1) Less variety? The RoE Eldrazi were big and had annihilator. Then there were colored drones that produced spawn. That's it. Now, they made entire themes, art directions and mechanics for each of the Titans, and we've only even seen two of them. I honestly don't see where this is coming from. I can understand if you don't like the themes, but there's no way you can call less variety.
When wizards created RoE, there were 15 eldrazi creatures. 3 very different legendary titans, 6 lesser colorless titans and 6 drones. These were divided between 3 different broods, with 4-6 of each, and thus plenty of room for the eldrazi to be completely distinct. A hand of emrakul and spawnsire of ulamog weren't going to be mistaken for each other. Note the use of action subjects in artisan of kozilek and it that betrays- these aren't jut eldrazi blankly pictured on a background from the same perspective, they're doing something.
When wizard revisited it for BFZ, they boxed themselves into a corner with the decision to only represent ulamogs brood in set 1, only kozileks in set 2. There are 51 eldrazi in BFZ, of which 47 are from ulamogs. And as a result, its simply not enough artistic direction to cover that many cards. You can see how the artists struggled to do anything interesting on the smaller drones and processors, like mind raker and nettle drone, but even then you start to see tide drifter and fathom feeder sorts of repetitions. But as you scale it up to the lesser titans, you get the almost unbelievable sameness of oblivion sower, void winnower, deathless behemoth, endless one, desolation twin, eldrazi devastator, breaker of armies and of course newalmog himself. "Interchangeable art" indeed.
This is what happens when you create a deep and interesting backstory and worldbuilding for a short story in only a brief view, then revisit it later and try to torturously stretch it into a 3-part series with a shoehorned love triangle and a scene where an elf start hopping on the heads of bloody dwarves in barrels floating down a river. When you spread too little butter over too much 2-dimensional cardboard, ahem. There simply wasn't enough art direction from RoE for 1/3 of the eldrazi to be represented tenfold. They had to either develop a new aesthetic or come up with a better idea.
2) I agree Zendikar's mechanics were a lot better. I really do miss the quests and traps, cards that made little minigames inside your games of magic. Still, you call the Allies 'rife with parasitism, but actually their new mechanic is not as parasitic as it used to be in Zendikar, but you don't mention that up there. Probably because Zendikar allies were more powerful and had a more coherent theme.
If it were just the ally tribal it might not have been notable for parasitism, but the presence of ingest, devoid & processor, all of which do nothing in a vacuum, was what pushed it over the top. Zendikar had a share of tribal parasitism in allies for sure, and indeed that mechanic was less open-ended, but landfall, kicker, traps, quests, neo-fear, all were open mechanics. So I guess its the comparison of one damning mechanic vs four
3) It is BFZ's lands that enable the whole 4 colour bull***** decks with Clan cards, which are naturally more powerful because they are 3 colours. That restriction is gone, and WotC messed up big time with their standard crafting. The powerlevel would have to be on-par with the original zendikar, if you want to produce monocoloured/colorless cards that are on equal level with clan cards. In fact, it's easier to craft a sensible manabase that combines Crackling Doom with Siege Rhino than it is to play best-buds Gideon next to Drana. WTF wizards?
I think I heard it well put in Admiral Sultans post up there that the rewards for jumping through the hoops of BFZ cards simply weren't worth the payoffs, and it wasn't just the khans overshadowing them with easy wedge costs. When the best eldrazi is a mystic snake that needs you to run enablers just to let it do its job at all, whereas for just 1 more color investment you can run a siege rhino with a bigger effect 1:1 with no enablers.
Even without the fetch mana base in standard, BFZ isn't near the original zendikar. Original zendikar occurred when wizards were at the height of power creep and the game had sped up so much they needed to start reeling it back in and intentionally depowering future sets. BFZ, from what we've seen, is on the (hopefully) bottom end of the stroke, and we can say this is the low point- with the exceptions of khans, each set has gotten progressively weaker for years now, and delve seems largely a mistake. Back in zendikar 1.0, we had goblin guide, spell pierce, jace the mindsculptor, stoneforge mystic, bloodghast, vengevine, inquisition of kozilek, loam lion, distortion strike / kiln fiend, day of judgment, amulet of vigor, steppe lynx, valakut, spreading seas, etc etc. This was all in the same standard as the core set that gave us prime time and bolt.
