We Need To Talk About Magic: The Gathering
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ย. 2024
- In this episode we talk about the current state of Magic: The Gathering, Commander's impact on the game, and where the game might go from here.
Hosts:
Forrest Imel forrestimel.com/
Gavin Valentine www.gavinvalen...
Join the Distraction Makers Discord: / discord
Schools of Magic by Robert Hahn: www.classicdojo...
Thumbnail: Grief by Nicholas Gregory
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Gavin here. I want to address some comments we’ve been getting on this video. My goal was to present the current situation of MTG from a perspective of incentives and remove my personal opinion. I don’t think I was successful in that goal. Magic exists within a system. That system values profit over anything else. I don’t think this is ultimately what is best for the game, but I have no power over WOTC or Hasbro. My definition of quality used to be what magic focused on because that was their path to profit. That isn’t true anymore. Magic is now being made for an audience with different goals for the game and if we want this to change we have to change the incentive structure. That isn’t something we can accomplish with WOTC.
I want to explore how we build a business to value quality over profits. I think the easiest answer is you could make your money elsewhere and remove that pressure from the creative work, like Valve with Steam and Laika being funded by Nike. But that doesn’t account for a way to measure if your audience is enjoying the experience, is still beholden to the company paying the bills, and removes the incentive to produce (both companies are not particularly prolific). So, how do we create a business structure that values quality of craft over profit and also has an audience it is still beholden to? This is a problem I want to solve. I don’t have a solid answer yet and I’d like to hear what thoughts all of you have.
I think, to your credit, you articulated well the fact that many of us are uncomfortable with the types of cards that are being printed nowadays - and that subsequently, it results in an overall play experience that is drastically different from, say, a decade ago.
My response to this overall shift has been to focus more of my time on curating my cube because I can better address some of the concerns that y’all have raised in this and other videos (power level being one of the big ones). In this way I don’t feel like I’m “grieving” Magic anymore because I can preserve the types of play experiences that my friends and I enjoy - again hitting at your point above and in the video about focusing your attention on making something new that’s informed from what you loved about Magic years ago.
Thanks for the follow up comment. I was scrolling through all of them when this video came out trying to grasp at a point other than "the game I knew died".
It really is a shame that the balance of standard and modern was sacrificed for commander novelty. I moved to Magic around Ixalan after Yugioh, Force of Will and Shadowverse power crept and banned my cards beyondy interest. This was right before Hasbro took over and changed everything too fast. The new leadership did not respect the decades of work that led to a loyal fan base of paying customers
I'd love to have a follow up video on the topic of making a compelling game that respects it's customers. The examples that come to mind for me are Helldivers and Path of Exile. In the TCG space I think Netrunner and Keyforge were good shots at that. And I've seen good things from Flesh and Blood and Grand Archive.
When we talk about "the Magic we miss" I think we're talking about a relatively balanced and competitive lifestyle game. Lifestyle game is the important term in my opinion.
I think a big factor to making and maintaining a lifestyle game is management that is aligned to the designers' vision. Management has to beware messing with a tried and true formula. I think incremental change has to be an important tool. Like how CocaCola can't change recipe drastically without Americans in an uproar.
Magic had silver border for experimenting and New Magic (New coke lol) invented Acorn stamps and puts C for commander in the set symbol. They could have easily used these marks or similar to learn about their new designs before pumping standard full of legendary draft chaff and ban targets. But we know taking their time wasn't enough profit.
Can any game design or system design fix a problem of ownership or shareholders? And sure Magic makes more money today because people vote with their wallets but something was obviously lost by selling out of the old balance and into casual appeal.
I don't think anything short of a hands-off owner can truly ensure that the Magic we miss can be recreated and (more importantly) be made to preserve a core value. People change their minds and taste, and that includes players as well as designers. Maybe old Magic was simply a product of it's time or it's size.
Hopefully Wizards has learned some lessons and can restore some of the old balance with Foundations, but I'm not holding my breath.
It depends on whether it's a passion project like Netrunner or a game that needs to cover its costs.
For the latter: a lot of small family businesses can run for decades, even centuries, because they aren't concerned about endless growth. The real trick is expanding that mentality to a larger scale. I understand EVE Online has a minimum threshold of players, and as long as they stay above the threshold they are paying the bills and releasing new content.
All of the commies disappeared during McCarthyism rolling in their graves rn
It's not just about Competitive. The Lore/Vorthos aspect of Magic has been destroyed. Now half of all creatures printed are Legendary, with no flavor text or lore, because the text box is filled with rules text.
And I don't think the offensive levels of powercreep are liked by new or casual players, because it creates the same problem as rotation. Product fatigue and power creep are killing Commander.
WOTC carefully nurtured this game and player base into a phenomenon, and now they are cashing out. They are leveraging the equity in the game, even if the game gets destroyed. Casual players will not be loyal when the game is dead.
Luckily, as EDH once was, we have tons of ways to play MTG outside of WOTC's bungling greed. I call for players to proxy instead of buy, and experiment with formats. EDH started this way, Pauper, Cube, etc. Don't let them take the ship down with no survivors. We carry MTG in our hearts.
EDH is the #1 reason that Magic has seen these negative developments over the years. WOTC wanted to monetise the non-competitive audience, and they have successfully done so.
That's an aspect that I know exists but I don't personally have a lot of read on. For me the cards are numbers. The words and pictures are nice anchors to remember what is what and I certainly know a lot of random Magic lore trivia but I could not care less. That said, there are clearly people for whom that stuff is important and that's totally legitimate.
I like your point about cramming text boxes full of rules text leaving little room for flavor text. I've also heard the argument that the best part of early-to-mid-lifecycle EDH was that there was an enormous unsearched space of older cards and when new cards came out, because they weren't targeted at EDH/Commander, there was a puzzle to be solved about how to use those cards in this format they were never designed for.
I think product fatigue has hit everyone who is heavily invested regardless of format or casual/competitive. WOTC is aiming at volume of customers rather than volume of spend per customer. This leads to releasing a firehose of products, each meant to appeal to its own small subset of potential customers. The sticking point for me is that those products frequently (and often unintentionally) have unique game pieces that end up being necessary for competitive play. I can live without the Chun-Li version of card X but I can't play Modern without The One Ring. So I either buy these products that are ostensibly "not for me" or I stop playing the game I love.
I agree that casual play has a leg up in that it doesn't need new cards all the time nor does it need institutional support to thrive. Competitive play does need those things and that's why it's so sad for me to see all the investment going toward casual play. I would of course love for things to go back to the way they were when everything was aimed at pleasing the type of player I am but that's not a reasonable expectation. I just wish there was some way to make the competitive scene profitable, possibly independent of WOTC so that it could thrive again.
"Is it sustainable" is absolutely the question to ask. Modern industry is not focused primarily on insinuating itself into 100 years of steady growth and success, not captured by earlier corporations' fixation on building consumer confidence or relationships with communities, no matter how disingenuous those prior examples had been anyhow.
They've cracked the code. All they need is a solid 5 year run of pushing up margins, slashing expenses, and showcasing that they can sell 20+ product releases a year. None of it needs to be standing in 10 years if everyone involved cashes out and leaves before private equity gets it all, as is the current model. I truly believe that it's about bonusing on your way out of making a company's balance sheet look good (if you don't think about it too much.)
My opinions on UB aside, there is absolutely a discussion to be had on how Hasbro is essentially cashing out on 30 years of entrenched customers and the equity of their Magic brand to turn the product into what it is now. Especially when you've got more or less a captive audience.
On the absolute smallest scale, the average player isn't thinking about how buying a one ring for their modern deck is incentivizing hasbro to do more crossovers. They're looking at a card that is a 4-of in the format. On the largest scale, they can manufacture hype with large-scale giveaways like, say, a 1 of 1 serialized card tie-in.
It's not purely "Hasbro does x because they got feedback that x is desirable." Hasbro has a monopoly on the supply because they make the game and was able to boil the frog until this was just an assumed part of the deal. It's less "voting with your dollar" and more "manufacturing consent." There are absolutely people who do and will enjoy the new landscape of Magic, but there is not zero risk here and I am not so optimistic as to give WotC the benefit of the doubt. When people call something a "cash grab," it might seem funny because, yeah, it's a business - they're trying to max profits - but I think being dismissive of people who feel instinctively that there is something cheap, crass, and exploitative about a product line and the de-emphasizing of competitive play but don't know precisely how to express that is silly.
You have done an excellent job of stating this position clearly, I have many of the same concerns.
@@TheLordRumfish "Hasbro has a monopoly on the supply because they make the game and was able to boil the frog until this was just an assumed part of the deal."
That is until the 30th Anniversary. Where a lot of people realize it's just cardboard and start accepting proxies.
