/yɔr, yoʊr/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yawr, yohr]
–noun 1. Chiefly Literary. time past: knights of yore. –adverb 2. Obsolete. of old; long ago.
Origin:
bef. 900; ME; OE geāra
Remember when a Serra Angel was the shizzle?
Most of you certainly don't; it was long ago and far away, the world was younger than today, and, well, for one thing, nobody back then had even heard of the word 'shizzle'.
But it's true, once upon a time, a Serra Angel was the very shizzle itself, and a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward on it... glorious day, glorious day, it was a combo to be dreamed of, because, yeah, that creep across the table from you could still Terror your wonderful no-Tap attacker, yes he could, and certainly he could Fireball or Disintegrate or Drain Life her if he had the mana (although your Angel was, pleasantly and thankfully, out of Lightning Bolt range, a distinction that, back in the day, really used to mean something) and he could even Plowshares her, but here's what he couldn't do -- he couldn't Unsummon her, and, most importantly, he couldn't Control Magic her.
9 out of 10 of you are reading this with a look of utter bewilderment (perhaps mixed with no little contempt) on your faces; you have no idea what the hell I'm writing about and furthermore, you just don't care. But the tenth, maybe, whoever the tenth reader is, maybe he or she is now remembering the insane pain of finally getting out that second white mana, tapping five lands (or three and a Sol Ring, or two Plains and a Basalt Monolith, or, just to show off a little, maybe even a Mox or two, you never know), slapping that Serra down on the table with a triumphant little grunt... and then looking with trepidation over at your opponent, who didn't appear to be worried. And why should he or she be worried? This was long before anyone had ever heard of Haste, so your Serra was nothing but a blocker for the first round, and then, on your opponent's next turn, he or she naturally tapped two blue and two colorless, chuckled evilly, slapped down his or her Control Magic, crooked his or her finger at your poor hapless innocent Serra Angel, and said "She is for me, James T. Kirk".
(Okay, none of your opponents ever said that because none of them are as geeky as I am, but you know what I mean.)
And the really tragic thing? Back then there were only three possible solutions to the situation: an Unsummon, a Disenchant, or a Tranquility.
So a Serra Angel -- the only creature in the game that could attack without tapping, a big flying 4/4 and, say hey and by the way, the only Angel in the game, too, can you dig that? -- was the very spiff, yes she was, but a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward... that was the bomb diggity.
Those days are dust and less than dust now, of course. I've lost track of how many creatures there are with Vigilance now, and it hardly matters, because at this point if you really want your creature to attack without tapping, you just stick a Vigilance on it. Stick a Vigilance on your Gate Hound and ALL your creatures can do it.
We've lost so much.
Nowadays, throw out a Serra Angel at your local card shop and the most common response (unless you're playing a geezer-mage, like me) is "What the heck is THAT?" And they'll pick it up, and they'll turn it around, and they'll scrutinize it from every direction, and then they'll toss it back down with a little sniff and say something like "A 4/4 Flyer with Vigilance? Is that all?"
And it's not much, I sorrowfully admit... not compared to some of the Angels flapping around the Magical ether nowadays.
Platinum Angel? What @#!!&$! brain trust came up with that... er... interesting... card, anyway?
I'm not blind, though, even in my nostalgia. Magic was broken in my day and had to be fixed. Interestingly, of course, Magic is still broken right now and still has to be fixed... but I grant you, over the past near two decades, the rules-mongers at WOTC have done an excellent job fixing nearly everything that was broken back when I had yet to see my first grey hair. Fast mana is pretty much gone now... by which I mean, you're not going to find any in Standard or Extended formats. WOTC has been absolutely meticulous in getting rid of everything that might give you a fast start... Dark Rituals, Sol Rings, Moxes, dual mana... it's all gone, replaced by stuff that does the same thing, but that costs more than you get back out of it, or comes into play tapped, or something else meant to make sure you aren't going to nuke your opponent into radioactive fragments on your first turn.
Which I don't mind. First round nukings always suck. I'm happy that they are mostly a thing of the past now. I miss my Sol Rings... hell, I miss my Moxes, and my one, beat to hell Black Lotus that was so worn down I never dared to shuffle it, just kept it in a sleeve so I could show people I really had one when I played the proxy... but I really do prefer to play in an environment where a game takes just a little bit longer to develop before some snotty 12 year old taps 4 mana and makes me draw 117 cards, or hits me with a 22/22 Trample creature. Or something.
And because I like slower developing games, and always have, I like SHARDS OF ALARA.
I know, I know, many people don't. (Or so I gather from what I read on the 'net and hear down at the shop when I wander in for a game.) And mostly, the complaint seems to be that it's much too slow, that it takes too long, that there isn't enough direct damage, that there aren't enough counterspells or control effects or Unsummons, that there isn't enough land destruction, that the only really effective SHARDS decks rely entirely too much on creatures, and creature decks are so boring, etc, etc, etc.
I like SHARDS for all those reasons. I don't need much permanent destruction; a couple of Naturalizes work fine for me. I love the multicolored creatures and lands and artifacts, I adore all the mana fixing, and I really REALLY like the fact that you can kill my creatures all you want, but they'll probably be back (Unearth) and when they go out, they could make something else bigger (the Algae creatures).
And I really love the fact that one of the Shards is a great big creature Shard! That's REALLY cool.
So I love SHARDS, for all the reasons most people seem to hate it. And I can't wait for CONFLUX.
But the biggest reason I love SHARDS is very simple --
It isn't goddam LORWYN.
I cannot tell you how much I hate, loath, despise, detest, abhor, abominate, scorn, and disdain LORWYN. And it's not because of the card design (although Hideaway pretty much bit the big one) because, like SHARDS, it was a block of cards filled with interesting tactics that built slowly into fun strategies mostly based around permanents interacting in intruiging ways, which is the stuff I like best in Magic. And I've always loved to build tribal decks even before people called them tribal decks, so LORWYN should have worked pretty well for me there, too.
