The most ironic part of the density of text on cards is that there is no space left for reminder text. If WOTC wants new players to enjoy the game, then the cards need to read out exactly what they do, without any uncertainty. I personally believe that’s a huge, undiscussed reason why there isn’t many newer players at younger ages coming into the game. The fact that “committing a crime” isn’t described on any Thunder Junction cards, and MaRo had to specifically request permission to post what the actual reminder text is to what “committing a crime” does is indicative of that underlying issue.
Yeah, this feels especially painful in commander since there are so many boards and cards to keep track of. There have been many games where I kinda stopped listening when people read their cards as they played them because I wasn't going to remember them anyway. And this contributes to longer games because every time someone goes to take any action, they have to ask everyone what everything on their board does again.
The trick is you print a queen knight commander with 2 paragraphs granting it both types of movement and a triggered ability whenever a knight or queen etbs
Magic for 25 years relied on option 3 to attract people to the game. Have a Rotation that only allowed you to play with the most recent 2 years of cards. That was the Real solution.
When Brian (The Professor) began his channel and used to say "reading the card explains the card", it wasn't a joke. It was true. People used to say "rtfc" [read the f-ing card]. It was his polite way of saying, "rtfc." It became a "joke" when complexity creep began to go wild.
I do think it's kind of interesting to slice further into everything bagels. I've seen people hold up Ojer Axonil as an example of negative complexity creep, and I'd disagree in that I think it's selling the player a coherent gameplan, similar to Slime Against Humanity. It's a burn god for a burn deck, it incentivizes specific game action and a specific deck composition. Conversely you have something like the Mulldrifter+Baneslayer everything bagel of the new Atraxa, Grand Unifier. It doesn't really sell a gameplan beyond "If you like winning at magic, four keywords on a 7/7 and a bunch of card advantage is great for that" and I think cards like it have a much more corrosive effect on meta diversity than the narrower bagels.
Good point. Paint by numbers is a different problem I think. Hearthstone and yugioh use that approach. Printing very specific cards to fix in the meta decks they’re trying to sculpt. It does keep the power and complexity creep down though as it only creeps one specific archetype. The trade off is in player agency in deck building.
Well atraxxa is more so, congratulations you played a 5 colour deck here a keyword soup creature with a powerful etb. Obviously in commander shes is jusst good since if your in the colours to player her shes a very good inclusion.
I'm surprised people think Axonil is complex. Red non-combat damage to players < his power = his power. Floats to a land that can resurrect him as a sorcery after dealing 4 red non-combat damage in a turn. Seems pretty tame in comparison to some of the other cards we've gotten in recent years. But maybe I'm biased, I immediately built a commander burn deck around him that specializes in dealing "1" damage.
Fable of the Mirror Breaker seems like a prime example of the everything bagle. front side with 3 chapters,backside becomes a relevant creature and to add even more text it creates a creature token with even more relevant text so we effectively already have 3 pages of text
I like everything bagel as a term. (And as someone who made a Greta food commander deck I feel called out!) By far my biggest issue with "everything bagels" is that they have proliferated through the game at the same time copy effects have become more numerous. It's one thing when you have to look at a token on the board and remember "oh that's a 4/4 angel" vs "oh that is a food artifact with "Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, if it targets..." I know in our game we've always gotten in the most trouble with everything bagels, and the easiest way to balance it was always to split up its abilities into other cards. I do get that a lot of the massive text on cards is essentially trying to spell out a concept rather than keyword it. i.e. In Star Trek CCG 2E instead of "Look through your deck for [a card], reveal that card to all players, place it in your hand, then shuffle your deck." they just had the term, "download [a card]." But then as a designer you get caught in a catch 22. Use too many game terms, and you scare away new players by making the game seem too much like a new language. On the other hand, spell it all out for them, and then it looks intimidating to new players too. (Plus I can't count how many times densely worded cards have been misplayed.) And don't even get me started on when you phrase a card very carefully, very precisely to prevent broken shenanigans from happening, and then someone just skims the text and makes assumptions about how they want it to play - leading to the very broken stuff you were trying to prevent! 🤣
Haha the skimming thing happens so often. This really negatively impacts draft as well. You have a time limit to choose a card from a pack and you can barely get through reading the cards before you gotta pass.
The problem isn't the complexity creep in and of itself, the problem is that it is power creep *and* complexity creep. If you play a landfall deck, then you not only need to have a good ratio in your deck of landfall cards and extra landdrop effects *and* draw them but you also need to play both of them meaning more mana spent and possibly a turncycle where the first peace could be removed. And on the other side you have sam who is in your command zone and when you play him you immediately have the combo enabler and payoff, I would call it a one card combo because of that, and can use it immediately, so he does the thing at least once even if he gets removed immediately after. Back in ye olden days when you only had complexity creep in the form of ever more keywords that are almost the same or a card triggering in a very specific circumstance only, that was fine to the enfranchised players but modern card design is just insanity.
In a card game that incentives the player to play a land and a card per turn, whilst drawing only a single card, "everything bagles", "modal cards", "token creation", "mdfc spell/lands" and "flashback/kicker/mana sink abilities" are very important because the player will otherwise run out of cards/options by turn 6 or 7. I don't think that this desing is only for commander, but also very much for draft and limited because they also help with the risk of being mana screwed/flooded or drawing dead cards in the late game. Complexity creep is defenitly also a thing with whole paragraphs, amount of triggers and unexplained abilities, but I think that that is a seperated issue from everything bagles / forced power creep by adding more abilities
I used to play tons of Magic back in middle school and highschool (roughly Stronghold thru Odyssey). I quit mostly becuase I just got tired of the CCG model. Some of my friends never stopped playing and building decks. I recently jumped into a few games of commander with them (borrowing their spare decks) for fun and the way they design cards now is completely insane. I know its partially due to it being a non rotation format but damn, theres all these hyper specific tokens, day night cycles, monarch, and it feels like every card is power crept so hard compared to the older days of MtG. Especially in free for all commander I felt like it was impossible to truly understand the game state because every permanent had like two paragraphs of rules text and abilities, and so many things were interacting with exiled cards and graveyards. This caused me to be too nervous to make any big moves, and I ended up winning a few games because that often means you get ignored while everyone else dukes it out. 😂
Interesting perspective! I started playing in odyssey actually. Going from the standard format leading the game to commander has been really interesting. It’s awesome to see so many people enjoying the game, but designing for eternal formats is very challenging.
