The lands also ensure the value variance of packs is really low - which I strongly prefer to lottery packs.
Absolutely agree. I quit drafting and buying boxes a long time ago because every single time, I lost money. How is it I can draft, win prize packs, and still not break even? Last time I opened three prize packs, and all six of my packs totaled only $6 - which means I lost $10 in the draft. I got sick of that and started buying singles only.
Then Unstable came along, with guaranteed value in every pack - I drafted and bought a box for the first time in a very long time. I had a blast playing with the wacky cards, I sold the lands to pay for a big chunk of it, and now I have a bunch of fun cards to build an Un-Cube with so I can play them all over again.
Hence, it's not silver bordered that's a commercial succes, it no border.
And why can't it be both? I didn't want the set for the land - I actually don't like the frameless look, and I sold all of the basics to pay for 75% of the box price - I wanted the wacky silver bordered cards. They were the success to me. But as I said above, the guaranteed value and lack of lottery variance made it actually worth buying sealed product rather than just ordering singles.
Personally, I think that is the lesson Wizards needs to learn from this set: don't pack all the value in three chase cards; try to spread it more evenly, and people will be more willing to buy.
I'm starting to see why they may not have done it and it is a complete misunderstanding of what value actually means. People aren't talking about monetary value or the power of the card, we're talking about the depth of play the card has. I'm starting to think that NWO might have been the worst decision wizards ever made in the history of the entire game. I know they are worried about accessibility, but the entire problem is that they pushed all the cards with complexity to them into the rare slot and sometimes maybe one or two uncommons. Heck, the big factor as to why Cut // Ribbons was not instant speed is because it can be played from the graveyard, which would have made that card have a lot of lines of play that aren't immediately apparent.
Maybe what we want is the ability to discover things again?
I feel that the notion that NWO specifically is to blame is not right. Both Innistrad and RtR were post-NWO, and both of those are well regarded draft formats; the former considered one of the best draft formats of all time.
The problem is that they have gone way, way, way too far down the rabbit hole. There are merits to NWO, and it didn't arise out of a vacuum. While a lot of experience players look at Time Spiral all whisty-eyed, the truth is that it was utterly miserable for newer players to play.
The problem is a few fold, and I don't think NWO specifically is the problem, even if NWO led to the path we are on. There are good things that have come from NWO, after all. There are also bad things. I feel that the power creep you have seen at common/uncommon is an indirect result pushing too far down NWO order territory; when you remove a lot of complexity from commons/uncommons, you have to make up for the lost power potential somewhere. So you push them a bit in their stats. They are not constructed all-stars, obviously, but when something like [[Nessian Courser]] isn't immediately played in green because it's just not good enough, the power level of the format has been skewed too heavily. And that is a large part because you no longer get to choose between Courser and a somewhat weaker creature with relevant text, you get to choose between Courser and something that is just plain better than courser (Essentially).
That said, there are things I think they are being just flat wrong with in terms of limited, that carries over into constructed. Uncommon good removal should exist. Doom Blade is not warping, at all, particularly in modern formats where Grizzly Bears are utterly unplayable, and not worth considering most of the time due to them being too weak. I am of the opinion that players should want to play every card they pick, not feel like they are forced to have it. The draft formats feel very canned, without room for variation. The archetypes are just too narrowly defined, and too many cards are just not functional outside of said archetype.
I haven't seen power creep at common. What I've seen at common is dropping the floor a lot more in order to fill in for draft because they've decided that sets should have both constructed cards and stand-in cards to fill the role of the constructed cards when drafting. That's part of the reason a lot of older players are now just buying singles online instead of boxes. Other TCGs do have bad cards and in fact those cards have to exist in the game, but the worst cards in a Force of Will expansion are still miles above the worst things out of Ixalan. It's also fairly easy to compare the two games as well since mechanically they are so similar.
So for some examples, a common in the latest set for Force of Will is Fire Majin, which is a one drop that is basically a piker that reads if you control an enchantment called Magic Crest of Fire it does basically lightning bolt to a creature or planeswalker. The Magic Crest itself is a common that does a lightning bolt effect at sorcery speed to a creature. It's also a relevant creature type as a Wicked Spirit, which gives it synergy with one of the planeswalkers in the set. Now keep in mind they have a different power and toughness system so it's hard to really compare direct damage spells between the two games, so you can consider the bolt equivalent to a shock in the current standard. Another common is a mermaid that is basically an 0/2 that when it dies it lets you draw a card. There's also a 1/1 that does that, but those are basically the bottom floor of commons in that game.