And there are some damn fine cards in the LORWYN block, cards I'm happy to have, cards like all the Planeswalkers, and the various Commands, and Sage of Fables, and Battle Mastery.
Yet, overall I despised LORWYN and could not wait for it to be over (and just when I thought it must be over, WOTC rolled out a fourth LORWYN set to really aggravate me). And why did I hate it so much?
Two reasons. The art, and the miserable wretched no good lousy hateful disgusting despicable rotten horrifyingly filthy Hobbi -- er, Kithkin.
I abhor Kithkin. Why? Because they STINK, that's why. Because they bite, lick, and chew. Because they're dorky little midget freaks who gnaw on your kneecaps in battle, THAT's why. They're stupid looking and have moronic names and they're really short and they use table knives instead of swords and they have big ears and flat heads and what have they got in their nasty little pocketses anyway?... and in FOUR FREAKIN' SETS OF TRIBAL CARDS we didn't get so much as ONE STINKING SPELL to make all the little vermin explode.
Just one spell. Something like "Massive Kithkin Explosion" or "Kithkin Extinction Event". Make it cost eighteen mana, and make it be a Sorcery I can only cast on alternate Tuesdays when there are no Enchantments or Artifacts or non basic Land in play and a guy named Bruce is visiting my upstairs neighbor. I don't care. Make it a gold. Make it a mythic rare. It doesn't matter, I'll buy 20 on Ebay. As long as it's something like "All Kithkin in play are removed from the game and their controllers take 2 damage per Kithkin removed in this way plus you may kick them over and over and over again in the kidneys while they writhe in agony on the linoleum" I'll be happy. More than happy. Delirious. Ecstatic. Capering like a dwarf, chortling and chortling. Oh, all the Kithkin exPLOded! Oh that's so deLIGHTful! Do it again, do it AGAIN!
Leaving aside Kithkin -- which is all but impossible as they're just so insanely horrifyingly aggravatingly mind bogglingly awful, but, still, doing our best to move on for the moment -- nearly everything in the LORWYN block looked really, really stupid. Changelings could have been cool, if, you know, anything at all about them had been cool, but, especially, if there hadn't been some global mandate handed down from WOTC to their artists to make all Changelings looks as dopey as possible. I'm serious, I'm sure the word 'dopey' was in the actual memo. Capitalized. As in "make them all look like the Disney Dwarf of that name".
But new creature types are always chancy; I give WOTC credit for continually taking shots, even after past godawful flops like Thallids and Saprolings and Thrulls and whatever those appalling Blue shellfish things were. They took a lot of shots at new creatures in LORWYN and, yes, pretty much all of them sucked steaming piles, and it was especially sad when new creatures that really should have been cool, like Scarecrows, refused to do anything but sit in the corner and whimper miserably at their own absysmal suckitude (unless you managed to get 4 Reaper Kings, in which case, fill a deck with really cheap other Scarecrows and 4 Fabricates and then just BLOW STUFF UP! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!). But a crapload of original creatures who are all sucktastical isn't a mortal blow for an expansion. As long as an expansion gives props to the classic creatures of yore, it can still work fine.
And here, I have to say, LORWYN did give some props. Merfolk, Giants, and especially Fairies rocked hard once LORWYN came out... and yet, still, there was the Dopey Memorandum that must have gone around to all the LORWYN artists, commanding, nay, demanding that every creature in a LORWYN set look like, you know, the Disney Dwarf who has no beard, and fewer braincells. Merfolk looked... freaky. Giants looked... goofy. Fairies came closest to looking cool, but even they couldn't quite get all the way there.
And then there was the ongoing horror, the insufferable insidious vileness, that LORWYN inflicted on Goblins.
Boggarts. I mean, excuse me, WOTC, put down the SANDMAN trade paperback and the crack pipe and back away slowly. BOGGARTS? That enormous sucking sound you hear is, well, the sound of all those poor LORWYN goblins sucking and sucking and sucking.
It's not that some of them weren't cool, conceptually. And it's not that there haven't been lame-o loser Goblins before this. But never in MTG history has there been an entire block of expansions in which Goblins all had such stupid frickin names (Squeaking Pie Grubfellows? Bring me the head of the card designer who came up with THAT name, right NOW) and all looked so uniformly retarded.
I grant you, Quill Slinger Boggarts nearly saved LORWYN all by themselves, and if only WOTC had given every Boggart the Quill Slinger's power as a standard tribal ability, the whole block could have turned itself around. But they didn't.
Yes, LORWYN gave us evil black elves and nasty black treefolk and that was very nearly cool enough, especially along with the nifty new Merfolk and sweet new Fairies and awesome new Giants, lousy art or no lousy art. (Balancing that, the white elves were boring and the white giants were just plain straight out disturbing. Cloudgoat Ranger? WTF? What exactly are those Kithkin doing with that Giant to make him fly, anyway?) Yet it was all in vain, all for naught, all a terrible, horrible waste.
And why?
Because of Kithkin.
And Boggarts.
::shudder::
Of course, future sets could still redeem LORWYN. All it will take is one Predatory creature with "Devour Kithkin/Boggart: When this creature comes into play, sacrifice any number of Kithkin or Boggarts, or remove from play any number of Kithkin or Boggarts you do not control".
That would be cool. And reduce Kithkin to what they should always have been -- fodder.
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I understood and even sympathized to a degree (old-school Magic horribly broken, Alara very cool) until you reached the fourth page and started foaming about Lorwyn's art. Then you reached the level of epic fail.
I rarely write anything short. You have been so advised. I appreciate your trudging through, though. Thanks for the cookies.
Kpaca,
How can you hate EVERYone? Have you never seen a kitten?
Calibretto,
I am the wind beneath your wings?
