I am surprised it took them this long to come to this to be quite frank.
There was no real incentive to go over these rules until they made new split cards I suppose.
I think a case could be made that releasing a set with the Expertise cycle, not to mention Treasure Keeper and Rashmi, would have been a good incentive. I'd have to think that, like CopyCat, this was an interaction that blindsided them (even if it really shouldn't have).
they obviously must have known about the interaction between expertise cards and split cards, since they're in consecutive blocks and would be in the same standard. we're talking about iconic cycle and iconic mechanic (not just two single cards). that means they had pre-meditated the change to split cards even before Aether Revolt was released. So to pull the rug out from under fans who adore the expertise cycle at the last minute is the heinous crime. This moves shows their lack of empathy and respect to customers, and lack of finesse at handling the timing of rules changes announcements. Now players have to unlearn the interaction between expertise and split cards. Just so they can keep a mechanic from a future set as secret.
they obviously must have known about the interaction between expertise cards and split cards, since they're in consecutive blocks and would be in the same standard. we're talking about iconic cycle and iconic mechanic (not just two single cards). that means they had pre-meditated the change to split cards even before Aether Revolt was released. So to pull the rug out from under fans who adore the expertise cycle at the last minute is the heinous crime. This moves shows their lack of empathy and respect to customers, and lack of finesse at handling the timing of rules changes announcements. Now players have to unlearn the interaction between expertise and split cards. Just so they can keep a mechanic from a future set as secret.
It's a pitty that it never made logical sense to you, because it was indeed quite logical.
It was indeed logical. The only problem is many people have a problem understanding logic.
This sums it up nicely
Either interpretation had its problems. So really did'nt matter which they went with but they should stick with it. Tossing it willy nilly just annoys ppl.
And no i do not play split cards
I just feel it a pity to lose that niche functionality for no real gain. Its no big deal, ppl just have to relearn and split cards now suck more :/
The original functionality always made perfect sense to me, but I'm that kind of person. As a judge, I received so many questions about split card CMCs, even from experienced players, so I fully understand and support the change.
As for the cries of "dumbing down the game", exploiting weird rules loopholes doesn't make you a good player, sorry.
The original functionality always made perfect sense to me, but I'm that kind of person. As a judge, I received so many questions about split card CMCs, even from experienced players, so I fully understand and support the change.
As for the cries of "dumbing down the game", exploiting weird rules loopholes doesn't make you a good player, sorry.
Im not sure it has anything to do with people thinking they are good players. I think people are tired of being told one thing just to have it change because wotc panders to new players/potential customers.
I started playing in 96. I played through 2004. Came back to the game in 08-13. Took another break. I started getting back into it 15.
It is less fun, the cards are lame, the ones that aren't lame get nerfed or banned.
It really does seem like part of the community gets to dictate or define what "fun" is to the other parts. Just my opinion. Magic has more players than ever. Good for wizards. I think the game is the worst ive ever seen it.
The original functionality always made perfect sense to me, but I'm that kind of person. As a judge, I received so many questions about split card CMCs, even from experienced players, so I fully understand and support the change.
As for the cries of "dumbing down the game", exploiting weird rules loopholes doesn't make you a good player, sorry.
Im not sure it has anything to do with people thinking they are good players. I think people are tired of being told one thing just to have it change because wotc panders to new players/potential customers.
People are complaining about "catering to newbies/casuals". That kind of implies "screwing over skilled players" (as a side note, people who think this, casual does not equal unskilled), as though skill equates to knowing weird rules interactions.
I started playing in 96. I played through 2004. Came back to the game in 08-13. Took another break. I started getting back into it 15.
It is less fun, the cards are lame, the ones that aren't lame get nerfed or banned.
I've been playing practically nonstop since 2000, and...well, to be completely honest, I too feel like it's been going downhill. But for reasons completely unrelated to changes like this.
"hurr durr magic is for smart people but they are dumbing it down"
Please stop. This is a good change. The rule loophole that existed previously didn't make any sense.
