I kind of want a job where one of my responsibilities is to observe that spiders don't normally care about money.
While I didn't care for the deck as a whole, I found the spider to be a very creative way to make a valid green Gold card. It's not a hireling, it doesn't care about money; but it's a LUSTERSILK spider, implying the web it weaves to catch Snapping Drakes also happens to be used to make the golden silk trim the nobles of this City World are wearing!
Same way Hunted Wumpus isn't magically summoning enemy dragons and giants onto the table, it's just a walking bag of tasty meat (as is Brindle Boar in a slighlty different...flavor of tastiness). And Ursapine happily loans extra quills from its back to teammates.
This spider happens to provide a natural resource that citydwellers can sell to pay for mercenaries. Makes way more sense than Rental Hydra lol.
Edit: using this card in the booster pack challenge would have conveyed the flavor much better with an art description; "A nobleman riding on a leotau/dromad/horse looks over his shoulder at a spider nesting between two towers; his clothes are obviously made from the same silk" or "while one poor mercenary is getting wrapped up by a hungry spider, his greedy companions are cutting apart the rest of the golden web and running off with it"
While I didn't care for the deck as a whole, I found the spider to be a very creative way to make a valid green Gold card. It's not a hireling, it doesn't care about money; but it's a LUSTERSILK spider, implying the web it weaves to catch Snapping Drakes also happens to be used to make the golden silk trim the nobles of this City World are wearing!
I agree. I actually really liked the flavor of the spider, I just thought that the phrase "spiders don't normally care about money" was pretty funny.
I got the flavor of how the spider produces silk to generate wealth for its summoner, but the larger issue of green cards dealing in commerce remained. Lotus Peddler has really bothersome flavor for me; why is a green druid selling magical plants for a profit? How does that fit into the patterns of nature? Even more so is the idea of green mercenaries, which explicitly fight in exchange for the acquisition of wealth, which is absolutely not what green is about, in any terms.
What are you suggesting? That green be left out of the mana producing game?
That's where the issue of mechanics versus flavor come up. Flavorfully, green using gold makes no sense. Mechanically, green producing mana makes perfect sense. Which one wins out in this situation? I'd prefer keeping green out of this particular flavor of mana production, if it means compromising the color's philosophical tenets.
People can care about nature and money at the same time. Just look at the current greening trend in corporate America at the moment.
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Green isn't just "cares about nature," though. Green is about primal instinct, and the overarching web of life and accepting one's place in it. Trading one's strength, abilities, and goods in return for material wealth is a betrayal of those parts of green's philosophy. Money, economics, and the like are not part of any natural system, they are entirely artificial. Gold has no value to green outside of its use as a material. The only way connecting gold and green makes sense is if some non-green agent is taking advantage of green-produced resources for profit. Using the spider's silk, for example. But it makes no sense for green creatures to desire that wealth for themselves. Gold might work in green, but hireling certainly doesn't.
Are you trolling here? The test concept I proposed would have been nearly as quick and far more appropriate.
Speaking as somebody who has actually graded a thing, ever
No
Multiple choice test is something that is feasible for thousands OR MORE to do because each one can be graded pretty much instantaneously by a computer.
Grading a single vertical cycle fairly would take longer than grading a million multiple choice tests.
That's where the issue of mechanics versus flavor come up. Flavorfully, green using gold makes no sense. Mechanically, green producing mana makes perfect sense. Which one wins out in this situation? I'd prefer keeping green out of this particular flavor of mana production, if it means compromising the color's philosophical tenets.
Green isn't just "cares about nature," though. Green is about primal instinct, and the overarching web of life and accepting one's place in it. Trading one's strength, abilities, and goods in return for material wealth is a betrayal of those parts of green's philosophy. Money, economics, and the like are not part of any natural system, they are entirely artificial. Gold has no value to green outside of its use as a material. The only way connecting gold and green makes sense is if some non-green agent is taking advantage of green-produced resources for profit. Using the spider's silk, for example. But it makes no sense for green creatures to desire that wealth for themselves. Gold might work in green, but hireling certainly doesn't.
