There is a huge gulf between believing nothing would be banned (saw stoneforge coming a mile away) and my position that nothing should be banned. It's not that I was proven wrong, I'm upset that I'm going to be proven RIGHT. Nothing should have been banned. Nothing. Not stoneforge, and definately not Jace. Anyone could pick up Jund, Affinity, or Valukut and win with it. The same can certainly not be said of fae and cawblade. The more casual crowd has always been resentful of control stategies, but they are an integral part of the game that makes Magic what it is. Go play pokemon if all you want is a bunch of monsters fighting with no interruption.
Yes, let them quit. The ones that quit were probably not that dedicated anyway, and catering to these people who were going to quit in a year or two anyway just makes R+D dumb down magic. Let these people quit, let the more dedicated players get others into the game properly, and have a stronger community in the end. Natural selection.
You sir are completely correct in all your posts and I applaud you for speaking the truth. You won't find the support on these forums because everyone who posts here is a casual blue-hating anti-control super aggro player who hates expensive cards.
I really wish Wizards and dumb Aaron would stop catering to BAD casual players because they really are ruining the skill of the game and they want anything skill intensive or blue banned. It's really sad, and it's causing all the good players to switch to other games. They don't care about how good a game they make, they only care about making as much money as possible. There should be a balance between the two. Control is dead in standard because of whiny terrible at magic noobs
You're pretty late to the party, and by far this is the worst Jace printed, worse than Jace 1.0 also. I'm not sure how you're able to say this is better than Jace 2
Milling ten each turn will basically mean you win in four or five turns (unless your opponent kills your planeswalker, or has more than 60 cards in his or her deck, or has something like Elixir of Immortality), and if you do mill ten each turn that reduces the chance of him or her getting a card that he or she needed from his or her deck to stop Jace or do any significant damage to you.
Milling ten each turn will basically mean you win in four or five turns (unless your opponent kills your planeswalker, or has more than 60 cards in his or her deck, or has something like Elixir of Immortality), and if you do mill ten each turn that reduces the chance of him or her getting a card that he or she needed from his or her deck to stop Jace or do any significant damage to you.
If you brainstorm four-five times with jace you SHOULD win that game as well. The new jace is jank; it isn't as big a swiss army knife as jace, TMS. Saying 'I untapped with a PW on my side 5 turns in a row' means you win with ANY planeswalker, not just this jace, memory adept.
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"Yawgmoth," Freyalise whispered as she set the bomb, "now you will pay for your treachery."
So in reading these comments from begining to end... Some 22 pages of either A) Whining. B) Complaining about Whining. C) Forum members generally making comments to Blue/White or Blue in general being Useless now. D) Oh my I spent a fortune on these core cards and now I am hosed because the value is dropping so rapidly!
Why do the goats get to have all the fun? I had to make a profile and crawl out from under my bridge so I could join in as well.
For the A) type of people noted above. Whining after the fact that it happend does nothing, helps no one and makes you look... well just take note of the next whiner and when you say to yourself -
"Self, that guy is a frigging cry baby whiner..." Yea. So are you. Thats what you look like. Its not pretty.
To the B) Type of people out there that see some one whine on the forums and says to himself -
"Self, OMG WHAT A WHINER!! I HAVE TO POST HOW MUCH A WHINER HE IS AND MAKE SURE MY POINT GETS ACROSS SO WHEN HE REPLIES I CAN CALL HIM A WHINER AGAIN AND DEFEND MY POSITION WITH FALSE FACTS AND HALF TRUTH'S DEVELOPED THROUGH THE POINT OF VIEW OF MY *14 YEAR OLD MIND!"
*REGAURDLESS OF REAL AGE.
Not much prettier then the person who made the initial "whiny" statement.
To the C) Type of poster, one Card doesn't make all the Blue in standard useless. Or any color really. Blue/White control will still see plenty of play.
It changes some of the decks that used that one card as its focal point. Weather it was the Stone Forge Mystic or Jace The Mind Stealer, those decks simply used that one card like the Lakers used Kobe, either he wins it or he is the cause of the loss. Reshuffle and try again.