"hurr durr magic is fine they're not pandering to the lowest common denominator and you're not smart"
They're quite literally dumbing down the game. That's what NWO is all about. This is not a good change, either. If you're playing at a competitive event, I fully expect you to know the rules, and if you don't it's not my fault. Chances are, people that don't understand this interaction don't care about the game anyways and are here just to play casual through high school.
The corner case rules relevance is cute but absolutely unintuitive.
If a player looks at a card and guesses wrong about something that should be immediately clear, there is a problem.
I'm really sad, really, that this screws with the combo decks. It's always sad to see a strategy go. But if the rules don't make sense, change them.
The ideal solution is to make certain sides matter with their interactions (So you can't cheatcast Bust by referencing Boom's CMC, but can cheatcast Boom by Boom's CMC) but as they haven't done this, I don't think it's possible within the rules.
It is sad for these decks. But it's better for the health of the game. I hope people understand this.
Never made logical sense to me that Counterbalance could count Wear//Tear as a 1 or a 2 when revealed from the library, but if Dark Confidant hit it, it was always a 3. Fixing this rule makes these interactions more intuitive going forward while simultaneously eliminating an undesired interaction or two. Win all around.
It's a pitty that it never made logical sense to you, because it was indeed quite logical. Split cards are two cards with two converted manacosts. When another card looks at the splitcard and asks: "What's your converted mana cost?" It will get one answer from each card on the split-card. So in case of Wear//Tear, Wear looks at the symbols in its upper right corner and says: "Two." and at the same time, Tear looks at its symbols in the corner and answers: "One."
So when Counterbalance asks: "What's your manacost?" The answer will be "Two." and "One." - so it counters every spell with converted manacost of two and every spell with cmc of one.
When Dark Confidant asks: "What's your manacost?" The answer will be the same: "Two." and "One." - so you lose two life and you lose one life for a total of three life.
Except "1 and 2" is not the same as "1 or 2" which is how Counterbalance used to interpret it.
Is your converted mana cost 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost less than 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost 1? Yes!
That is not "quite logical".
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If the Vikings were around today, they would probably be amazed at how much glow-in-the-dark stuff we have, and how we take it for granted.
There's not a ton of relevant stuff you can no longer Sunforger out. Fire // Ice, Wear // Tear, Hide // Seek, Dead // Gone, and Wax // Wane can all still be hit by Sunforger. The relevant losses are Turn // Burn (which is pretty mediocre if you can't fuse it anyways) and Odds // Ends which is definitely a sad loss from Jeskai. I guess pure Boros decks can also no longer target Order // Chaos but I've never seen that in anyone's 99 so meh.
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Didn't see this in the thread yet, but the full article for this was published on the Mothership some time between when spoilers went up earlier today and now:
Wow they just ruined an entire modern deck based around the old ruling of split cards.Beck // Call and Sram's Expertise. They just ruined it again because they think the player based can't read or follows game rules. The ruined Boom // Bust land destruction with Goblin Dark-Dwellers. 2 modern decks that I know of are now completely ruined.
I don't think Boom Bust and Dwellers is ruined. The deck is rarely played and when it is it is in a shell where most iterations run Chalice and Suppression Field, which combined with the landkill suite and attack/critter taxes is still a powerful thing to do in the right meta. I have played the deck a lot- I have the RW prisons primer in tier 2 - and the number of times you abuse the Boom Bust rule with Dwellers is quite low. It is annoying that the move is most used against the fair grindy decks like BG-X, which are the hardest match ups for the deck, but in most of the deck's best matches you rarely needed the Dweller into Geddon tech. I still wish they had not done it, but it has not upset me as much as the fact that they are still printing anaemic standard cards apart from critters and planeswalkers.
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People with belligerent signatures are trying to compensate for something....