@@arvinsim The monopoly will continue so long as the majority of the community continues to pursue real cards, and feel uncomfortable with Proxies. I'm just starting to get my local players feel comfortable with MTGGoldfish hand printed text copies for EDH, but there's still a lot of people who will want the "real thing", for whatever reason they use to justify that want. Even I fall for that. I bought a One Ring for $90 CAD a few months ago because I wanted to own one before putting it or proxies of it into my decks.
I will say, I'm really happy I discovered MTGGoldfish's (and other deck builder sites) services that provide access to well templated text proxies. It lets me test more decks now. :)
@@arvinsim Proxies are an interesting path forward. I made an entire expansion named Wastes of Veldmar, community projects like that could give Magic longevity if Hasbro ultimately runs Magic into the ground.
The *only* reason anyone needs actual official MtG cards is to play in official WotC sanctioned tournaments. WotC going all in on commander will inevitably end with their playerbase realizing they don't need WotC to play Magic.
i think the thing that frustrates me with current mtg is that by the nature of printing 4x more magic than they printed years ago, they are still printing cards for a game i want to play, but they are printing infinitely more cards for a game i want no part in, and theres no real way to queue into that game i want on arena.
Competitive magic makes/made the game unique. I think without the competitive scene, Wizards may as well print full set boxes like Munchkin or whatever and make the game into a board game. The fact that there was once full time MTG pro players is a pretty cool thing we used to have that casuals could also admire.
I agree - the fact that this game, that also has Commander as part of it, has a Hall of Fame? This is important to the culture, and the diminished presence of competitive play in the last 2-3 years makes me sad, because those stories are not being told or maintained.
There are also popular entirely closed formats, in MTG (Premodern) and in YGO (Goat and Edison primarily), which have a decent little scene. And even if those tend to have a metagame that's much closer to solved, I'm not sure that that the box set model impedes competitiveness, per se.
Android Netrunner (coincidentally, also originally by Richard Garfield) had a similar sale model under Fantasy Flight Games. They just released 6 20 card packs (with a playset of three each), staggered over 6 months, for each expansion set. It still has a small competitive scene based on a fanmade continuation, following WOTC pulling the license.
Looking up on Scryfall, less than half of the MH3 cards (128 to be precise) are going for over 10 cents. It's 8 cards more than a full Android Netrunner expansion (there are a few pauper playables below that but it's to be expected with a high power set like this). Standards set fare even worse:
Karlov Manor has 78;
Thunder Junction has 92 (granted, The Big Score has like 30 cards above that price, but it was originally meant as a separate set and is pretty predatory, especially for Arena players);
Lost Caverns of Ixalan and Wilds of Eldraine have 102 and 104 respectively;
Even the Lord of the Rings set has only 123 cards above the 10 cent cutoff.
Most cards are meant for draft. Since WOTC sales model requires them to print desirable cards alongside hundreds of copies of random commons and uncommons, most printed cards are worth less than their weight in cardboard outside of draft.
The fact that I could play magic on Friday then watch a weekly GP or SCG Open throughout the weekend was amazing.
Shoot even the player invitational was great.
I think I may disagree in fact. I mean, currently at the latest pro tour we saw majority Nadu decks played. I feel as though it’s unique to a point, but once a meta is found everyone gravitates towards the most optimal play decks. Yet in more casual formats I see cards from all walks of MTGs history.
@@dachugadakelley650 Nadu is a symptom of the design being skewed heavily toward casual. They made that thing to be a commander. More specifically, so that commander players would buy these packs. They likely did very little testing for it in any competitive format.
god it's so awesome to hear people say "the Magic Reddit is only about 5% of the whole of the Magic player base, if that". online Magic discourse is so poisoned by the idea that only the people participating in it play Magic.
This is something you see across almost every topic/hobby/game across all social media and content creation
I don't know I would say poisoned, but sure. That 5% of the players mostly see themselves as casuals,
and think that the 1% of players are the actual 5%. If less people play paper magic and more people play online,
I'm sure it's even easier to lose that perspective. It doesn't seem inherently positive or negative, either way.
If you're participating in online discourse about a game, are you really that casual? @@Grogeous_Maximus The point is, they're the minority regardless and places like reddit/TH-cam/social media tend to think they're an all encompassing part of the community, when that's just super not true. This leads to situations where a tiny sliver of the community wholeheartedly believes they know what's best for the community writ large without considering how small of a piece of it they actually represent. Regardless of what positive or negative viewpoints the reddit community has, it's inherently somewhat of a toxic environment just simply because of the nature of these websites.
The MagicTCG subreddit has like 3/4 of a million subscribers, and while that sounds like a lot, it's really not when you zoom out.
You guys probably know Josh Strife Hayes. He does some good analysis on all kinds of MMOs, and a constant that he highlighted is when the cosmetics for the game are completely absurd or whimsical and "out of universe", he knows the visual identity has been abandoned and the game will now have that whimsical tone, with characters dressed as bees or sexy nurses in a medieval town.
Do note, some of these MMOs aren't dead, some even have a new surge of players when they introduce those cosmetics. He just adjusts the mentality to "ok, this game does not take itself seriously anymore".
I think that's what happened to Magic.
This
Standard is still a serious format because it has a smaller pool of cards curated by WOTC specifically to have some story sense to them. Pioneer is (at this point) only former standard sets, so is also protected. Legacy and vintage are the formats where design mistakes live on and thrive, so the goofy new stuff is generally nowhere near powerful enough to be playable.
Modern hasn't seen playables from Universes Beyond other than Lord of the Rings. Commander is the only format that has been genuinely ruined by these sets, and I think that's okay because it's not a sanctioned format.
Shame WotC doesn't take standard seriously too. Pro tours are gone, and Arena championships are Explorer, Historic and Bloomburrow limited. Regional Championships for the new "Premier Play" were all Limited too.
Pioneer has been fun, but it's the same reason modern was fun. Here is hoping WotC leaves the format alone.
And while I agree that Modern hasn't seen many UB cards yet, if we look at the top most used cards (I looked at mtgTop8) it's basically The One Ring, Bolt and lands, with Orcish Bowmasters as the most played creature.
You'll see a UB card basically everyday you play modern.
Legacy was completely warped by Orcish Bowmasters when it released too, and The One Ring has being gaining traction there beyond Modern. For God's sake, an Unfinity card (______ Goblin) made the goblins deck the best deck in legacy while it was legal. The One Ring trend only slowed down in legacy because Grief is over 30% of the format right now.
@@JohnFromAccountingCommander hasn’t been ruined by these cards. For some, these cards are upsetting (don’t use them, but you don’t get to tell people what they can’t use) and for others its the sheer number of cards being printed (you didn’t know all the cards before this influx, you just knew common staples). No, the issue with Commander is the discourse around what is or isn’t casual. (Anything beyond not caring if you lose is just justifying why your broken strategy isn’t degenerate).
You guys of all people should know that commander isn't the same thing as casual kitchen table games. It's a heavy investment of time, money, mental load, and social interaction to play a game like that vs. buying two standard precons or some sealed product and playing with one or two friends.
From the competitive perspective there really isn't a difference though. You are playing games unconstrained by proxy rules and which are more about being social than they are about mastery of the game. That's neither better nor worse but it is different. Certainly some Commander players are quite good at the game and invest lots of time and money in it, but at its core, they're playing a fundamentally different game than serious grinders at a standard RCQ. In a sense it's a wholly different culture -- social gaming vs competitive gaming rather than about how invested the players are in terms of time/money/etc.
I will also point out that the vast, vast majority of commander play is two or more commander precons mashing against one another at kitchen tables.
@@joeldheath Right, it's not really competitive, but I would argue it's not quite casual either.
I totally respect your opinion here but the vocabulary we have is failing us a bit. From my perspective the difference between casual and competitive is the attitude and expectations between opponents. The primary reason I don't enjoy commander is that there's this extra layer of social expectations not to actually try to win and arbitrary metagaming (you kill me last game, so I'm going after you; he's my best friend so I'm attacking everyone else first) that does not appeal to me. I don't want to be punished for playing the card game instead of the social situation. In a competitive environment, everyone implicitly agrees to the ground rules simply by virtue of entering the tournament. Game rules will be strictly enforced and very little, if anything, outside the card game will be given any weight in decision-making. I get to focus on optimizing my play, my understanding of the deck vs deck metagame, and sports-psychology stuff like avoiding tilt. Any social aspects are saved for periods between games and matches.