I think that you aren't looking at gold from green's perspective. The point of gold (for green, anyway) isn't to have a bunch of dead-metal treasure. Gold is CURRENCY. It's value is SYMBOLIC. It's merely a medium of exchange. Obviously if you're in the wilderness gold is pointless, but in an urban context currency is worth using, for any color.
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-Ethan Fleischer, Magic Designer, Wizards of the Coast
It's symbolic value is only a construction of artificial rules and societies, though. That value is not intrinsic in the material itself. That is at odds with green's perspective of everything having an in-born role provided to it by the patterns of nature. In an urban setting like Ravnica, there is little alternative, so green goes along with it, but only because it is forced to. In an urban setting, green should be raging against those shackles and artificial rules and symbols imposed upon it.
Green's probably the color least likely to care about gold, but in a block where everyone cares about gold, green cares about gold. It's sort of the Entangling Vines issue, where something fits flavorfully into certain colors but the mechanics that are most natural to associate with that sort of thing belong to other colors. Sometimes concessions get made for block themes; blue and red get to care about the graveyard a little, black gets to care about artifacts a little, etc. If you're starting with "gold is an important mechanic in this block, and green's going to get it at least a little because it's the best fit mechanically", I think "this spider makes silk, which is something spiders do and silk is a thing that people recognize as valuable" works. (Okay, so silk used as a fabric isn't made by spiders, but close enough to get there.)
As one of the judges mentioned, green + gold = leprachauns. And other kinds of faeries. (Faerie gold typically has the property that if you don't spend it, it disappears by dawn [end of turn?])
Like I said, I'm less concerned when green is on the producing end of the gold. It's the desire to acquire it for themselves, as hirelings do, that feels much more out of place. A creature with hireling isn't just trying to get along in the world around it, it deliberately wants to be paid as much as it can be, and won't use its full potential otherwise. That seems the most inconsistent with the very core of green's worldview. It's one thing to dabble in things that the color doesn't normally care about, but it's another to make use of a mechanic that is in outright opposition of what the color cares about, from a flavor point of view. It's like a blue berserker.
It's symbolic value is only a construction of artificial rules and societies, though. That value is not intrinsic in the material itself. That is at odds with green's perspective of everything having an in-born role provided to it by the patterns of nature. In an urban setting like Ravnica, there is little alternative, so green goes along with it, but only because it is forced to. In an urban setting, green should be raging against those shackles and artificial rules and symbols imposed upon it.
Maybe he should have used "loot" or "trade" counters rather than "gold" counters. Black would deal in gold, of course, but the other colors would contribute their respective goods* to society, translated in gameplay as "trade."
*Things like food, silk, hell, knowledge. Hireling would still work as written even.
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Can we have Megiddo removed from the forum forever please?
i'm pretty sure i can find your ***** online within 3 minutes
Multiple choice test is something that is feasible for thousands OR MORE to do because each one can be graded pretty much instantaneously by a computer.
Grading a single vertical cycle fairly would take longer than grading a million multiple choice tests.
Irrelevant. They didn't need to grade millions OR MORE. A vertical cycle can be graded pretty much instantaneously by an experienced designer. You can argue all you want. The test was stupid, period.
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I care less about us making mistakes that lead to degenerate environments than I am when we don’t push ourselves and make something that’s boring to play. - MaRo
Yes, the test was not as good as it could have been. There are glaring errors, subtle errors, and arguably issues with philosophy. But any idea that requires human intervention on every single test is a non-starter. That's the entire reason the test exists - to pull the number down to something managable in a somewhat objective fashion.
When you're multiplying something by 900, the difference between "pretty much instantaneously" and "thirty seconds or so, if you're willing to be incredibly slapdash and grade cards mostly on the first impression they make on you" starts to add up. That's 2700 cards. That's equivalent to evaluating every creature printed since Kamigawa, and that's a misleading comparison since you know you're going to see way more random individual mechanics, innovative stuff, and stuff that's never been done before than you see on a random card. It also introduces a significant element of human error, since someone's snap judgments of a card may not be the same after they've spent seven hours going through them. Sure, there's going to be a lot of "obviously bad, question missed" in there, but there's going to be a lot of close ones because - and this is key - for the question to be useful, you have to put the bar high enough that people are going to miss the question. Yeah, you could mark anyone who submits a legendary creature with ten abilities half of which don't work "wrong" and mark everyone who submits something printable "right", but the guy who's submitting the first card isn't going to pass the test anyway. Anybody who's going to do at least good-ish on the rest of the test is going to have something reasonable (or unreasonable, but interesting and gutsy) for their cards. For the question to be meaningful, they need to be able to take a huge pool of decent-to-great designs and very rapidly split them into buckets. That's hard.