I will probably create more rambling threads like this. I have actually been admitted to the Writer's Forum, but they have all kinds of rules and all their articles are about How To Win Win Win By Killing Everything In Four Turns, or, alternatively, This Cool Thing I Figured Out You Could Do With State Based Effects, Split Second Cards, Seven Different Triggered Effects, And A Spatula. Frankly, they intimidate me, and I don't think any of my foolish, dimwitted nonsense is going to pass muster there. So it will most likely get posted other places.
Mr. President,
Epic fail? Sir, need I speak the mystic phrases "Katrina" or "no WMDs" or "PATRIOT Act" to you? Much less "stolen 2000 election". Epic fail indeed, o mighty Chief Executive.
As to LORWYN's art, for the love of Horus, Anubis, and Bast, even the frickin ELEMENTALS looked like Webkinz. As they used to wail at the beginning of some dumb show on the WB, "Somebody SAAAAAAAAAVE me..."
Kristos,
In my house we aren't allowed to play with discard spells (because they SUCK) so Noggin Whack isn't a card I pay much attention to. You're right to point it out, though. It does indeed have hilarious art, and quite well rendered art, at that, if you don't mind your Goblins looking like they take the short bus to school. Or maybe that's a Mexican Kithkin, or something, in which case, I suppose the poor little burrito-eating Hobbit can't help it. And certainly all Kithkin should be whacked in the head with a fish... right before the napalm strike, I mean.
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MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
Funny... Nobody back then really thought Magic was "broken". In fact, incredulity began creeping in to the players' faces with WotC's first, horribly inept attempts at "balancing" the game's power level. Homelands, anyone?
It would have been simpler for them simply to invalidate first-turn wins in tourneys, and let everyone else keep their fast mana, but a lot of this has more to do with placating the secondary market fatcats than making the game more "playable".
That said, recent expansions have been far more interesting, mechanically speaking. I'm not too impressed with Alara, though, even though I like long, slow games. It's just that the set's mechanics are a little too simplistic, and lack power.
It's more entertaining if you imagine you're listening to the opening post through a Roosevelt-era radio and everything's in black and white. Otherwise, I have trouble taking seriously the opinions of anyone who uses 'shizzle' and 'bomb-diggity' to make their points.
Funny... Nobody back then really thought Magic was "broken". In fact, incredulity began creeping in to the players' faces with WotC's first, horribly inept attempts at "balancing" the game's power level. Homelands, anyone?
It would have been simpler for them simply to invalidate first-turn wins in tourneys, and let everyone else keep their fast mana, but a lot of this has more to do with placating the secondary market fatcats than making the game more "playable".
That said, recent expansions have been far more interesting, mechanically speaking. I'm not too impressed with Alara, though, even though I like long, slow games. It's just that the set's mechanics are a little too simplistic, and lack power.
I must be the only Magic player anywhere who actually liked HOMELANDS. And FALLEN EMPIRE. Ah, well.
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MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
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Cloudgoat Ranger? WTF? What exactly are those Kithkin doing with that Giant to make him fly, anyway?) Yet it was all in vain, all for naught, all a terrible, horrible waste.
I think the idea is, you tap the three to put them to work getting the ranger's goat prepped for takeoff, plus armor, etc.
Take your monoblack deck, then set aside 14 swamps. Add 4 Creeping Tar Pits, 4 Darkslick Shores, 4 Drowned Catacombs, and 2 Jwar isle Refuge and add 4 Jace, the Mindsculptors. Your monoblack deck is instantly better. Better yet, drop those refuges, throw in some islands and some mana leaks, and lo and behold, you're now playing a real deck. Congratulations. Welcome to the world of competitive M:TG.
Sir, you just made my day.
And yeah, I still got a playset of Serra Angels (RV) in my collection. Because they rock, "no matter what"!
Thanks. Feedback from the Writer's Forum has been that this article is too long, rambles too much, is too emotional and opinionated, and doesn't provide enough meaty analysis (read as: numbers crunching) to back up my opinionated assertions as to the worth of ALARA relative to LORWYN. Apparently, simply hating Kithkin isn't enough. But over here in this thread, I seem to be making a lot of people's day with the article, and, honestly, as I don't play on a tournament level and never will (I'm just not smart enough) that's really all I'm aiming for.
Oh, and thanks for kicking this thread over to Page 2, too.
that was fantastically written. I don't quite agree with everything you said (given that I generally dislike lorwyn as a whole, because I do not like being raped by tribal), it was still a very good and enteraining read.
It reminded me of a few months later when i built my first deck and felt the Fungusaur/Rod of ruin combo was the dogs bollocks.
I had noticed that Alara not only takes a cue from historically slower games, but also taking games back to it's roots a little. There's such a good swathe of vanilla and french vanilla critters floating round that just makes things feel a little more basic (even though curves are way above what could be imagined when i picked up my starter box of 4th).
Maybe not the best article I've read, but fun. I'll keep an eye out for future posts.
It seems to me that there are many types of Magic players. However, the articles you see over on the official Magic site, and, largely, here, all seem to be targeted at the elite, tournament level Master Mages, the kind of people who simply aren't happy with any deck that doesn't brutally body slam their opponent into scattered shreds of pulped plasma by turn 6 at the latest. These are the people who look at a card I myself find to be silly or even stupid, instantly check that card against the perfect database of all other cards they keep constantly in their heads, and instantly see a fabulous seven card combination that will allow them to get out a creature, hit their opponent with another creature while unsummoning the first creature, counter any spells the opponent may want to cast, destroy one of their opponent's permanents, and cause the opponent to discard their entire hand. And they're the kind of people that, if they build a deck which does not give them the opportunity to do at least three of these things on their first turn, they aren't interested.
But I don't think these people make up the majority of WOTC's customers, or even the majority of those of us who buy and play Magic cards. However, these people do tend to regard the rest of us who support their hobby/vocation with at least some scorn and contempt; our only really use in these players' eyes is to be the sort of opponent they pray to draw in the first and second rounds of local tournaments... which is why I no longer bother to play in tournaments. I simply can't compete on this level.