Theres nothing in the current standard to match what was going on when primeval titan would plop out multiple valakuts and mountains and kill you or caw blade was doing its thing
4) You've no idea what common enablers they've put in to facilitate processing and ingest, and there's bound to some some. Still, I agree it's silly that they introduce it as a main mechanic and then drop it. Don't worry about converge, you actually get to draft dual lands now, and the colorless lands will be scooped up by the guys who picked the colorless cards. It was very hard in 3x BFZ to get converge going, it's going to be far easier in OOB.
We can still hold some hope that wizards will put a few common enablers in there. It would definitely through a bone to the draft format, but both ingest/process and converge are still going to be stuck exclusively in pack 3, even with the tap duals in uncommon OGW you're going to be drafting barely any converge anyway. And converge already suffers from being high rarity in BFZ, that really makes the 3rd pack problem that much bigger- the only common worth playing is Tajuru Stalwart. Would getting one of the three uncommons really do anything? Skyrider Elf is great, but its no bomb.
5) I think I agree that OGW looks like it's almost a complete redesign of the whole theme. They said that the lack of overlap between Zendikar and RoE was something they wanted to fix, but so far it looks like there's nothing from BFZ that they would like to retain. I also don't get why Support exists when they could just go with landfall and Awaken :S. Seems like the same mistake they made with Tribute in Born of the Gods, which they later admitted should have just been Monstrosity.
I feel like Tribute should have either been explored more deeply, or not at all. They had something interesting going with the "opponents choice" theme of BNG, but they both did it too tepidly with weak cards and didn't explore it very deeply anyway. If they had bothered pricing it competitively and seeing how much design space it had, they could have done something cool. Awaken and Landfall most certainly have more design space than Support, and I don't know anyone who would justify it just for a checklist of "New mechanics instead of reused mechanics!". Recycled content is a let-down, but low effort new content is even worse.
What really strikes me about this block is that BFZ was the "exiles matters" set, and OGW was the "Two headed giant" set. Yet, while both of these provided huge amounts of new untapped design space for wizards, they didn't capitalize at all on the former, and it doesn't look good for the latter. They could have created far more interesting and interactive mechanics than Support, surge is decent but its just scraping the potential, Cohort doesn't even work at all with THG even though it could have been templated better to do so. Its like wizards get the chance to do something big, doesn't, and then doesn't really do anything at all, just prints more +1/+1 counters and tribal.
Why does Battle for Zendikar feel so unappealing? Before anyone gets mad, I'm sure people have other opinions about the block. But it seems like many people don't like the set, myself included. I know we can't Judge oath yet, but so far they haven't really shown anything too exciting. What's wrong with it?
Because there really isn't anything exciting in it. The removal is bad, landfall we've seen before, Eldrazi we've seen before, and they feel worse because the first were broken. There aren't enoughb quuality cards to make ppl care. Standard didn't change from this set being added. People are mostly playing the same decks with a few missing cards. Devoid has promise, but the only mechanic that's interesting isn't usable until the next set comes out. So players understandably said screw this.
Innistrad is next and is one of the msot beloved sets so it will be crazy to keep up with this downgrade to the next set wich it won't contain Expeditions to sell the set
My feeling about BFZ & OGW is similar to all previous blocks (after mirrodin).
"Why did not WotC plan abilities on a block-level instead of a set-level?"
Oh well.. I am as neutral as anything. Late or early? Spoiler or no spoilers?
Limited is relatively bad, depending on wether you're picking all the Grixis Eldrazi and winning unchallenged, or not, and losing like a chump because you just can't build any other strategy without ridiculous luck. There's not enough support.