Competitive players got there first in terms of trying to define what sets them apart from other types of players so naturally they set up a binary categorization and heaped all sorts of negative connotations on the group that wasn't them. It's not kind or good to do this, but I'm sure you can see that this is a common phenomenon in human groups. "in-group good! out-group bad!". Casual play is an extremely broad category and it only makes sense to want to further subdivide it to provide nuance. I just don't think you're going to make much headway trying to carve off "casual" as separate from what Commander players who show up to stores regularly are doing. Instead I would suggest adding an orthogonal axis to the model and giving that axis a name. I would suggest "investment" or something like that to capture the idea that you're putting in lots of time/money/etc.
so if I understand you correctly, under my proposed model, you'd be Casual and High Investment.
I would be Competitive and High Investment
Kitchen table folks who never set foot in an LGS are Casual, Low Investment
Competitive, Low Investment feels like a rare bird indeed but maybe we can figure out who fits. Maybe it's people who were in one of the other categories at one point but have shifted over time? The guy who drafts like a pro but nowadays just shows up to cube once a month but when he does he locks in?
Obviously this is just an idea. I'm curious what you think of it and how you would categorize folks if we want to go beyond the simple Casual/Competitive dichotomy
Yeah but most casuals just buy a commander precon and then drop another $50 on singles and then trade with what they open from packs.
@joeldheath Yeah my main point is that commander shouldn't be considered the default "casual format" or something necessary for people to play casually.
As someone who primarily plays casually, but who played standard a decade ago... the thing that frustrates me about current design in Magic is that I feel like Commander, while it may be a good casual format for those who have played the game for some time, it is a really bad format for new players.
In commander: the cost of building your own deck in terms of money and time is prohibitive; you have to expose yourself to and read about 30 years' worth of mechanics; not to mention, the social intrigue of a commander game can make for a lot of feels-bad experiences for someone who is still so new that they are easily discouraged.
I really wish there was focus... not on tournament play necessarily, but at least on 60 card formats with reduced cardpools such as in a rotating format, or limited play with battle boxes or draft... etc. I just think it is a better space for teaching new players.
The overwhelming push toward commander that people feel when new makes it very hard for me to introduce friends to the game.
Multiplayer casual in general is an awful modality for teaching new players how to play the game of Magic and play it well. EDH/Commander just turns all the reasons why that is to 11/10 through the increased complexity of board states and stacks that occur late in long games.
People should teach new players using 60 card 1v1 play of some variety, but ideally some stock decks from a 1v1 format's meta. Multiplayer is mostly a process of learning to play other players in concert with using your already honed skills at Magic itself.
Part of me wants to design a magic-like game with less focus on Permanents and more focus on The Stack since that concept is so freaking cool. Like something where you contest over how a spell resolves and who controls it when it resolves.
Called CEDH lol
until then i'm gonna keep playing mainly pauper edh. still able to build broken degenerate decks but you have to jump through way more hoops and be at risk of dying to some flying 2/2 if you ignore the fundamentals
You guys are totally miss construding two things: What is good for the business and what is good for the game.
Totally destroying your game to reach the "larger audience" will be good business, but bad for the game.
Diving right into the crossover singularity that is slowly engulfing every single interactive media in existence, annihilating any verisimilitude and sens of identity to turn everything into a grey sludge of pop culture references that will be dated in 6months is good for business, but bad for the game.
Since when the monetary success of a game is a metric to judge if the game is actually good or not?
@@Pers0n97 to set the scene, I have quit magic because of the direction it has gone, so for the most part I'm 'on your side'
However, characterizing the shift in magic as "destroying the game" is factually inaccurate. Magic is being played by more people than ever, and I'd say that's the metric being used to say that the shift is "good for the game."
If you miss the old style of competitive magic without the crossover slop, and a focus on community and great games, you can come join us in Flesh and Blood!
@@Aegisworn You just swapped the "business" by "number of players" here so I'll repeat my last question and changing just that part:
Since when the number of play is a metric to judge if the game is actually good or not?
Candycrush has way more players than MTG ever had, random P2W gatcha idle mobile games have way more players than even that.
Does that mean these games are better?
Obviously not.
As I said, there is a huge difference between the success of the product and the actual game, and making the argument that only the KPI (number of players, money made, etc) are the only metrics that mater always leads to the marking pole taking the lead over the design of the game (look up "Steve jobs on why xerox failed" on youtube, this interview is now more relevant than ever).
In the pursuit of these KPI, you will always end up destroying your product because your product isn't made for "everyone", and this is the greatest barrier between you, and that "everyone's money".
@@Pers0n97 I don't know how to explain that the number of people who like a thing is a good metric for how good a thing is.
Like I agree that magic has become worse for me (and presumably you), but I would say that most people playing nowadays would say that it's doing better than before.
This isn't to say that this is the only metric, but it's certainly a valid one.
There comes a time where you just have to realize that "this game isn't for me" and walk away
@@Aegisworn Your last sentence is the problem I have with that video originally.
Trying to defend a destruction of a game to make it "something else" to garner "a different audience" isn't a good thing for the game, it's a good thing for the BUSINESS of the company making the game.
And telling people "just suck it up boys, and move along you aren't welcomed here anyone" is both insulting to the consumers that made the game what it is today, but also the most "don't ask question, just consume product" mentality possible.
Yes, OBVIOUSLY, if the game totally changed into something you don't like the only logical move is to quit, but that's like telling someone that's watching their house burn down "Stop whining dude, just get a new house".
Nobody expect the shift to magically reverse and things to go back to what they were, but that doesn't mean we all should just "suck it up and move on" without a word.
@@Pers0n97 My point about moving on is that everything that could be said has already been said. Holding onto bitterness is only hurting yourself. You can offer critique, you can mourn, but rhetoric with no substance (like claiming that the game is "destroyed," whatever that means) doesn't advance any kind goal.
And this is why Cube is the best format. It's essentially designing your own game with the Magic rules engine.
Forrest's illustration for the new card Carrot Cake is a 10/10
you're the real MVP of the comment section
@@ForrestImel 😁🙌
I understand the desire to build your own game when one isn't working the way you want. I recently made a Magic expansion named Wastes of Veldmar and posted it on my other channel. I was thinking if Magic keeps diverging from its roots, I could create an alternate universe where the roots can keep growing.
Speaking as someone who only started playing 2 or 3 years ago, and who plays almost exclusively with pods of existing friends in a casual setting... I dunno, I just don't think I can get behind the interpretation of recent Magic as "fun over function". Our groups don't go anywhere near meta-warping cards like Grief or Nadu, but the severe disparity in power level of newly printed cards has caused a lot of strain on our games in recent months. If even one player is buying new packs or picking up a few choice singles, that's instant pressure for everyone else to either fork up the cash and crank up the power level of their own decks to match, or to employ increasingly strict and elaborate house rules to maintain a play environment that allows everyone to have fun. We used to get by with a simple "keep all cards under $10" clause, but now even bulk commons/uncommons are completely invalidating older cards. The only thing that feels worse than skipping a Universes Beyond set I don't care about is seeing someone slam down an absolutely bonkers powerful card from that set and then become instant archvillain.
And of course fun is subjective, but the trend of all new commanders having enough lines of rules text to be self-sufficient engines really puts a damper on what I personally enjoy the most out of Commander as a format -- the deckbuilding puzzle and flexibility to be thematic/expressive. In my experience, games against commanders like Sauron, the Dark Lord or Hakbal merfolk spam or Voja flatten games into linear strategies with a wild amount of consistency. And if that's one of your buddy's two decks, then you'd better dig deep to find your own fun against those decks again and again.
All to say, even from a casual perspective, this doesn't feel sustainable. I think it's naive to believe the slogan that commander lets you play whatever old cards you want, but it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect a deck to function with some periodic upgrades without getting completely overshadowed by the next set of precons. If WotC was designing toward fun, I'd expect new cards and mechanics to expand OUTWARD, exploring new angles and fleshing out under-supported archetypes, to ensure as wide a field of viable strategies as possible. Instead, they seem to be designing UPWARD, with each set providing the same handful of staple effects in each color, but power-creeping each time so there's a reason to crack new packs... Combine that with a truly overwhelming release schedule, and the whole thing feels like a cheap cash grab.
...Speaking instead as someone fascinated with game design and finally feeling out this prolific card game, it would be a bummer for WotC to sideline the competitive scene by just throwing game balance out the window. I actually think Modern Horzions 3 feels exceptionally considered in most of its card designs, and I was very impressed with their clear focus on shaking up established play patterns and shoring up old mechanics (I don't love energy in general, but they designed one hell of an engaging energy package). Once again, outlier cards like Nadu and Grief don't feel like they're there for "fun"... the generous read is they were somehow overlooked, the cynical read is that they're there to push packs. Grief getting an MH3 reprint suggests the latter.
This was your best Magic video yet! It makes a great summation of the trouble a lot of folks are having with Magic now-a-days. Keep it up! 🎉
oh wow, you guys SO need to try your hands on cube design...
Yup. My thoughts exactly.