For those posters that fall into the D) category, I truely feel for you. I know how it is to buy something that loses its value at nothing that you did. I own a house. I own a car. I own many things that I spent a good amount of money on and if I wanted to turn and sell it for what I paid, even though at no fault of my own, I couldn't get the same value of it. But that is just a part of the crux of it. If you bought a card because you wanted retain its value and sell it for more later, these were not the right cards in the first place. All rotating sets have thier prices drop considerably once they leave the standard scene, the fact that it was sooner then expected has no bearing on the "whats done is done" cliche that fits so well here.
Next person to say Sorin is becoming w/b will be teleported to Jin-Gitaxias' labs with a sign saying 'everything usable except for the brain'.
We have been practically told it won't happen. If (and this is an if so large it alters weather patterns) Sorin adds a color, it will likely be red. And even then, hedonism (which seems to be the main argument for) is still black. Self-indulgence is black.
Milling ten each turn will basically mean you win in four or five turns (unless your opponent kills your planeswalker, or has more than 60 cards in his or her deck, or has something like Elixir of Immortality), and if you do mill ten each turn that reduces the chance of him or her getting a card that he or she needed from his or her deck to stop Jace or do any significant damage to you.
As top 200 in the world, I understand this. Also, as stated above, you'll win any game where your planewalker is on the board for 5 turns. It's terrible right now. When INN is released, that may change.
I am kind of amazed at [...] the fact that somebody on this thread called Mind's Eye, Mirari's Wake, Decree of Pain, Desertion, AND Scroll Rack, all before they were officially spoiled. I will edit this post VERY shortly with the username of this user who deserves at least all of the cookies. Probably more cookies than that.
As a relative newcomer to MTG, I will say that I would not have continued to play if something was not done about SFM/Batterskull. Continually going against a Batterskull turn 3 is terribly annoying and a real put off. From what I can tell, through these bannings the meta is wide open and there is going to be a lot diversity which obviously draws in a more diverse crowd not just the hardcore lifers.
What's with the new jace's hair? Are we playing magic, or yugioh?
Appeals to the new kids. Probably gets more business compared with how many people quit because of it...
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Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
There is a huge gulf between believing nothing would be banned (saw stoneforge coming a mile away) and my position that nothing should be banned. It's not that I was proven wrong, I'm upset that I'm going to be proven RIGHT. Nothing should have been banned. Nothing. Not stoneforge, and definately not Jace. Anyone could pick up Jund, Affinity, or Valukut and win with it. The same can certainly not be said of fae and cawblade. The more casual crowd has always been resentful of control stategies, but they are an integral part of the game that makes Magic what it is. Go play pokemon if all you want is a bunch of monsters fighting with no interruption.
Yes, let them quit. The ones that quit were probably not that dedicated anyway, and catering to these people who were going to quit in a year or two anyway just makes R+D dumb down magic. Let these people quit, let the more dedicated players get others into the game properly, and have a stronger community in the end. Natural selection.
Are you seriously arguing for a game to become more skill-intensive at the direct expense of the playerbase?
Here's a little secret: When Capcom released SF III: 3S (yes, I'm bring back the 3S analogy again since I used it last time to describe the pre-ban Standard), they intended the game to be skill-intensive and geared to hardcore players of the franchise. What ended up happening was that 3S almost made the fighting game genre go extinct. Turns out that not so many players were hardcore into fighting games to begin with, which meant that a game like 3S catered to a small subset of players rather than the masses that were plugging quarters into the cabinets all day. It also didn't help that the only returning characters in 3S were Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Akuma. There is a reason why Capcom rebooted the SF series by bringing back all the characters from SFII, and not 3S. It's the same thing in Magic. People enjoy both diversity AND the ability to connect to something they like and know.
I don't know about you, but I actually want to play against people. It is fruitless to make a game be extremely skill-intensive so that only a handful of people play and remaining 90% don't/can't play. If you can't get new blood, a game will eventually succumb to entropy and die.
Seriously, it makes we wonder if you actually played Magic during the Affinity era. Anyone could play Affinity, but it was still the same pros still placing like they would in any other format.