Never made logical sense to me that Counterbalance could count Wear//Tear as a 1 or a 2 when revealed from the library, but if Dark Confidant hit it, it was always a 3. Fixing this rule makes these interactions more intuitive going forward while simultaneously eliminating an undesired interaction or two. Win all around.
It's a pitty that it never made logical sense to you, because it was indeed quite logical. Split cards are two cards with two converted manacosts. When another card looks at the splitcard and asks: "What's your converted mana cost?" It will get one answer from each card on the split-card. So in case of Wear//Tear, Wear looks at the symbols in its upper right corner and says: "Two." and at the same time, Tear looks at its symbols in the corner and answers: "One."
So when Counterbalance asks: "What's your manacost?" The answer will be "Two." and "One." - so it counters every spell with converted manacost of two and every spell with cmc of one.
When Dark Confidant asks: "What's your manacost?" The answer will be the same: "Two." and "One." - so you lose two life and you lose one life for a total of three life.
Except "1 and 2" is not the same as "1 or 2" which is how Counterbalance used to interpret it.
Is your converted mana cost 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost less than 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost 1? Yes!
That is not "quite logical".
Exactly. Like I said above, reasonable people can disagree on what is "logical," but the fact that the rules were written such that you could cast a 6 CMC card (Bust) off a card that explicitly says "cast a card with CMC 2 or less" was not logical. Now, let me be clear, once you understood all the rules behind it, the interaction was logically consistent. But the rules themselves were not written in a logical and streamlined way such that that interaction could take place.
Again, this has nothing to do with power level or "cuteness," in my mind. Strictly a set of rules that make sense and have a clear purpose.
I am a casual player, though not by choice. My schedule sadly prevents me from being available around tournament time. I must admit that I am sad about this new ruling. While I never got into the complete intricacies of the potential for brokenness, I did use the Sunforger into Order//Chaos plenty of times in my Commander deck. Finding a replacement to go in my toolbox won't be too difficult, however. I just understood the reasoning for the old ruling. It made sense to me. But oh well, I'll adjust and won't even think twice about it a couple years down the road.
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They love and hate to see me walk through the door. I'm the man with the box, one to carry all his Standard cards with him. I've got the commons and uncommons they need. But I've also got my decks. If I walk into FNM, I came to play. And they never know what I'm gonna pull out of my hat next. I may lose more than I win, but it just might be THIS deck that has all the answers that they don't have answers for. They fear the unknown. They fear me. And they never see me coming!
Huh. Suddenly that one copy of Far // Away in my Riddle of Lightning/Interpret the Signs deck will be a bit more useful. Not massively so, but it helps raise the average CMC of the deck without actually raising its curve.
It hurts the Expertises, but there are also a few positive interactions produced by this change in Standard: one interaction that might actually matter is that Dusk // Dawn will count as having a CMC of 9 if you flip it off of Sorin, Grim Nemesis. On a more janky note, Red's gotten a decent helping of CMC-matters cards over the last couple of blocks that I've always kind of hoped turned into a deck: Sin Prodder, Nahiri's Wrath, Combustible Gearhulk, and Spark of Creativity. It'd probably take more than one Constructed-playable Red Aftermath card for a deck taking advantage of that to have even a chance of working, but it's fun to think about.
This ruling does not in any way change how Split Cards work with the cards you listed. Only with cards like the Expertises, Disciple of Deceit and Brain in a Jar.
This is the most disappointingly sensical thing. It makes perfect sense to change this, but having those wacky interactions made a number of interesting things possible in eternal formats that required enough setup to make them not broken as hell.
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That was pretty interesting. But dropping a warship on me is cheating. Take it back!
When they introduced Expertise cards they specifically mentioned the interaction with split cards. That was last set.
The rules change was surely decided by then. But Wizards chose not to mention it. That does not help to create trust, either.
Did they? I found the article talking about how they work with the suspend cards, but nothing on split cards.