Magic the Gathering used to have commons that were like that, albeit I think the better comparison would be things like Quirion Ranger, Hisoka's Guard.
The objective of the NWO was to simplify commons to make them easier for players to understand, but when they did this they also dropped the number of lines of play a common could be involved in. That is the issue with commons and why so many of them are completely unplayable. If they can't be used in some line of play with more advanced cards at rare or uncommon, than the only thing they can be are vanilla creatures and filler. Since they are common, they can't be as powerful as the uncommon cards on power and toughness or mana cost according to how they design things in this game as well.
Also, cards that make tokens are not good examples of the contrary. In those cases it's just adding value to the [card}Squire[/card] or Storm Crow. That being said, I'm not saying they get rid of vanilla creatures. It's just they need to start bringing back things that have more complicated interactions at common to make them more desirable.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The majority of cards in current Limited formats is just aggressive.
Attacking should always be favored in that kind of format and blocking is incredible punishing, if a single trick can be so devastating that the game is just decided right away (trading 2 creatures to 1 trick is just way too brutal in fast formats).
The power of 2 drops is 3 right now, which makes any 2 drop a real threat , and 2 of them will just win in 3 turns, so they demand answers.
Increasing most creatures power by 1 compared to old times made all the limited formats faster so you cannot really establish a board, you just keep attacking and stumbling on mana is a neckbreaker as you cannot do nothing for a turn if the opponent pops 3 power creatures every turn.
And then removal become so bad in limited , and situational, that the only realistic answer to an aggressive start from an opponent is to be even more aggressive and/or lifelink creatures to negate what damage they do.
Its incredible narrow in that way.
Ofcourse it makes combat much more relevant and it shifts the games focus on creature combat, rather than building up synergy effects outside of combat and snowball mechanics (stuff that makes you win, if you do something thats good anyway, playing lots of creatures and attacking with them and mechanics that reward you for doing so are just terrible, as it doesnt add something new, it just snowballs even harder, if the mechanic works, you just overrun the opponent and the game seems to be incredible one-sided , and if the mechanic does not work, you cannot even use the creatures to block in any reasonable way, as they are just worse).
----
They could make slower sets that reward synergy more outside of combat ; but then, games drag on longer, and time becomes an issue again, if people play slow and nobody attacks.
The latest master set has some of these elements , but it has an entirely different issue that WotC is forcing more and more.
And thats the extreme All-In mechanics you are set in stone during a draft and you simply cannot leave your commitment.
If you are merfolk in Ixalan you ARE merfolk, switching or picking other cards is no question and thats the case for the majority of drafts, you pick a tribe and you are doomed to fail or profit for doing so ; theres simply no realistic cross-draft strategy and that makes the drafts more and more just plain luck and less actual skill.
More generic mechanics would help, stuff that works with other mechanics in the set so you could in fact build a 5-color deck and it would work to some degree, which means every color combination would be viable and no pick would just force you into a strategy that your entire draft depends on to hit or miss.
Sadly i dont see them changing how they do limited formats anytime soon ; as they stick to the design patterns of the last bunch of set quite hardly and even Unstable is like that.
I dunno. I dig Unstable and I guess the lands are important too. I think the whole thing is a winning formula. The factions are pretty great, honestly (with very few changes and mostly having to do with names) I could imagine them living on various MTG worlds pretty seamlessly and I already like several of the groups more than many of the established game world elements (… all I'm sayin' is the Gobbos in unStable are way cooler than the whole of the Gatewatch in my book). There are some neat mechanics (heck, I'd kinda like to see augment / host type cards in standard) It's fun for drafting and it's even pretty fun to turn those draft take home into sixty-card silver bordered decks to pull out every once in a while and change things up a bit.
The problem being, everyone has some kinda budget and the limits to silver-bordered cards are obvious. For me the tokens and land (and I think this is the intent) add value-motivation (I just made that word up) for me. If it's a token I can use, I'm gonna use it. My lands I'm setting aside, if after some time they increase in value dramatically as some speculate I'll sell em' and use the proceeds to get more magic cards that'll see more play than the silver borders, if they don't I'll have a handful of really sweet lands I can put in decks I wanna bling-up.
Would I buy Unhinged with its limited playability without the lands / tokens? Maybe, but only if they were much cheaper, so much it'd probably be inhibitive for WotC to sell packs for (under $2). Do I expect this to be some kinda major money-making investment? Not really… but honestly the potential card value is less important than the fact that they're really super sweet lands.
The set is just a gimmick , the lands and especially the foil lands are what drives the market to buy a lot of this product.
Given each land is worth like what the standard rare is in Ixalan, this "fun" product is ironicly worth more than Ixalan.
And the fact that they print ALL the tokens as foils in this "fun" set, while they replace FNM with "foil" tokens as somewhat mind boggling stupid excuse of a "reward" is just ... dont get me started !
Anyway, in the end, these boxes have a pretty nice floor of value, due to 1 land per booster, the tokens and some random fun extra cards. So if you can buy boosters for 2$ a pop, this is almost no lost money and chances to make a profit.
----
The most ironic part is that this "fun" set sells so much better than the other sets they released ...
Its almost like this set makes fun of Magic and the form of distribution they did in the last couple years ...
FYI, it's been confirmed Wizards is running another print run of Unstable, so we will have more boxes coming in later while the new standard sets and masters set are getting pushed out. Glad to know the full art lands should be cheap.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
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I feel that the notion that NWO specifically is to blame is not right. Both Innistrad and RtR were post-NWO, and both of those are well regarded draft formats; the former considered one of the best draft formats of all time.
The problem is that they have gone way, way, way too far down the rabbit hole. There are merits to NWO, and it didn't arise out of a vacuum. While a lot of experience players look at Time Spiral all whisty-eyed, the truth is that it was utterly miserable for newer players to play.
The problem is a few fold, and I don't think NWO specifically is the problem, even if NWO led to the path we are on. There are good things that have come from NWO, after all. There are also bad things. I feel that the power creep you have seen at common/uncommon is an indirect result pushing too far down NWO order territory; when you remove a lot of complexity from commons/uncommons, you have to make up for the lost power potential somewhere. So you push them a bit in their stats. They are not constructed all-stars, obviously, but when something like [[Nessian Courser]] isn't immediately played in green because it's just not good enough, the power level of the format has been skewed too heavily. And that is a large part because you no longer get to choose between Courser and a somewhat weaker creature with relevant text, you get to choose between Courser and something that is just plain better than courser (Essentially).
That said, there are things I think they are being just flat wrong with in terms of limited, that carries over into constructed. Uncommon good removal should exist. Doom Blade is not warping, at all, particularly in modern formats where Grizzly Bears are utterly unplayable, and not worth considering most of the time due to them being too weak. I am of the opinion that players should want to play every card they pick, not feel like they are forced to have it. The draft formats feel very canned, without room for variation. The archetypes are just too narrowly defined, and too many cards are just not functional outside of said archetype.
So for some examples, a common in the latest set for Force of Will is Fire Majin, which is a one drop that is basically a piker that reads if you control an enchantment called Magic Crest of Fire it does basically lightning bolt to a creature or planeswalker. The Magic Crest itself is a common that does a lightning bolt effect at sorcery speed to a creature. It's also a relevant creature type as a Wicked Spirit, which gives it synergy with one of the planeswalkers in the set. Now keep in mind they have a different power and toughness system so it's hard to really compare direct damage spells between the two games, so you can consider the bolt equivalent to a shock in the current standard. Another common is a mermaid that is basically an 0/2 that when it dies it lets you draw a card. There's also a 1/1 that does that, but those are basically the bottom floor of commons in that game.
Magic the Gathering used to have commons that were like that, albeit I think the better comparison would be things like Quirion Ranger, Hisoka's Guard.
The objective of the NWO was to simplify commons to make them easier for players to understand, but when they did this they also dropped the number of lines of play a common could be involved in. That is the issue with commons and why so many of them are completely unplayable. If they can't be used in some line of play with more advanced cards at rare or uncommon, than the only thing they can be are vanilla creatures and filler. Since they are common, they can't be as powerful as the uncommon cards on power and toughness or mana cost according to how they design things in this game as well.