@@kateslate3228 Yes actually my favorite MtG experience I've had in the last few years was going to a friend's house to participate in a booster draft of the first dungeons and dragons expansion. It was a mostly pretty reasonable set and the booster draft format means everyone is on even footing and is deck building in a walled garden of the expansion design. I personally enjoy the game the most when it's focused on the simple fundamentals, and there are things that force you to make sub optimal choices when deck building. I guess I'm considered a "Magic Boomer" nowadays but I miss the days when me and my friends would just be cracking open packs of Urza's Saga boosters at the game store at the mall and trying to build functioning mono or two color decks with the cards our allowance could afford. When I look at what the game has evolved into via accretion, design skewed towards high level competitive play, and rules complexity bloat it just seems like WotC has lost the plot.
I still haven't gotten over Guilded Drake. That thing was a JUNK RARE outta the pack back in 1998. I had like 30 of them I sold out and took a 20 year break and now all of a sudden EDH and what the hell is that and GD is $200 because you can steal someone's commander with it 😂😂
They never HAD to power/complexity creep. They CHOSE to power/complexity creep. That, and I don't trust that the current design team/staff and/or goal at WotC is in line with the vision of 25+ years of magic. There was nothing wrong with having: • a setting specific vanilla creatue suit • you set mechanic(s) instant, sorcery, artifact, enchantment, land, and etb/dies trigger & activated ability creature suite • your obligatory angles, demons, dragons, etc. • your storyline cards • your planeswalker package If nobody is playing your cards, it isn't specifically because they aren't powerful - I mean, kind of - but more specifically because your set mechanic(s) suck. There was a period of time when they were doing that and magic was selling very well, but greedy Hasbo executives wanted to ramp up sales numbers and here we are now. Magic wasn't dying. It wasn't getting stale. They just wanted to crank up the dial and make the money gun go buuurrrrr
I agree with your first and last paragraph, but not with your second one. - Vanilla creatures always were useless and boring, with rare exceptions. Almost nobody is missing the 'good old vanilla 3/2 for 3'. - Of the last five standard sets, WOE was the only one without angels and demons. The same goes for original ELD. MKM, LCI, MOM and ONE all have creatures of all three types. - Are storyline cards not around anymore? I don't follow the story, but if anything, I feel they have become more ubiquitous. - The new single planeswalker policy is both quite popular and reduces complexity. I think you're just leaning into your conservative bias a bit too hard here.
@bladdnun3016 - Vanilla was for limited [draft and sealed constructed] when that was the power level. A 3/2 for 3 was fine in limited until WotC said it wasn't. Nobody misses it? Fine. Whatever. People are actively complaining about complexity creep, so they DO, in fact, miss it without being able to put a finger on why what it is they miss. I was making a list of what sets were like, and you would have replied to me that I forgot that in the formula if I hadn't listed the Angles/Demons/Dragons... or someone else would have. Same with the other things you replied to. The notion that WotC is "forced" to do power and/or complexity creep is demonstrably not true based on what we have talked about, and I think you said you agreed on. It also doesn't HAVE TO BE pure vanilla. Sometimes the basic 2/2 with fear or intimidate or whatever they like, and the 3/2 with trample, and the 4/1 with haste and vlah blah blah. They have all been done before, but having a different creature type to support a tribe or name to build the flavor of the set/setting is good enough.
Imma be honest, from a perspective of "game feel" having both halves of an effect as you described is very boring. There is so much texture to a deck's design that has been sanded down if all your cards are AB, BC, CA as opposed to A, B, C. Like, that is a whole card worth of difference to have the whole effect! Muliply this over 60 or 100 cards it robs games of identity and power creeps into oblivion.
I tried arena again awhile ago, and quickly ran into problems against everything bagel Nazgul. It just does everything it needs to with no downside. This means it'll always trade 2 for 1. And you can have 9 in your deck, so you're going to get at least 3 every game. Way too much self synergy.
I think another notable thing is protection creep, especially notable with the ixalan gods and the dominus cycle, where it feels like big enablers are getting harder to remove because “my big piece getting removed in commander feels bad”
I have been playing magic for just shy of a year and when I play commander or drafts I still barely know what's going on. They way you guys describe magic makes it sound so fun and not at all like the game I have been playing lol
so the big takeaway im getting from this is: players making commander the main magic format are gonna kill magic the gathering in time and be stuck playing without new players, from the looks of where the path is headed. i don't believe im about to say this but.. it feels like MtG would benefit to transition into a Live Service model instead of TCG.
@@PensFan96 seasons for introducing rotation and to cover the monetization lost by physical set releases. digital cards can be patched, which solves one thing, and rotation solves power creep and stagnation in 1 go. sets are already seasons, just not digital. seeing as keeping up with MtG is already a piecemeal subscription model in spirit, i don't think the transition would be a decline in profits. on the contrary. being fully digital is an easy way to solve a lot of issues but the sacrifice of losing physical paper is one i imagine not all are willing to pay. one of the major underrated benefits of full digital is that done proper, onboarding new players can be extremely more effective, and that can allow more freedom to use game specific language without the natural drawbacks of it.
Just going to point out that the MtG Arena game is deeply flawed, with the way it cheats (both for and against) the players to keep them handing over money.
The puzzle solving is my favorite part of the game, and it has both increased and been weirdly stunted in recent years. Power creep shortened the window you have to solve even though more and more complex pieces with more synergy have been printed. So now it's turbo puzzle solving.
Yugioh has had a lot of effect creep over the years as well. Most cards used to do 1 thing. Now they do like 3. I guess that's just what happens after a card game is around for so long
It doesn't have to happen on the level that Yugioh has experienced. If Yugioh had made Master Rule 4 its own standard/rotating format they could've de-escalated the power of the game. Magic has dampened this problem for 30 years and only now that Commander has become the premier format are mtg players experiencing 2-3 effects per card. Because once a casual player builds a commander deck, they are set for life in theory. That has always been true for Yugioh which is why the game is in the state it's in. They have needed a premier rotating format for years. Magic does too unfortunately...