Are you seriously arguing for a game to become more skill-intensive at the direct expense of the playerbase?
Here's a little secret: When Capcom released SF III: 3S (yes, I'm bring back the 3S analogy again since I used it last time to describe the pre-ban Standard), they intended the game to be skill-intensive and geared to hardcore players of the franchise. What ended up happening was that 3S almost made the fighting game genre go extinct. Turns out that not so many players were hardcore into fighting games to begin with, which meant that a game like 3S catered to a small subset of players rather than the masses that were plugging quarters into the cabinets all day. It also didn't help that the only returning characters in 3S were Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Akuma. There is a reason why Capcom rebooted the SF series by bringing back all the characters from SFII, and not 3S. It's the same thing in Magic. People enjoy both diversity AND the ability to connect to something they like and know.
I don't know about you, but I actually want to play against people. It is fruitless to make a game be extremely skill-intensive so that only a handful of people play and remaining 90% don't/can't play. If you can't get new blood, a game will eventually succumb to entropy and die.
Seriously, it makes we wonder if you actually played Magic during the Affinity era. Anyone could play Affinity, but it was still the same pros still placing like they would in any other format.
First off, I confess that no, I did not play competitively during Affinity. Insinuating that this in any way diminishes my viewpoint on the Jace ban would be akin to saying that someone cannot have a strong viewpoint on the Iraq war if the were not alive during Vietnam.
You make a reasonable point backed by a solid example; I myself will attempt to use a video game genre in my counterpoint.
Have you played or are you at least familiar with the turn-based console rpg? It's quite a bit of a niche genre, but I've always been a fan of them myself. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the genre more or less originated in the late 1980s with Enix's Dragon Quest and Squaresoft's Final Fantasy. Both were solid games which saw a decent measure of success, but again, they catered only to a niche crowd within the gaming community. If in this analogy console RPG = MTG, then these games are essentially alpha and beta block.
Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy saw enough success to inspire multiple sequels and spinoffs, and other developers borrowed heavily from their concepts. As time progressed on into the SNES and then PSX era of video games, the genre became popular enough to inspire of bit of a golden age within itself (Think Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, Grandia, Pokemon, Xenogears, etc.) There were several fantastic titles produced each year, and the genre flourished as its player base expanded. Let's say this would be like Ravnica-Lorwyn
Herein lies the problem, though. There is a limit to how much a niche genre can expand before it loses itself. As these games became more popular, they were dumbed down to pander to the masses (inverse power creep on control strategies.) They would be released with poor mechanics just to try and seem innovative (cascade.) They would slowly replace narrative and good gameplay for an emphasis on visualization and graphics (mythics.) Due to it's own popularity began to loose itself. Now there is only a company called Atlus that makes decent console RPGs while Square-enix, etc, produce awful bastardizations of their once great games and other companies morphed the genre into something totally different. There is maybe 1 good turn-based RPG printed per year at best.
While it is true that a game that cannot draw new blood stagnates and dies, what can be said of the game that loses its own identity in order to pander to the masses. If MTG's development continues down it's recent path, it may gain a few fresh faces, but not only will it lose plenty of old ones, but it will be MTG in name alone.
First off, I confess that no, I did not play competitively during Affinity. Insinuating that this in any way diminishes my viewpoint on the Jace ban would be akin to saying that someone cannot have a strong viewpoint on the Iraq war if the were not alive during Vietnam.
You make a reasonable point backed by a solid example; I myself will attempt to use a video game genre in my counterpoint.
Have you played or are you at least familiar with the turn-based console rpg? It's quite a bit of a niche genre, but I've always been a fan of them myself. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the genre more or less originated in the late 1980s with Enix's Dragon Quest and Squaresoft's Final Fantasy. Both were solid games which saw a decent measure of success, but again, they catered only to a niche crowd within the gaming community. If in this analogy console RPG = MTG, then these games are essentially alpha and beta block.
Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy saw enough success to inspire multiple sequels and spinoffs, and other developers borrowed heavily from their concepts. As time progressed on into the SNES and then PSX era of video games, the genre became popular enough to inspire of bit of a golden age within itself (Think Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, Grandia, Pokemon, Xenogears, etc.) There were several fantastic titles produced each year, and the genre flourished as its player base expanded. Let's say this would be like Ravnica-Lorwyn
Herein lies the problem, though. There is a limit to how much a niche genre can expand before it loses itself. As these games became more popular, they were dumbed down to pander to the masses (inverse power creep on control strategies.) They would be released with poor mechanics just to try and seem innovative (cascade.) They would slowly replace narrative and good gameplay for an emphasis on visualization and graphics (mythics.) Due to it's own popularity began to loose itself. Now there is only a company called Atlus that makes decent console RPGs while Square-enix, etc, produce awful bastardizations of their once great games and other companies morphed the genre into something totally different. There is maybe 1 good turn-based RPG printed per year at best.
While it is true that a game that cannot draw new blood stagnates and dies, what can be said of the game that loses its own identity in order to pander to the masses. If MTG's development continues down it's recent path, it may gain a few fresh faces, but not only will it lose plenty of old ones, but it will be MTG in name alone.
The fallacy in your argument is that Final Fantasy's later installments have sold far better than their older installments. Don't call era on this, because most if not all of them have been re released and sold in the contemporary market. More people buy crap like Final Fantasy XIII than Final Fantasy VI, the best overall game in the series. Chrono Trigger has sold roughly 3.5 million games in all of its incarnations, which about 60% of what Final Fantasy XIII has sold since its release last year, and about a 30% of what Final Fantasy VII has sold since its inception. CT is the far superior game, so logically, it should have sold better than both of the above cases. This is by millions of copies, so by your own logic, eschewing any sense of quality and producing only games with atrocious graphics driven linear narratives would just be natural selection.
Banning Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were what Standard needed to survive. Attendance was at record lows, and diversity had suffered. When roughly 60% of decks run the same build, with only a few card choices to differentiate between any given two, you have a problem. There's "skill-based" and then there's stupid, and the environment Standard has seen in the last few months has definitely been in pile B. This is like the Tele-DAD era in Yu-Gi-Oh!, a time where seeing 15 out of the 16 top 16 playing the same goddamn thing. That was a "skill-based" format, but it also ruined the game. A lack of diversity is not healthy. Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably in their golden age right now, where in a pro tour tournament the top 32 consists of around 8 archetypes, with variants of each deck to prevent too much mirroring. Come to think of it, it's likely worse since at least you can count on Konami at least trying to fix their mistakes every few months. This ban is long overdue in my opinion. Maybe now we can see some new blood in Standard and the game can be fun again.
The fallacy in your argument is that Final Fantasy's later installments have sold far better than their older installments. Don't call era on this, because most if not all of them have been re released and sold in the contemporary market. More people buy crap like Final Fantasy XIII than Final Fantasy VI, the best overall game in the series. Chrono Trigger has sold roughly 3.5 million games in all of its incarnations, which about 60% of what Final Fantasy XIII has sold since its release last year, and about a 30% of what Final Fantasy VII has sold since its inception. CT is the far superior game, so logically, it should have sold better than both of the above cases. This is by millions of copies, so by your own logic, eschewing any sense of quality and producing only games with atrocious graphics driven linear narratives would just be natural selection.
Banning Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were what Standard needed to survive. Attendance was at record lows, and diversity had suffered. When roughly 60% of decks run the same build, with only a few card choices to differentiate between any given two, you have a problem. There's "skill-based" and then there's stupid, and the environment Standard has seen in the last few months has definitely been in pile B. This is like the Tele-DAD era in Yu-Gi-Oh!, a time where seeing 15 out of the 16 top 16 playing the same goddamn thing. That was a "skill-based" format, but it also ruined the game. A lack of diversity is not healthy. Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably in their golden age right now, where in a pro tour tournament the top 32 consists of around 8 archetypes, with variants of each deck to prevent too much mirroring. Come to think of it, it's likely worse since at least you can count on Konami at least trying to fix their mistakes every few months. This ban is long overdue in my opinion. Maybe now we can see some new blood in Standard and the game can be fun again.
