The randomness is what lets this be red as well as let them push him the way they did.
Haktos's ability basically amounts to rolling a 1d6, treating three of the results as the same, or a 1d4 with 1 being the auto-reroll result. Which what cards have rolling dice to determine a result again? Oh yeah, its the silver-bordered cards. Which means his ability is literally from an un-set. The only way they could print Achilles is putting a silver-bordered effect on him in black-border.
Which you are in agreement with.
Oh you mean from the set that was said to be a testing grounds for ideas that they might use just not sure quite how to execute?
As said the randomness helps the card not be pin-pointed down for removal and such and imo help the card and ability feel red.
I been mulling over this card since he was revealed, and I feel the more elegant solution is just to cut out the RNG part of his text and reworking the protection to have a fixed number.
The randomness is what lets this be red as well as let them push him the way they did.
And thats what makes him a dollar-bin rare. The best cards in magic don't rely on randomness.
As others have this, this card is most similar to Progenitus or True-name but with a slim weakness that your opponent can't predict. While I don't think this will be the next banned card in every format I wouldn't right it off quickly.
I would write it off quickly. While there is the dream of landing a 4 in eternal formats to have a strong wrecking ball like him, its also only 33% chance of that. 66% of the time is the other two possible results which are quiet unfavorable. Probably a favorite with magicians and con-artists who can force a die roll to land on a result they want.
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Warriors, torch-bearers, come redeem our dreams
Shine a light upon this night of otherworldly fiends
Odin's might be your guide, divorce you from the sane
Hammer's way will have its say, rise up in their name
Scratching hag, you rake your claws, gnash your crooked teeth
You've taken slaves like ocean waves, now feel the ocean seethe
- Children of the Elder Gods by Poets of the Fall
Rude? For starters, CAC should stay in CAC threads. Second, calling a card with only a single protection effect and nothing else, as well designed by removing half of the effect of an existing card "boring" is valid. Internet isn't a safe space free of criticism.
Third, everything else I said was elaborating on a point used by WotC themselves and, in my 2nd response, a cynical and sarcastic response for an equally cynical and sarcastic response. Or you think his sarcastic "media" comment was any less rude than my sarcastic GDS comment?
And thats what makes him a dollar-bin rare. The best cards in magic don't rely on randomness.
Wrong. The problem with random cards is how often their power ceiling (aka. card at its best) doesn't justifies their floor (aka. card at its worst). Cards like CoCo or Delver, for example, are technically random cards, but they have a high ceiling and whose deckbuilding allows you to reduce its floor. Haktos tackles this problem and solves it by making its ceiling and floor equally as potent - there's no inherently bad roll, rolling a 2 could be much better than rolling a 3 if your opponent has Murderous Rider in hand or much better than 4 if your opponent has Storm's Wrath. Haktos seeing play or not is less reliant on its random design and more on if there's a Boros deck that could actually play him.
You're the one who used that as a defense of the card.
And it's a valid defense, reason why it's stated in the article. Metagaming to hate on a particular player is usually shunned upon in playgroups for a reason, and while oftenly there's nothing WotC can do about it, this time they did, and this should be seen as a good thing.
You have me all wrong, I don't justify bad gameplay like that. I justify bad behavior from players like that. Salty players don't get invited back to the table.
See point above. WotC trying to promote a more dynamic gameplay in casual tables should be seen as a good thing, not as a problem to be fixed by removing 2/3rds of the effect of a card in a CAC. You can let salty players be salty now, because Haktos as-is is perfectly fine.
Technically I did, 4cmc-matters. Also its not the same thing as its not RNG.
No, you did not, you created a Voltron Commander. The only gimmick about him is that he can only be Voltron'd by 4 CMC stuff, so instead of trying to work around his random protection with anthems and global effects, you're going to Scryfall and looking up Auras and Equipments with CMC 4. It's still just another Boros Commander that likes to hit face in the end and, if anything, you just made building around him more linear and boring.
And, once again, there's nothing wrong with randomness. Making 1d6 Goblins isn't bad because you had to use a die, it's bad because your chances of winning are reliant on rolling a 6 and not a 1. Your chances of winning with Haktos aren't reliant on rolling a 4 instead of a 2, they rely on your opponent having the appropriate answer to the rolled CMC - sometimes this might be 2, sometimes it's 4. And hey, "having the appropriate answer to a threat" has been a part of Magic since the old days of Terror.
You're the one who used that as a defense of the card.
[Ritokure claims that Wizards successfully pushed back against metagaming against Haktos by making it RNG-reliant.]