When I think of cards with too much text, I think of Ojer Axonil. Ojer Axonil doesn't have *that* much text on it. It's longer than plenty of cards, but it's pretty short for a mythic creature that's part of a horizontal cycle. It only has 2 effects, and 1 of those 2 effects is its flip to its backside, which is just a death trigger. Ojer Axonil is not difficult to understand, and it's not an especially complex card. But it *is more complex than it needs to be*, which is my issue with it. When I say that Ojer Axonil's effect text is too long, I mean that its effect is unnecessarily bloated with small hinderances or clauses the card doesn't need. The two small clauses being that you would deal damage to an opponent, and you would deal damage equal to less than Ojer Axonil's power. These clauses aren't meaningless, they do have gameplay consequences, but they both rarely come up and when they do come up, make the gameplay less interesting. These small stipulations exist specifically to ensure that an effect is never detrimental, always at worst neutral, to whoever is playing Axonil. This isn't an uncommon trend. Sometimes text is slapped on cards to essentially protect players from themselves, or from their opponent using their tools against them. An Axonil player will never hurt themselves with boosted symmetrical damage, or have their damage turned off by an enemy reducing Axonil's power for instance. So the designers end up using plenty of card real estate to prevent interactions that are both rare and also good for the game in a tepid attempt to shield players from "feel bad" moments. Note that getting rid of these clauses make the card less wordy, and less mechanically complex, but actually makes the gameplay more complex. Often, cards gets "more complex" and yet their gameplay actually gets less complex, because the complexity creep makes effects more specific and constrains options or decisions as a result of that specificity. Lots of cards have "too much text" because they have multiple effects or are modal or have two part effects meant to work together, like for instance Agatha's Soul Cauldron. I thought Axonil was an important point to bring up because it illustrates how individual effects are also being made worse, it isn't simply that they're putting a larger number of effects on a card.
Complexity creep actually results in railroading deck making. Giving every piece in chess the ability to move anywhere turns it into checkers, not chess v2.
Been playing this game since forever, I have big problems with how things are today. Many things is easier on Arena, but on paper, all those tokens, counters, triggers, ON TOP of all thousands of keywords!
Ban all counter spells. No exceptions. Anyone should be able to defend cards on stack without needing their own counter spells. Same with 1 mana discard crap people play on first turn after you Milligan down to the only card you need. If you can't defend against something, it's cheating.
Even in non eternal formats you'll always end up with either feature or power creep right? I never really engaged too much card games personally, but I imagine it would be easy for longstanding players to be like "didn't we do this before? Why did you rotate this 2 mana 2/2 cat out in exchange for a 2 mana 2/2 green cat?"
With rotation you can reuse cards that have been out of rotation for a long time and players will rejoice. You’ll get some power and complexity creep for sure, but you’re not competing with every card ever made at all times.
i think giant spider was reprinted every rotation from alpha to core set 2014. It's just a useful card to have in the game that creates fun play patterns. You can also use the 2/2 vanilla creature slot to do some worldbuilding. It could be a cat, or a soldier, or a priest, whatever.
Other problem with all the "everything bagel" card designs is that there is no "let's go halves on a pizza" type design. Cards like "Master of the Feast" where you get a discounted thing by giving your opponent something.
2:06 pretty sure that just a tangentially version of nivmizzet effects. Not sure how its an every bagel card. As it seems like your complaining a card has the ability to synergise with other cards. As the alternative for that kinda of card would be when you play and instant or sorcery deal 1 damage to each opponent and draw a card. Its seems to actually just be better if the effect is spread over 2 abilities to allow for more interactions with other cards or effects.
So I think text density has a lot to do with precision, especially in multiplayer formats, with many ways for other players to interact with your cards and their effects.
Cards have become less comprehensible as they've gotten wordier. Now you have to remember the three plus effects a card has each with the potential to have numerous use cases.
I see people often point to commander players for what's wrong with the current complexity issue with MtG and I'd have to disagree. It's more WotC capitalizing on Commander's popularity (it's both evergreen and casual) and pushing product to be usable in non-standard formats (MH2 anyone?). Even still, I wouldn't necessarily blame Commander players for the ever escalating prices for cards as they're frequently used in more competitive formats where their power and scarcity drive up card price. Commander can see far more casual and budgetable deck building on average compared to standard or modern which are arms races for competitive edges.
Yeah I agree, but I think it’s both. Nearly the entire player base plays non-rotating formats and it hurts everyone. It used to be commander players could wait until cards rotated out of standard and pick up cards they were interested in for cheap. This also created a demand for those cards when they rotated out allowing standard players to cash out and invest in the new cards. Now everyone is trying to buy the same cards in a lot of cases.
@@distractionmakers the demand isn't quite there when Commander players only really need 1-2 copies of any given card while Modern or Standard pushes for 4 copies. It's again WotC for printing ever more powerful product trying to get people to play Standard while also have potential in Modern (MH2 made Ragavan which demanded 4 copies to play in Modern, at most need 1 in Commander). Most cards in standard sets that are designed for commander typically cost less since there's no demand for them anywhere else and they usually end up niche by design, see Tetzin, Gnome Champion a penny rare from Caverns of Ixalan.
I'm just starting to think that the current generation of designers just aren't as good or experienced at card design as the older generations were. They come from different backgrounds expect different things and don't quite have the forsite that the last lot did. Not that they won't be able to achieve the same quality in the long run but in the short run they are shifting baselines, IMO, too quickly. The cards are long winded, wordy and do a lot for the same reason a writer's books might do the same; they aren't being wrangled down by more experienced editors/designers anymore. There's been recent cards, that I've see (though none spring to mind), that are pointlessly wordy, often to the point where a simple effect comes of as gobbledygook until you sit down and pull it apart. It would be as if lifelink were worded "At any point this creature deals damage to a player, planeswalker, or creature increase your life total by a value equal to the damage dealt" On top of this is an internal desire to push cards to be more powerful, the for stated reasons which, to me, demonstrate a misunderstanding of why some cards are weaker than others, especially in standard sets which are draftable. A lot of cards are now designed to be a complete combo within the card. I like to think of how Spider Spawning would be designed in a modern set. "Swarming Spiders: 2GG Sorcery; Mill the top 5 cards from your library, then summon a number of 2/2 black spider creature tokens with death touch and this creature cannot block equal to the number of creatures in your graveyard. Flashback 3B" This is based on 1. The ever reduced Mana Values of cards compared to their historical analogues 2. A stated goal to make cards mana values contain more colour pips to reduce splashing in draft 3. The outright stated goal to remove as many ways to prevent board stalls as possible by making blocking less optimal: such as tokens that cannot block, printing creatures with lower touchness generally and giving creatures strong keywords for offence like First Strike and Deathtouch. 4. The card needs no support to work, it just works. Instead of building a deck around a card, e.g. Spider Spawning in Innistrad, now payoff cards set themselves up and visa versa for set up cards.
