What you are implicitly stating is that the only thing that should matter when comparing sets is tournaments. This is strange, as the majority of magic players will never play in a tournament and don't care about them.
You care about tournaments. That is fine, but you are letting your own values warp your sense of what you claimed your criteria were. If you want criteria to care about tournaments, then redefine your criteria to be in terms of tournaments. Just don't expect people who don't care about tournaments to share your values.
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
What you are implicitly stating is that the only thing that should matter when comparing sets is tournaments. This is strange, as the majority of magic players will never play in a tournament and don't care about them.
You care about tournaments. That is fine, but you are letting your own values warp your sense of what you claimed your criteria were. If you want criteria to care about tournaments, then redefine your criteria to be in terms of tournaments. Just don't expect people who don't care about tournaments to share your values.
If you don't have a single basis to check for the criteria that I mentioned (i.e. tournaments) then how do you expect to measure the success of the criteria? You would have different players playing with decks that may or may not be amazing and giving their particular opinions of what may or may not have worked for them. In general it would be really hard to gather this information, which already makes the use of criteria useless since you can't check it later, and you would have different opinions based on people personal beliefs. Timmy may lose 99 of a 100 games that he plays with his eldrazi deck, but he likes eldrazis and therefore he loves zendikar. Should Timmy be a good measure of what players expect from eldrazi in every future set? Should Timmy subjective opinion tell you that BFZ succeeded? And what if Johnny dislikes playing with eldrazi, no matter if they are competitive or not? He just dislikes the idea of them, and therefore dislikes Zendikar. Should we consider Johnny opinion?
It is to avoid this sort of conundrum that I use tournaments as a good measurement tool. You may not want to use them, fine, but then I have absolutely no idea how you expect to compare/judge sets.
Would you like to read Commander stories? Check my latest stories, coming from Lorwyn and Innistrad: Ghoulcaller Gisa and Doran, The Siege Tower! If you like my writing, ask me to write something for your commander as well!
What you are implicitly stating is that the only thing that should matter when comparing sets is tournaments. This is strange, as the majority of magic players will never play in a tournament and don't care about them.
You care about tournaments. That is fine, but you are letting your own values warp your sense of what you claimed your criteria were. If you want criteria to care about tournaments, then redefine your criteria to be in terms of tournaments. Just don't expect people who don't care about tournaments to share your values.
For one, there is a point to be made about design that is relevant to tournament play, some mechanics are "easier" to develop than others, designing a mechanic that is easy to develop to a competitive level is good design, then again there's storm , which saw a ton of competitive play, yet it's one of the worst designs out there in development terms, why you ask? Simple, you either have to put irrelevant effects on the cards or it becomes broken very quickly.
As for processors, I think most people are underestimating the effects, getting a 3 mana FTK or 7 power out of 5 mana, a good payoff, and there are quite a few ways to enable them, it's obviously tricky because it's new design space. One more thing you have to consider is, people are inherently gonna lean to the safer choices, and because there are more established/explored/fleshed out strategies, they are inherently at an advantage over new less explored, and not fully fleshed out ones.
And again, more people are gonna make kitchen table processor decks than tournament abzan or Jeskai black decks.
If you don't have a single basis to check for the criteria that I mentioned (i.e. tournaments) then how do you expect to measure the success of the criteria? You would have different players playing with decks that may or may not be amazing and giving their particular opinions of what may or may not have worked for them. In general it would be really hard to gather this information, which already makes the use of criteria useless since you can't check it later, and you would have different opinions based on people personal's beliefs. Timmy may lose 99 of a 100 games that he plays with his eldrazi deck, but he likes eldrazis and therefore he loves zendikar. Should Timmy be a good measure of what players expect from eldrazi in every future set? Should Timmy subjective opinion tell you that BFZ succeeded? And what if Johnny dislikes playing with eldrazi, no matter if they are competitive or not? He just dislikes the idea of them, and therefore dislikes Zendikar. Should we consider Johnny opinion?
Cause clearly spike is the only one that matters, right? You honestly don't see your bias here?
It is to avoid this sort of conundrum that I use tournaments as a good measurement tool. You may not want to use them, fine, but then I have absolutely no idea how you expect to compare/judge sets.
I agree. Comparing sets is difficult. I'm pretty sure the best we can do is opinion polls. Failing that, knowing the delta in the size of the player base over time would be an interesting metric as well.
Absent this data, all we are doing is saying "I don't like this set, poor me" or "I like this set, sucks to be you."
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
What you are implicitly stating is that the only thing that should matter when comparing sets is tournaments. This is strange, as the majority of magic players will never play in a tournament and don't care about them.
You care about tournaments. That is fine, but you are letting your own values warp your sense of what you claimed your criteria were. If you want criteria to care about tournaments, then redefine your criteria to be in terms of tournaments. Just don't expect people who don't care about tournaments to share your values.