You have me all wrong, I don't justify bad gameplay like that. I justify bad behavior from players like that. Salty players don't get invited back to the table.
[Ritokure ignores why bad behavior at the table from players is undesirable. Goes after CAC I made.]
Technically I did, 4cmc-matters. Also its not the same thing as its not RNG.
[Ritokure proceeds to claim that a boros commander with only global effects to support it is more interesting than a boros commander with global effects + auras + equipment.]
What the... what is even happening in this thread? I feel like some of you don't play any games, or even Magic for that matter.
Rolling a d6 isn't especially common in black-border Magic nowadays, but it happens from time to time. I've never seen a card expressly require a d3, but Outlaws' Merriment comes close, so there's recent precedent. A d3 itself is actually fairly common in the larger scope of gaming, so there should be no mystery there. For the uninitiated, you can roll a d6 and divide the result by 2, rounding up, or you can count ones and twos as 1, threes and fours as 2, and fives and sixes as 3. Both methods will yield exactly the same result. If you don't have a d6 lying close by, well, you probably aren't playing Magic at all because they're pretty much ubiquitous for tracking counters and tokens.
Honestly, what makes Haktos worthy of so much drama? The combination of four specific mana spread across two different colors makes him considerably harder to cast than True-Name Nemesis, rendering the comparison largely moot. For EDH he's just another RW face commander with conditional evasion and/or invulnerability, albeit in slightly different (and novel) design space. He still dies to sweepers quite handily, and for anyone not keeping track, those usually start blowing up the board around turn three. If people in your particular playgroup aren't running sweepers, or ways to fetch them, I really don't know what to tell you at this point. Git gud, maybe?
This reminds me of the way way back, when I thought Lazav 1.0 was going to run the table in perpetuity. Instead of being immortal, I cast him on-curve and he promptly died to a sweeper. The same thing happened on consecutive turns until I could no longer afford the tax, at which point I began to realize that the combination of hexproof and low toughness wasn't everything I hope it'd be. At least there was still a chance of him doing something productive later in the game, after his cost skyrocketed to 10+. I think you'll find Haktos considerably less valuable at that point in the game; he has 0 other utility, and requires a board presence for that paltry 3 damage to do anything meaningful when, presumably, your opponents have had many turns and a corresponding amount of mana to play their own games. If your plan is to drop him on-curve and take out one or more players with commander damage before they can react, you run the very probable risk of being focused down by the entire table.
TLDR: sweepers and politics. I hope you all learned something today.
And, once again, there's nothing wrong with randomness. Making 1d6 Goblins isn't bad because you had to use a die, it's bad because your chances of winning are reliant on rolling a 6 and not a 1. Your chances of winning with Haktos aren't reliant on rolling a 4 instead of a 2, they rely on your opponent having the appropriate answer to the rolled CMC - sometimes this might be 2, sometimes it's 4.
Having played some d6-based games, I can assure you there's nothing inherently bad about mechanics that rely on chance, as long as you understand them and plan accordingly. Heck, the entirety of a Magic deck is one big game of chance, and the conversation hasn't devolved to comparisons between 4/60 or 1/99. I think we can be genuine with each other, yeah?
The key to taking advantage of d6 rolls is twofold: understanding that the value of an average die roll is 3.5, and rolling enough dice for the collective values to regress toward the mean. The latter is, in fact, quite difficult to do in Magic, but there's nothing wrong with assuming (in the abstract) that you'll roll a 3 or 4, especially over the course of several games. It's not a tremendous downside unless the result means the difference between winning and losing the game, and if it's a net positive then you're gaining some advantage no matter what you roll. Hearthstone, as a franchise, is built entirely around this premise.
Having played some d6-based games, I can assure you there's nothing inherently bad about mechanics that rely on chance, as long as you understand them and plan accordingly. Heck, the entirety of a Magic deck is one big game of chance, and the conversation hasn't devolved to comparisons between 4/60 or 1/99. I think we can be genuine with each other, yeah?
The key to taking advantage of d6 rolls is twofold: understanding that the value of an average die roll is 3.5, and rolling enough dice for the collective values to regress toward the mean. The latter is, in fact, quite difficult to do in Magic, but there's nothing wrong with assuming (in the abstract) that you'll roll a 3 or 4, especially over the course of several games. It's not a tremendous downside unless the result means the difference between winning and losing the game, and if it's a net positive then you're gaining some advantage no matter what you roll. Hearthstone, as a franchise, is built entirely around this premise.