1- if you bring up generational diferences than we shoul also look at the players and consider that they seem to want faster games (less setup) and more impactful plays ( cards that do more and lead to more " streamable moments". on your memorable points 1- that is just nore boticeble these days when they design more and more cards and such designs are not based on the main format of the game, standard. 2-that is a recent stated goal, am i correct? 3- acording to Rosewater that is a fundamental part of the designers, making sure that the game ends. And that is not a new thing at all. Board stalls are one of the sins more often perceived about mtg ( wrongly so) and one that modern card game designers seem to try to fiercely avoid. 4- Strong cards that work on their own( jund cards?) were always around. same for synergy cards and strategies. Balance and variety is what matters. Even if power creep is a thing i am not sure that balance has gone wrong excepting some very small number of cards.
@@goncaloferreira6429 yeah I mean Pile decks like Jund were always a thing but in the example given we are talking about Spider Spawning; a draft card, to illustrate the increase in power, complexity, and wotc hand-holding players. The example of NEW-spider spawning not only turns the card into both an enabler and payoff. It also makes the card one-dimensional and less thought-provoking by not allowing for a slower gamestate with powerful blockers that could attack.
@@goncaloferreira6429 1. You can achieve both of those goals without resporting to or making the mistakes that WotC are doing. 2. The problem you get when all cards are designed with commander in mind is that commander isn't like other formats. It has an incredibly consistent mana curve and ramp is plentiful. This has resulted in for example limited having an increased amount of now games (games where neither player got to make any decisions) due to land issues and runaway snowballs. 3. Whilst I cannot be entirely sure what you mean by "that". Anything I have claimed WotC have stated I heard from a WotC dev either mark Rosewater or other's during interviews such as those on the preprerelease with LRR 4.There's a fundamental difference between making sure games end and what they are currently doing. Sets from 2019 and back had lots of ways to avoid board stalls without resorting to the frankly absurd extremes we're currently seeing. I think I can point to New Capenna for the first example of my problems insanely pushed cards, overwhelming tempo and agro with few ways if any to buy time in order to catch up as it were. MOM had those phyrexian mites that couldn't block in another insanely fast set and we've seen similar design return in other recent sets. Are these designers really of the opinion that Dominaria was worse becuase saprolings could block? 5. We've always had some yes but not "every" card doing it when it was one or two pushed commons or uncommons it was fine but now it's half the set or more. Previously you had time whilst your opponent assembled their combo to intervien with removal, or wall up so you weren't run over. You used to have time to dig through a land pocket or find the land you were missing. With modern card design not only are we no longer seeing the tools to regain lost tempo but also lots of cards that punish a loss of tempo.
I just want them to ban Tamiyo's Safekeeping and all the other, just..OVERPOWERED cards they have. I'm tired of feeling like I get punished for NOT going on Reddit to copy a cheap deck.
The premise of this video is based on a false dichotomy. Universes Beyond has proven that players are MORE than willing to buy cards based solely on the flavor. The majority of Secret Lair drops are just cosmetic changes to preexisting cards. A big part of collector boosters' success is the alternate art style cards. The one of one ring sold tons of boosters based solely on its collectiblity. You guys are actually paid to produce this shallow level of analysis? Whatever you are making as game designers, it's too much. I think you owe your employer a refund.
🤦 OMG WotC has been very transparent that card complexity is tied to rarity. Commons and uncommons are just as simple now as they were 20 years ago. What you fail to take into account is your own biases. You are quick to mention commander which is an eternal format. As time goes on, people will be able to rotate out simpler cards for ones that do more whereas in formats like Standard, Pauper, Limited, etc. This PERCIEVED problem does not exist. This is yet another episode of two guys not understanding that THEY are the REAL problem.
Actually commons and uncommons are not as simple as they were 20 years ago and more recently within the last few years we have seen less and less vanilla and french vanilla cards printed in each set. Compare this to back in the 2010 core set for instance that was printed with 31% of their creatures being either vanilla or french vanilla. Even a non-core set at the time like original Ravnica has 10% of it's creatures be vanilla/french vanilla. Looking at Murders of Karlov Manor we are at 0 vanilla creatures and only 3 creatures are french vanilla (which comes out to about 2% of the creatures for the full set).
@ForrestImel vanilla was never the standard for common cards. That's a made-up standard that was never a design expectation at WotC. MaRo's article from 2018 very clearly articulates what the internal direction continues to be and is still posted on the mothership. Anyone with the slightest bit of intellectual curiosity can Google it in less than 10 seconds. I guess that's too much work for two game designers / subpar content creators 🤷🤷🤷
There's 55 French Vanilla in all of standard currently, including commons, uncommons, rares, and even a mythic. There's one vanilla creature in all of standard and it's a RARE. If you played draft you'd know how much more complex sets are getting and there's no shortage of TH-cam videos of other people complaining about how much more annoying draft has become, especially in brand new sets. It used to be a third of a pack you see a cost, stats, and some keywords and can immediately put that into context. Now you have to read every damn card in order to draft. Yes, on the average WotC has kept to the "more complex is more rare" theme, but it's certainly not a design exclusive.
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The most ironic part of the density of text on cards is that there is no space left for reminder text.
If WOTC wants new players to enjoy the game, then the cards need to read out exactly what they do, without any uncertainty. I personally believe that’s a huge, undiscussed reason why there isn’t many newer players at younger ages coming into the game.
The fact that “committing a crime” isn’t described on any Thunder Junction cards, and MaRo had to specifically request permission to post what the actual reminder text is to what “committing a crime” does is indicative of that underlying issue.
Patrick: You can either be a Mulldrifter or a Baneslayer.
Atraxa: Hold my beer.
Grislebrand.
Yeah, this feels especially painful in commander since there are so many boards and cards to keep track of. There have been many games where I kinda stopped listening when people read their cards as they played them because I wasn't going to remember them anyway. And this contributes to longer games because every time someone goes to take any action, they have to ask everyone what everything on their board does again.
The ironic thing about the "queen problem" is that sometimes you want a knight because it has unique movement.
The trick is you print a queen knight commander with 2 paragraphs granting it both types of movement and a triggered ability whenever a knight or queen etbs
Magic for 25 years relied on option 3 to attract people to the game. Have a Rotation that only allowed you to play with the most recent 2 years of cards. That was the Real solution.