If you don't have a single basis to check for the criteria that I mentioned (i.e. tournaments) then how do you expect to measure the success of the criteria? You would have different players playing with decks that may or may not be amazing and giving their particular opinions of what may or may not have worked for them. In general it would be really hard to gather this information, which already makes the use of criteria useless since you can't check it later, and you would have different opinions based on people personal beliefs. Timmy may lose 99 of a 100 games that he plays with his eldrazi deck, but he likes eldrazis and therefore he loves zendikar. Should Timmy be a good measure of what players expect from eldrazi in every future set? Should Timmy subjective opinion tell you that BFZ succeeded? And what if Johnny dislikes playing with eldrazi, no matter if they are competitive or not? He just dislikes the idea of them, and therefore dislikes Zendikar. Should we consider Johnny opinion?
It is to avoid this sort of conundrum that I use tournaments as a good measurement tool. You may not want to use them, fine, but then I have absolutely no idea how you expect to compare/judge sets.
Yeah... tournament cares about just spike's variants, so that's no good either, in real life you have to take all 3 psycographics, plus both Vorthos and Mel, like wizards do with sales data, questionnaires and the like.
I have a bias towards making cards that nobody use effective at playing competitively, sure, that is why I analyze things with a somewhat competitive scenario in mind. But I do believe tournaments at the moment are one of the most reliable tools of comparison, if you don't use them the story becomes a lot more complex. Maybe opinion pools can work, I really don't know.
I don't trust wizards sales data because magic is a growing game, which makes it easier for the next set to outsell the previous one and because in BFZ we have the Expeditions and the Full-art basic lands that threw the sales through the roof. And while that is a brilliant marketing decision it has absolutely nothing to do with set quality and looking at sales would cloud your judgement in that.
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I think at this point the thread has become kind of stale, now it's just circular arguing of 'but I think it's okay' without any clear argument other than 'I feel like this could be good / we don't know yet / casual players might like it". To each their own. The actual topic, though, isn't whether this group or that group likes the set, the question was 'is this the worst magic set' and the writing is all over the wall that the answer is yes.
- After two major opens, besides lands, only Gideon has repeatedly made a Top 8 list. People are not playing these cards. That is unprecedented in the history of Standard as long as I've been playing (CHK/RAV). Bring to light, one of the only (if not the only) build around me cards in the set makes a close second.
- The value on this set is atrocious.
- In the absence of other playstyles / options, coupled with the multi-format play, Jace has hit $80 and divided Standard into decks with blue and Jace and decks without either.
- The lack of efficient kill spells, countermagic, and burn didn't make everyone stick to the wedge-colored of the previous block or the big dumb monsters theme of this block. Instead, they used the lands to jam 4 and 5-color strategies to fill in missing holes. Jeskai without Lightning Strike became Jeskai black with Crackling Doom and Murderous Cut.
- Watching matches with the above is horrendous. Guys are using unfavorable Radiant Flames as kill spells for problematic creatures, or worse, they can't fetch the right colors on time. It's miserable to watch, and believe me, for 4 hours I tried.
- Not one Ingest/Processor deck in any Top 32. It's not a good mechanic. Stop defending it already.
At this point, if Origins had Gideon, Kiora, Radiant Flames, and the lands, BFZ would not need to exist, period. I've never seen a set basically eschewed en masse from the brewing table like this. Quite honestly, this was even worse than I predicted. I actually thought there would be some Eldrazi strategies, maybe UG Tutelage Fog, but no. Nothing. If that doesn't say worst set in modern memory, I don't know what does.
I ask you the same question this thread has been tackling all day. Why should I care about tournaments? You critique others for saying "I think the set is fine" yet all you have done is say "I think this set sucks". Why should I listen to you when I don't care about any of the aspects of magic that you seem to value exclusively?
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
Well i don't play tournaments, droped standard and basically play Commander and casual and i think this set is lame.Very few cards that jigles my inner timmy, even with freaking Eldrazi in it.Most of them are really boring and dull and don't get me on the Processors, i hate them.
O rigins had more interesting and fun to build around cards like Starfield of Nyx, flameshadow conjuring, Outland colossus, Demonic Pact,etc.Cards that most likelly won't see no tournament play but they are fascinating cards that makes me decks with them, even if they are casuals.IMO BFZ doesn't for me because Devoid/Ingest are poorlly implemented, Awaken is ok but feels tacked on like scry on Theros that just made cards cost more just because they got a new mechanic added to them, LAndfall is boring this time, Allies seems abit messy been randomlly placed on some cards but in others...just very weird implementation.
Maybe the hype was too big for this set that the disapointing outcome became big aswell.Eitherway i'll jsut get some singles, full art lands and never look back at this lottery set that is using Expeditions to sell more.
I ask you the same question this thread has been tackling all day. Why should I care about tournaments? You critique others for saying "I think the set is fine" yet all you have done is say "I think this set sucks". Why should I listen to you when I don't care about any of the aspects of magic that you seem to value exclusively?