Not sure what you meant by posting that, but yeah, that's what I've been saying as well. My 1d6 Goblins comment was not made to trash the concept of die-based cards, it was to demonstrate why poor design can make randomness bad - as I said, by making the floor of a card so low (i.e.: spending, say, 4 mana to make only 1 Goblin via dice roll) that the risk severely undermines the reward, or makes the game's success too reliant on the success of the die (i.e.: spending, say, 2 mana to make 6 Goblins via dice roll). It's not about the randomness itself, the problem is the variance caused by the die (or any random value) being too high, aka. 1 being loss, 6 being victory.
A good example of this in Magic is Collected Company vs Fallen Shinobi. Both are cards that rely on randomness, both cost 4, one is a Constructed all-star and the other is a kitchen table wet dream. The difference between the two is how much variance is involved - Fallen Shinobi's ceiling is much higher than CoCo, potentially winning you the game on the spot depending on what you flip, but a) the floor is much lower, as flipping only 2 cards has a much higher chance of just getting nothing and b) you have much less control of both the ceiling and the floor of Fallen Shinobi, while you can make your CoCos hit much more often and hit better cards via deckbuilding.
My point is, while it's difficult to control the variance of Haktos, there's very little reason to do so, because Haktos has so little variance in the first place. Yes, if you're staring down a Paradise Druid on the board, I guess it sucks to roll a 2, but it would suck just as much to roll a 4 and get killed by Wicked Wolf. The 2-roll isn't much worse than the 4-roll in this case, so it's less about the randomness and more about the cards both you and your opponent currently have. How is this different to drawing, say, Cast Down while staring down a Yorvo, Lord of Garenbrig and a Questing Beast? Your card is still dead, and you DID had a variance-less option in Murder. That doesn't makes Cast Down a bad card, just like getting randomly killed by a Paradise Druid means that, sometimes, your opponent won't ever be able to stop Haktos because he only drew Wicked Wolfs.
I think you missed my point. You control the variance simply by understanding the possible outcomes. Would you spend two mana for 3.5 goblins? Three mana? Four mana? At what point does the investment cease to be worth it?
I think you missed my point. You control the variance simply by understanding the possible outcomes. Would you spend 2 mana for 3.5 goblins? 3 mana? 4 mana? At what point does the investment cease to be worth it?
And you missed mine - I'm not talking about power level. 2 mana for 3.5 goblins would be amazing and definitely a powerful card, even with the risk of making a single Goblin. I'm talking about design, why people dislike entrusting their success or failure at the roll of the die, and why Haktos' randomness is fine from a design standpoint because no roll is inherently better than the other in a vacuum.
Making extremely pushed cards with high variance isn't a real solution to the design problem of people just not liking to entrust their victory to the said variance in the first place, because people playing these cards would just be frustrated that player A defeated player B for rolling two sixes in a row.
Oh, I understood your larger point. It just wasn’t relevant to mine.
There’s a 1/36 chance of rolling boxcars, that’s almost three times as likely as drawing any single card in EDH. I don’t think people who are accustomed to the inherent variance of a well shuffled deck are as hung up on or mystified by dice as you make them out to be.
Oh, I understood your larger point. It just wasn’t relevant to mine.
There’s a 1/36 chance of rolling boxcars, that’s almost three times as likely as drawing any single card in EDH. I don’t think people who are accustomed to the inherent variance of a well shuffled deck are as hung up on or mystified by dice as you make them out to be.
Except that, if you read this thread in its entirety, they are. The whole point of this comment thread stems from the fact that someone "improved" Haktos' design by removing the randomness, or calling it a "dollar bin rare" solely on the fact randomness is involved instead of evaluating if said randomness is actually detrimental to what the card is trying to accomplish.
I agree with Ritokure. Just because a card has a random element doesn't automatically make it bad. Everything depends on what the effects of the random element is. 'Fixing' the randomness by setting what Haktos is weak to seems like it would make it 'better', but that would just make it consistent. Which would work against him as now it's easy to home in on his weakness. The random element makes it so that this cannot be easily done as it forces opponents to have to work around something that requires a specific answer at a specific time.
Simply put, his randomness allows for the possibility of him seeing play and doing things in game vs. being constantly shut down because you always know what it take to stop him.
It'd be different if Haktos' effect was like:
Roll a 2: Sacrifice Haktos.
Roll a 3: Give him to an opponent.
Roll a 4: Haktos has protection from all CMC except 4.