When Brian (The Professor) began his channel and used to say "reading the card explains the card", it wasn't a joke. It was true. People used to say "rtfc" [read the f-ing card]. It was his polite way of saying, "rtfc." It became a "joke" when complexity creep began to go wild.
I do think it's kind of interesting to slice further into everything bagels. I've seen people hold up Ojer Axonil as an example of negative complexity creep, and I'd disagree in that I think it's selling the player a coherent gameplan, similar to Slime Against Humanity. It's a burn god for a burn deck, it incentivizes specific game action and a specific deck composition. Conversely you have something like the Mulldrifter+Baneslayer everything bagel of the new Atraxa, Grand Unifier. It doesn't really sell a gameplan beyond "If you like winning at magic, four keywords on a 7/7 and a bunch of card advantage is great for that" and I think cards like it have a much more corrosive effect on meta diversity than the narrower bagels.
Good point. Paint by numbers is a different problem I think. Hearthstone and yugioh use that approach. Printing very specific cards to fix in the meta decks they’re trying to sculpt. It does keep the power and complexity creep down though as it only creeps one specific archetype. The trade off is in player agency in deck building.
Well atraxxa is more so, congratulations you played a 5 colour deck here a keyword soup creature with a powerful etb. Obviously in commander shes is jusst good since if your in the colours to player her shes a very good inclusion.
I'm surprised people think Axonil is complex. Red non-combat damage to players < his power = his power. Floats to a land that can resurrect him as a sorcery after dealing 4 red non-combat damage in a turn. Seems pretty tame in comparison to some of the other cards we've gotten in recent years. But maybe I'm biased, I immediately built a commander burn deck around him that specializes in dealing "1" damage.
Power creep in order to sell packs because they gave up on standard where you could actually play simpler cards
Fable of the Mirror Breaker seems like a prime example of the everything bagle. front side with 3 chapters,backside becomes a relevant creature and to add even more text it creates a creature token with even more relevant text so we effectively already have 3 pages of text
It is a saga which creates a creature token, which creates an artifact token, which could be sacrificed for man
I miss when eating the card explained the card
Cards that are their own enablers and payoffs are the worst, very boring.
I like everything bagel as a term. (And as someone who made a Greta food commander deck I feel called out!)
By far my biggest issue with "everything bagels" is that they have proliferated through the game at the same time copy effects have become more numerous. It's one thing when you have to look at a token on the board and remember "oh that's a 4/4 angel" vs "oh that is a food artifact with "Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, if it targets..."
I know in our game we've always gotten in the most trouble with everything bagels, and the easiest way to balance it was always to split up its abilities into other cards.
I do get that a lot of the massive text on cards is essentially trying to spell out a concept rather than keyword it. i.e. In Star Trek CCG 2E instead of "Look through your deck for [a card], reveal that card to all players, place it in your hand, then shuffle your deck." they just had the term, "download [a card]." But then as a designer you get caught in a catch 22. Use too many game terms, and you scare away new players by making the game seem too much like a new language. On the other hand, spell it all out for them, and then it looks intimidating to new players too. (Plus I can't count how many times densely worded cards have been misplayed.)
And don't even get me started on when you phrase a card very carefully, very precisely to prevent broken shenanigans from happening, and then someone just skims the text and makes assumptions about how they want it to play - leading to the very broken stuff you were trying to prevent! 🤣
Haha the skimming thing happens so often. This really negatively impacts draft as well. You have a time limit to choose a card from a pack and you can barely get through reading the cards before you gotta pass.
New players just want to be able to understand the card. When reading the card doesn’t explain the card. That’s a bad thing.
The problem isn't the complexity creep in and of itself, the problem is that it is power creep *and* complexity creep.
If you play a landfall deck, then you not only need to have a good ratio in your deck of landfall cards and extra landdrop effects *and* draw them but you also need to play both of them meaning more mana spent and possibly a turncycle where the first peace could be removed. And on the other side you have sam who is in your command zone and when you play him you immediately have the combo enabler and payoff, I would call it a one card combo because of that, and can use it immediately, so he does the thing at least once even if he gets removed immediately after.
Back in ye olden days when you only had complexity creep in the form of ever more keywords that are almost the same or a card triggering in a very specific circumstance only, that was fine to the enfranchised players but modern card design is just insanity.
In a card game that incentives the player to play a land and a card per turn, whilst drawing only a single card, "everything bagles", "modal cards", "token creation", "mdfc spell/lands" and "flashback/kicker/mana sink abilities" are very important because the player will otherwise run out of cards/options by turn 6 or 7.
I don't think that this desing is only for commander, but also very much for draft and limited because they also help with the risk of being mana screwed/flooded or drawing dead cards in the late game.
Complexity creep is defenitly also a thing with whole paragraphs, amount of triggers and unexplained abilities, but I think that that is a seperated issue from everything bagles / forced power creep by adding more abilities
I used to play tons of Magic back in middle school and highschool (roughly Stronghold thru Odyssey). I quit mostly becuase I just got tired of the CCG model.
Some of my friends never stopped playing and building decks. I recently jumped into a few games of commander with them (borrowing their spare decks) for fun and the way they design cards now is completely insane.
I know its partially due to it being a non rotation format but damn, theres all these hyper specific tokens, day night cycles, monarch, and it feels like every card is power crept so hard compared to the older days of MtG.
Especially in free for all commander I felt like it was impossible to truly understand the game state because every permanent had like two paragraphs of rules text and abilities, and so many things were interacting with exiled cards and graveyards.
This caused me to be too nervous to make any big moves, and I ended up winning a few games because that often means you get ignored while everyone else dukes it out. 😂
Interesting perspective! I started playing in odyssey actually. Going from the standard format leading the game to commander has been really interesting. It’s awesome to see so many people enjoying the game, but designing for eternal formats is very challenging.
Playing a rotating format or one with a more established metagame IS easier, but it's def a virulent design issue today.
@@kateslate3228 Yes actually my favorite MtG experience I've had in the last few years was going to a friend's house to participate in a booster draft of the first dungeons and dragons expansion. It was a mostly pretty reasonable set and the booster draft format means everyone is on even footing and is deck building in a walled garden of the expansion design.
I personally enjoy the game the most when it's focused on the simple fundamentals, and there are things that force you to make sub optimal choices when deck building.
I guess I'm considered a "Magic Boomer" nowadays but I miss the days when me and my friends would just be cracking open packs of Urza's Saga boosters at the game store at the mall and trying to build functioning mono or two color decks with the cards our allowance could afford.