Yet there are people, lots of people, who play Magic for fun. We like to win and hate to lose, but still, we aren't windmilling our libraries or millstoning our opponents or coming up with creatureless decks that slice, dice, and julian fries any permanent foolish enough to enter play against us. We like our tribal decks and we like our artifact decks and we have our favored creature types and the types we just can't stand and we get a lot of pleasure out of blasting that annoying Tim or Royal Assassin into scattered cinders or, conversely, keeping our own Tims and Royals out regardless of how hard our opponents attempt to blow them to pieces. We love the game and we enjoy it... but we can't come up with those insane combos whereby we use an obscure sorcery to get eight different permanents with seven different triggered effects into play during the combat phase before blockers are chosen in such a way that the Worldgorger Dragon leaves play before it actually comes into play, or some frickin' thing.
And even if we could, and even if we had the cards to build one of those decks, it would never never work for us, because we'd never never draw that combo in any game, ever.
So you have the elite Brainiac semi-pro or pro players whose decks glitter like poisoned shuriken, and then you have the rest of us, who just like to build Dwarf decks, or Dragon decks, or a deck where we can unsummon all our creatures any time we want so we can replay them for their triggered effects, which usually just let us look at the top 4 cards of our library and then put them back in any order. (Honest, that's about as sophisticated as MY decks get.)
I really think there's a niche out there for someone who writes articles for the non-master mages, the people who just play for fun. But maybe I'm wrong.
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I know I'd appreciate some good comedic writing on this site, and your writing style has me in stitches.
I may not agree with all of what you say (I hated Lorwyn, but liked Shadowmoor; I despise Shards, but Conflux is looking ok...), if I laugh while reading it, you get an A+ in my book.
Some people do forget that this is a game, in which you are supposed to have FUN.
Edit:
If I recall, the rhyme goes..
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and women weren't particular
Against the wall
we backed them all
and ----ed them perpendicular.
I laughed hard, very, very good. I'm an old timer that got back into the game a couple of years ago (started at the end of Unlimited, ended with... Homelands *shudder*), and I remember very well the joy of a Serra Angel, or in my case the mighty powers of a Nightmare and a Royal Assassin, and how I stomped on everyone's heads in my first local tourney win with some Vampire Bats that had just been to a lovely Feast of the Unicorn under a shining Bad Moon.
But what this person says:
Funny... Nobody back then really thought Magic was "broken". In fact, incredulity began creeping in to the players' faces with WotC's first, horribly inept attempts at "balancing" the game's power level. Homelands, anyone?
Is totally wrong. Oh we knew, we knew all too damn well. If you weren't packing a deck full of Duals and Moxen, you were at a definite disadvantage, and the only thing to help you was luck. What Homelands did, though, was what I would call a "grievous overcorrection," kind of like driving along at 100 mph and stopping in, like, 1 second. Your brains would fly out of your head and spatter on the windshield. That's what it felt like to me.
As for your comments on Shards, THANK YOU SIR, you have echoed my thoughts exactly. As you did with the art of Lorwyn block... I liked Shadowmoor/Eve a little better, but Lor/Mor did suffer from chronic cutsey-poo syndrome. As a whole Lorwyn was all right by me because I liked tribal, and I also love the PWs and Commands, but Kith also made me nauseous. Alara's art just seems more... classy, sharper, better defined.
Oh, and Boggarts suck, I'm all on board there. Art usually doesn't keep me away, but there was something off-putting about a lot of that art.
Ah well, I am also gearing up for Conflux, and I'm excited. Glad to see at least a few other people are as well.
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Decks
Commander
Ezuri, Renegade Leader (Aggro/Combo - Favorite) Skullbriar, the Walking Grave (Sac and Grave hijinks) Azusa, Lost but Seeking (Landfall hijinks) Kaalia of the Vast (Heavily modded)
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and women weren't particular
Against the wall
we backed them all
and ----ed them perpendicular.
You're the first to pick up on the source, but as I learned the thing in Boy Scouts, there are endless verses (and the one you quote is new to me). The ones I know are things like
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and toilets weren't invented
people left their load
beside the road
and walked away contented
And
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and condoms weren't invented
the men wrapped socks
around their (you know)
and babies were prevented
And several dozen more I've forgotten right now. Good catch on your part, though. Maybe I should make WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD the regular title of a series of geezer rants about Old Magic vs. New Magic.
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I laughed hard, very, very good. I'm an old timer that got back into the game a couple of years ago (started at the end of Unlimited, ended with... Homelands *shudder*)
I just found a visual spoiler of Homelands to check and see if it is indeed the set I remember, and it is, and I love that set. And here's the thing:
and I remember very well the joy of a Serra Angel, or in my case the mighty powers of a Nightmare and a Royal Assassin, and how I stomped on everyone's heads in my first local tourney win with some Vampire Bats that had just been to a lovely Feast of the Unicorn under a shining Bad Moon.
You love Homelands, too. It's the set that gave us great cards like Feast of the Unicorn. The reason most people seem to hate it is that it is almost entirely creature-centric; there are few or no cards that do lots of damage or make someone discard or blow up someone's permanents or that interact in really interesting ways with instants, triggered effects, and upkeep costs, and there's not much card draw at all. But it has GREAT creature cards, and great creature enhancement cards.
But what this person says is totally wrong. Oh we knew, we knew all too damn well. If you weren't packing a deck full of Duals and Moxen, you were at a definite disadvantage, and the only thing to help you was luck.
Luck won't do it, either. Champion Magic players have three attributes -- a natural affinity for numbers which allows them to hold the ongoing game equation in their head and adjust it whenever necessary; the disposable income to buy the rare OOPs or the almost impossible to find rares (you know, the supposed 'rares' that people like me never ever see in a set, because if you can't buy your cards by the booster box, you will just never get, say, a Vein Feeder or that cool new Blue artifact Planeswalker); and, last but certainly not least, luck at card draw.