i was one of theos yugioh players in the teledad age. i had the deck. i was winning. game got boring. plays became repettitive. deck stomped rouge decks. many players quit. i quit because winning with the deck was easy.
same with mtg
i had the deck. but i didnt like it. atleast in mtg there are other decks. teledad age was teledad or nothing
The fallacy in your argument is that Final Fantasy's later installments have sold far better than their older installments. Don't call era on this, because most if not all of them have been re released and sold in the contemporary market. More people buy crap like Final Fantasy XIII than Final Fantasy VI, the best overall game in the series. Chrono Trigger has sold roughly 3.5 million games in all of its incarnations, which about 60% of what Final Fantasy XIII has sold since its release last year, and about a 30% of what Final Fantasy VII has sold since its inception. CT is the far superior game, so logically, it should have sold better than both of the above cases. This is by millions of copies, so by your own logic, eschewing any sense of quality and producing only games with atrocious graphics driven linear narratives would just be natural selection.
Yes, they have all sold better then their earlier installments. This of course being because Square in essence sold out. It released a sequence of trash and eye candy to pander to the unwashed masses and over time lost their ability to turn out quality games. I'm sure by the time FF15 or 16 comes around they will have lost most of their original fan base, and the interest of the masses is fleeting at best. Eventually no one will care about the next Final Fantasy game, and Square will be on it's way out. This is what I'm saying about Magic. Cater to your true fans like Atlus, and maybe you'll never be huge, but you survival is guaranteed. Pander to the masses and you can make quite a bit of profit for sure, but what happens to you when your true fanbase gets sick of you, and the masses no longer find you in style?
Whether or not the success of FFXIII is a result of natural selection is subjective. If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
Yes, they have all sold better then their earlier installments. This of course being because Square in essence sold out. It released a sequence of trash and eye candy to pander to the unwashed masses and over time lost their ability to turn out quality games. I'm sure by the time FF15 or 16 comes around they will have lost most of their original fan base, and the interest of the masses is fleeting at best. Eventually no one will care about the next Final Fantasy game, and Square will be on it's way out. This is what I'm saying about Magic. Cater to your true fans like Atlus, and maybe you'll never be huge, but you survival is guaranteed. Pander to the masses and you can make quite a bit of profit for sure, but what happens to you when your true fanbase gets sick of you, and the masses no longer find you in style?
Whether or not the success of FFXIII is a result of natural selection is subjective. If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
It is entertaining so see people compare Magic to so many things.
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"If you don't wear your seatbelt, the police will shoot you in the head."
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
Everyone knows that good luck and good game are such insincere terms that any man who does not connect his right hook with the offender's jaw on the very utterance of such a phrase is no man I would consider as such.
Yes, they have all sold better then their earlier installments. This of course being because Square in essence sold out. It released a sequence of trash and eye candy to pander to the unwashed masses and over time lost their ability to turn out quality games. I'm sure by the time FF15 or 16 comes around they will have lost most of their original fan base, and the interest of the masses is fleeting at best. Eventually no one will care about the next Final Fantasy game, and Square will be on it's way out. This is what I'm saying about Magic. Cater to your true fans like Atlus, and maybe you'll never be huge, but you survival is guaranteed. Pander to the masses and you can make quite a bit of profit for sure, but what happens to you when your true fanbase gets sick of you, and the masses no longer find you in style?
Whether or not the success of FFXIII is a result of natural selection is subjective. If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
pandering to the masses seems to be working for WoW pretty well....
Just for the record, I love that this happened. For anyone who spent $100 buying a JTMS, I have no sympathy for you. You wasted your money on something that should really be considered a hobby. Sure, you can be serious, but spending $100 on a card is rediculous. Anyone with any decent grasp of common sense should know that spending half a grand on a deck is completely BONKERS.
And yes I don't have that much money, but Magic is a hobby and should be treated as such and you don't go wasting money a card thats $100 when there is so many other important things you could spend it on. (Like food, petrol or taking your girlfriend out on a date or whatever!)
Whether or not the success of FFXIII is a result of natural selection is subjective. If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
If you consider this subjective, than by extension you've rendered your own statements regarding natural selection subjective, and therefore they can be dismissed off hand as a result. You seem to be doing so regarding mine.