When I look at what the game has evolved into via accretion, design skewed towards high level competitive play, and rules complexity bloat it just seems like WotC has lost the plot.
@@wwcyfd22 You just adhere to a more classical design philosophy. I do too! It's just sad it seems to be getting lost nowadays.
I still haven't gotten over Guilded Drake.
That thing was a JUNK RARE outta the pack back in 1998. I had like 30 of them
I sold out and took a 20 year break and now all of a sudden EDH and what the hell is that and GD is $200 because you can steal someone's commander with it 😂😂
They never HAD to power/complexity creep. They CHOSE to power/complexity creep. That, and I don't trust that the current design team/staff and/or goal at WotC is in line with the vision of 25+ years of magic.
There was nothing wrong with having:
• a setting specific vanilla creatue suit
• you set mechanic(s) instant, sorcery, artifact, enchantment, land, and etb/dies trigger & activated ability creature suite
• your obligatory angles, demons, dragons, etc.
• your storyline cards
• your planeswalker package
If nobody is playing your cards, it isn't specifically because they aren't powerful - I mean, kind of - but more specifically because your set mechanic(s) suck.
There was a period of time when they were doing that and magic was selling very well, but greedy Hasbo executives wanted to ramp up sales numbers and here we are now. Magic wasn't dying. It wasn't getting stale. They just wanted to crank up the dial and make the money gun go buuurrrrr
I agree with your first and last paragraph, but not with your second one.
- Vanilla creatures always were useless and boring, with rare exceptions. Almost nobody is missing the 'good old vanilla 3/2 for 3'.
- Of the last five standard sets, WOE was the only one without angels and demons. The same goes for original ELD. MKM, LCI, MOM and ONE all have creatures of all three types.
- Are storyline cards not around anymore? I don't follow the story, but if anything, I feel they have become more ubiquitous.
- The new single planeswalker policy is both quite popular and reduces complexity.
I think you're just leaning into your conservative bias a bit too hard here.
@bladdnun3016 - Vanilla was for limited [draft and sealed constructed] when that was the power level. A 3/2 for 3 was fine in limited until WotC said it wasn't. Nobody misses it? Fine. Whatever. People are actively complaining about complexity creep, so they DO, in fact, miss it without being able to put a finger on why what it is they miss.
I was making a list of what sets were like, and you would have replied to me that I forgot that in the formula if I hadn't listed the Angles/Demons/Dragons... or someone else would have.
Same with the other things you replied to.
The notion that WotC is "forced" to do power and/or complexity creep is demonstrably not true based on what we have talked about, and I think you said you agreed on.
It also doesn't HAVE TO BE pure vanilla. Sometimes the basic 2/2 with fear or intimidate or whatever they like, and the 3/2 with trample, and the 4/1 with haste and vlah blah blah. They have all been done before, but having a different creature type to support a tribe or name to build the flavor of the set/setting is good enough.
Imma be honest, from a perspective of "game feel" having both halves of an effect as you described is very boring.
There is so much texture to a deck's design that has been sanded down if all your cards are AB, BC, CA as opposed to A, B, C.
Like, that is a whole card worth of difference to have the whole effect! Muliply this over 60 or 100 cards it robs games of identity and power creeps into oblivion.
I had a recent "You can finally make this old card work!" moment with Bushi Tenderfoot and Case of the Gateway Express.
We are having both complexity and power creep. A double decker shit bagel.
I tried arena again awhile ago, and quickly ran into problems against everything bagel Nazgul. It just does everything it needs to with no downside.
This means it'll always trade 2 for 1. And you can have 9 in your deck, so you're going to get at least 3 every game.
Way too much self synergy.
There's a reason the boardwipe meta has been gaining traction lately
I think another notable thing is protection creep, especially notable with the ixalan gods and the dominus cycle, where it feels like big enablers are getting harder to remove because “my big piece getting removed in commander feels bad”
I have been playing magic for just shy of a year and when I play commander or drafts I still barely know what's going on. They way you guys describe magic makes it sound so fun and not at all like the game I have been playing lol
so the big takeaway im getting from this is: players making commander the main magic format are gonna kill magic the gathering in time and be stuck playing without new players, from the looks of where the path is headed.
i don't believe im about to say this but.. it feels like MtG would benefit to transition into a Live Service model instead of TCG.
Yeah, I believe this to be true. Unless something can be done to bring rotation back to paper magic.
How do you propose a live service model would work in mtg? I'm curious
@@PensFan96 seasons for introducing rotation and to cover the monetization lost by physical set releases. digital cards can be patched, which solves one thing, and rotation solves power creep and stagnation in 1 go.
sets are already seasons, just not digital. seeing as keeping up with MtG is already a piecemeal subscription model in spirit, i don't think the transition would be a decline in profits. on the contrary.
being fully digital is an easy way to solve a lot of issues but the sacrifice of losing physical paper is one i imagine not all are willing to pay.
one of the major underrated benefits of full digital is that done proper, onboarding new players can be extremely more effective, and that can allow more freedom to use game specific language without the natural drawbacks of it.
Just going to point out that the MtG Arena game is deeply flawed, with the way it cheats (both for and against) the players to keep them handing over money.
@@00101001000000110011 not sure if going entirely digital would be healthy for the game either being honest
The puzzle solving is my favorite part of the game, and it has both increased and been weirdly stunted in recent years. Power creep shortened the window you have to solve even though more and more complex pieces with more synergy have been printed. So now it's turbo puzzle solving.
Yugioh has had a lot of effect creep over the years as well. Most cards used to do 1 thing. Now they do like 3. I guess that's just what happens after a card game is around for so long
Rotation can keep this from happening. It’s just that once the illusion breaks how can you go back?
It doesn't have to happen on the level that Yugioh has experienced. If Yugioh had made Master Rule 4 its own standard/rotating format they could've de-escalated the power of the game.
Magic has dampened this problem for 30 years and only now that Commander has become the premier format are mtg players experiencing 2-3 effects per card.
Because once a casual player builds a commander deck, they are set for life in theory.
That has always been true for Yugioh which is why the game is in the state it's in. They have needed a premier rotating format for years. Magic does too unfortunately...
@@distractionmakersWe CRAVE a good illusion. Pokemon, The Eternal Card Game. There are fantastic examples.
When I think of cards with too much text, I think of Ojer Axonil.