I am and always have been a mediocre Magic player, but when I lived in Syracuse the gaming group I hung with contained several local champions, so I learned from the best. And those guys always get good card draw; maybe one in ten games they get a crappy hand. So luck isn't going to help a lower level player, either.
I suppose it might, though, if you were going up against someone whose only advantage was better cards... and if that's the case, then you are correct -- back in the day, better cards were a MUCH greater advantage than they are now.
What Homelands did, though, was what I would call a "grievous overcorrection," kind of like driving along at 100 mph and stopping in, like, 1 second. Your brains would fly out of your head and spatter on the windshield. That's what it felt like to me.
That's what it felt like to all of us, but take another look at the whole set now and see if you don't feel otherwise. It was an abrupt change, but damn if that set doesn't seem like a wonderfully designed and beautifully balanced one now.
As for your comments on Shards, THANK YOU SIR, you have echoed my thoughts exactly. As you did with the art of Lorwyn block... I liked Shadowmoor/Eve a little better, but Lor/Mor did suffer from chronic cutsey-poo syndrome. As a whole Lorwyn was all right by me because I liked tribal, and I also love the PWs and Commands, but Kith also made me nauseous. Alara's art just seems more... classy, sharper, better defined.
Oh, and Boggarts suck, I'm all on board there. Art usually doesn't keep me away, but there was something off-putting about a lot of that art.
Ah well, I am also gearing up for Conflux, and I'm excited. Glad to see at least a few other people are as well.
You're welcome. Thanks for the feedback.
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You have a fantastic way with words there, I would heartily support your writing of articles for us casual folk that really, really want to make a deck based around the stationsfrom5thDawn that doesn't suck.
(and god help me, I'll crack it one day).
/yɔr, yoʊr/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [yawr, yohr]
–noun 1. Chiefly Literary. time past: knights of yore. –adverb 2. Obsolete. of old; long ago.
Origin:
bef. 900; ME; OE geāra
Remember when a Serra Angel was the shizzle?
Most of you certainly don't; it was long ago and far away, the world was younger than today, and, well, for one thing, nobody back then had even heard of the word 'shizzle'.
But it's true, once upon a time, a Serra Angel was the very shizzle itself, and a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward on it... glorious day, glorious day, it was a combo to be dreamed of, because, yeah, that creep across the table from you could still Terror your wonderful no-Tap attacker, yes he could, and certainly he could Fireball or Disintegrate or Drain Life her if he had the mana (although your Angel was, pleasantly and thankfully, out of Lightning Bolt range, a distinction that, back in the day, really used to mean something) and he could even Plowshares her, but here's what he couldn't do -- he couldn't Unsummon her, and, most importantly, he couldn't Control Magic her.
9 out of 10 of you are reading this with a look of utter bewilderment (perhaps mixed with no little contempt) on your faces; you have no idea what the hell I'm writing about and furthermore, you just don't care. But the tenth, maybe, whoever the tenth reader is, maybe he or she is now remembering the insane pain of finally getting out that second white mana, tapping five lands (or three and a Sol Ring, or two Plains and a Basalt Monolith, or, just to show off a little, maybe even a Mox or two, you never know), slapping that Serra down on the table with a triumphant little grunt... and then looking with trepidation over at your opponent, who didn't appear to be worried. And why should he or she be worried? This was long before anyone had ever heard of Haste, so your Serra was nothing but a blocker for the first round, and then, on your opponent's next turn, he or she naturally tapped two blue and two colorless, chuckled evilly, slapped down his or her Control Magic, crooked his or her finger at your poor hapless innocent Serra Angel, and said "She is for me, James T. Kirk".
(Okay, none of your opponents ever said that because none of them are as geeky as I am, but you know what I mean.)
And the really tragic thing? Back then there were only three possible solutions to the situation: an Unsummon, a Disenchant, or a Tranquility.
So a Serra Angel -- the only creature in the game that could attack without tapping, a big flying 4/4 and, say hey and by the way, the only Angel in the game, too, can you dig that? -- was the very spiff, yes she was, but a Serra Angel with a Blue Ward... that was the bomb diggity.
Those days are dust and less than dust now, of course. I've lost track of how many creatures there are with Vigilance now, and it hardly matters, because at this point if you really want your creature to attack without tapping, you just stick a Vigilance on it. Stick a Vigilance on your Gate Hound and ALL your creatures can do it.
We've lost so much.
Nowadays, throw out a Serra Angel at your local card shop and the most common response (unless you're playing a geezer-mage, like me) is "What the heck is THAT?" And they'll pick it up, and they'll turn it around, and they'll scrutinize it from every direction, and then they'll toss it back down with a little sniff and say something like "A 4/4 Flyer with Vigilance? Is that all?"
And it's not much, I sorrowfully admit... not compared to some of the Angels flapping around the Magical ether nowadays.
Platinum Angel? What @#!!&$! brain trust came up with that... er... interesting... card, anyway?
I'm not blind, though, even in my nostalgia. Magic was broken in my day and had to be fixed. Interestingly, of course, Magic is still broken right now and still has to be fixed... but I grant you, over the past near two decades, the rules-mongers at WOTC have done an excellent job fixing nearly everything that was broken back when I had yet to see my first grey hair. Fast mana is pretty much gone now... by which I mean, you're not going to find any in Standard or Extended formats. WOTC has been absolutely meticulous in getting rid of everything that might give you a fast start... Dark Rituals, Sol Rings, Moxes, dual mana... it's all gone, replaced by stuff that does the same thing, but that costs more than you get back out of it, or comes into play tapped, or something else meant to make sure you aren't going to nuke your opponent into radioactive fragments on your first turn.
Which I don't mind. First round nukings always suck. I'm happy that they are mostly a thing of the past now. I miss my Sol Rings... hell, I miss my Moxes, and my one, beat to hell Black Lotus that was so worn down I never dared to shuffle it, just kept it in a sleeve so I could show people I really had one when I played the proxy... but I really do prefer to play in an environment where a game takes just a little bit longer to develop before some snotty 12 year old taps 4 mana and makes me draw 117 cards, or hits me with a 22/22 Trample creature. Or something.