This isn't entirely fair. While Grixis Eldrazi/Devoid has a lot of depth at Common and can easily support 2-3 drafters in a pod, there are other archetypes that are decently supported. R/G Landfall, U/W Skies, and B/W Lifegain are almost always viable in a draft pod. And there will most certainly be some sort of Allies deck draftable in the pod, though, yeah, luck does play a huge role in whether you get a nuts R/W build or some shakier/weaker build; most of the lynchpin cards for Allies are at Uncommon.
That said, B/G Sacrifice, G/x Ramp, and the Converge deck are total crapshoots that have a good probability of trainwrecking in any given draft pod. Or, if you're luckier, the decks will come together in entirely underwhelming forms.
I actually enjoy BFZ draft quite a bit, but it's certainly disappointing that the format isn't approaching perfection given how many design concessions are made in the name of Limited and how lacking the set is everywhere else.
Because the selling point is the expeditions. They can make the block as mediocre as they want; people will still buy packs in the hopes of getting an expedition.
The problem with defining this format by what is "fun" is that everyone seems to define fun as what they don't lose to. If you keep losing to easily answered cards, that means you should improve your deck. If you don't want to improve your deck, then you should come to peace with the idea that you are going to lose because you chose to not interact with better strategies.
To me it felt like Khans Block was a real milestone in Magic. It was powerful, the art was great, and they had awesome dragons.
This is a hard act to follow. Delve, Dragons, a new interesting world, Fetchlands... This is the prime reason for a case of the blahs with this set, in my opinion.
Other Reasons Include...
It's a "Return" set, and if it doesn't strike just the correct tone with reference to the original, then your going to lose people.
They didn't reprint Fetchlands. A lot of people expected them to.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I feel like we've hit a modern Magic low point in the art and flavor text department.
Power wise, I think BFZ is a little like Theros. It's best cards won't be players until much later in their life span. Also its main mechanics feel insular and parasitic... Nothing magic players love more than cards that barely work with the rest of their collection.
Lastly, they took away Elvish Mystic. What the hell? Wizards should be ashamed. Don't forget where Magic came from.
11 mythics shown so far. 7 are garbage, 2 mediocre, and 2 will see serious play in modern.
25 rares, how many will see play in modern? 1? 2? I'm trying to see the good in the set... I am pretty disappointed and I hope that soi will be better than this. We need another snapcaster mage.
Maybe it was the ascensions, annihilation, and sfm last time around, but the block is like a tame kitten this time around.
Besides having a terrible story and changing everything we thought about how strong Eldrazi were compared to Planeswalkers (how can Gideon just stand up to Ulamog's attack all alone?!?!?), terribly uninspired mechanics involving the now usual +1/+1 counters, some of the most bland and inferior art of any TCG I have ever seen (and flavor text. My God the flavor text...), and blatant cash grab by WotC in the form of Expeditions,the only redeeming quality of this whole set is full art basics.
I'll chime in as a dissenter. I like the block overall, at least based on what we've seen so far.
1. The limited play is awesome, easily the best since 3xKhans and personally I'd even rate it higher than that. Even with draft being unbalanced when it comes to green it is still challenging/interesting 20 drafts in, and the game play itself really shines. Tons of ways to use extra mana, tons of lands that do stuff, means fewer games going into top deck mode or lost to manascrew. Synergies matter, but not to the point that you have to have them or feel like you are drafting the same deck every time you end up in a given color pair.
2. I've had a blast playing Gx Eldrazi in Standard, with various versions that are fun and competitive. Although admittedly it has been mostly a tier 2 deck, depending on which way the meta is swinging and what kind of answers/disruption people are using. But with the Oath additions it will get stronger (Kozilek's Return is pure gold for the deck, as are a number of the Eldrazi/colorless cards, which this deck is very well poised to use), and I really think it steps into the spotlight post-rotation. Personally I'm good with that kind of cycle, a deck that is fun at first but not dominant, then gets stronger over time. I much prefer that to the cards/decks that are just amazing from day one and stay at or near the top for their duration in Standard. That gets old fast.