Quote from Good stuff in Standard though - Maybe if Red"s "Aftermath" card is good we could see some sort of hyper-aggressive red deck with [card »
Sin Prodder[/card] and Nahiri's Wrath dishing out massive chunks of damage off of a playable card? Add more discard and milk that new Flameblade Adept for all he's worth alongside cards with low cycling costs and high CMCs.
Card that make you discard your hand and draw that many cards are still a better option than Nahiri's Wrath: the Red escalate spell and the other one from kaladesh
I love that the last line of text is "We believe that these changes will improve the player experience when playing with split cards, old and new." despite the fact that this new rule means split cards are pointless eyesores that may as well be charms/entwine/flashback cards, depending on which arbitrary rules modification they make to it each time they release it. This rules change doesn't actually add anything to the game, it just takes it away.
Expertise decks are soft banned.
Split cards can no longer be played in tiny leader decks
Split cards can no longer be imprinted on scepter
Split cards can no longer be taken with inquisition
Split cards can't be cascaded into
+ a bunch of other interactions that I haven't thought of yet.
What's more, the new rules don't make things any simpler. If for whatever reason someone plays a split card at a tournament, you'll still probably get judged called for ruling clarification. Because to most people, CMC is how much you pay to cast the spell, not the two different numbers added together. The previous rulings, although weird, were more logical then what they're feeding us now.
It would have been better if they just ruled that split cards are treated as two seperate cards, and if you can free cast them with limitations, like expertises, you're limited to just casting that that part of the card. It'd still be arbitrary and unneeded, but it'd make more sense then what they're trying to do.
I don't agree with this at all. They're split cards, so why aren't their CMCs split too? They have to be summed? Can't remember if it was Foresythe or MaRo, but I remember reading an article by Wizards explaining the design philosophy behind split cards, cycling, kicker, commands and charms etc. It was basically that players love to have cards that have options; cards that essentially functioned as multiple cards at once. Each one of those mechanics/card types occupies a niche spot in magic design and card funtionality, and split and fuse cards' quirk used to be that they were simultaneously two/three separate cards with unique characteristics, and one card with all of those characteristics combined. And since they were multiple cards in one, having multiple CMCs made sense. This allowed players to find cool things to do with them. Now they're just clunky and boring. Is the new rule easier to understand? Possibly. But I don't think one CMC makes sense for split cards - IMO, they should be each of their cards simultaneously, until they're on the stack.
I think a case could be made that releasing a set with the Expertise cycle, not to mention Treasure Keeper and Rashmi, would have been a good incentive. I'd have to think that, like CopyCat, this was an interaction that blindsided them (even if it really shouldn't have).
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Please stop. This is a good change. The rule loophole that existed previously didn't make any sense.
It was indeed logical. The only problem is many people have a problem understanding logic.
........................
This sums it up nicely
Either interpretation had its problems. So really did'nt matter which they went with but they should stick with it. Tossing it willy nilly just annoys ppl.
And no i do not play split cards
I just feel it a pity to lose that niche functionality for no real gain. Its no big deal, ppl just have to relearn and split cards now suck more :/
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[dice=1]100[/dice]
As for the cries of "dumbing down the game", exploiting weird rules loopholes doesn't make you a good player, sorry.
Im not sure it has anything to do with people thinking they are good players. I think people are tired of being told one thing just to have it change because wotc panders to new players/potential customers.
I started playing in 96. I played through 2004. Came back to the game in 08-13. Took another break. I started getting back into it 15.
It is less fun, the cards are lame, the ones that aren't lame get nerfed or banned.
It really does seem like part of the community gets to dictate or define what "fun" is to the other parts. Just my opinion. Magic has more players than ever. Good for wizards. I think the game is the worst ive ever seen it.
People are complaining about "catering to newbies/casuals". That kind of implies "screwing over skilled players" (as a side note, people who think this, casual does not equal unskilled), as though skill equates to knowing weird rules interactions.
I've been playing practically nonstop since 2000, and...well, to be completely honest, I too feel like it's been going downhill. But for reasons completely unrelated to changes like this.