You don't have to listen to a word I say. That "to each their own" was meant for you. You value something about this set, have a ball. I'm not here to change anyone's mind, especially when minds like yours are too rigid to be changed. If you've been playing as long as I have, and enjoyed as many new releases as I have, and don't see this as the bottom (I hope) of a low point we've been trending towards for years, no amount of logical argument, objective data, statistics, pointing at other sets, or anything else is going to change your feelgoods about it. So great, have fun, throw oodles of money at the product so Wizards can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Unfortunately, that pat is going to last as long as the next rotation, which is about the average length of time it takes before they take accountability and apologize for their mistakes and learn nothing from them. They've done it before, they'll do it again, but people like you buy up BFZ and MM15 and let them think for a little while that this was acceptable.
Because they look really dumb if they make a set so bad for competitive that it hurts their big cash cow in standard. I hope some pro does have some brew coming next week, but right now SephX is right in that this set has only offered a very few cards to constructed and has made for some awful looking decks.
Limited is not looking much better. When your coverage team states that Bane of Bela Ged or any other 7+ mana Eldrazi is not playable in competitive draft in this set it means you've messed up. If this set sucks for competitive magic it absolutely trickles down to affect everyone.
Limited is not looking much better. When your coverage team states that Bane of Bela Ged or any other 7+ mana Eldrazi is not playable in competitive draft in this set it means you've messed up. If this set sucks for competitive magic it absolutely trickles down to affect everyone.
I can't speak to "competitive draft", but I can say that I've gone 3-0 with Bane of Bela Ged. None of my games were close either. Maybe as people figure out the format, that deck will no longer be viable, but I doubt it.
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Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
Claims like "The Worst Magic Set" are going to get a lot of dissent because there have been some really bad Magic sets. And as far as terrible design, this set has nothing on Prophecy, Saviors, BotG or about half the pre-Tempest editions.
There are a lot of things I don't like about this set, but looking at a lot of its cards, the power level is fine to fit into the already-watered-down Standard (leaving aside the cards that actually do something, BFZ's mana and staples like Murder, Cancel, Pyroclasm, or aggro low-drops are all auto-includes because there just isn't enough competition from Tarkir).
Early tournaments rarely look like the tournaments 2-3 months in, just because it takes a while for everyone to figure out how to best approach the new environment. Look at all the GB midrange or UW control decks in early Theros tourneys, just jamming RTR cards plus Polukranos, World Eater or Elspeth, Sun's Champion (the only Devotion card I remember making an impact in the first open or two was Fanatic of Mogis). Early RTR tourneys were bloated with BG and BR Zombies.
Give it a month, and even if BFZ doesn't have a lot of representation in the established meta by then, there are still a lot of absolutely godawful editions that would supercede just about anything for "Worst Magic Set."
I ask you the same question this thread has been tackling all day. Why should I care about tournaments? You critique others for saying "I think the set is fine" yet all you have done is say "I think this set sucks". Why should I listen to you when I don't care about any of the aspects of magic that you seem to value exclusively?
Because if you don't care about tournaments there are way more fun cards from magic's history to play with than these (subjective but probably true for most people). If you aren't playing a tournament format than why restrict yourself to rubbish?
The only cards from BFZ that I will buy are crumble to dust, the new art dispel and the new lands.
I played the sealed pre release and it was the worst sealed match I have ever experienced.
Subjective but, looking at the responses online, true for many.
Hmm surprised no one has mentioned CHRONICLES. The problems from it have easily had one of the longest lasting effects on Magic. The aftermath of Chronicles is still being felt, and though it was definitely better than many "bad" sets playability wise it did more harm to Magic than a dozen sets like BFZ in a row could even begin to do.
The people who claim worst set of all time are mistaken. Obviously noobs vs true jaded vets on this thread! Battle for zendikar is ok but not super sweet, the design space they have brought to this set screams for sequels, I doubt we've seen the last of any of these mechanics in the long run. And Lulz at people who get clammed by radiant flames
What's your problem with Chronicles or Renaissance? The original Reprint Set had a good idea, not very well executed as a limited Format but still good.
Quote from mtgsalvation.gamepedia.com entry »
The purpose of Chronicles was to keep two steady sources Magic available at the same time, to increase the pool of cards available, and to make it easier for new players to get a hold of useful, popular cards for their decks. However, this plan was aborted by the time of the release of Fifth Edition, where extra cards simply were incorporated in the basic set.
Much like the Modern Master sets, the idea is very good. They could be better executed since they lack some obvious card choices. But in the end, they did more for the Magic Sets than Homelands.
IMO, Wizard should revise their Reprint policy and do a real Modern Masters set - with the most used cards from the past 18 months and some fitting additions to make a decent limited set. And no limitation of the print run, selling it for the standard price of a normal booster and forcing that price with a huge print run.