Ojer Axonil doesn't have *that* much text on it. It's longer than plenty of cards, but it's pretty short for a mythic creature that's part of a horizontal cycle. It only has 2 effects, and 1 of those 2 effects is its flip to its backside, which is just a death trigger. Ojer Axonil is not difficult to understand, and it's not an especially complex card. But it *is more complex than it needs to be*, which is my issue with it.
When I say that Ojer Axonil's effect text is too long, I mean that its effect is unnecessarily bloated with small hinderances or clauses the card doesn't need. The two small clauses being that you would deal damage to an opponent, and you would deal damage equal to less than Ojer Axonil's power. These clauses aren't meaningless, they do have gameplay consequences, but they both rarely come up and when they do come up, make the gameplay less interesting. These small stipulations exist specifically to ensure that an effect is never detrimental, always at worst neutral, to whoever is playing Axonil. This isn't an uncommon trend. Sometimes text is slapped on cards to essentially protect players from themselves, or from their opponent using their tools against them. An Axonil player will never hurt themselves with boosted symmetrical damage, or have their damage turned off by an enemy reducing Axonil's power for instance.
So the designers end up using plenty of card real estate to prevent interactions that are both rare and also good for the game in a tepid attempt to shield players from "feel bad" moments. Note that getting rid of these clauses make the card less wordy, and less mechanically complex, but actually makes the gameplay more complex. Often, cards gets "more complex" and yet their gameplay actually gets less complex, because the complexity creep makes effects more specific and constrains options or decisions as a result of that specificity.
Lots of cards have "too much text" because they have multiple effects or are modal or have two part effects meant to work together, like for instance Agatha's Soul Cauldron. I thought Axonil was an important point to bring up because it illustrates how individual effects are also being made worse, it isn't simply that they're putting a larger number of effects on a card.
Complexity creep actually results in railroading deck making.
Giving every piece in chess the ability to move anywhere turns it into checkers, not chess v2.
Yup. Great point.
Been playing this game since forever, I have big problems with how things are today. Many things is easier on Arena, but on paper, all those tokens, counters, triggers, ON TOP of all thousands of keywords!
Cinnamon raisin? You monster!
I'm super over the wall of text cards. I don't play Yugioh specifically because of that. Sad to see Magic going that way.
As someone coming from YGO, MTG players complaining about the amount of text is hilarious.
Nadu is an everything bagel because it does everything.
They give aggro players better cards, and control players more wordy cards so aggro players don't read them and die. True balance achieved.
I just ate an everything bagel an hour ago
Ban all counter spells. No exceptions. Anyone should be able to defend cards on stack without needing their own counter spells. Same with 1 mana discard crap people play on first turn after you Milligan down to the only card you need. If you can't defend against something, it's cheating.
$$$ The simplest answer is likely the most true.
Even in non eternal formats you'll always end up with either feature or power creep right? I never really engaged too much card games personally, but I imagine it would be easy for longstanding players to be like "didn't we do this before? Why did you rotate this 2 mana 2/2 cat out in exchange for a 2 mana 2/2 green cat?"
With rotation you can reuse cards that have been out of rotation for a long time and players will rejoice. You’ll get some power and complexity creep for sure, but you’re not competing with every card ever made at all times.
i think giant spider was reprinted every rotation from alpha to core set 2014. It's just a useful card to have in the game that creates fun play patterns.
You can also use the 2/2 vanilla creature slot to do some worldbuilding. It could be a cat, or a soldier, or a priest, whatever.
Oh you sweet summer child
-sincerely, a yugioh player
Other problem with all the "everything bagel" card designs is that there is no "let's go halves on a pizza" type design. Cards like "Master of the Feast" where you get a discounted thing by giving your opponent something.
2:06 pretty sure that just a tangentially version of nivmizzet effects. Not sure how its an every bagel card. As it seems like your complaining a card has the ability to synergise with other cards.
As the alternative for that kinda of card would be when you play and instant or sorcery deal 1 damage to each opponent and draw a card.
Its seems to actually just be better if the effect is spread over 2 abilities to allow for more interactions with other cards or effects.
Yeah, something like Atraxa is more in line with what we’re talking about.
Yugioh was selling too much so wotc decided to copy their font size.
Simple as
like flash hulk 4:55
So I think text density has a lot to do with precision, especially in multiplayer formats, with many ways for other players to interact with your cards and their effects.
Cards have become less comprehensible as they've gotten wordier. Now you have to remember the three plus effects a card has each with the potential to have numerous use cases.
TLDR. More text on card means more money fo Wotc!!!
What tutor videos?
There were no tutor videos.
Stop talking about the tutor videos.
I see people often point to commander players for what's wrong with the current complexity issue with MtG and I'd have to disagree. It's more WotC capitalizing on Commander's popularity (it's both evergreen and casual) and pushing product to be usable in non-standard formats (MH2 anyone?). Even still, I wouldn't necessarily blame Commander players for the ever escalating prices for cards as they're frequently used in more competitive formats where their power and scarcity drive up card price. Commander can see far more casual and budgetable deck building on average compared to standard or modern which are arms races for competitive edges.
Yeah I agree, but I think it’s both. Nearly the entire player base plays non-rotating formats and it hurts everyone. It used to be commander players could wait until cards rotated out of standard and pick up cards they were interested in for cheap. This also created a demand for those cards when they rotated out allowing standard players to cash out and invest in the new cards. Now everyone is trying to buy the same cards in a lot of cases.
@@distractionmakers the demand isn't quite there when Commander players only really need 1-2 copies of any given card while Modern or Standard pushes for 4 copies. It's again WotC for printing ever more powerful product trying to get people to play Standard while also have potential in Modern (MH2 made Ragavan which demanded 4 copies to play in Modern, at most need 1 in Commander). Most cards in standard sets that are designed for commander typically cost less since there's no demand for them anywhere else and they usually end up niche by design, see Tetzin, Gnome Champion a penny rare from Caverns of Ixalan.