I'm just looking into Cube format right now, after being introduced to it by 3/3 Elk's video about it earlier today, and it really does seem like it solves all of these problems. Do you have any advice for someone who's completely new to the format?
@@Quincunx_5 put a pile of cards you like in a box, in a good mana curve, and just try not to put too much removal
@@freddiesimmons1394 Sounds simple enough, thanks!
Agree with all points about WotC appealing to casual players in the right way, except for one: The amount of text on cards and new card designs, and I think they're related.
To release upwards of 2000 new card designs per year, it seems that WotC just adds a 30 keywords in different combinations to a card, rather than thoughtfully curate concise designs. Now casual players are trying to make sense of veritable novels on every card and how they interact with the other million keywords and lines of text on the battlefield.
It's truly felt like keeping up with the number of new unique cards printed each year has become third job on top of my actual job and my second job as a parent and I just don't have fucking time for that.
If more card in the supplemental sets were reprints rather than unique new designs they could make their money without making people feel constantly overwhelmed by something they want to love but can't enjoy when it starts to feel like a chore.
@@StrongButAwkward Completely agree. Why do they think every card release has to be a new design? Let us play with old favorites in Standard that are redressed to match the theme of the set. It would slow the power creep tremendously.
Flash flying cascade desend 2 😂 - take that newbie ! That's why they like Dinosaur decks
The universes beyond could have been silver bordered. Would solve so many issue that I have with those sets.
I don’t like UB either. I’ve made my peace with it though. I don’t buy, acquire, or play any of them. Ever. To me they don’t exist. If other people play them, sure, it’s what they like.
at least they're physically distinct enough that playgroups or pods can restrict them. i'm surprised it isn't already a thing
I dunno man. My LGS put a 10 collar cover charge on playing commander there cause the players only used proxy cards and brought their own pop. Literally almost never spent a single dime on the game or at the LGS. Catering to that seems dumb.
I'm really curious to see how the new Foundations set is going to affect Paper Standard; Wizards seems really keen to revitalize "gently competitive" IRL Magic, especially considering how simple and intuitive the mechanics of Bloomburrow are. I can absolutely see a future where Standard is a low-ish power, introductory competitive experience, with Pioneer and Modern being geared towards those who want a more stressful competitive experience.
I would really like to see standard become the primary way that people engage with Magic again.
You just can't force people to play less powered cards. And there is no sense to play Standard if there are no tournaments. Soooo... I'm not optimistic, about it.
@@Wolan.Yeah they're trying to with store championships, but the Oko era did its damage and ruined players' confidence. Really a shame too cuz standard has been good for the past 6-9 months. Most importantly, the kamigawa, vow, and capenna rotation will help get rid of the cards that have plagued the format for so long.
Magic should hold a LGS standard tournament with a Mana Crypt as top prize. Trust me, people will build standard decks again to try for this. And once they have a deck, they will play with it again.
We just don’t have any reason to make a deck and keep up with the meta. It’s too fast and too much for 0 reward other than fun.
@@georgiopapakonstantinou1580 I think the point about Oko (and really everything from WAR through ZNR) destroying consumer confidence is super important. Yes, there was a global pandemic that also ruined in-person Magic, but Standard with Eldraine was a miserably overpowered experience.
Money has a huge problem in how it works with games like Magic. Printing more sets will make more money but it won't necessarily make more players happy, just people feel a need to keep up. Printing more powerful cards makes more money and makes the game worse. The design goal isn't "make the best game" it's how much can we push players to spend before they quit in significant enough numbers for it not to be worthwhile.
This hits our point on the head. The incentives of business don’t value quality of product.
@@distractionmakers The problem is it doesn't sound like that's your point when you exchanges like
"My feelings aside... this is just what's best for the game"
"...it's clearly been profitable"
"...LotR was the highest grossing set of all time. Why would they not continue to do that?"
It sounds like you're arguing that what is good for profits is good for the *game*. As in the quality of the product and the game and the experience of playing it.
If you meant it's what's best for the company, you should say that. Saying it's best for the game makes you guys sound like you're about to start quoting "invisible hand of the market" talking points or something.
@@StrongButAwkward I think something that needs to be addressed is that profit is what a company can measure, quality is ephemeral. While I think craft should be put ahead of profit that isn't the incentive structure in which magic exists. What is the clearest indicator (for WOTC) that something is working? Profit.
I think supplemental sets have been the issue. Standard should be the focus of design. It's possible to push power level of older sets without affecting standard by printing the second of a synergy that long rotated out. Brainstorm and fetchlands is a good example of how a card can be mildly okay in standard, but the best card in legacy.
The issue with current WOTC design is cards like Grief and Ragavan that do everything in one card.
Agreed. It is an issue with the strategy circle breaking down. Cards are doing too many things, leading to decks that can effectively shore up weaknesses.
The problem with that is few people play standard anymore outside of Arena. People play the eternal formats, which are all effected seperated based on what cards are eternally printed into them.
@@distractionmakers Didn't they have a problem similar to that in the past, which lead to a substantial design shift that forced various game play elements back into their intended colours and (this may have been a second round of such change imediately after) forced the powerscale back down by letting the old powerful cards rotate out before introducing the replacement that was more expensive and/or less effective at the job?
@@CatManThree if most players are casual, then the 'standard' format is arguably 'whatever I have in my collection that my friends are willing to put up with me playing as more than a funny one off'. ... well, so far as physical cards go. Digital formats are somewhat unavoidably more rigid.
@@laurencefraser Thats not really relevant to what I was saying.
Im a fan of all the old border stuff personally and always happy when they print those. It's crazy that I still can't pick the option to play with old borders in mtgArena. Okay I'm opening the can of worms that is MtG. I'll close it again.
This is one of the reasons I moved from the modern format to Flesh and Blood. Flesh and Blood has a much better competitive/tournament focus and scratches that itch better (and is an amazing game system in its own right with a company that still cares about its players as more than just wallets).
I still play commander from time to time, but I don't miss playing what competitive magic has become.
If you haven't played Flesh and Blood before, but enjoy game systems I highly recommend at least checking it out. It isn't a "fixed" Magic clone like SWU, Lorcana, Runeterra, etc (not that there's anything wrong with those games).
Came down here to say the same thing. FaB has really picked up the ball that MtG dropped
"Aw if I could have got one card deeper I woul-"
"That's a game loss, pack your shit and get the fuck out."
Flesh and blood might be fun and good, but it's competitive rules are dogshit
@@yugioh1870 You can still say things like that after the result of the game is recorded.
The rule is in place to prevent any attempt at convincing your opponent to concede
@@yugioh1870 I agree their rules about going to time aren't great, but that's one small blip compared to all of the crap WoTC has been doing.
Unfortunately it’s hard to teach new players to play commander magic. The complexity of their own deck, 100 cards, and the introduction to 3 other decks that are most likely advanced and optimized makes commander super hard to teach.
The social contract works but unfortunately there are many players that have no “chill” decks. And your random eldrazi deck is not chill. Trust me.
It may be a little harder to teach someone Magic through Commander because each card is unique, but Wizards has realized that's how a lot of people are getting into the game - their friends play Commander, so that's how they get introduced to the game. As for complexity, people continue to play Magic *because* it's complex.
@@arichardson0972 I disagree with you here. People don’t play it because it’s complex. People play mtg because it’s the only game with so much depth. There is a lot of nuance in the difference.
One interesting thing could be that in a commander setting, there are three people able to teach one new player in a pod. That’s kind of cool and might balance out all the grok you need to do when you are new to MTG.
I think something that I’ve noticed is that my commander decks cost way more than a modern deck with shocks and fetches
But because I’m buying cards for my commander decks one at a time, rather than netdecking and buying them all at once, the financial pain is spread way out
Idk i guess I could build a 60 card deck that way but, idk it feels like 60 card decks need a critical mass of cards before they’re viable but with commander a kludged together pile can still work while you’re planning your upgrades
I recommend covering flesh and blood at some point if you want to spotlight modern competitive tcgs. It's definitely the kind of crunchy that a game designer perspective gels with.
It's fair to say that corporations could and should sell products that fit demand. It's also fair to say that corporations have and frequently exercise a weird ability to dictate that demand in the first place.
Would the LotT set have sold nearly as well without the version of the The One Ring we ended up with? Don't know, don't get to know. I do know that even though I grew up loving that IP, I was already too exhausted from endless efforts to keep up with the game to buy into it.
Just because it’s profitable, doesn’t mean it’s good.
I felt the same exact way about magic after being a long time player. Then, I decided to check out flesh and blood. It has really sparked that same joy I had back when I first started playing magic, especially competitively. As game designers I’d love to hear yalls takes on the game system, as I think it’s far superior to magic. Thanks for all the great videos keep it up!
What I don't understand is why people seem to equate the terms 'casual' and 'commander' when it comes to Magic.