"hurr durr magic is fine they're not pandering to the lowest common denominator and you're not smart"
They're quite literally dumbing down the game. That's what NWO is all about. This is not a good change, either. If you're playing at a competitive event, I fully expect you to know the rules, and if you don't it's not my fault. Chances are, people that don't understand this interaction don't care about the game anyways and are here just to play casual through high school.
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The corner case rules relevance is cute but absolutely unintuitive.
If a player looks at a card and guesses wrong about something that should be immediately clear, there is a problem.
I'm really sad, really, that this screws with the combo decks. It's always sad to see a strategy go. But if the rules don't make sense, change them.
The ideal solution is to make certain sides matter with their interactions (So you can't cheatcast Bust by referencing Boom's CMC, but can cheatcast Boom by Boom's CMC) but as they haven't done this, I don't think it's possible within the rules.
It is sad for these decks. But it's better for the health of the game. I hope people understand this.
Except "1 and 2" is not the same as "1 or 2" which is how Counterbalance used to interpret it.
Is your converted mana cost 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost less than 3? Yes!
Is your converted mana cost 1? Yes!
That is not "quite logical".
There's not a ton of relevant stuff you can no longer Sunforger out. Fire // Ice, Wear // Tear, Hide // Seek, Dead // Gone, and Wax // Wane can all still be hit by Sunforger. The relevant losses are Turn // Burn (which is pretty mediocre if you can't fuse it anyways) and Odds // Ends which is definitely a sad loss from Jeskai. I guess pure Boros decks can also no longer target Order // Chaos but I've never seen that in anyone's 99 so meh.
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I don't think Boom Bust and Dwellers is ruined. The deck is rarely played and when it is it is in a shell where most iterations run Chalice and Suppression Field, which combined with the landkill suite and attack/critter taxes is still a powerful thing to do in the right meta. I have played the deck a lot- I have the RW prisons primer in tier 2 - and the number of times you abuse the Boom Bust rule with Dwellers is quite low. It is annoying that the move is most used against the fair grindy decks like BG-X, which are the hardest match ups for the deck, but in most of the deck's best matches you rarely needed the Dweller into Geddon tech. I still wish they had not done it, but it has not upset me as much as the fact that they are still printing anaemic standard cards apart from critters and planeswalkers.
Exactly. Like I said above, reasonable people can disagree on what is "logical," but the fact that the rules were written such that you could cast a 6 CMC card (Bust) off a card that explicitly says "cast a card with CMC 2 or less" was not logical. Now, let me be clear, once you understood all the rules behind it, the interaction was logically consistent. But the rules themselves were not written in a logical and streamlined way such that that interaction could take place.
Again, this has nothing to do with power level or "cuteness," in my mind. Strictly a set of rules that make sense and have a clear purpose.
This ruling does not in any way change how Split Cards work with the cards you listed. Only with cards like the Expertises, Disciple of Deceit and Brain in a Jar.
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Card that make you discard your hand and draw that many cards are still a better option than Nahiri's Wrath: the Red escalate spell and the other one from kaladesh
does wizards not want me to be a clever boy on the internet.
Expertise decks are soft banned.
Split cards can no longer be played in tiny leader decks
Split cards can no longer be imprinted on scepter
Split cards can no longer be taken with inquisition
Split cards can't be cascaded into
+ a bunch of other interactions that I haven't thought of yet.
What's more, the new rules don't make things any simpler. If for whatever reason someone plays a split card at a tournament, you'll still probably get judged called for ruling clarification. Because to most people, CMC is how much you pay to cast the spell, not the two different numbers added together. The previous rulings, although weird, were more logical then what they're feeding us now.
It would have been better if they just ruled that split cards are treated as two seperate cards, and if you can free cast them with limitations, like expertises, you're limited to just casting that that part of the card. It'd still be arbitrary and unneeded, but it'd make more sense then what they're trying to do.
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