Nearly all of the mechanics, about a third of the art and a confusing alternate mana symbol are all things I find distasteful and prefer to omit from my cardpool. (I don't hate Devoid or Landfall, but on the other hand, I don't particularly care about them either.)
Fortunately BFZ's cards are weak enough that doing so isn't actually a problem.
OGW seems to be running strong with the distasteful mechanics and dull monotonous artwork.
EDIT: And yeah, the flavor text. But that's nearly always embarrassingly bad.
This set has taken the mystery or excitement out of the Eldrazi. They're way too similar to Phyrexians for me. Eldrazi destroy while Phyrexians assimilate. Eldrazi have more tentacles and look more Lovecraftian. Other than that, they pretty much cannibalize each other, leaving only Nicol Bolas (and hopefully Ob Nixilis) as the game's only viable antagonist.
And since we're talking about sales at the moment, I wonder how much Modern Masters 2015 factored into the decline. My LGS still has a couple of boxes, and I've met very few people who have a high opinion of it.
Just not sure how them making less and less over the year during Q2 and Q3 is supposed to be an indicator of BFZ's failings, when BFZ was primarily a Q4 product. Sounds like Dragons/Origins would be the problems there, or we could even be looking at a bigger picture issue where something else is creating this downward pressure (i.e. set quality hasn't been the cause of the decline).
As a setting, Zendikar was awesome. Traps, quests, adventuring parties and leveling up, it had a great Dungeons and Dragons/Indiana Jones theme to it. Then the Eldrazi showed up and ruined everything. And then the Eldrazi showed up again and continued ruining everything.
I don't want huge upheavals in the setting, like the one in the second Mirrodin block when the Phyrexians showed up and ruined everything. I want a good, fun plane, and I want it to still be good and fun by the end of the block.
Don't forget about the time the Angels showed up and ruined the spooky atmosphere endangered-human feel of Innistrad, the Dragons showed up and ruined the wedge clan of Tarkir, or the when Jace showed up on Ravnica and became the LIVING FREAKING GUILDPACT after running through a bunch of gates.
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I mean seriously who did they think they were impressing with expeditions?
Collectors? Speculators? Competitive players with enough bank to pimp out their decks? Kids who want to build better decks but have nothing to trade for some of the more expensive powerful cards?
It's one thing to say "this isn't for me" but it's another to imply that nobody likes it just because you don't.
I was initially with you on the Expeditions being dumb gimmicks (not sour grapes, either, I opened a Verdant Catacombs in my first draft so I lucked into a lot of value right away), but I think I've come full circle since then and like what they've done to the market value of the set. If you look at the whole ecology of the thing, Expeditions give speculators and shops a reason to open a lot of sealed product, which floods the market with mythics and rares, which in turn depresses the price of basically every other card in the set -- Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is at ~$23 and falling right now, with three weeks left of 3x BfZ drafs -- this is good for the Standard crowd because it keeps the entire set easily attainable, and while the real power is in sets that sets that aren't being opened much anymore, it's promising in the long term. Now is a great time to pick up a bunch of $1-$3 mythics and rares that will likely be very playable after rotation. So it's a win-win for both elite collectors and budget players.
I mean, think about it: what if "the most expensive standard since Caw Blade" is an anomaly based on fetches and Jace, and going forward we have a format where only a couple powerful cards can maintain a price tag of $20? I think that's a great thing for the game, at least at the local level.
...or the time when Jace showed up on Ravnica and became the LIVING FREAKING GUILDPACT after running through a bunch of gates.
That one doesn't seem so bad. The people, the city and the guilds of Ravnica still exist, right?
Yes, in fact that was the only block where there wasn't a dramatic change, considering the sets we've been getting in the past few years.
Actually almost every block from Time Spiral onwards had some dramatic change, which means the only Block before RTR that didn't experience much change was Ravnica 1.0. (because the actual ending was muddy and RTR resolved it.)
Time Spiral - Dominaria pretty much crushed, planeswalkers de-powered and made into cards (and started poking their noses into stories).