I refuse to acknowledge ad hominem or straw man bull****ting, so please take it somewhere else.
If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
This is the arc of pretty much every company with shareholders. People invest only when they expect your company to grow, and ultimately growth is not sustainable. You may well be right that they are heading for ruin down the line, but it's not like they are going to change course when you suggest they shouldn't be trying to make more money.
If you consider this subjective, than by extension you've rendered your own statements regarding natural selection subjective, and therefore they can be dismissed off hand as a result. You seem to be doing so regarding mine.
I refuse to acknowledge ad hominem or straw man bull****ting, so please take it somewhere else.
Ok, then to be more blunt the manner in which you "disproved" my use of the term Natural Selection had so little to do with the context in which I used it that I wouldn't even begin to know how to respond to it properly. It wasn't my intent to dismiss you offhand. If it were I would have just not responded to you.
Have I used fallacies? Perhaps... the fallacy in your argument is your belief that finding a fault with the manner in which I presented my premises disproves my premises themselves.
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You sir are completely correct in all your posts and I applaud you for speaking the truth. You won't find the support on these forums because everyone who posts here is a casual blue-hating anti-control super aggro player who hates expensive cards.
I really wish Wizards and dumb Aaron would stop catering to BAD casual players because they really are ruining the skill of the game and they want anything skill intensive or blue banned. It's really sad, and it's causing all the good players to switch to other games. They don't care about how good a game they make, they only care about making as much money as possible. There should be a balance between the two. Control is dead in standard because of whiny terrible at magic noobs
Milling ten each turn will basically mean you win in four or five turns (unless your opponent kills your planeswalker, or has more than 60 cards in his or her deck, or has something like Elixir of Immortality), and if you do mill ten each turn that reduces the chance of him or her getting a card that he or she needed from his or her deck to stop Jace or do any significant damage to you.
If you brainstorm four-five times with jace you SHOULD win that game as well. The new jace is jank; it isn't as big a swiss army knife as jace, TMS. Saying 'I untapped with a PW on my side 5 turns in a row' means you win with ANY planeswalker, not just this jace, memory adept.
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Why do the goats get to have all the fun? I had to make a profile and crawl out from under my bridge so I could join in as well.
For the A) type of people noted above. Whining after the fact that it happend does nothing, helps no one and makes you look... well just take note of the next whiner and when you say to yourself -
"Self, that guy is a frigging cry baby whiner..." Yea. So are you. Thats what you look like. Its not pretty.
To the B) Type of people out there that see some one whine on the forums and says to himself -
"Self, OMG WHAT A WHINER!! I HAVE TO POST HOW MUCH A WHINER HE IS AND MAKE SURE MY POINT GETS ACROSS SO WHEN HE REPLIES I CAN CALL HIM A WHINER AGAIN AND DEFEND MY POSITION WITH FALSE FACTS AND HALF TRUTH'S DEVELOPED THROUGH THE POINT OF VIEW OF MY *14 YEAR OLD MIND!"
*REGAURDLESS OF REAL AGE.
Not much prettier then the person who made the initial "whiny" statement.
To the C) Type of poster, one Card doesn't make all the Blue in standard useless. Or any color really. Blue/White control will still see plenty of play.
It changes some of the decks that used that one card as its focal point. Weather it was the Stone Forge Mystic or Jace The Mind Stealer, those decks simply used that one card like the Lakers used Kobe, either he wins it or he is the cause of the loss. Reshuffle and try again.
For those posters that fall into the D) category, I truely feel for you. I know how it is to buy something that loses its value at nothing that you did. I own a house. I own a car. I own many things that I spent a good amount of money on and if I wanted to turn and sell it for what I paid, even though at no fault of my own, I couldn't get the same value of it. But that is just a part of the crux of it. If you bought a card because you wanted retain its value and sell it for more later, these were not the right cards in the first place. All rotating sets have thier prices drop considerably once they leave the standard scene, the fact that it was sooner then expected has no bearing on the "whats done is done" cliche that fits so well here.
I quote a very famous line in many comic books
Flame on!
-Johnny Blaze
As top 200 in the world, I understand this. Also, as stated above, you'll win any game where your planewalker is on the board for 5 turns. It's terrible right now. When INN is released, that may change.
Baby Jace won't be in standard.
Commanders:
Basandra, Battle Seraph | Diaochan, Artful Beauty | Mayael the Anima | Nath of the Gilt Leaf | Oona, Queen of the Fae | Raksha Golden Cub | Rayne, Academy Chancellor | Roon of the Hidden Realm
I have a Jace playmat, and i customized it, it now says:
Top: Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Middle: Banned June 20th, 2011
Bottom: "You can't beat me, Ban Me."
Soon to be
UWBEsper ControlUWB
or
UBControlUB
Appeals to the new kids. Probably gets more business compared with how many people quit because of it...
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)I guess now we know why Jace always wore that cloak over his head.
For what it's worth, he should keep that hood on.
Personally I'm pretty glad Jace 3.0 isn't as ridiculous as JTMS.
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Are you seriously arguing for a game to become more skill-intensive at the direct expense of the playerbase?
Here's a little secret: When Capcom released SF III: 3S (yes, I'm bring back the 3S analogy again since I used it last time to describe the pre-ban Standard), they intended the game to be skill-intensive and geared to hardcore players of the franchise. What ended up happening was that 3S almost made the fighting game genre go extinct. Turns out that not so many players were hardcore into fighting games to begin with, which meant that a game like 3S catered to a small subset of players rather than the masses that were plugging quarters into the cabinets all day. It also didn't help that the only returning characters in 3S were Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, and Akuma. There is a reason why Capcom rebooted the SF series by bringing back all the characters from SFII, and not 3S. It's the same thing in Magic. People enjoy both diversity AND the ability to connect to something they like and know.
I don't know about you, but I actually want to play against people. It is fruitless to make a game be extremely skill-intensive so that only a handful of people play and remaining 90% don't/can't play. If you can't get new blood, a game will eventually succumb to entropy and die.
Seriously, it makes we wonder if you actually played Magic during the Affinity era. Anyone could play Affinity, but it was still the same pros still placing like they would in any other format.
First off, I confess that no, I did not play competitively during Affinity. Insinuating that this in any way diminishes my viewpoint on the Jace ban would be akin to saying that someone cannot have a strong viewpoint on the Iraq war if the were not alive during Vietnam.
You make a reasonable point backed by a solid example; I myself will attempt to use a video game genre in my counterpoint.
Have you played or are you at least familiar with the turn-based console rpg? It's quite a bit of a niche genre, but I've always been a fan of them myself. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the genre more or less originated in the late 1980s with Enix's Dragon Quest and Squaresoft's Final Fantasy. Both were solid games which saw a decent measure of success, but again, they catered only to a niche crowd within the gaming community. If in this analogy console RPG = MTG, then these games are essentially alpha and beta block.
Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy saw enough success to inspire multiple sequels and spinoffs, and other developers borrowed heavily from their concepts. As time progressed on into the SNES and then PSX era of video games, the genre became popular enough to inspire of bit of a golden age within itself (Think Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, Grandia, Pokemon, Xenogears, etc.) There were several fantastic titles produced each year, and the genre flourished as its player base expanded. Let's say this would be like Ravnica-Lorwyn
Herein lies the problem, though. There is a limit to how much a niche genre can expand before it loses itself. As these games became more popular, they were dumbed down to pander to the masses (inverse power creep on control strategies.) They would be released with poor mechanics just to try and seem innovative (cascade.) They would slowly replace narrative and good gameplay for an emphasis on visualization and graphics (mythics.) Due to it's own popularity began to loose itself. Now there is only a company called Atlus that makes decent console RPGs while Square-enix, etc, produce awful bastardizations of their once great games and other companies morphed the genre into something totally different. There is maybe 1 good turn-based RPG printed per year at best.
While it is true that a game that cannot draw new blood stagnates and dies, what can be said of the game that loses its own identity in order to pander to the masses. If MTG's development continues down it's recent path, it may gain a few fresh faces, but not only will it lose plenty of old ones, but it will be MTG in name alone.
The fallacy in your argument is that Final Fantasy's later installments have sold far better than their older installments. Don't call era on this, because most if not all of them have been re released and sold in the contemporary market. More people buy crap like Final Fantasy XIII than Final Fantasy VI, the best overall game in the series. Chrono Trigger has sold roughly 3.5 million games in all of its incarnations, which about 60% of what Final Fantasy XIII has sold since its release last year, and about a 30% of what Final Fantasy VII has sold since its inception. CT is the far superior game, so logically, it should have sold better than both of the above cases. This is by millions of copies, so by your own logic, eschewing any sense of quality and producing only games with atrocious graphics driven linear narratives would just be natural selection.
Banning Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic were what Standard needed to survive. Attendance was at record lows, and diversity had suffered. When roughly 60% of decks run the same build, with only a few card choices to differentiate between any given two, you have a problem. There's "skill-based" and then there's stupid, and the environment Standard has seen in the last few months has definitely been in pile B. This is like the Tele-DAD era in Yu-Gi-Oh!, a time where seeing 15 out of the 16 top 16 playing the same goddamn thing. That was a "skill-based" format, but it also ruined the game. A lack of diversity is not healthy. Yu-Gi-Oh! is probably in their golden age right now, where in a pro tour tournament the top 32 consists of around 8 archetypes, with variants of each deck to prevent too much mirroring. Come to think of it, it's likely worse since at least you can count on Konami at least trying to fix their mistakes every few months. This ban is long overdue in my opinion. Maybe now we can see some new blood in Standard and the game can be fun again.
i was one of theos yugioh players in the teledad age. i had the deck. i was winning. game got boring. plays became repettitive. deck stomped rouge decks. many players quit. i quit because winning with the deck was easy.
same with mtg
i had the deck. but i didnt like it. atleast in mtg there are other decks. teledad age was teledad or nothing
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This is why I joined this site
OH NOES!!! now someone else gets a turn to win!!! NOT FAIR!!!
Yes, they have all sold better then their earlier installments. This of course being because Square in essence sold out. It released a sequence of trash and eye candy to pander to the unwashed masses and over time lost their ability to turn out quality games. I'm sure by the time FF15 or 16 comes around they will have lost most of their original fan base, and the interest of the masses is fleeting at best. Eventually no one will care about the next Final Fantasy game, and Square will be on it's way out. This is what I'm saying about Magic. Cater to your true fans like Atlus, and maybe you'll never be huge, but you survival is guaranteed. Pander to the masses and you can make quite a bit of profit for sure, but what happens to you when your true fanbase gets sick of you, and the masses no longer find you in style?
Whether or not the success of FFXIII is a result of natural selection is subjective. If all you care about is money then sue, guess you got me. If you are looking at a broader pictue then don't be so sure.
It is entertaining so see people compare Magic to so many things.
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
pandering to the masses seems to be working for WoW pretty well....
Thanks for going in a different direction.
And yes I don't have that much money, but Magic is a hobby and should be treated as such and you don't go wasting money a card thats $100 when there is so many other important things you could spend it on. (Like food, petrol or taking your girlfriend out on a date or whatever!)
Pretty much sums up why I like green so much
On the internet, everywhere is Soviet Russia[/QUOTE]
If you consider this subjective, than by extension you've rendered your own statements regarding natural selection subjective, and therefore they can be dismissed off hand as a result. You seem to be doing so regarding mine.
I refuse to acknowledge ad hominem or straw man bull****ting, so please take it somewhere else.
This is the arc of pretty much every company with shareholders. People invest only when they expect your company to grow, and ultimately growth is not sustainable. You may well be right that they are heading for ruin down the line, but it's not like they are going to change course when you suggest they shouldn't be trying to make more money.
Ok, then to be more blunt the manner in which you "disproved" my use of the term Natural Selection had so little to do with the context in which I used it that I wouldn't even begin to know how to respond to it properly. It wasn't my intent to dismiss you offhand. If it were I would have just not responded to you.
Have I used fallacies? Perhaps... the fallacy in your argument is your belief that finding a fault with the manner in which I presented my premises disproves my premises themselves.