To make it different, you could even call it "Magic Essentials" and cycle through different formats each year, with Modern in one year, EDH the next (since we dont see reprints there) and Vintage/Legacy in the third. Even if you cant reprint some really expensive cards like Moxen and the others on the Reserved List, a new print run of Force of Will, Brainstorm, Fetches and Shocks in one set would be wonderful for the availability of Eternal staples.
Would it suck if the prices of some X00 Dollar cards tank? Yeah - but in the end we would have way more players that would play Eternal formats - if the decks are only 250 Dollar instead of 2500 Dollar.
Yeah.. that's not gonna happen, and for good reason, it would hurt the game more than it would help, you'd probably get another reserve list, and as it's been said multiple times, there's a fine line with legacy staples, WotC CAN'T print certain legacy cards because they are in the reserve list, if they print the ones they can print, what would happen is, more people try to get into legacy, the demand for the cards they can't print increases, and you get a bigger problem.
Nobody promised anything about modern being affordable, much less cheap, they promised that it would be supported, and they have delivered on that promise, you guys need to understand that Magic The Gathering is a TCG, and for the game to thrive, the cards have to hold value, they are collectibles and WotC needs them to be relatively expensive so people actually wants to buy them, modern masters' goal is to make the cards AVAILABLE not cheap.
I think at this point the thread has become kind of stale, now it's just circular arguing of 'but I think it's okay' without any clear argument other than 'I feel like this could be good / we don't know yet / casual players might like it". To each their own. The actual topic, though, isn't whether this group or that group likes the set, the question was 'is this the worst magic set' and the writing is all over the wall that the answer is yes.
- After two major opens, besides lands, only Gideon has repeatedly made a Top 8 list. People are not playing these cards. That is unprecedented in the history of Standard as long as I've been playing (CHK/RAV). Bring to light, one of the only (if not the only) build around me cards in the set makes a close second.
- The value on this set is atrocious.
- In the absence of other playstyles / options, coupled with the multi-format play, Jace has hit $80 and divided Standard into decks with blue and Jace and decks without either.
- The lack of efficient kill spells, countermagic, and burn didn't make everyone stick to the wedge-colored of the previous block or the big dumb monsters theme of this block. Instead, they used the lands to jam 4 and 5-color strategies to fill in missing holes. Jeskai without Lightning Strike became Jeskai black with Crackling Doom and Murderous Cut.
- Watching matches with the above is horrendous. Guys are using unfavorable Radiant Flames as kill spells for problematic creatures, or worse, they can't fetch the right colors on time. It's miserable to watch, and believe me, for 4 hours I tried.
- Not one Ingest/Processor deck in any Top 32. It's not a good mechanic. Stop defending it already.
At this point, if Origins had Gideon, Kiora, Radiant Flames, and the lands, BFZ would not need to exist, period. I've never seen a set basically eschewed en masse from the brewing table like this. Quite honestly, this was even worse than I predicted. I actually thought there would be some Eldrazi strategies, maybe UG Tutelage Fog, but no. Nothing. If that doesn't say worst set in modern memory, I don't know what does.
Actually, the writing on the wall isn't "yes". The writing on the wall is "this set has divided the community in a way that hasn't been seen since Scars with infect and NPH with Phyrexian mana". What's this says to me is that two seperate subsets of players have different values to guage if a set is good or bad and those two subsets being unable to come to a middle ground... well actually, one subset is saying "I think this set is fine, it appeals to my desires of what I expect from this set" and the other saying "This set is bad, period, and it's not a matter of opinion... Just look at the proof provided by people only in my own subset". Once again I say, for a bunch of folks who like to think so highly of their own intelligence, there is some major idiocy at play here.
If Spikes were vegetarians, they'd be the vegetarians that not only practice vegetarianism themselves, but insist that everyone that doesn't is an evil human being and is just wrong. Instead of saying is "wrong to eat meat" they say "it's wrong to play with competitively inferior cards", like it is the word of God and not just their own preference.
If Spikes were vegetarians, they'd be the vegetarians that not only practice vegetarianism themselves, but insist that everyone that doesn't is an evil human being and is just wrong. Instead of saying is "wrong to eat meat" they say "it's wrong to play with competitively inferior cards", like it is the word of God and not just their own preference.
It's not wrong to have Day of Judgement being reprinted over Wrath of God. It is wrong for a new card to be Day of Judgement but be costed at 8 mana instead. This set is weaker than Zendikar, Worldwake and Rize. If you compare this set to any set in the original zendikar block it loses in flavour and gameplay.
The point of this thread is to state why people think this is a terrible set and I will prove it now;
Since 8th edition came out, start of modern block, there have been 48 sets release. 9 of those were core sets. We will ignore the core sets in this count. So 39 sets came out.
The supposed worst were Champions of Kamigawa, Coldsnap, Dragon's Maze and Born of Gods (Mirrodin is excused from this list because of imbalanced and not underpushed cards).