I've been nothing but a casual player ever since I began playing Magic and I've never seen it as a competitive game. However, I like the 60 card minimum deck size and the option to have up to 4 copies of a card.
For the life of me I can't understand how a format that restricts how players can build their decks by forcing them to adhere to a single way of doing it as well as forcing them to play multiplayer is considered THE casual way of playing Magic.
I don't see why people don't explore the freedom that actually playing casually gives them. I.e. to build decks with however many cards they want and put whatever they want in them. Also, it should be obvious that multiplayer is fine as long as that's what they wanna do but should not be mandatory.
I've expressed a lot of angry opinions about commander lately but I realised that there's nothing wrong with the format itself as long as it's seen as what it is - just one of the infinite ways of playing Magic casually.
What I have a real problem with though, is people talking about commander as if it was the only way to play Magic casually, it makes me irrationally angry because I feel as if this invalidates all of my and many other people's experience with casual Magic.
Within your own play group, your approach absolutely works. Outside the play group, not so much. The main issue is the same reason why an unofficial committee that determines the banlist for commander exists. Imagine that there's no banlist in commander. You take your deck, which would be considered a CEDH deck by today's standards, and go to the local commander scene. There, they're playing Timmy decks. It's likely the case that at least one party isn't going to have a good time. Same goes for embracing a more open casual format - there's going to be feelsbad moments because expectations are not set among players.
@@bobbymccullough3210 Oh sorry, I thought it goes without saying that basically any card should be fine in a deck as long as the person or people you're playing with are fine with it. Isn't that common sense?
Of course you're able to play 4 Sol Rings in a deck, and as long as your friends or current play group are aware and prepared it shouldn't really be a problem. But you better be prepared to either whip out a different deck or replace those Sol Rings with something else if your opponents aren't having fun.
Exactly. Commander isn't more "casual" in any particular way, especially compared to something like draft or sealed. It also swallowed every other multiplayer product like planechase, conspiracy, and archenemy and people use words like "archenemy" and "the monarch" like they were invented for commander.
I used to play Heroclix a lot, and I loved having the weird Iron Maiden figures with a zombie army, or having superheroes square off against the Pacific Rim giants.
The weirdness on the side of the serious tournaments was hilarious. I sorta wish Magic would be less intentionally silly, because equipping a sword to the front of a vehicle and similar is silly enough as is. I'm still here for it.
Honestly, you said many right things.
I really wanna say you need to try flesh and blood.
Is everything you listed as something you missed in magic. Original and unified IP and lore, total attention for the competitive scene (better organized than any other card game ever) great balancing.
Plus the game was an incredible breath of fresh air, it's so unique compared to every other card game i tried, and i tried a lot of them.
I gave up on 12 years of magic experience and started playing flesh and blood, and i never looked back.
UB shows the creators do not care about the actual Magic players and only are focused on the prospect of more money. Look at the new scam I mean play packs that are aimed for new players and it screws anyone that buys one.
I think a nice band-aid solution for a few issues I've seen raised here, would be the growth of formats like pre-modern. It may have it's share of problems, like the meta not being able to evolve a ton, but it's cool as a format that's competitive where you're not going to have to spend hundreds of dollars changing whenever the next rotation set comes out.
As a guy who got into magic during OG Innistrad block, there's little I wish more than to have a format which used cards from that era of magic that I feel a lot of people are very nostalgic for. I feel like there are a lot of players who still regularly look back fondly for the splinter twin/birthing pod modern days. Something like a format that uses all the cards from before Tarkir when they changed the borders I think would be really cool.
Enough formats like that might be a good way to appease a lot of disenfranchised older players like us who don't like seeing universe beyond cards, or who hate cards with text boxes so big they have to shorten the names for key mechanics to fit more text on them. Players that want that, but also want something competitive to sink their teeth into.
I am also dissatisfied with current magic. So what I am doing is building decks for a specific format from yesteryear that I enjoyed, which is Invasion Block constructed. With the intention of running an 8 player mini tourney.
IDK, EDH has its own problems now, mainly power creep, however, having played in tournaments back in the late 90s and early 00s, the range of viable cards was very narrow back then and that wasn‘t always healthy. Also we lacked a really good kitchen table multiplayer format. I had really fun with highlander, before over a decade later with Alara and Zendikar, we build the first EDH-Decks and not playing 3-Minute games and shuffle was really fun
The money signaling thing kind of ignores a lot of the ways that the money has nothing to do with the end user/player. WotC gets money through sales, but also gets more money by laying off employees, selling off assets, taking out loans, getting investors, and licensing their stuff. And they can lose money in plenty of ways other than products just not selling. Me buying or not buying a pack of cards is not me telling them "fire this many employees" or "take on this much debt." It's possible they could be making much more money than they're currently making if they did things differently and sold different products but also ran the company differently in other ways.
Fair shot for venting and saying your piece but it feels like the argument that ppl are buying so it’s working is missing out on some pretty obvious signals to the contrary: BoA telling Hasbro off for overprinting, abysmal failures for epilogue sets, failing stock prices, no retail price guides, Amazon dumping, buyer fatigue from across the base (not just spikes and obvs only those who speak on it but still clearly runs from casuals to competitive players), insane design choices to nuke formats with OP cards (one ring, evoke elementals, nadu). This isn’t a game that works it’s a game that sells because of legacy and because the economic system props up such corporate failures by only looking at value from a pov of markets not community / users.
As for design I’d be really curious to hear you speak on the whole fire design thing bcos clearly a lot of the ills in the game today seem to stem from that decision to turn shit up. Sure it makes for fun casual to a degree but it’s also unsustainable.
I hope everyone knows that knowing that something used to be better than it is now doesn't make you a "boomer"
I mean the hard part about tcgs is that there's always updates.
Like everyone starts playing and eventually finds the meta they played the most, and liked the most and will always remember that.
That's why I quit yugioh, I played it for 10 years or so since I was like 5 years old or something. But eventually the deck I played and had multiple iterations of and enjoyed the most, just wasn't really even playable anymore (noble knights, 2016-18) and I just sorta never got over that 2016 format that I felt like was perfect even up until the like mid 2017 format pre-extreme force that I felt like the format was pretty open.
But then, it was over. The dam broke, and my format knowledge wasn't enough anymore to keep up with power creep when playing my favorite decks.
And if I started playing Yugioh today I think I'd have some fun, even if I couldn't get as into it as I did then but I would def get a good half year at least out of it.
But I can never go back, the play patterns and things I like about the game are no more.
And I do think this is why commanders the most popular format, as you can take your kamigawa standard deck and throw in some other fun cards or tutors or whatnot and viola u got a deck.
This reminds me of a rule that another game developer who has a certain blow call the 80, 20, 5 rule.
What it means is that when it comes to the audience of games like Magic or most video games, only about 20% of the players are usually invested enough to look into the game beyond just playing, aka online discourse, keeping up with news, following content creators etc. And only 5% of those players are super invested to the point of playing at tournaments, create content about the game etc
UB is always going to be my pain point, because I wish I could know if the runaway success of LOTR or other UB sets is why we have twenty releases a year and ten different types of boosters
The highly competitive version of Magic (and the amount of support it used to have) was at one time the epitome of what I enjoy in games and hobbies. With that on the wane, there's literally nothing to replace it and the explosion of casual Magic feels like an additional injustice because it's not like Magic has disappeared; It has morphed into this other game that I don't enjoy but struggle to explain to those who love it why I hate it without "yucking their yum". Casual Magic always existed and apparently thrived without attention but competitive can't thrive without massive amounts of support. It's like robbing the poor to give to the rich (minus the moral angle).
Obviously WOTC's change of focus is understandable and hard to argue with but one of the most wonderful things in my world just ceased to exist almost overnight and was replaced with a pale imitation and the clear indication that we're not going back. The grief is indeed real.
I think part of the reason why entrenched players who have been playing for a while hate universes beyond is because MtG leadership said “we are never going to do that” for years. The thing we don’t think about is that they kept saying that because people were CONSTANTLY asking for crossovers. UB Makes monetary sense, and money is what matters, so we might as well come to terms with it.
I also think you could support the competitive scene a bit more and make the people from that community happy, without really doing much more
As a commander player, I wish WOTC would give less "support" to the format. :D
@@shorewall agreed. Much of the fun from commander back in the day was seeing all the weird stuff people came up with. Now it's always the same commanders, using all the staples their colors have. Something is lost when the "format" which was made for fun in between tournament days becomes serious. I mean for fucks sake they started doing some cEdh tournaments in Colorado (USA) with 128 players CAPPED, as they could not fit anyone else.
How long until wizards of the coast looks at this and sees a cash cow?