I'm just starting to think that the current generation of designers just aren't as good or experienced at card design as the older generations were. They come from different backgrounds expect different things and don't quite have the forsite that the last lot did. Not that they won't be able to achieve the same quality in the long run but in the short run they are shifting baselines, IMO, too quickly. The cards are long winded, wordy and do a lot for the same reason a writer's books might do the same; they aren't being wrangled down by more experienced editors/designers anymore. There's been recent cards, that I've see (though none spring to mind), that are pointlessly wordy, often to the point where a simple effect comes of as gobbledygook until you sit down and pull it apart. It would be as if lifelink were worded "At any point this creature deals damage to a player, planeswalker, or creature increase your life total by a value equal to the damage dealt"
On top of this is an internal desire to push cards to be more powerful, the for stated reasons which, to me, demonstrate a misunderstanding of why some cards are weaker than others, especially in standard sets which are draftable. A lot of cards are now designed to be a complete combo within the card. I like to think of how Spider Spawning would be designed in a modern set. "Swarming Spiders: 2GG Sorcery; Mill the top 5 cards from your library, then summon a number of 2/2 black spider creature tokens with death touch and this creature cannot block equal to the number of creatures in your graveyard. Flashback 3B" This is based on 1. The ever reduced Mana Values of cards compared to their historical analogues 2. A stated goal to make cards mana values contain more colour pips to reduce splashing in draft 3. The outright stated goal to remove as many ways to prevent board stalls as possible by making blocking less optimal: such as tokens that cannot block, printing creatures with lower touchness generally and giving creatures strong keywords for offence like First Strike and Deathtouch. 4. The card needs no support to work, it just works. Instead of building a deck around a card, e.g. Spider Spawning in Innistrad, now payoff cards set themselves up and visa versa for set up cards.
Your spider spawning example is a good one. I could see them printing that in the future.
1- if you bring up generational diferences than we shoul also look at the players and consider that they seem to want faster games (less setup) and more impactful plays ( cards that do more and lead to more " streamable moments".
on your memorable points
1- that is just nore boticeble these days when they design more and more cards and such designs are not based on the main format of the game, standard.
2-that is a recent stated goal, am i correct?
3- acording to Rosewater that is a fundamental part of the designers, making sure that the game ends. And that is not a new thing at all. Board stalls are one of the sins more often perceived about mtg ( wrongly so) and one that modern card game designers seem to try to fiercely avoid.
4- Strong cards that work on their own( jund cards?) were always around. same for synergy cards and strategies. Balance and variety is what matters. Even if power creep is a thing i am not sure that balance has gone wrong excepting some very small number of cards.
@@goncaloferreira6429 yeah I mean Pile decks like Jund were always a thing but in the example given we are talking about Spider Spawning; a draft card, to illustrate the increase in power, complexity, and wotc hand-holding players.
The example of NEW-spider spawning not only turns the card into both an enabler and payoff. It also makes the card one-dimensional and less thought-provoking by not allowing for a slower gamestate with powerful blockers that could attack.
@@goncaloferreira6429 1. You can achieve both of those goals without resporting to or making the mistakes that WotC are doing.
2. The problem you get when all cards are designed with commander in mind is that commander isn't like other formats. It has an incredibly consistent mana curve and ramp is plentiful. This has resulted in for example limited having an increased amount of now games (games where neither player got to make any decisions) due to land issues and runaway snowballs.
3. Whilst I cannot be entirely sure what you mean by "that". Anything I have claimed WotC have stated I heard from a WotC dev either mark Rosewater or other's during interviews such as those on the preprerelease with LRR
4.There's a fundamental difference between making sure games end and what they are currently doing. Sets from 2019 and back had lots of ways to avoid board stalls without resorting to the frankly absurd extremes we're currently seeing. I think I can point to New Capenna for the first example of my problems insanely pushed cards, overwhelming tempo and agro with few ways if any to buy time in order to catch up as it were. MOM had those phyrexian mites that couldn't block in another insanely fast set and we've seen similar design return in other recent sets. Are these designers really of the opinion that Dominaria was worse becuase saprolings could block?
5. We've always had some yes but not "every" card doing it when it was one or two pushed commons or uncommons it was fine but now it's half the set or more. Previously you had time whilst your opponent assembled their combo to intervien with removal, or wall up so you weren't run over. You used to have time to dig through a land pocket or find the land you were missing. With modern card design not only are we no longer seeing the tools to regain lost tempo but also lots of cards that punish a loss of tempo.
@@Gibbons3457 thank you for your opinion.
I just want them to ban Tamiyo's Safekeeping and all the other, just..OVERPOWERED cards they have. I'm tired of feeling like I get punished for NOT going on Reddit to copy a cheap deck.
The premise of this video is based on a false dichotomy. Universes Beyond has proven that players are MORE than willing to buy cards based solely on the flavor. The majority of Secret Lair drops are just cosmetic changes to preexisting cards. A big part of collector boosters' success is the alternate art style cards. The one of one ring sold tons of boosters based solely on its collectiblity. You guys are actually paid to produce this shallow level of analysis? Whatever you are making as game designers, it's too much. I think you owe your employer a refund.
Hey MajinVegeta, good to see you!
🤦 OMG WotC has been very transparent that card complexity is tied to rarity. Commons and uncommons are just as simple now as they were 20 years ago. What you fail to take into account is your own biases. You are quick to mention commander which is an eternal format. As time goes on, people will be able to rotate out simpler cards for ones that do more whereas in formats like Standard, Pauper, Limited, etc. This PERCIEVED problem does not exist. This is yet another episode of two guys not understanding that THEY are the REAL problem.
We love you too man. Have a good one!
Actually commons and uncommons are not as simple as they were 20 years ago and more recently within the last few years we have seen less and less vanilla and french vanilla cards printed in each set. Compare this to back in the 2010 core set for instance that was printed with 31% of their creatures being either vanilla or french vanilla. Even a non-core set at the time like original Ravnica has 10% of it's creatures be vanilla/french vanilla. Looking at Murders of Karlov Manor we are at 0 vanilla creatures and only 3 creatures are french vanilla (which comes out to about 2% of the creatures for the full set).
@ForrestImel vanilla was never the standard for common cards. That's a made-up standard that was never a design expectation at WotC. MaRo's article from 2018 very clearly articulates what the internal direction continues to be and is still posted on the mothership. Anyone with the slightest bit of intellectual curiosity can Google it in less than 10 seconds. I guess that's too much work for two game designers / subpar content creators 🤷🤷🤷
Seems like It’s just two dudes who love magic talking about magic
There's 55 French Vanilla in all of standard currently, including commons, uncommons, rares, and even a mythic. There's one vanilla creature in all of standard and it's a RARE.
If you played draft you'd know how much more complex sets are getting and there's no shortage of TH-cam videos of other people complaining about how much more annoying draft has become, especially in brand new sets. It used to be a third of a pack you see a cost, stats, and some keywords and can immediately put that into context. Now you have to read every damn card in order to draft. Yes, on the average WotC has kept to the "more complex is more rare" theme, but it's certainly not a design exclusive.