Oh, I understood your larger point. It just wasn’t relevant to mine.
There’s a 1/36 chance of rolling boxcars, that’s almost three times as likely as drawing any single card in EDH. I don’t think people who are accustomed to the inherent variance of a well shuffled deck are as hung up on or mystified by dice as you make them out to be.
Except that, if you read this thread in its entirety, they are. The whole point of this comment thread stems from the fact that someone "improved" Haktos' design by removing the randomness, or calling it a "dollar bin rare" solely on the fact randomness is involved instead of evaluating if said randomness is actually detrimental to what the card is trying to accomplish.
A vocal minority is still a minority. You really think a few chumps complaining in this thread is representative of the larger Magic community? These forums are the poorest of piss-poor sample sizes.
A vocal minority is still a minority. You really think a few chumps complaining in this thread is representative of the larger Magic community? These forums are the poorest of piss-poor sample sizes.
Then what's your issue with anything being discussed here then? If nothing here is representative of the Magic community as a whole, why write three paragraphs about die rolls in a discussion that doesn't concerns you about a theme you don't want to discuss?
The short answer? Because I could. Elucidating a few misguided souls on some random internet forum isn't necessarily the best or most practical way of improving the community, but it's a start.
Shine a light upon this night of otherworldly fiends
Odin's might be your guide, divorce you from the sane
Hammer's way will have its say, rise up in their name
Scratching hag, you rake your claws, gnash your crooked teeth
You've taken slaves like ocean waves, now feel the ocean seethe
- Children of the Elder Gods by Poets of the Fall
Third, everything else I said was elaborating on a point used by WotC themselves and, in my 2nd response, a cynical and sarcastic response for an equally cynical and sarcastic response. Or you think his sarcastic "media" comment was any less rude than my sarcastic GDS comment?
Wrong. The problem with random cards is how often their power ceiling (aka. card at its best) doesn't justifies their floor (aka. card at its worst). Cards like CoCo or Delver, for example, are technically random cards, but they have a high ceiling and whose deckbuilding allows you to reduce its floor. Haktos tackles this problem and solves it by making its ceiling and floor equally as potent - there's no inherently bad roll, rolling a 2 could be much better than rolling a 3 if your opponent has Murderous Rider in hand or much better than 4 if your opponent has Storm's Wrath. Haktos seeing play or not is less reliant on its random design and more on if there's a Boros deck that could actually play him.
And it's a valid defense, reason why it's stated in the article. Metagaming to hate on a particular player is usually shunned upon in playgroups for a reason, and while oftenly there's nothing WotC can do about it, this time they did, and this should be seen as a good thing.
See point above. WotC trying to promote a more dynamic gameplay in casual tables should be seen as a good thing, not as a problem to be fixed by removing 2/3rds of the effect of a card in a CAC. You can let salty players be salty now, because Haktos as-is is perfectly fine.
No, you did not, you created a Voltron Commander. The only gimmick about him is that he can only be Voltron'd by 4 CMC stuff, so instead of trying to work around his random protection with anthems and global effects, you're going to Scryfall and looking up Auras and Equipments with CMC 4. It's still just another Boros Commander that likes to hit face in the end and, if anything, you just made building around him more linear and boring.
And, once again, there's nothing wrong with randomness. Making 1d6 Goblins isn't bad because you had to use a die, it's bad because your chances of winning are reliant on rolling a 6 and not a 1. Your chances of winning with Haktos aren't reliant on rolling a 4 instead of a 2, they rely on your opponent having the appropriate answer to the rolled CMC - sometimes this might be 2, sometimes it's 4. And hey, "having the appropriate answer to a threat" has been a part of Magic since the old days of Terror.
Rolling a d6 isn't especially common in black-border Magic nowadays, but it happens from time to time. I've never seen a card expressly require a d3, but Outlaws' Merriment comes close, so there's recent precedent. A d3 itself is actually fairly common in the larger scope of gaming, so there should be no mystery there. For the uninitiated, you can roll a d6 and divide the result by 2, rounding up, or you can count ones and twos as 1, threes and fours as 2, and fives and sixes as 3. Both methods will yield exactly the same result. If you don't have a d6 lying close by, well, you probably aren't playing Magic at all because they're pretty much ubiquitous for tracking counters and tokens.