And because I like slower developing games, and always have, I like SHARDS OF ALARA.
I know, I know, many people don't. (Or so I gather from what I read on the 'net and hear down at the shop when I wander in for a game.) And mostly, the complaint seems to be that it's much too slow, that it takes too long, that there isn't enough direct damage, that there aren't enough counterspells or control effects or Unsummons, that there isn't enough land destruction, that the only really effective SHARDS decks rely entirely too much on creatures, and creature decks are so boring, etc, etc, etc.
I like SHARDS for all those reasons. I don't need much permanent destruction; a couple of Naturalizes work fine for me. I love the multicolored creatures and lands and artifacts, I adore all the mana fixing, and I really REALLY like the fact that you can kill my creatures all you want, but they'll probably be back (Unearth) and when they go out, they could make something else bigger (the Algae creatures).
And I really love the fact that one of the Shards is a great big creature Shard! That's REALLY cool.
So I love SHARDS, for all the reasons most people seem to hate it. And I can't wait for CONFLUX.
But the biggest reason I love SHARDS is very simple --
It isn't goddam LORWYN.
I cannot tell you how much I hate, loath, despise, detest, abhor, abominate, scorn, and disdain LORWYN. And it's not because of the card design (although Hideaway pretty much bit the big one) because, like SHARDS, it was a block of cards filled with interesting tactics that built slowly into fun strategies mostly based around permanents interacting in intruiging ways, which is the stuff I like best in Magic. And I've always loved to build tribal decks even before people called them tribal decks, so LORWYN should have worked pretty well for me there, too.
And there are some damn fine cards in the LORWYN block, cards I'm happy to have, cards like all the Planeswalkers, and the various Commands, and Sage of Fables, and Battle Mastery.
Yet, overall I despised LORWYN and could not wait for it to be over (and just when I thought it must be over, WOTC rolled out a fourth LORWYN set to really aggravate me). And why did I hate it so much?
Two reasons. The art, and the miserable wretched no good lousy hateful disgusting despicable rotten horrifyingly filthy Hobbi -- er, Kithkin.
I abhor Kithkin. Why? Because they STINK, that's why. Because they bite, lick, and chew. Because they're dorky little midget freaks who gnaw on your kneecaps in battle, THAT's why. They're stupid looking and have moronic names and they're really short and they use table knives instead of swords and they have big ears and flat heads and what have they got in their nasty little pocketses anyway?... and in FOUR FREAKIN' SETS OF TRIBAL CARDS we didn't get so much as ONE STINKING SPELL to make all the little vermin explode.
Just one spell. Something like "Massive Kithkin Explosion" or "Kithkin Extinction Event". Make it cost eighteen mana, and make it be a Sorcery I can only cast on alternate Tuesdays when there are no Enchantments or Artifacts or non basic Land in play and a guy named Bruce is visiting my upstairs neighbor. I don't care. Make it a gold. Make it a mythic rare. It doesn't matter, I'll buy 20 on Ebay. As long as it's something like "All Kithkin in play are removed from the game and their controllers take 2 damage per Kithkin removed in this way plus you may kick them over and over and over again in the kidneys while they writhe in agony on the linoleum" I'll be happy. More than happy. Delirious. Ecstatic. Capering like a dwarf, chortling and chortling. Oh, all the Kithkin exPLOded! Oh that's so deLIGHTful! Do it again, do it AGAIN!
Leaving aside Kithkin -- which is all but impossible as they're just so insanely horrifyingly aggravatingly mind bogglingly awful, but, still, doing our best to move on for the moment -- nearly everything in the LORWYN block looked really, really stupid. Changelings could have been cool, if, you know, anything at all about them had been cool, but, especially, if there hadn't been some global mandate handed down from WOTC to their artists to make all Changelings looks as dopey as possible. I'm serious, I'm sure the word 'dopey' was in the actual memo. Capitalized. As in "make them all look like the Disney Dwarf of that name".
But new creature types are always chancy; I give WOTC credit for continually taking shots, even after past godawful flops like Thallids and Saprolings and Thrulls and whatever those appalling Blue shellfish things were. They took a lot of shots at new creatures in LORWYN and, yes, pretty much all of them sucked steaming piles, and it was especially sad when new creatures that really should have been cool, like Scarecrows, refused to do anything but sit in the corner and whimper miserably at their own absysmal suckitude (unless you managed to get 4 Reaper Kings, in which case, fill a deck with really cheap other Scarecrows and 4 Fabricates and then just BLOW STUFF UP! WHEEEEEEEE!!!!). But a crapload of original creatures who are all sucktastical isn't a mortal blow for an expansion. As long as an expansion gives props to the classic creatures of yore, it can still work fine.
And here, I have to say, LORWYN did give some props. Merfolk, Giants, and especially Fairies rocked hard once LORWYN came out... and yet, still, there was the Dopey Memorandum that must have gone around to all the LORWYN artists, commanding, nay, demanding that every creature in a LORWYN set look like, you know, the Disney Dwarf who has no beard, and fewer braincells. Merfolk looked... freaky. Giants looked... goofy. Fairies came closest to looking cool, but even they couldn't quite get all the way there.
And then there was the ongoing horror, the insufferable insidious vileness, that LORWYN inflicted on Goblins.
Boggarts. I mean, excuse me, WOTC, put down the SANDMAN trade paperback and the crack pipe and back away slowly. BOGGARTS? That enormous sucking sound you hear is, well, the sound of all those poor LORWYN goblins sucking and sucking and sucking.
It's not that some of them weren't cool, conceptually. And it's not that there haven't been lame-o loser Goblins before this. But never in MTG history has there been an entire block of expansions in which Goblins all had such stupid frickin names (Squeaking Pie Grubfellows? Bring me the head of the card designer who came up with THAT name, right NOW) and all looked so uniformly retarded.