Lorwyn/Shadowmoor - Technically storywise it fixed the day/night problem that was around from the start , but honestly gameplay-wise people probably felt like it was two different planes, so it basically felt like it was crushing two worlds together (still a dramatic change regardless)
Alara - 5 shards crashed back into 1. Somewhat like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, but at least the mechanics and announcement made it way more clearer they were one in the first place. Still a dramatic change.
Zendikar - Rise of the Eldrazi - enough said.
Scars of Mirrodin - New Phyrexia - same story.
Innistrad - Avacyn Restored - same story, except from the opposite side of the good-bad scale.
RTR - Made Guildpact 2.0. Even Jace's interference didn't differ the structure of the original block too much (except for making Dragon's Maze relatively a disaster set-wise since it's a small set with hardly any Shocklands in it.)
Theros - Actually Theros didn't change much either. Xenagos drove the plot, but the at the end it was still pretty much status quo because Ajani hasn't started doing anything to avenge Elspeth yet.
Tarkir - We changed timelines, it doesn't get much more drastically different than that.
Battle for Zendikar - I'll say this was actually named wrongly, it only feels like a change because "Zendikar" in the name evokes different expectations. The change that Rise brought to Zendikar already happened back then, this is simply a continuation of that change. If the set was called "Rampage of the Eldrazi", it might not have felt that jarring.
Because of previous zendikar block, people have set a very high bar for the expectation and with much expectation comes big disappointments.
What i can say about it is that BZF as both boring and weak. I can't talk much about the power of OGW, but at last this time we have some interesting designs.
In that very article is says that Origins was released in Q3...so that seems like a safe assumption.
Actually the release of BFZ is in Q4. But it's prerelease is in Q3. And even with a BFZ prerelease data. Magic has still dropped. Just read their quarterly results. They aren't hard to read. http://investor.hasbro.com/results.cfm
Magic has been making less and less money over the year. We'll know the truth in a few weeks when they release Q4.
The article specifically says that the BFZ prerelease was the best attended one to date, and that Origins was the biggest summer set release in the game's history. If anything, these results are indicative of a very stagnant Standard environment pre-BFZ, meaning that the decline in sales is thanks to Khans block, not to BFZ. In other words, sales were better immediately following Theros block than they were Khans block.
Many of you may be wondering how that is even possible, but you have to remember that serious/competitive players are a very small minority of all Magic consumers. Khans may have made that minority happy, but it clearly wasn't resonating well with the Magic population at large, so I would expect Wizards to learn from its mistakes going forward.
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When wizards created RoE, there were 15 eldrazi creatures. 3 very different legendary titans, 6 lesser colorless titans and 6 drones. These were divided between 3 different broods, with 4-6 of each, and thus plenty of room for the eldrazi to be completely distinct. A hand of emrakul and spawnsire of ulamog weren't going to be mistaken for each other. Note the use of action subjects in artisan of kozilek and it that betrays- these aren't jut eldrazi blankly pictured on a background from the same perspective, they're doing something.
When wizard revisited it for BFZ, they boxed themselves into a corner with the decision to only represent ulamogs brood in set 1, only kozileks in set 2. There are 51 eldrazi in BFZ, of which 47 are from ulamogs. And as a result, its simply not enough artistic direction to cover that many cards. You can see how the artists struggled to do anything interesting on the smaller drones and processors, like mind raker and nettle drone, but even then you start to see tide drifter and fathom feeder sorts of repetitions. But as you scale it up to the lesser titans, you get the almost unbelievable sameness of oblivion sower, void winnower, deathless behemoth, endless one, desolation twin, eldrazi devastator, breaker of armies and of course newalmog himself. "Interchangeable art" indeed.
This is what happens when you create a deep and interesting backstory and worldbuilding for a short story in only a brief view, then revisit it later and try to torturously stretch it into a 3-part series with a shoehorned love triangle and a scene where an elf start hopping on the heads of bloody dwarves in barrels floating down a river. When you spread too little butter over too much 2-dimensional cardboard, ahem. There simply wasn't enough art direction from RoE for 1/3 of the eldrazi to be represented tenfold. They had to either develop a new aesthetic or come up with a better idea.