I would rather play every set named above than play BFZ again.
Champions at least had a cool cycle of dragons, diving top, gilmpse of nature and kiki-jiki.
Coldsnap had Ohran Viper, Dark Depths, Ice basic lands and Vanish into Memory (a YMTC card)
DGM had Ral Zarek, shock lands(higher chance than expeditions), Voice and Aetherling
Born Of Gods had Brimaz, Gods and Courser.
To me this set is the worst set in modern. Out of 39 sets this is the worst. That is 12 years of production for those wondering.
If I buy a box of Fifth Dawn from the markets, wizards sees no money from that. I would rather buy old boxes of magic and draft them with my friends (which I do) than draft BFZ.
- Glimpse doesn't count, it was unplayable for a really really really long time, who knows if any of the unplayable cards from BfZ is gonna turn out to be like glimpse
- Dark depts was also unplayable until Zendikar came out, Vanish into memory also turned out to be unplayable, and battle lands are better than snow lands, +1 for BfZ
- DGM had Ral Zarek, and shocks, this set has Gideon, Drana and Battle lands, plus the expeditions, and those are the ones that are obvious, BfZ comes ahead.
- None of the gods saw any play, this set also had the temples, but again Brimas + Courser vs Gideon and drana, BFZ comes ahead here too
So what was your point again? I'll stress, this set has been out for 2 weeks, some of the cards you named became playable years after their release. BfZ is definitely better than those sets, not even close.
If Spikes were vegetarians, they'd be the vegetarians that not only practice vegetarianism themselves, but insist that everyone that doesn't is an evil human being and is just wrong. Instead of saying is "wrong to eat meat" they say "it's wrong to play with competitively inferior cards", like it is the word of God and not just their own preference.
It's not wrong to have Day of Judgement being reprinted over Wrath of God. It is wrong for a new card to be Day of Judgement but be costed at 8 mana instead. This set is weaker than Zendikar, Worldwake and Rize. If you compare this set to any set in the original zendikar block it loses in flavour and gameplay.
The point of this thread is to state why people think this is a terrible set and I will prove it now;
Since 8th edition came out, start of modern block, there have been 48 sets release. 9 of those were core sets. We will ignore the core sets in this count. So 39 sets came out.
The supposed worst were Champions of Kamigawa, Coldsnap, Dragon's Maze and Born of Gods (Mirrodin is excused from this list because of imbalanced and not underpushed cards).
I would rather play every set named above than play BFZ again.
Champions at least had a cool cycle of dragons, diving top, gilmpse of nature and kiki-jiki.
Coldsnap had Ohran Viper, Dark Depths, Ice basic lands and Vanish into Memory (a YMTC card)
DGM had Ral Zarek, shock lands(higher chance than expeditions), Voice and Aetherling
Born Of Gods had Brimaz, Gods and Courser.
To me this set is the worst set in modern. Out of 39 sets this is the worst. That is 12 years of production for those wondering.
If I buy a box of Fifth Dawn from the markets, wizards sees no money from that. I would rather buy old boxes of magic and draft them with my friends (which I do) than draft BFZ.
You seem to have missed The_Return_of_Skullfer's point entirely. We understand what you are saying. You don't like BFZ. That doesn't make it the worst set ever or even necessarily bad.
Every time I read a comment about "Well if this card had card draw/trample/haste/indestructible/hexproof/life gain...", I think "You're missing the point." They're armchair developer comments that fail to take into account the card's role in the greater Limited and Standard environment. No, it may not be as good as whatever card you're comparing it to. There's a reason for that. Not every burn spell is Lightning Bolt, nor does it need to be or should be.
- Manite
They were "fun" sets, they just weren't "good" sets. The biggest issue with fallen empires, is it was created to try and deal with the massive demand this newish game started to get. Previously they couldn't keep packs in stores, so they increased the print run... but A LOT, I forget the exact order, by maybe by 10 or even 100 times as many. AND the set wasn't good, so no one bought it. That is party of why, even 15-20 years after it came out, you can still get packs for $1-2 some places.
My guess most people try to compare the new "bad sets" to the old "really truly bad sets", because they never played in a "really truly bad set", so if a set is lower powered than other recent sets "it is the worst set since FE".
<begin old man> Back in my day, people traded black lotuses for shivan dragons cause dragons were useful. I remember seeing ancestral recall for $20 and thinking "who would ever pay $20 for that card". I remember wondering why people wanted moxes, with mana drop moxes were just easier to kill lands. And in my day we knew what a bad set was, cause we spent money on fallen empires and homelands. <end old man>
It is scary looking back on this game from the standpoint of someone who started in mid 1993... where has my life gone?
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I basically only play EDH:
Damia, Jenara, Xiahou Dun, Mareth, Nekusar, Oloro, Kresh, Deretti
Also, Saying BFZ is "the worst set in modern", is quite different than "worse set ever".