I grant you, Quill Slinger Boggarts nearly saved LORWYN all by themselves, and if only WOTC had given every Boggart the Quill Slinger's power as a standard tribal ability, the whole block could have turned itself around. But they didn't.
Yes, LORWYN gave us evil black elves and nasty black treefolk and that was very nearly cool enough, especially along with the nifty new Merfolk and sweet new Fairies and awesome new Giants, lousy art or no lousy art. (Balancing that, the white elves were boring and the white giants were just plain straight out disturbing. Cloudgoat Ranger? WTF? What exactly are those Kithkin doing with that Giant to make him fly, anyway?) Yet it was all in vain, all for naught, all a terrible, horrible waste.
And why?
Because of Kithkin.
And Boggarts.
::shudder::
Of course, future sets could still redeem LORWYN. All it will take is one Predatory creature with "Devour Kithkin/Boggart: When this creature comes into play, sacrifice any number of Kithkin or Boggarts, or remove from play any number of Kithkin or Boggarts you do not control".
That would be cool. And reduce Kithkin to what they should always have been -- fodder.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
Thanks. Tis better to be pure win than a veritable avatar of epic fail, as I always say.
Okay, I hardly ever say it, but I still believe it, which should count for something.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
I really appreciated the part about Lorwyn, and the boggarts.
:cookie::cookie::cookie:
Have some cookies, you earned them.
Thanks to spiderboy4 of High~Light Studios for the awesome banner and avatar!
Sir, please stick around and post more. If I were capable of not hating everyone, you would be the first person I didn't hate.
i remember when serra angel was a force to be reckoned with and a sweet find in someone else's tradebook.
please, for the love of magic, create more of these threads.
calibretto
MTGS Average Peasant Cube 2023 Edition
Follow me. I tweet.
:symch:Finkle tastes like cardboard.:chaos:
I rarely write anything short. You have been so advised. I appreciate your trudging through, though. Thanks for the cookies.
Kpaca,
How can you hate EVERYone? Have you never seen a kitten?
Calibretto,
I am the wind beneath your wings?
I will probably create more rambling threads like this. I have actually been admitted to the Writer's Forum, but they have all kinds of rules and all their articles are about How To Win Win Win By Killing Everything In Four Turns, or, alternatively, This Cool Thing I Figured Out You Could Do With State Based Effects, Split Second Cards, Seven Different Triggered Effects, And A Spatula. Frankly, they intimidate me, and I don't think any of my foolish, dimwitted nonsense is going to pass muster there. So it will most likely get posted other places.
Mr. President,
Epic fail? Sir, need I speak the mystic phrases "Katrina" or "no WMDs" or "PATRIOT Act" to you? Much less "stolen 2000 election". Epic fail indeed, o mighty Chief Executive.
As to LORWYN's art, for the love of Horus, Anubis, and Bast, even the frickin ELEMENTALS looked like Webkinz. As they used to wail at the beginning of some dumb show on the WB, "Somebody SAAAAAAAAAVE me..."
Kristos,
In my house we aren't allowed to play with discard spells (because they SUCK) so Noggin Whack isn't a card I pay much attention to. You're right to point it out, though. It does indeed have hilarious art, and quite well rendered art, at that, if you don't mind your Goblins looking like they take the short bus to school. Or maybe that's a Mexican Kithkin, or something, in which case, I suppose the poor little burrito-eating Hobbit can't help it. And certainly all Kithkin should be whacked in the head with a fish... right before the napalm strike, I mean.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
It would have been simpler for them simply to invalidate first-turn wins in tourneys, and let everyone else keep their fast mana, but a lot of this has more to do with placating the secondary market fatcats than making the game more "playable".
That said, recent expansions have been far more interesting, mechanically speaking. I'm not too impressed with Alara, though, even though I like long, slow games. It's just that the set's mechanics are a little too simplistic, and lack power.
Well, thanks for that. How do I do that?
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
Beats yelling at clouds, I bet.
I must be the only Magic player anywhere who actually liked HOMELANDS. And FALLEN EMPIRE. Ah, well.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
I think the idea is, you tap the three to put them to work getting the ranger's goat prepped for takeoff, plus armor, etc.
And yeah, I still got a playset of Serra Angels (RV) in my collection. Because they rock, "no matter what"!
Thanks. Feedback from the Writer's Forum has been that this article is too long, rambles too much, is too emotional and opinionated, and doesn't provide enough meaty analysis (read as: numbers crunching) to back up my opinionated assertions as to the worth of ALARA relative to LORWYN. Apparently, simply hating Kithkin isn't enough. But over here in this thread, I seem to be making a lot of people's day with the article, and, honestly, as I don't play on a tournament level and never will (I'm just not smart enough) that's really all I'm aiming for.
Oh, and thanks for kicking this thread over to Page 2, too.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
that was fantastically written. I don't quite agree with everything you said (given that I generally dislike lorwyn as a whole, because I do not like being raped by tribal), it was still a very good and enteraining read.
I applaud you, sir!
It seems to me that there are many types of Magic players. However, the articles you see over on the official Magic site, and, largely, here, all seem to be targeted at the elite, tournament level Master Mages, the kind of people who simply aren't happy with any deck that doesn't brutally body slam their opponent into scattered shreds of pulped plasma by turn 6 at the latest. These are the people who look at a card I myself find to be silly or even stupid, instantly check that card against the perfect database of all other cards they keep constantly in their heads, and instantly see a fabulous seven card combination that will allow them to get out a creature, hit their opponent with another creature while unsummoning the first creature, counter any spells the opponent may want to cast, destroy one of their opponent's permanents, and cause the opponent to discard their entire hand. And they're the kind of people that, if they build a deck which does not give them the opportunity to do at least three of these things on their first turn, they aren't interested.