If it were just the ally tribal it might not have been notable for parasitism, but the presence of ingest, devoid & processor, all of which do nothing in a vacuum, was what pushed it over the top. Zendikar had a share of tribal parasitism in allies for sure, and indeed that mechanic was less open-ended, but landfall, kicker, traps, quests, neo-fear, all were open mechanics. So I guess its the comparison of one damning mechanic vs four
I think I heard it well put in Admiral Sultans post up there that the rewards for jumping through the hoops of BFZ cards simply weren't worth the payoffs, and it wasn't just the khans overshadowing them with easy wedge costs. When the best eldrazi is a mystic snake that needs you to run enablers just to let it do its job at all, whereas for just 1 more color investment you can run a siege rhino with a bigger effect 1:1 with no enablers.
Even without the fetch mana base in standard, BFZ isn't near the original zendikar. Original zendikar occurred when wizards were at the height of power creep and the game had sped up so much they needed to start reeling it back in and intentionally depowering future sets. BFZ, from what we've seen, is on the (hopefully) bottom end of the stroke, and we can say this is the low point- with the exceptions of khans, each set has gotten progressively weaker for years now, and delve seems largely a mistake. Back in zendikar 1.0, we had goblin guide, spell pierce, jace the mindsculptor, stoneforge mystic, bloodghast, vengevine, inquisition of kozilek, loam lion, distortion strike / kiln fiend, day of judgment, amulet of vigor, steppe lynx, valakut, spreading seas, etc etc. This was all in the same standard as the core set that gave us prime time and bolt.
Theres nothing in the current standard to match what was going on when primeval titan would plop out multiple valakuts and mountains and kill you or caw blade was doing its thing
We can still hold some hope that wizards will put a few common enablers in there. It would definitely through a bone to the draft format, but both ingest/process and converge are still going to be stuck exclusively in pack 3, even with the tap duals in uncommon OGW you're going to be drafting barely any converge anyway. And converge already suffers from being high rarity in BFZ, that really makes the 3rd pack problem that much bigger- the only common worth playing is Tajuru Stalwart. Would getting one of the three uncommons really do anything? Skyrider Elf is great, but its no bomb.
I feel like Tribute should have either been explored more deeply, or not at all. They had something interesting going with the "opponents choice" theme of BNG, but they both did it too tepidly with weak cards and didn't explore it very deeply anyway. If they had bothered pricing it competitively and seeing how much design space it had, they could have done something cool. Awaken and Landfall most certainly have more design space than Support, and I don't know anyone who would justify it just for a checklist of "New mechanics instead of reused mechanics!". Recycled content is a let-down, but low effort new content is even worse.
What really strikes me about this block is that BFZ was the "exiles matters" set, and OGW was the "Two headed giant" set. Yet, while both of these provided huge amounts of new untapped design space for wizards, they didn't capitalize at all on the former, and it doesn't look good for the latter. They could have created far more interesting and interactive mechanics than Support, surge is decent but its just scraping the potential, Cohort doesn't even work at all with THG even though it could have been templated better to do so. Its like wizards get the chance to do something big, doesn't, and then doesn't really do anything at all, just prints more +1/+1 counters and tribal.
The whole block is an ongoing, uninteresting was between 2 sides.
Side 1 (Spirits/Eldrazi):
...at least in Kamigawa we got Samurai/Ninjas/Snakes/Rats to play with...
Because there really isn't anything exciting in it. The removal is bad, landfall we've seen before, Eldrazi we've seen before, and they feel worse because the first were broken. There aren't enoughb quuality cards to make ppl care. Standard didn't change from this set being added. People are mostly playing the same decks with a few missing cards. Devoid has promise, but the only mechanic that's interesting isn't usable until the next set comes out. So players understandably said screw this.
But the difference here is that BFZ has expeditions, so it will actually sell well and Wizards won't care.
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
"Why did not WotC plan abilities on a block-level instead of a set-level?"