Honestly, what makes Haktos worthy of so much drama? The combination of four specific mana spread across two different colors makes him considerably harder to cast than True-Name Nemesis, rendering the comparison largely moot. For EDH he's just another RW face commander with conditional evasion and/or invulnerability, albeit in slightly different (and novel) design space. He still dies to sweepers quite handily, and for anyone not keeping track, those usually start blowing up the board around turn three. If people in your particular playgroup aren't running sweepers, or ways to fetch them, I really don't know what to tell you at this point. Git gud, maybe?
This reminds me of the way way back, when I thought Lazav 1.0 was going to run the table in perpetuity. Instead of being immortal, I cast him on-curve and he promptly died to a sweeper. The same thing happened on consecutive turns until I could no longer afford the tax, at which point I began to realize that the combination of hexproof and low toughness wasn't everything I hope it'd be. At least there was still a chance of him doing something productive later in the game, after his cost skyrocketed to 10+. I think you'll find Haktos considerably less valuable at that point in the game; he has 0 other utility, and requires a board presence for that paltry 3 damage to do anything meaningful when, presumably, your opponents have had many turns and a corresponding amount of mana to play their own games. If your plan is to drop him on-curve and take out one or more players with commander damage before they can react, you run the very probable risk of being focused down by the entire table.
TLDR: sweepers and politics. I hope you all learned something today.
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#DefundThePolice
Having played some d6-based games, I can assure you there's nothing inherently bad about mechanics that rely on chance, as long as you understand them and plan accordingly. Heck, the entirety of a Magic deck is one big game of chance, and the conversation hasn't devolved to comparisons between 4/60 or 1/99. I think we can be genuine with each other, yeah?
The key to taking advantage of d6 rolls is twofold: understanding that the value of an average die roll is 3.5, and rolling enough dice for the collective values to regress toward the mean. The latter is, in fact, quite difficult to do in Magic, but there's nothing wrong with assuming (in the abstract) that you'll roll a 3 or 4, especially over the course of several games. It's not a tremendous downside unless the result means the difference between winning and losing the game, and if it's a net positive then you're gaining some advantage no matter what you roll. Hearthstone, as a franchise, is built entirely around this premise.
---
#BLM
#DefundThePolice
A good example of this in Magic is Collected Company vs Fallen Shinobi. Both are cards that rely on randomness, both cost 4, one is a Constructed all-star and the other is a kitchen table wet dream. The difference between the two is how much variance is involved - Fallen Shinobi's ceiling is much higher than CoCo, potentially winning you the game on the spot depending on what you flip, but a) the floor is much lower, as flipping only 2 cards has a much higher chance of just getting nothing and b) you have much less control of both the ceiling and the floor of Fallen Shinobi, while you can make your CoCos hit much more often and hit better cards via deckbuilding.
My point is, while it's difficult to control the variance of Haktos, there's very little reason to do so, because Haktos has so little variance in the first place. Yes, if you're staring down a Paradise Druid on the board, I guess it sucks to roll a 2, but it would suck just as much to roll a 4 and get killed by Wicked Wolf. The 2-roll isn't much worse than the 4-roll in this case, so it's less about the randomness and more about the cards both you and your opponent currently have. How is this different to drawing, say, Cast Down while staring down a Yorvo, Lord of Garenbrig and a Questing Beast? Your card is still dead, and you DID had a variance-less option in Murder. That doesn't makes Cast Down a bad card, just like getting randomly killed by a Paradise Druid means that, sometimes, your opponent won't ever be able to stop Haktos because he only drew Wicked Wolfs.
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Making extremely pushed cards with high variance isn't a real solution to the design problem of people just not liking to entrust their victory to the said variance in the first place, because people playing these cards would just be frustrated that player A defeated player B for rolling two sixes in a row.
There’s a 1/36 chance of rolling boxcars, that’s almost three times as likely as drawing any single card in EDH. I don’t think people who are accustomed to the inherent variance of a well shuffled deck are as hung up on or mystified by dice as you make them out to be.
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#DefundThePolice
Simply put, his randomness allows for the possibility of him seeing play and doing things in game vs. being constantly shut down because you always know what it take to stop him.
It'd be different if Haktos' effect was like:
Roll a 2: Sacrifice Haktos.
Roll a 3: Give him to an opponent.
Roll a 4: Haktos has protection from all CMC except 4.
BK'rrik Goodstuff
GWSythis Enchantress
URYusri Coin Flip
BRGKorvold Tokens
BGUYarok Lands Matter
WUBRaffine Looter
A vocal minority is still a minority. You really think a few chumps complaining in this thread is representative of the larger Magic community? These forums are the poorest of piss-poor sample sizes.
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#DefundThePolice
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#DefundThePolice