I fully support proxies now because I have had it with these cards
3 things are changing in Magic. Each separately. Outside Magic IPs are now here. More product than ever is being made faster and faster. These are not gameplay related, but they are different nonetheless. The big change I see is that Magic used to be a game of resource management. If I played an aggressive deck I might run out of steam, because a lot of cheap aggressive cards don’t have card advantage, that is saved for more expensive costing spells. Cards had drawbacks, limits, were situational, colors had restrictions . But as of 🔥design, that is all changing. Now my aggro cards can have card advantage, my disenchant now can kill a creature and pump a creature, all on one card. All creatures now need ETBs. All creatures need 3 or more abilities. Cards are getting stronger and stronger such that so many of them can win the game if left unchecked. Sooo many cards draw 1 or multiple cards, so each player always has several cards in hand. The old game of resource management, card limits, color restrictions, is going away. I say it’s worse, but it’s just changing. That’s a fact.
Have you tried cedh tho
I went 3rd and lost a tournament 25 years ago to a squirrel deck. 25 years ago and squirrel decks are still alive today. Feels like lots of cards are printed but nothing actually really has changed.
I would say the new direction of Magic is less a "rebirth" than a "reanimation". Like has been happening with so many other once-great IPs these days, the vital essence of what made it what it was is being strangled out of it in the pursuit of wringing every last red cent from its value as quickly as possible, leaving the dessicated corpse to shamble along as a mockery of what once made it great.
The thing that gets me about designing the literal parts of the game with no regard for their relationship to what that game is (the core relationship between its parts--the balance) and solely on the socially perceived fun (a purely subjective experience), is that I fail to see how that actually constitutes the game as a game at all.
Like... if "rule zero" is the core determining factor for the "fun" and "self identity" of the game experience and those involved, then they have actually created the opposite... people now need to argue with each other what they find "acceptable" or "tolerable" to their experience because there is no longer an "anchor" or mediated expectation that the game inherently provides. It's an unpleasant experience for everyone because everyone is not on the same page of what the game is supposed to be.
In my opinion this idea that there is a "competitive" version and a "casual" version of any game is a problem. The reality is that building and designing a game is an explorative experience where it builds upon itself and past decisions made. All elements are to be respected for the game as a whole to uphold that anchor of expectation of what the game is by its nature. This idea that there is a "casual" version where you "remove the competitive parts" is like saying "I don't like it's very nature." It works both ways; that there is a "competitive" version and you ignore the "casual elements" is the same argument. It's the same game, it's just your motivations for playing it. Both arguments are selfish and honestly it continues to creep into many discussion about other games like with difficulty settings in souls games. Everything that is designed fits a goal of its design. If it's not for you, then forcing it to be is a disrespect to the designer's goals and becomes a selfish demand. People seem to forget that the "competitive environment" is built over the top of the game. The game exists as it is, then that environment comes after. The same is true for the casual environment. If you act like that environment and the game itself are the same then you misrepresent the game. People will play any game with whatever mindset they choose.
With modern Magic design and every set and universes beyond release is for completely unique audiences yet forcibly unified in play, it just means that people have these conversations socially as the game completely lacks its baseline expectations of what it is supposed to be and who it is for. We haven't even approached the part of as an experience the game's lore and content was their version of tropes, cultures, types of media. When you bring in literal copies of external media, who needs writers? Real people lose jobs to this type of marketing and product first, content second approach. It is disrespectful to both artists and players and becomes less of a game with that anchored core of a unified world and balanced system, and more of a product with a thousand faces each providing different expectations to different people.
Long story short, the modern version of Magic is not designed for the same people as it was a decade ago. It is almost exclusively designed for a completely different audience.
I think the key difference between designing for casual vs. competitive - and a major pain point of people like myself who prefer competitive - is that designing for casual is ruining competitive environments. Whereas when the game was designed for competitive, the casual formats got the "trickle down" cards that you mentioned, but the play environment was never made less fun for those players. Casual players got the enjoyment of putting pieces together to make something cool. Now, cards are designed to do everything under the sun because WotC assumes there's 3 opponents to deal with, and the competitive players have to deal with the stress and monetary cost of bannings.
I think this conversation leaves out the fact that there are many people who view magic cards as finacial assets more so than game pieces. Sure, the casual playerbase is the overwhelming majority of people buying cards, but I know there are plenty of people who spend a LOT of money on MTG and do not play the game.
This side of the game has had a significant impact on the games/product designs. It's not necessarily a new thing for the game, but it has certainly influenced the direction of design. These cards are as much collectibles as they are playing cards.
I need to come to terms with the fact that commander is the most fun for me
I recently got kinda burnt out by commander (i was also kinda stressed out at the time) and i was coping by working on a mono red burn list for modern
I did the whole professional thing i got different sleeves for my sideboard, i was tracking life total with a little book
I went to ftm and got stomped, super hard
Next week I went to commander with a new deck i had been slowly building for the past few months. I was the arch enemy, did some scary things interacted with my opponents stuff a lot and was killed in a most spectacular fashion
And it was way more fun
‘Make my own dream game’ is exactly where I’m going too. I’ll always have fond memories of Magic, but now that wotc is owned by hasbro and the bean counters are calling the shots rather than the Magic team, it’s no longer the game I want to play. So I’m trying my hand at a tcg that takes the best of the hobby and builds on it.
I’ll be interested in the game you come up with when you’re ready to present it.
If you think a 42 page article is a deep dive, have you heard about the 400 page book that is all about the strategy and play of a single card? "Understanding Gush" is just that, it is a way to understand the game of magic and strategy through the lens of a single card.
Haha ok I haven’t heard of this one. That’s incredible.
Great time to try Sorcery TCG if you haven't :D
I guess my frustration is how focussing on casual players is hurting competitive players, when previously, in my view, focussing on competitive players did not harm casual experience.
The mid-years of Magic had cards too weak for competitive play that were casually appealing, and were past the period of unfun experiences like Gloom, Nether Void, Mass LD.
The new years of magic has made those appealing cards so plentiful and so powerful, that they are also defining the competitive experience, but they dont hold up as good experiences in that context.
Main deck Leyline for Hogaak, Grief triple Thoughtseize, Nadu being a nightmare to play out, One Ring becoming the brainstorm of Modern, Initiative and Monarch are so different 1v1 or 1v3, Oko +1 and Uro and Omnath, Lurrus got power-level banned in Vintage.
All the best creatures are from the last 5 years, where this FIRE and casual focus keeps powercreeping and one-upping itself, and it's hard enough to design for Casual OR Competitive contexts, let alone both.
Funny enough, I wasn't able to engage with "competitive" Magic until Arena F2P, so it feels like Commander is bank-rolling that experience for me, so I'm happier with the current status quo (even if those things are not necessarily linked).
The more they push Commander and Universes Beyond, the more interested I get in board games, draft and Pioneer instead because those environments feel safer and more satisfying.
It is interesting to me how it seems like people are very into the cross over sets, it does seem a very casual mindset, which there is nothing wrong with. i was surprised at myself that I wasn't more excited about the Lord of the Rings set being a big fan myself. I found myself super disappointed though that for example there were duplicates of characters, i hated that there are like 5 or 6 Gandalf's. i much prefer one of each character for stuff like that or better yet. one of my favorite decks I ever made was a Harry Potter Vorthos deck but if they were to do a crossover set that deck would loose a lot of it's luster.
I want to play Commander, it's the only product that interests me. I never want "cards rotating" to limit my freedom. However, I have no interest in CEDH, and my playgroup is progressively moving that direction. I don't think the game is designed for casual players at all, the instinct to be as competitive as possible is something that has been ingrained into the DNA over 30 years, that there is not escaping it. There will never be a true "kitchen table" experience again.
Call of Duty has mirrored Magic very closely. A third mode was introduced (Warzone/Commander) that is much more popular than the main competitive mode (6v6/Standard) and they both focus on IP collabs to further grow their playerbase.
Commander should not be the only "casual" way to play at stores / FNM level. How do we fix that?
really appreciated this video, you guys!
to your point about money being a success metric for Hasbro/WOTC, i wonder how much of that profit from "players" is really just distributors and LGSs buying the products to then sell to players. this is why i always feel iffy on the "just proxy" argument: if we all did that, LGSs are the ones who lose. we saw firsthand how many of them were stuck with boxes of Karlov Manor that they couldn't sell, but Hasbro still got their check regardless. to me, it feels that even if Hasbro makes a bad product, the pressure local stores feel to carry new MTG products forces THEM to foot the bill.
so, while i do feel players influence the profits, it's hard for me to refuse buying MTG products without feeling like i'm screwing over the stores who brought me the game to begin with, and that's why i keep buying from them. would love to know your thoughts on this!