Oh well.. I am as neutral as anything. Late or early? Spoiler or no spoilers?
This isn't entirely fair. While Grixis Eldrazi/Devoid has a lot of depth at Common and can easily support 2-3 drafters in a pod, there are other archetypes that are decently supported. R/G Landfall, U/W Skies, and B/W Lifegain are almost always viable in a draft pod. And there will most certainly be some sort of Allies deck draftable in the pod, though, yeah, luck does play a huge role in whether you get a nuts R/W build or some shakier/weaker build; most of the lynchpin cards for Allies are at Uncommon.
That said, B/G Sacrifice, G/x Ramp, and the Converge deck are total crapshoots that have a good probability of trainwrecking in any given draft pod. Or, if you're luckier, the decks will come together in entirely underwhelming forms.
I actually enjoy BFZ draft quite a bit, but it's certainly disappointing that the format isn't approaching perfection given how many design concessions are made in the name of Limited and how lacking the set is everywhere else.
To me it felt like Khans Block was a real milestone in Magic. It was powerful, the art was great, and they had awesome dragons.
This is a hard act to follow. Delve, Dragons, a new interesting world, Fetchlands... This is the prime reason for a case of the blahs with this set, in my opinion.
Other Reasons Include...
It's a "Return" set, and if it doesn't strike just the correct tone with reference to the original, then your going to lose people.
They didn't reprint Fetchlands. A lot of people expected them to.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I feel like we've hit a modern Magic low point in the art and flavor text department.
Power wise, I think BFZ is a little like Theros. It's best cards won't be players until much later in their life span. Also its main mechanics feel insular and parasitic... Nothing magic players love more than cards that barely work with the rest of their collection.
Lastly, they took away Elvish Mystic. What the hell? Wizards should be ashamed. Don't forget where Magic came from.
Thsts my .02
25 rares, how many will see play in modern? 1? 2? I'm trying to see the good in the set... I am pretty disappointed and I hope that soi will be better than this. We need another snapcaster mage.
Maybe it was the ascensions, annihilation, and sfm last time around, but the block is like a tame kitten this time around.
BUG Reanimator
BWG Nic-Fit
BGR Punishing Nic-Fit
1. The limited play is awesome, easily the best since 3xKhans and personally I'd even rate it higher than that. Even with draft being unbalanced when it comes to green it is still challenging/interesting 20 drafts in, and the game play itself really shines. Tons of ways to use extra mana, tons of lands that do stuff, means fewer games going into top deck mode or lost to manascrew. Synergies matter, but not to the point that you have to have them or feel like you are drafting the same deck every time you end up in a given color pair.
2. I've had a blast playing Gx Eldrazi in Standard, with various versions that are fun and competitive. Although admittedly it has been mostly a tier 2 deck, depending on which way the meta is swinging and what kind of answers/disruption people are using. But with the Oath additions it will get stronger (Kozilek's Return is pure gold for the deck, as are a number of the Eldrazi/colorless cards, which this deck is very well poised to use), and I really think it steps into the spotlight post-rotation. Personally I'm good with that kind of cycle, a deck that is fun at first but not dominant, then gets stronger over time. I much prefer that to the cards/decks that are just amazing from day one and stay at or near the top for their duration in Standard. That gets old fast.
Fortunately BFZ's cards are weak enough that doing so isn't actually a problem.
OGW seems to be running strong with the distasteful mechanics and dull monotonous artwork.
EDIT: And yeah, the flavor text. But that's nearly always embarrassingly bad.
In that very article is says that Origins was released in Q3...so that seems like a safe assumption.
And since we're talking about sales at the moment, I wonder how much Modern Masters 2015 factored into the decline. My LGS still has a couple of boxes, and I've met very few people who have a high opinion of it.
My 720 Peasant Cube
Don't forget about the time the Angels showed up and ruined the spooky atmosphere endangered-human feel of Innistrad, the Dragons showed up and ruined the wedge clan of Tarkir, or the when Jace showed up on Ravnica and became the LIVING FREAKING GUILDPACT after running through a bunch of gates.
