭😭🤮
(🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗
😘😘😘😘😘😘
🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑)