Aetherling is just outclassed by a dozen other choices. He was a bear in Standard only because of the smaller card pool. Consider Geist of Saint Traft, who is hexproof (so no need to exile) and hits for 6 with the angel buddy, coming out 4 whole turns sooner. Consider all the creatures that do something when they ETB, for that matter.
Btw, how does one prevent an opponent from simply killing the Geist with a chump blocker or two? Or is it assumed that the Geist's controller has eliminated every single enemy creature from play?
Intuition is almost the definition of "intellectually undemanding". I don't understand why the term 'dumbed down' causes such great offence and prompts so many knee-jerk reactions. It's treated like a hate crime here! Heaven forbid anything is being dumbed down in our society!
Really? The reason is obvious to me, so I'll dumb it down for you:
In a way WotC is dumbing down the game in that they are changing rules (and correct startegy) to align with player intuition rather than rewarding the players to actually learn. I do not like it, but that's how you take a complicate strategy game and sell it to the masses.
'Dumbed down' implies that the target audience is dumb, whether you mean it to or not, 'actually learning' gives the strong impression that you think that overcoming complexity which exists for the sake of complexity is some kind of badge of honor, and 'the masses' is something that a Bond villain would say.
Oh, and your weirdly sarcastic comment about hate crimes and society makes you sound like some kind of political crusader.
So what do you think? Should Wizards change rules due to the intuition of a significant number of players, or are the rules fine the way they are now?
I suppose it depends on the rule. If the greater intuitiveness outweighs whatever downside results, then yes, by all means it should be done!
I played casually for many years without realizing that board wipes bypass protection from x and such, and I still find it utterly unintuitive. Don't know how common this mistake and/or opinion is though.
For those who don't play hearthstone:
1 - try it out! it's fun!
Agreed! There are things that I prefer about MtG, but HS has a couple of big advantages. I have a lapsed MtG friend who loves that we never get mana-screwed or flooded, and I can't say that I object to playing without that particular random element either. And HS just seems to be generally more...sane than MtG. Which isn't surprising, given that MtG had a long and rocky adolescence as the first TCG, while the HS devs got the benefit of all that hindsight.
I think it would be really fun. I kno this is a corner case, but silencing a defender to get past him, or silencing that annoying flier that you can't block. Shut down a card with an activated/triggered ability. I wish!
I could see it working as an enchantment -- MtG cards don't have 'memory,' so a card that generates silence would have to stay right there on the board.
Someone told me that there's a WotC article -- presumably a Making Magic one, but I'm not sure -- which describes how cards are assigned their mana costs. My google-fu is weak, so if you happen to know its specific title or location, I'll give you a big :smileup:.
I think the color pie is an important concept for Magic, but the way they handle it is pretty frustrating sometimes. The choices they made for what each color can and cannot do is not very balanced at all.
This.
I like a strict color pie in concept, but I think it suffers from both the weight of M:tG tradition and the subjectivity of countless magic card designers. So given that flavor is so subjective, and the color pie is so messy already, I don't see the use in worrying about it.
...Until M:tG is rebooted from the ground up, with all the accumulated wisdom of its design history aimed at rethinking and redefining the color pie.
Because anything that is strong apparently should never have been printed and is retroactively called a mistake.
Well, that is part of the definition of a mistake -- nobody knows they're making a mistake before they make it. Well, sometimes people ironically say "This is going to be a mistake..." before doing something, like "Getting drunk tonight when I have an important meeting tomorrow morning is going to be a mistake," but choosing to accept the known consequences of a decision isn't a mistake. It's just a bad decision.
That said, feel free to debate which particular cards are mistakes, and which are merely at the upper end of the acceptable power spectrum.
What are your favorite five-card symmetries, whether it be for playability or aesthetic value? Alternatively, are there any pre-existing lists of five-card symmetries? I doubt I'm the first MtG player to have this particular interest.
[quote]Assume that there was never mana burn, and now they would want to introduce it. How many players would be ok with it?
I think the issue at hand is far too important to leave the decision to the player base. That said, I'd be among the first to approve. A system as vital to the game as mana needs some self-balancer in order to not end up broken to bits, and if mana burn hadn't already existed it would have to be invented. At all costs.
One could make the same argument for instituting equally bizarre rules:
A system as vital to the game as permanents needs some self-balancer in order to not end up broken to bits, and it must be instituted at all costs. The issue at hand is far too important to leave the decision to the player base, so MaRo has chosen to institute the following rule: At the end of his or her turn, each player loses 1 life for each permanent he or she controls in excess of 10. This rule opens up some very interesting new design space for cards that trade control of permanents, and a great niche for deck strategies that involve generating creature tokens and then passing control of those tokens to your opponents!
Yeah I hate ari for taking advantage of this deck and screwing me over. He used a deck I have been tuning and testing for months based on Conley's strategy and took a tournament by surprise, which made the deck known to everyone, now not only do people understand better thanks to his article explaining the whole thing, but other people at my LGS are netdecking it. Now whenever I play it people don't say "cool deck", they say "oh your playing the ari list, I see" Even though I have been testing and tuning for months. Especially because if people see the deck as a threat at all, they can devote one or two sb slots to rest in peace or incursion, which never would have happened before ari. Now because of ari and all the other people who net decked his list, people at my LGS actually play sb against me that completely screw over the strategy. Mostly I'm just angry be use I'm a fairly poor player and putting this deck deck together took a long time, and now that it's finally complete ari brought it to everyone's attention. He got in, and used the deck for the surprise factor, wrote a smarmy article on it and then discarded it after ruining. Thanks ari. / end rant phew that feels better.
Vibes, man. That's got to be really disappointing.
Btw, how does one prevent an opponent from simply killing the Geist with a chump blocker or two? Or is it assumed that the Geist's controller has eliminated every single enemy creature from play?
Really? The reason is obvious to me, so I'll dumb it down for you:
'Dumbed down' implies that the target audience is dumb, whether you mean it to or not, 'actually learning' gives the strong impression that you think that overcoming complexity which exists for the sake of complexity is some kind of badge of honor, and 'the masses' is something that a Bond villain would say.
Oh, and your weirdly sarcastic comment about hate crimes and society makes you sound like some kind of political crusader.
I suppose it depends on the rule. If the greater intuitiveness outweighs whatever downside results, then yes, by all means it should be done!
I played casually for many years without realizing that board wipes bypass protection from x and such, and I still find it utterly unintuitive. Don't know how common this mistake and/or opinion is though.
Agreed! There are things that I prefer about MtG, but HS has a couple of big advantages. I have a lapsed MtG friend who loves that we never get mana-screwed or flooded, and I can't say that I object to playing without that particular random element either. And HS just seems to be generally more...sane than MtG. Which isn't surprising, given that MtG had a long and rocky adolescence as the first TCG, while the HS devs got the benefit of all that hindsight.
I could see it working as an enchantment -- MtG cards don't have 'memory,' so a card that generates silence would have to stay right there on the board.
This.
I like a strict color pie in concept, but I think it suffers from both the weight of M:tG tradition and the subjectivity of countless magic card designers. So given that flavor is so subjective, and the color pie is so messy already, I don't see the use in worrying about it.
...Until M:tG is rebooted from the ground up, with all the accumulated wisdom of its design history aimed at rethinking and redefining the color pie.
Well, that is part of the definition of a mistake -- nobody knows they're making a mistake before they make it. Well, sometimes people ironically say "This is going to be a mistake..." before doing something, like "Getting drunk tonight when I have an important meeting tomorrow morning is going to be a mistake," but choosing to accept the known consequences of a decision isn't a mistake. It's just a bad decision.
That said, feel free to debate which particular cards are mistakes, and which are merely at the upper end of the acceptable power spectrum.
Clearly, you're not using the usual definition of 'parasitic,' but I can't imagine what you do mean. Mind cluing in the new guy?
Wow, I never made the connection between these five! It probably doesn't help that I've never actually seen a real copy of Ancestral Recall.
Thanks for the link!
What are your favorite five-card symmetries, whether it be for playability or aesthetic value? Alternatively, are there any pre-existing lists of five-card symmetries? I doubt I'm the first MtG player to have this particular interest.
One could make the same argument for instituting equally bizarre rules:
A system as vital to the game as permanents needs some self-balancer in order to not end up broken to bits, and it must be instituted at all costs. The issue at hand is far too important to leave the decision to the player base, so MaRo has chosen to institute the following rule: At the end of his or her turn, each player loses 1 life for each permanent he or she controls in excess of 10. This rule opens up some very interesting new design space for cards that trade control of permanents, and a great niche for deck strategies that involve generating creature tokens and then passing control of those tokens to your opponents!
Vibes, man. That's got to be really disappointing.