I perhaps would agree that BFZ is the worst set in modern, or at least agree that it "could be". But I don't play modern. Too expensive to play, and it would cost me several of my 12 EDH decks to sacrifice to play it. So I don't know that format, but I also think that a lot of modern takes time to grow. A year from now people's views of this set could be quite different. But CoK block was a really crappy block, that was near the end of my T2 days, before I switched to Big Deck (a mostly local phily format) and then to EDH when Big Deck died.
I don't know for certain, others might, but doesn't this type of thread basically emerge after every set comes out? I mean <old man> I used to be able to buy LEDs for 4/$1, and dream halls was the worst card in its set </old man>. Perhaps people need to take a breath from complaining about wizards, and just play the game. Every set can't be really powerful, full of really powerful cards, or power creep starts setting in. So yeah, most cards from any new set are going to be bad, because if they aren't, and you have 60-70% great playable cards, how are they going to keep doing that in every future set without eventually making an "instant, CC U, draw 10 cards" years later.
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I basically only play EDH:
Damia, Jenara, Xiahou Dun, Mareth, Nekusar, Oloro, Kresh, Deretti
What's your problem with Chronicles or Renaissance? The original Reprint Set had a good idea, not very well executed as a limited Format but still good.
As I said I wasn't talking about their power level or the quality of cards in them. Plain and simple Chronicles nearly killed Magic. It drove the entire early secondary market to the brink of collapse, ruined the value of nearly every staple to that point, and drove off a large portion of the player base. It is the reason the Reserved List exists, and why WoTC is very careful about their reprint policy.
On an separate note, the print run on Fallen Empires was on the order of 140,000,000 cards. Multiple times larger than the combined print runs of every set to that point.
What you are implicitly stating is that the only thing that should matter when comparing sets is tournaments. This is strange, as the majority of magic players will never play in a tournament and don't care about them.
You care about tournaments. That is fine, but you are letting your own values warp your sense of what you claimed your criteria were. If you want criteria to care about tournaments, then redefine your criteria to be in terms of tournaments. Just don't expect people who don't care about tournaments to share your values.
- Manite
If you don't have a single basis to check for the criteria that I mentioned (i.e. tournaments) then how do you expect to measure the success of the criteria? You would have different players playing with decks that may or may not be amazing and giving their particular opinions of what may or may not have worked for them. In general it would be really hard to gather this information, which already makes the use of criteria useless since you can't check it later, and you would have different opinions based on people personal beliefs. Timmy may lose 99 of a 100 games that he plays with his eldrazi deck, but he likes eldrazis and therefore he loves zendikar. Should Timmy be a good measure of what players expect from eldrazi in every future set? Should Timmy subjective opinion tell you that BFZ succeeded? And what if Johnny dislikes playing with eldrazi, no matter if they are competitive or not? He just dislikes the idea of them, and therefore dislikes Zendikar. Should we consider Johnny opinion?
It is to avoid this sort of conundrum that I use tournaments as a good measurement tool. You may not want to use them, fine, but then I have absolutely no idea how you expect to compare/judge sets.
Read my other stories as well (some ongoing):
Reaper King (a horror story), Kaalia of the Vast (an origin story), Sequels for Innistrad (Alternative sequels for Inn), Grey Areas (Odric's fanfic), Royal Succession (goblins),The Tracker's Message (eldrazi on Innistrad) and Ugin and his Eye (the end of OGW).
For one, there is a point to be made about design that is relevant to tournament play, some mechanics are "easier" to develop than others, designing a mechanic that is easy to develop to a competitive level is good design, then again there's storm , which saw a ton of competitive play, yet it's one of the worst designs out there in development terms, why you ask? Simple, you either have to put irrelevant effects on the cards or it becomes broken very quickly.
As for processors, I think most people are underestimating the effects, getting a 3 mana FTK or 7 power out of 5 mana, a good payoff, and there are quite a few ways to enable them, it's obviously tricky because it's new design space. One more thing you have to consider is, people are inherently gonna lean to the safer choices, and because there are more established/explored/fleshed out strategies, they are inherently at an advantage over new less explored, and not fully fleshed out ones.
And again, more people are gonna make kitchen table processor decks than tournament abzan or Jeskai black decks.
I agree. Comparing sets is difficult. I'm pretty sure the best we can do is opinion polls. Failing that, knowing the delta in the size of the player base over time would be an interesting metric as well.
Absent this data, all we are doing is saying "I don't like this set, poor me" or "I like this set, sucks to be you."
- Manite
I don't trust wizards sales data because magic is a growing game, which makes it easier for the next set to outsell the previous one and because in BFZ we have the Expeditions and the Full-art basic lands that threw the sales through the roof. And while that is a brilliant marketing decision it has absolutely nothing to do with set quality and looking at sales would cloud your judgement in that.
Read my other stories as well (some ongoing):
Reaper King (a horror story), Kaalia of the Vast (an origin story), Sequels for Innistrad (Alternative sequels for Inn), Grey Areas (Odric's fanfic), Royal Succession (goblins),The Tracker's Message (eldrazi on Innistrad) and Ugin and his Eye (the end of OGW).
- After two major opens, besides lands, only Gideon has repeatedly made a Top 8 list. People are not playing these cards. That is unprecedented in the history of Standard as long as I've been playing (CHK/RAV). Bring to light, one of the only (if not the only) build around me cards in the set makes a close second.
- The value on this set is atrocious.
- In the absence of other playstyles / options, coupled with the multi-format play, Jace has hit $80 and divided Standard into decks with blue and Jace and decks without either.
- The lack of efficient kill spells, countermagic, and burn didn't make everyone stick to the wedge-colored of the previous block or the big dumb monsters theme of this block. Instead, they used the lands to jam 4 and 5-color strategies to fill in missing holes. Jeskai without Lightning Strike became Jeskai black with Crackling Doom and Murderous Cut.
- Watching matches with the above is horrendous. Guys are using unfavorable Radiant Flames as kill spells for problematic creatures, or worse, they can't fetch the right colors on time. It's miserable to watch, and believe me, for 4 hours I tried.
- Not one Ingest/Processor deck in any Top 32. It's not a good mechanic. Stop defending it already.
At this point, if Origins had Gideon, Kiora, Radiant Flames, and the lands, BFZ would not need to exist, period. I've never seen a set basically eschewed en masse from the brewing table like this. Quite honestly, this was even worse than I predicted. I actually thought there would be some Eldrazi strategies, maybe UG Tutelage Fog, but no. Nothing. If that doesn't say worst set in modern memory, I don't know what does.
I ask you the same question this thread has been tackling all day. Why should I care about tournaments? You critique others for saying "I think the set is fine" yet all you have done is say "I think this set sucks". Why should I listen to you when I don't care about any of the aspects of magic that you seem to value exclusively?
- Manite
O rigins had more interesting and fun to build around cards like Starfield of Nyx, flameshadow conjuring, Outland colossus, Demonic Pact,etc.Cards that most likelly won't see no tournament play but they are fascinating cards that makes me decks with them, even if they are casuals.IMO BFZ doesn't for me because Devoid/Ingest are poorlly implemented, Awaken is ok but feels tacked on like scry on Theros that just made cards cost more just because they got a new mechanic added to them, LAndfall is boring this time, Allies seems abit messy been randomlly placed on some cards but in others...just very weird implementation.
Maybe the hype was too big for this set that the disapointing outcome became big aswell.Eitherway i'll jsut get some singles, full art lands and never look back at this lottery set that is using Expeditions to sell more.
You don't have to listen to a word I say. That "to each their own" was meant for you. You value something about this set, have a ball. I'm not here to change anyone's mind, especially when minds like yours are too rigid to be changed. If you've been playing as long as I have, and enjoyed as many new releases as I have, and don't see this as the bottom (I hope) of a low point we've been trending towards for years, no amount of logical argument, objective data, statistics, pointing at other sets, or anything else is going to change your feelgoods about it. So great, have fun, throw oodles of money at the product so Wizards can pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Unfortunately, that pat is going to last as long as the next rotation, which is about the average length of time it takes before they take accountability and apologize for their mistakes and learn nothing from them. They've done it before, they'll do it again, but people like you buy up BFZ and MM15 and let them think for a little while that this was acceptable.
Again, to each their own.
Limited is not looking much better. When your coverage team states that Bane of Bela Ged or any other 7+ mana Eldrazi is not playable in competitive draft in this set it means you've messed up. If this set sucks for competitive magic it absolutely trickles down to affect everyone.
I can't speak to "competitive draft", but I can say that I've gone 3-0 with Bane of Bela Ged. None of my games were close either. Maybe as people figure out the format, that deck will no longer be viable, but I doubt it.
- Manite
There are a lot of things I don't like about this set, but looking at a lot of its cards, the power level is fine to fit into the already-watered-down Standard (leaving aside the cards that actually do something, BFZ's mana and staples like Murder, Cancel, Pyroclasm, or aggro low-drops are all auto-includes because there just isn't enough competition from Tarkir).
Early tournaments rarely look like the tournaments 2-3 months in, just because it takes a while for everyone to figure out how to best approach the new environment. Look at all the GB midrange or UW control decks in early Theros tourneys, just jamming RTR cards plus Polukranos, World Eater or Elspeth, Sun's Champion (the only Devotion card I remember making an impact in the first open or two was Fanatic of Mogis). Early RTR tourneys were bloated with BG and BR Zombies.
Give it a month, and even if BFZ doesn't have a lot of representation in the established meta by then, there are still a lot of absolutely godawful editions that would supercede just about anything for "Worst Magic Set."
Because if you don't care about tournaments there are way more fun cards from magic's history to play with than these (subjective but probably true for most people). If you aren't playing a tournament format than why restrict yourself to rubbish?
For example, I started playing with Core 8 and was told at the time it was weak compared to expansions, basically for beginners. But cards from that basic, beginners, core set than I regularly use to play casual, EDH and Modern with are: Wrath of god, archivist, birds of paradise, blood moon, boil, bribery, choke, city of brass, coastal piracy, coat of arms, daring apprentice, defense grid, ensnaring bridge, evacuation, howling mine, intruder alarm, mana leak, merchant scroll, obliterate, phyrexian arena, plague wind, planar portal, pyroclasm, temporal adept, urza's mine, urza's tower, urza's power plant.
The only cards from BFZ that I will buy are crumble to dust, the new art dispel and the new lands.
I played the sealed pre release and it was the worst sealed match I have ever experienced.
Subjective but, looking at the responses online, true for many.
Yeah.. that's not gonna happen, and for good reason, it would hurt the game more than it would help, you'd probably get another reserve list, and as it's been said multiple times, there's a fine line with legacy staples, WotC CAN'T print certain legacy cards because they are in the reserve list, if they print the ones they can print, what would happen is, more people try to get into legacy, the demand for the cards they can't print increases, and you get a bigger problem.
Nobody promised anything about modern being affordable, much less cheap, they promised that it would be supported, and they have delivered on that promise, you guys need to understand that Magic The Gathering is a TCG, and for the game to thrive, the cards have to hold value, they are collectibles and WotC needs them to be relatively expensive so people actually wants to buy them, modern masters' goal is to make the cards AVAILABLE not cheap.
- Glimpse doesn't count, it was unplayable for a really really really long time, who knows if any of the unplayable cards from BfZ is gonna turn out to be like glimpse
- Dark depts was also unplayable until Zendikar came out, Vanish into memory also turned out to be unplayable, and battle lands are better than snow lands, +1 for BfZ
- DGM had Ral Zarek, and shocks, this set has Gideon, Drana and Battle lands, plus the expeditions, and those are the ones that are obvious, BfZ comes ahead.
- None of the gods saw any play, this set also had the temples, but again Brimas + Courser vs Gideon and drana, BFZ comes ahead here too
So what was your point again? I'll stress, this set has been out for 2 weeks, some of the cards you named became playable years after their release. BfZ is definitely better than those sets, not even close.
You seem to have missed The_Return_of_Skullfer's point entirely. We understand what you are saying. You don't like BFZ. That doesn't make it the worst set ever or even necessarily bad.
- Manite
My guess most people try to compare the new "bad sets" to the old "really truly bad sets", because they never played in a "really truly bad set", so if a set is lower powered than other recent sets "it is the worst set since FE".
<begin old man> Back in my day, people traded black lotuses for shivan dragons cause dragons were useful. I remember seeing ancestral recall for $20 and thinking "who would ever pay $20 for that card". I remember wondering why people wanted moxes, with mana drop moxes were just easier to kill lands. And in my day we knew what a bad set was, cause we spent money on fallen empires and homelands. <end old man>
It is scary looking back on this game from the standpoint of someone who started in mid 1993... where has my life gone?
Damia, Jenara, Xiahou Dun, Mareth, Nekusar, Oloro, Kresh, Deretti
I perhaps would agree that BFZ is the worst set in modern, or at least agree that it "could be". But I don't play modern. Too expensive to play, and it would cost me several of my 12 EDH decks to sacrifice to play it. So I don't know that format, but I also think that a lot of modern takes time to grow. A year from now people's views of this set could be quite different. But CoK block was a really crappy block, that was near the end of my T2 days, before I switched to Big Deck (a mostly local phily format) and then to EDH when Big Deck died.
I don't know for certain, others might, but doesn't this type of thread basically emerge after every set comes out? I mean <old man> I used to be able to buy LEDs for 4/$1, and dream halls was the worst card in its set </old man>. Perhaps people need to take a breath from complaining about wizards, and just play the game. Every set can't be really powerful, full of really powerful cards, or power creep starts setting in. So yeah, most cards from any new set are going to be bad, because if they aren't, and you have 60-70% great playable cards, how are they going to keep doing that in every future set without eventually making an "instant, CC U, draw 10 cards" years later.
Damia, Jenara, Xiahou Dun, Mareth, Nekusar, Oloro, Kresh, Deretti
As I said I wasn't talking about their power level or the quality of cards in them. Plain and simple Chronicles nearly killed Magic. It drove the entire early secondary market to the brink of collapse, ruined the value of nearly every staple to that point, and drove off a large portion of the player base. It is the reason the Reserved List exists, and why WoTC is very careful about their reprint policy.
On an separate note, the print run on Fallen Empires was on the order of 140,000,000 cards. Multiple times larger than the combined print runs of every set to that point.