@Distraction Makers - Based on your (very good) comments about Casual Focus replacing Competitive Focus, do you think that MtG needs or requires a competitive, professional scene? And if so, does that need to be expanded, decreased, changed (PT Commander Championship...)?
I believe that the "feeling" that is missing would increase drastically without the PT. I feel that feeling too, quite heavily.
Pssst.....
You should check out Sorcery: contested realm.
The irony of this topic is that one of the most destructive cards to modern and legacy (grief) was in no way designed for commander. Single-target hand disruption is weak in commander, it isn't fun for players in commander, and the design of the card is rife with ways to exploit it in 1v1 but not in commander. The same is true of the entire cycle of evoke elementals, except maybe solitude. (Fury and Endurance see cedh play but again that isn't the casual audience that commander designs allegedly cater to)
I stopped playing MtG for several years because I got really disillusioned with where it was heading, but I found it super interesting how a lot of decisions I really hated actually made the game more popular. It's always a bit depressing to see your hobby evolve past something you enjoy, but the sad truth is you can't do anything about it. The only thing you can do is accept it and either move on to something else or adjust to what it's become. Incidentally, I did want to say that I do think MtG still does a good job of creating interesting draft formats. Even if the 60 card constructed formats have been consistently having issues for the last few years, there's a way to play MtG that's interesting and imo better than any other draftable game right now. It's a shame that it's so expensive, though.
It saddens me that it's getting less competitive, especially now that I'm finally looking to join seriously😅
If Wizards has decided that the best way to make money is to focus on commander, it follows that there will be cards which disrupt the once tightly tuned competitive environment. It seems like actively maintaining format ban lists is a low effort way to appease players who want to play competitively. Ban lists are by definition reactive, so they don’t need to sink a ton of design time into format testing if they are willing to ban cards that didn’t fit into a format. Necropotence, Brainstorm and Force of will used to be in the same standard format. It’s fine to print cards at a high power level, if they get banned before the format becomes stale. Casual players still get the fun cards and competitive players get a short period of time where everyone is trying to brew the best way to break the new card in the format. It seems like an easy win.
You’re missing the downstream effects of bannings. The issue is constantly disenfranchising players who have invested in a deck only to have it banned.
Banning could leave a bad taste in peoples mouth, particularly for players new to a format or competitive play. But I don’t think it’s drastically different than the current status quo. Some of my favorite memories were sets like Urza and Mirrodin. I keep a binder with 4 of each card that got banned while I was playing it, it’s kind of a fun trip down memory lane. Since non rotating formats are defined by the highest power cards from every set in their pool. Accidental or intended power spikes from a new set will only ever raise the bar. If the intent is to print cards that affect eternal formats they must keep up with the ever raising bar or they will be ignored. This causes decks to be “power crept out” of the format even if cards are not banned. If you invested in an “eternal” deck, it’s not going to be around in 1-2 years either way. Banning cards is the only means of lowering the bar. When standard was the competitive format everyone knew decks would have a limited shelf life, but that is now expected in non-rotating formats as well.
That's why I play cube .. free spells and the invoke elementals feel a lot better in a singelton format
I share mamy opinions with Gavin.
I find myself playing historical MTG formats with my friends these days.
Distension Standard
Pre-Innistrad Legacy
93/94
They really capture the Magic I grew up loving. The current game is a shell of its former self.
What is worse now compared to the past, to you
@freddiesimmons1394
The powercreep is egregious. Older cards, especially creatures, are being completely phased out.
The color fixing is too good. Being just 1 or 2 colors should be a large consistency advantage at the cost of losing out on effects only other colors can do.
Color pie bleeding. Green is getting creature removal and black is getting enchantment removal. The whole game may as well just be 1 color soon.
Lastly I am not a fan of universes beyond. We used to have to commission artists for alters if you wanted another IP on your card. That took real investment
@@ZackeroniAndCheese 1) i have a rare-less cube and recently noticed that almost the entire thing is made of cards from the last several years. I dont remember that being so obvious before, so sure.
2) agreed, but i started playing in 2006. My memory has always included shocklands and other strong fixing.
3) that's not really fair. Colors have always gained and lost access to effects.
4) Universes beyond could have at least changed characters to be more in line aesthetically. That would leave out transformers but that works for me
So, the change in the way Wizards designs the game is what got me playing. But the bad behavior of Wizards and Hasbro as companies convinced me to stop buying things they make.
It's kind of abandoned game but could you guys see the ideas and mechanics in krosmaga. There is cool things never done there with spacing and movement in a field for a card game
We’ll check it out!
Seems like a new competitive format is required with only balanced cards. Just as with commander, a players committee could decide
This is why cube is the best format.
"Cube will outlive magic"
Can anyone explain to me how not banning grief/nadu from tournament play helps casual players who aren't showing up to said tournaments?
This conversation reminds me of a digital card game called "Legends of Runeterra", which I used to absolutely adore (if you asked me 1 year ago, I would have said it was the best digital card game on the market, best free to play one anyway). It basically underwent that exact development just at a rapid pace.
At first it was a very interesting card game with relatively competitive rules. But over time they added more and more random effects, making the game more "exciting" rather than strategic. Then they completely changed focus on the casual single player mode, since that one had a bigger player-base apparently. When they released another expansion of unbalanced "flashy" cards, putting rule of cool over balance, I quit the game.
I am afraid Magic is going down the same path. :(
Ever since I learned that Commander existed I sold my 10 modern deck collection to have the resources to build my Commander decks. I'm starting to rebuilding my collection again because I do enjoy both ways of playing the game. After 5 years of EDH there is the burnout in deck building. So I really enjoy the access to other formats because I don't need to get a play set for my modern knights deck every set. But for EDH? Man 😂😂😂
With things like Universes Beyond, I'm not really a fan of certain IPs in Magic, like Dr. Who, The Walking Dead, and to a lesser extent Assassin's Creed, primarily because they are set within a fictionalized version of the real world with the intent of having some amount of realism, so it feels very weird to me. From a purely mechanical view, I think there's some good stuff in there and I'll just pick and choose which cards to play from among them that are better fitting and don't mind if my opponents play any of the cards I find "unfitting".
That being said, Magic already has a ton of weird flavor juxtaposition in its settings and individual cards without the Universes Beyond or just silly interactions. A classic example is the 15 squirrels being capable of taking down Emrakul or the variance in how power and toughness is represented from one creature to another. Why does a 1/1 soldier fail to best a 1/3 horseshoe crab?
My point is, Magic is all just weird and disjointed so I don't have a problem with Universes Beyond, and I'll pick and choose what cards I use for any number reasons as is.
If you want to see a different game that tries to be flavor first, I'd recommend giving "Sorcery: Contested Realm" a look, I've only played a handful of games of it, but was great. It's got some old-school Magic look and feel to it but also with a bit of tactile and tactical feel to it.
pauper imho solves a lot of this. got me back into the game after a big break due to powercreep/crazy release schedule/ub/insane pricing
I miss commander getting precons once a year, and just having to find cards that are throw aways from modern and the beat cards you can find, now they just flood the market with crazy splashy stuff that only is playable in commander
Commander blew up because the vast majority of mtg players are casuals, casuals who are often tired of getting pubstomped at fnm by grinders.
Of course, with the onset of Cedh, casual players have to continue to find new avenues of having enjoyable games.
Magic players have complained the game is dead many times throughout history. From new frames, to planeswalkers to more things than I can remember.
As an ex-competitive mtg player I jumped ship 5-6 years ago from attending events/buying new stuff. If you want a taste of old MTG the main tcg doing that would be Flesh & Blood. They are somehow targeting competitvie players very hard and not going backrupt.
If you want something similar but a bit different then maybe Teamfight Tactics by Riot would work. They balance the game every 2 weeks and release new sets every 3-4 months. There is a very competitive ladder environment there if you want it and a tournament circuit. The downside being only the highest level of competition is in person.
I wish Assasins creed was a straight to commander set. where they can embrace exactly what commander is without ruining formats like legacy. but i also wish that there was more than one casual format. creatures and aggressive based decks are not really good in commander. so even with commander we are only hitting a small part of the psychographic chart.
I think Cube is the closest to being able to be that. Custom formats are another solution. Commander was a fan created format to begin with.
We need to create formats that WOTC can't fuck with. WOTC's "support" for Commander is ruining that format.
As a new player since January this is nuts to watch because I’m perfectly happy with magic lol
Welcome to the matrix
Welcome! To reiterate what was said in the video, there’s nothing wrong with the MTG of today, it’s just different. I hope you continue to love the game for years to come.
I think one of the problems with the "but people are buying it, so keep doing it" mindset is that, while only 10% or whatever of players that play in competitive tournaments, those players those players are entrenched enough to be the ones spending serious scratch on cards.
Nobody that plays casually with their buddies with beer and pretzels around the table is going out hunting the newest $100 chase mythic . They can just print off whatever cards they want and put it on a basic mountain in a sleeve. The people who are spending seriously on this game also don't really have the option NOT to if they want their deck to be optimal, because the stuff they print in these new UB and modern horizons sets are pushed to the max. If you're playing a tournament with any sort of stakes at all in a format where these cards are legal and you choose to skip buying cards from the newest set, you're putting yourself on the back foot for no reason. If it is viable in modern or legacy and you genuinely care about being competitive, you *have* to buy it. We can't vote with our dollar because we need the best cards, and the trend is that the best cards are consistently in the newest sets.
Yeah, heavily entrenched players may take time to quit. If someone gets tired of 6 months of The One Ring and Bowmasters and stops buying new cards after a decade of investment, they won't show up on the LotR balance sheet. Maybe the new players still make up for it long term, but you'll never know from just one set's numbers.
I agree somewhat here. From what I see, at the LGS' is comp players are very rarely buying sealed product. Sure they buy singles but the money to the vendor was already received. On prerelease and release weekends, I see the casuals ripping boxes or buying cases. Idk why they do that since for edh, there is no need to spend money on a casual format or as you said proxy.
@@georgiopapakonstantinou1580 "Idk why they do that since for edh, there is no need to spend money on a casual format or as you said proxy."
I used to work at a game store and the biggest spenders (on both sealed product and singles) were Commander players. They enjoy cracking packs, growing their collection, and using real Magic cards. Sure, you can proxy, but the feeling of gaining secondary market value from your hobby is often too strong of a pull.
I'm a casual player, but with each addon I have less, and less fun building new decks, not to mention playing them. So maybe sells are going up, but at a cost of... Grief?
MTG is encountering a contradiction of capitalism and its incentives in our particular situation of society: the thing that makes the most money is to homogenize, to turn MTG into "pop culture card game", but precisely this process of value-extraction and homogenization, is what threatens to kill it, rob it of the reason it came to exist to begin with, and is one and the same impulse of MANY creative avenues that have become nothing at all except for nostaliga/sequel/prequel/pop culture reference agglomerations denuded of all creativity, originality, or most importantly: risk to investment.
is Sunfall a card that's focued on fun? Genuinely asking.
It creates interesting play patterns in 1vs1 magic. Aggro vs Control can be extremely fun to play on both sides.
The exile part is mainly irrelevant and the token isn't unbeatable. As a 5 mana wrath, the control player needs to survive and keep a cushion of hp to not die to a haste creature.
As the aggro side, does the removal on turn 2 lets you think that the control player doesn't have it in hand ? What of removals on turns 2 and 3 ? Do you commit to the board ? Is it a bluff ? Can you force the control player to use it before deploying your threat ?
MoM was a nice draft environment imo because there were multiple wraths (Sunfall, Invasion of Paliano, and a red Battle) and it was reasonable to expect one. Successfully playing around one felt so rewarding. They also served as decent pressure valves against the uber bombs of the format (Glissa, the flip Praetors) or early flipped battles into overwhelming board position.
@@GerBessa I think you make good points. But I also feel like they are most valid for the highly competitive brand of magic. And not so much the more causal fun style that the video says is the future of the game. Makes me wonder if Sunfall and cards like it will be appear less. Or not,
Meanwhile, MTG Arena is designed as a strictly competitive environment. With win rewards, a 1v1 mockery of commander and a ranked system that would make the inventor of MMR want to pull his eyes out.
Arena seems designed as cashgrab first, competitive eSport wannabe second and fun game as an afterthought.
I have liked a lot of what you guys have had to say about game theory/strategy as it applies to MtG and what makes the game interesting, what makes mechanics within the game compelling or not and why, and how the nature of multiplayer in general and EDH specifically alters the strategies and incentives through the extra layer of psycho-social gamesmanship introduced by multiplayer that make it completely different from 1v1 Magic.
You've made a lot of very good, thoughtful and useful content in a short period of time..... but I take umbrage at conflating "what has been most profitable" with "what is good for the game". At best, that's *extremely* flawed logic rooted in a internalized capitalist value system that centers the profit and performance of a product in considerations/discussions about what is good or bar for the quality or longevity of a product. Which isn't reality, because it's not the best product or service that wins in capitalism, it's the most profitable one; the best ideas very often do not rise to the top or dominate an industry/product/service because if allowed to do so, established players/companies will always find it more profitable to kill/smother potential competition with anti-competitive practices rather than compete or innovate.
Any argument that what is maximally profitable for WotC/Hasbro this quarter and this fiscal year is good for the game of Magic, and whatever is more profitable is by definition better for the game than anything that is less profitable isn't a sound or defensible argument/position. Because those just *aren't* the same thing.
It's good for Magic that it is well made generally and that that drives it popularity and profitability; which creates a virtuous cycle by attracting good game designers to WotC because they want to help make the best card game in the world even better. What's most maximally profitable *right now* is what's good for *Hasbro*; what's good for its C-Suite executives who only have financial incentives to drive up the value of the company as much as possible in the short term before moving on before the house of cards crumples; what's good for its shareholders looking for maxed out dividends every quarter they have their money in the company before they also move on just before the bubble bursts. It's not even necessarily what is best for WotC, but Hasbro specifically. Hasbro seems to view it child companies a lot like EA has viewed its acquired child companies in the video game world; it's fine to run a franchise and company that makes it into the ground in their pursuit of squeezing every last drop of blood from that stone because they have other stones and there will always be other stones to pick up from their PoV. They don't care if they ruin a company/brand's reputation and good will while cashing in on what that company built by forcing them to push out products at faster pace whether that makes them worse or not; they don't care if that destroys the company in the long run because it makes EA money now and the husk can be discarded later and the next acquired company squeezed for all it's worth.
Now in the case of EA they make sure to keep their supply up, and with Hasbro they seem like they haven't understood that same strategy they are trying to employ with WotC through maximizing short term profits with MtG and less successfully attempting to do so with D&D. As they do things like firing large sections of their workforce (even those who led/developed their highest profit projects that year) despite record profits that are usually signs of preparing companies/products to coast forward on reputation and already planned out future products on vastly reduced staffing to make the company look more profitable Hasbro should have their next sacrificial company/product on deck.....but most of their other products and child companies are losing money or barely making them any compared to MtG. It's like their lining up the shot to ride MtG into the dirt on a skeleton crew and they don't have their next victim lined up yet.
And that's the sort of thing you can point to as an example of things Hasbro/WotC are doing of late that is definitely good for them and their profits and their quarterly returns they show to investors....but absolutely not good for the game's health or quality and outright bad for it: firing all your best creative and development talent to lower labor costs. Firing your best designers to push profits up the next FY is the type of unforced brain drain that isn't good for the game, and it isn't a sign of long term investment or confidence by the leadership of either WotC or Hasbro. Firing your best talent after they delivered you record profits? While trying to maintain the same or higher product outputs as before? Way worse. Definitely not concerned with the quality or longevity of the game and definitely not good for it.
I really loathe the idea that magic should become the game system every concept/idea/setting/brand must coalesce into because "it's just that good".
For me the IP adoption is such a let down because that's all it is: a skin deep change to the game that's just there to make money. There's so much potential for more than that, and they just don't do anything with it.
I was super excited for the 40k sets when I first heard about them, before I learned they are just commander decks. There was this potential for the game to radically shift and try crazy new things, but all they did was make 4 decks with unique pictures.
What I wanted to see was an attempt at something new and exciting. Like for instance, change up the mana colors. Perfect opportunity to not have the standard 5 and try something new, and more 40k themed. Would that have worked? Maybe. My point is less about what specific things they should have changed, and more to criticize that too little is being changed.
Solid
If your smart and you want a challenge try cedh , but please dont poltics too hard or angleshoot ty 😊
Why would a competitive player ever care what universe or set a card is from ?
I'm honestly surprised the percentage of tournament players is as high as 10%, I was expecting sub 1%
That’s not an accurate number. I don’t think they’ve ever released official numbers. MARO has said it’s under 10%.
death and rebirth? “Magic is dead, long live Magic.”
I don’t understand the kitchen table focus. Ppl who are completely offline, never post about magic, etc, don’t even know how to play the game, they just do whatever they want. How can you cater to people like that? What does someone who doesn’t even really know how to play the game want out of their game? Just give them the premade commander decks, that’s for the kitchen table crowd. But you can poison the game with Nadu and Grief
I feel like the kind of player you're describing wouldn't spring $50 for a commander deck.
I remember Rosewater saying the most popular way to play Magic was "casual constructed", just random decks with cards you own - not necessarily within a particular format's ruleset (including Commander!).
@@slydogamigo2303 yeah but you’re saying these people already have cards. I thought kitchen tablers wouldn’t have collections. They need a “starter deck”