Also, cards that make tokens are not good examples of the contrary. In those cases it's just adding value to the [card}Squire[/card] or Storm Crow. That being said, I'm not saying they get rid of vanilla creatures. It's just they need to start bringing back things that have more complicated interactions at common to make them more desirable.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Attacking should always be favored in that kind of format and blocking is incredible punishing, if a single trick can be so devastating that the game is just decided right away (trading 2 creatures to 1 trick is just way too brutal in fast formats).
The power of 2 drops is 3 right now, which makes any 2 drop a real threat , and 2 of them will just win in 3 turns, so they demand answers.
Increasing most creatures power by 1 compared to old times made all the limited formats faster so you cannot really establish a board, you just keep attacking and stumbling on mana is a neckbreaker as you cannot do nothing for a turn if the opponent pops 3 power creatures every turn.
And then removal become so bad in limited , and situational, that the only realistic answer to an aggressive start from an opponent is to be even more aggressive and/or lifelink creatures to negate what damage they do.
Its incredible narrow in that way.
Ofcourse it makes combat much more relevant and it shifts the games focus on creature combat, rather than building up synergy effects outside of combat and snowball mechanics (stuff that makes you win, if you do something thats good anyway, playing lots of creatures and attacking with them and mechanics that reward you for doing so are just terrible, as it doesnt add something new, it just snowballs even harder, if the mechanic works, you just overrun the opponent and the game seems to be incredible one-sided , and if the mechanic does not work, you cannot even use the creatures to block in any reasonable way, as they are just worse).
----
They could make slower sets that reward synergy more outside of combat ; but then, games drag on longer, and time becomes an issue again, if people play slow and nobody attacks.
The latest master set has some of these elements , but it has an entirely different issue that WotC is forcing more and more.
And thats the extreme All-In mechanics you are set in stone during a draft and you simply cannot leave your commitment.
If you are merfolk in Ixalan you ARE merfolk, switching or picking other cards is no question and thats the case for the majority of drafts, you pick a tribe and you are doomed to fail or profit for doing so ; theres simply no realistic cross-draft strategy and that makes the drafts more and more just plain luck and less actual skill.
More generic mechanics would help, stuff that works with other mechanics in the set so you could in fact build a 5-color deck and it would work to some degree, which means every color combination would be viable and no pick would just force you into a strategy that your entire draft depends on to hit or miss.
Sadly i dont see them changing how they do limited formats anytime soon ; as they stick to the design patterns of the last bunch of set quite hardly and even Unstable is like that.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
The problem being, everyone has some kinda budget and the limits to silver-bordered cards are obvious. For me the tokens and land (and I think this is the intent) add value-motivation (I just made that word up) for me. If it's a token I can use, I'm gonna use it. My lands I'm setting aside, if after some time they increase in value dramatically as some speculate I'll sell em' and use the proceeds to get more magic cards that'll see more play than the silver borders, if they don't I'll have a handful of really sweet lands I can put in decks I wanna bling-up.
Would I buy Unhinged with its limited playability without the lands / tokens? Maybe, but only if they were much cheaper, so much it'd probably be inhibitive for WotC to sell packs for (under $2). Do I expect this to be some kinda major money-making investment? Not really… but honestly the potential card value is less important than the fact that they're really super sweet lands.
At any rate, I'm pretty happy with the set...
Modern: Goblins,Storm
Legacy: Burn
EDH: Simic Merfolk
Given each land is worth like what the standard rare is in Ixalan, this "fun" product is ironicly worth more than Ixalan.
And the fact that they print ALL the tokens as foils in this "fun" set, while they replace FNM with "foil" tokens as somewhat mind boggling stupid excuse of a "reward" is just ... dont get me started !
Anyway, in the end, these boxes have a pretty nice floor of value, due to 1 land per booster, the tokens and some random fun extra cards. So if you can buy boosters for 2$ a pop, this is almost no lost money and chances to make a profit.
----
The most ironic part is that this "fun" set sells so much better than the other sets they released ...
Its almost like this set makes fun of Magic and the form of distribution they did in the last couple years ...
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!