But I don't think these people make up the majority of WOTC's customers, or even the majority of those of us who buy and play Magic cards. However, these people do tend to regard the rest of us who support their hobby/vocation with at least some scorn and contempt; our only really use in these players' eyes is to be the sort of opponent they pray to draw in the first and second rounds of local tournaments... which is why I no longer bother to play in tournaments. I simply can't compete on this level.
Yet there are people, lots of people, who play Magic for fun. We like to win and hate to lose, but still, we aren't windmilling our libraries or millstoning our opponents or coming up with creatureless decks that slice, dice, and julian fries any permanent foolish enough to enter play against us. We like our tribal decks and we like our artifact decks and we have our favored creature types and the types we just can't stand and we get a lot of pleasure out of blasting that annoying Tim or Royal Assassin into scattered cinders or, conversely, keeping our own Tims and Royals out regardless of how hard our opponents attempt to blow them to pieces. We love the game and we enjoy it... but we can't come up with those insane combos whereby we use an obscure sorcery to get eight different permanents with seven different triggered effects into play during the combat phase before blockers are chosen in such a way that the Worldgorger Dragon leaves play before it actually comes into play, or some frickin' thing.
And even if we could, and even if we had the cards to build one of those decks, it would never never work for us, because we'd never never draw that combo in any game, ever.
So you have the elite Brainiac semi-pro or pro players whose decks glitter like poisoned shuriken, and then you have the rest of us, who just like to build Dwarf decks, or Dragon decks, or a deck where we can unsummon all our creatures any time we want so we can replay them for their triggered effects, which usually just let us look at the top 4 cards of our library and then put them back in any order. (Honest, that's about as sophisticated as MY decks get.)
I really think there's a niche out there for someone who writes articles for the non-master mages, the people who just play for fun. But maybe I'm wrong.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
I may not agree with all of what you say (I hated Lorwyn, but liked Shadowmoor; I despise Shards, but Conflux is looking ok...), if I laugh while reading it, you get an A+ in my book.
Some people do forget that this is a game, in which you are supposed to have FUN.
Edit:
If I recall, the rhyme goes..
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and women weren't particular
Against the wall
we backed them all
and ----ed them perpendicular.
Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc
But what this person says:
Is totally wrong. Oh we knew, we knew all too damn well. If you weren't packing a deck full of Duals and Moxen, you were at a definite disadvantage, and the only thing to help you was luck. What Homelands did, though, was what I would call a "grievous overcorrection," kind of like driving along at 100 mph and stopping in, like, 1 second. Your brains would fly out of your head and spatter on the windshield. That's what it felt like to me.
As for your comments on Shards, THANK YOU SIR, you have echoed my thoughts exactly. As you did with the art of Lorwyn block... I liked Shadowmoor/Eve a little better, but Lor/Mor did suffer from chronic cutsey-poo syndrome. As a whole Lorwyn was all right by me because I liked tribal, and I also love the PWs and Commands, but Kith also made me nauseous. Alara's art just seems more... classy, sharper, better defined.
Oh, and Boggarts suck, I'm all on board there. Art usually doesn't keep me away, but there was something off-putting about a lot of that art.
Ah well, I am also gearing up for Conflux, and I'm excited. Glad to see at least a few other people are as well.
Commander
Ezuri, Renegade Leader (Aggro/Combo - Favorite)
Skullbriar, the Walking Grave (Sac and Grave hijinks)
Azusa, Lost but Seeking (Landfall hijinks)
Kaalia of the Vast (Heavily modded)
Standard
Waiting for Innistrad...
Extended
Hah!
Modern
Living End Cascade (RGB)
Legacy
Burn
Vintage
None
Casual
WB Aggro-Control
Green Stompy
Pink Floyd (UWr Wall Control)
Lunch Box (Fatty ramp)
D-Bag (White Control)
Level 13 Task Mage
Thanks. Nearly everything I write is meant to be funny, or should be.
You're the first to pick up on the source, but as I learned the thing in Boy Scouts, there are endless verses (and the one you quote is new to me). The ones I know are things like
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and toilets weren't invented
people left their load
beside the road
and walked away contented
And
In the days of old
when knights were bold
and condoms weren't invented
the men wrapped socks
around their (you know)
and babies were prevented
And several dozen more I've forgotten right now. Good catch on your part, though. Maybe I should make WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD the regular title of a series of geezer rants about Old Magic vs. New Magic.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
You love Homelands, too. It's the set that gave us great cards like Feast of the Unicorn. The reason most people seem to hate it is that it is almost entirely creature-centric; there are few or no cards that do lots of damage or make someone discard or blow up someone's permanents or that interact in really interesting ways with instants, triggered effects, and upkeep costs, and there's not much card draw at all. But it has GREAT creature cards, and great creature enhancement cards.
Luck won't do it, either. Champion Magic players have three attributes -- a natural affinity for numbers which allows them to hold the ongoing game equation in their head and adjust it whenever necessary; the disposable income to buy the rare OOPs or the almost impossible to find rares (you know, the supposed 'rares' that people like me never ever see in a set, because if you can't buy your cards by the booster box, you will just never get, say, a Vein Feeder or that cool new Blue artifact Planeswalker); and, last but certainly not least, luck at card draw.
I am and always have been a mediocre Magic player, but when I lived in Syracuse the gaming group I hung with contained several local champions, so I learned from the best. And those guys always get good card draw; maybe one in ten games they get a crappy hand. So luck isn't going to help a lower level player, either.
I suppose it might, though, if you were going up against someone whose only advantage was better cards... and if that's the case, then you are correct -- back in the day, better cards were a MUCH greater advantage than they are now.
That's what it felt like to all of us, but take another look at the whole set now and see if you don't feel otherwise. It was an abrupt change, but damn if that set doesn't seem like a wonderfully designed and beautifully balanced one now.
You're welcome. Thanks for the feedback.
MTG gets a little kinky in my latest original expansion, The Chained Lands
Meanwhile, my long running fantasy RPG gets the Magic card treatment here
Sic Gorgiamus Allos Subjectatos Nunc
(and god help me, I'll crack it one day).