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Collectors? Speculators? Competitive players with enough bank to pimp out their decks? Kids who want to build better decks but have nothing to trade for some of the more expensive powerful cards?
It's one thing to say "this isn't for me" but it's another to imply that nobody likes it just because you don't.
I was initially with you on the Expeditions being dumb gimmicks (not sour grapes, either, I opened a Verdant Catacombs in my first draft so I lucked into a lot of value right away), but I think I've come full circle since then and like what they've done to the market value of the set. If you look at the whole ecology of the thing, Expeditions give speculators and shops a reason to open a lot of sealed product, which floods the market with mythics and rares, which in turn depresses the price of basically every other card in the set -- Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is at ~$23 and falling right now, with three weeks left of 3x BfZ drafs -- this is good for the Standard crowd because it keeps the entire set easily attainable, and while the real power is in sets that sets that aren't being opened much anymore, it's promising in the long term. Now is a great time to pick up a bunch of $1-$3 mythics and rares that will likely be very playable after rotation. So it's a win-win for both elite collectors and budget players.
I mean, think about it: what if "the most expensive standard since Caw Blade" is an anomaly based on fetches and Jace, and going forward we have a format where only a couple powerful cards can maintain a price tag of $20? I think that's a great thing for the game, at least at the local level.
That one doesn't seem so bad. The people, the city and the guilds of Ravnica still exist, right?
Yes, in fact that was the only block where there wasn't a dramatic change, considering the sets we've been getting in the past few years.
Dunes of Zairo
SHANDALAR
Innistrad - The Darkest Night
~THE RAVNICAN CONSORTIUM~
A Community Set
Commander: Allies & Adversaries
Actually almost every block from Time Spiral onwards had some dramatic change, which means the only Block before RTR that didn't experience much change was Ravnica 1.0. (because the actual ending was muddy and RTR resolved it.)
Time Spiral - Dominaria pretty much crushed, planeswalkers de-powered and made into cards (and started poking their noses into stories).
Lorwyn/Shadowmoor - Technically storywise it fixed the day/night problem that was around from the start , but honestly gameplay-wise people probably felt like it was two different planes, so it basically felt like it was crushing two worlds together (still a dramatic change regardless)
Alara - 5 shards crashed back into 1. Somewhat like Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, but at least the mechanics and announcement made it way more clearer they were one in the first place. Still a dramatic change.
Zendikar - Rise of the Eldrazi - enough said.
Scars of Mirrodin - New Phyrexia - same story.
Innistrad - Avacyn Restored - same story, except from the opposite side of the good-bad scale.
RTR - Made Guildpact 2.0. Even Jace's interference didn't differ the structure of the original block too much (except for making Dragon's Maze relatively a disaster set-wise since it's a small set with hardly any Shocklands in it.)
Theros - Actually Theros didn't change much either. Xenagos drove the plot, but the at the end it was still pretty much status quo because Ajani hasn't started doing anything to avenge Elspeth yet.
Tarkir - We changed timelines, it doesn't get much more drastically different than that.
Battle for Zendikar - I'll say this was actually named wrongly, it only feels like a change because "Zendikar" in the name evokes different expectations. The change that Rise brought to Zendikar already happened back then, this is simply a continuation of that change. If the set was called "Rampage of the Eldrazi", it might not have felt that jarring.
What i can say about it is that BZF as both boring and weak. I can't talk much about the power of OGW, but at last this time we have some interesting designs.
The article specifically says that the BFZ prerelease was the best attended one to date, and that Origins was the biggest summer set release in the game's history. If anything, these results are indicative of a very stagnant Standard environment pre-BFZ, meaning that the decline in sales is thanks to Khans block, not to BFZ. In other words, sales were better immediately following Theros block than they were Khans block.
Many of you may be wondering how that is even possible, but you have to remember that serious/competitive players are a very small minority of all Magic consumers. Khans may have made that minority happy, but it clearly wasn't resonating well with the Magic population at large, so I would expect Wizards to learn from its mistakes going forward.