Here's something they could have done however - they could have not looked at the card designs for every single test-taker, and instead only looked at the ones that did well enough on the rest of the test. That way they wouldn't have needed to evaluate as many cards; they could even afford to have everyone do more than three that way. And HOLY COW that's exactly what they effectively did by cutting off everyone who didn't do decent on the questions, then having the rest design a world and ten faux-preview cards. If you don't like the idea that the test culled people without having those people do any design, think of it as though the multiple-choice and world-design preview-card portions were a single test, and they only looked at the world-design preview-card portions for the people that did well enough on the rest of the test. That's basically equivalent, except that they didn't make people who bombed the multiple-choice portion have to waste their time on the preview card portion.
790 people * (X words/person) * (minute/300 words) = 2.6 * X minutes.
So if each of the 790 people wrote about 50 words, then it would take a bit over 2 hours to go over the entire thing.
Mark Rosewater also acknowledged that people can slip through the cracks through the multiple-choice test, in this Magic Show epsiode (skip to ~18:30). Mark defends the multiple-choice test as a fast, objective way to cut the number of applicants down.
790 people * (X words/person) * (minute/300 words) = 2.6 * X minutes.
So if 790 people wrote about 50 words, then it would take a bit over 2 hours to go over the entire thing.
So are you saying that you think the process would have missed fewer capable designers if instead the cut to the top 100 had involved Mark Rosewater spending 10 seconds, while reading, to decide if a given person should be in the 1/8 that made it to the next round? That sounds almost random, especially after he'd read the first few hundred and his brain had gone numb. I bet the standards would be way stricter for the last 740 than for the first fifty.
So are you saying that you think the process would have missed fewer capable designers if instead the cut to the top 100 had involved Mark Rosewater spending 10 seconds, while reading, to decide if a given person should be in the 1/8 that made it to the next round? That sounds almost random, especially after he'd read the first few hundred and his brain had gone numb. I bet the standards would be way stricter for the last 740 than for the first fifty.
I was curious how much time was needed to process written responses instead of a computer scanning a multiple-choice exam, so I calculated it out. I thought the result was moderately interesting, and decided to share it in a forum post.
I thought 50 words would be a suitable length for a short written answer. I provided a number just so I could give a numeric example, rather than just give the algebraic formula. The number 50 is pretty arbitrary. I'm not advocating it to be an ideal length for any judging purposes.
I don't think reading something for 10 seconds and making a judgment would have improved the pool of designers in any noticeable fashion. I'm fine with how Rosewater did the culling.
Here's something they could have done however - they could have not looked at the card designs for every single test-taker, and instead only looked at the ones that did well enough on the rest of the test. That way they wouldn't have needed to evaluate as many cards; they could even afford to have everyone do more than three that way. And HOLY COW that's exactly what they effectively did by cutting off everyone who didn't do decent on the questions, then having the rest design a world and ten faux-preview cards. If you don't like the idea that the test culled people without having those people do any design, think of it as though the multiple-choice and world-design preview-card portions were a single test, and they only looked at the world-design preview-card portions for the people that did well enough on the rest of the test. That's basically equivalent, except that they didn't make people who bombed the multiple-choice portion have to waste their time on the preview card portion.
I already did just that, which is why I included the vertical cycle portion in my test - the competition was short no less than one early design step. Originally I was going to suggest it as another stage of the competition but realized it could fit it into my version of the test and that it would have been appropriate had the test actually been about design rather than development. There should have been another minor step or substep rather in the whole of the competition that revealed basic DESIGN skills in a vacuum preceding the set design aspect.
And I'm confused, R&D had time to read 11,200 250 word essay answers but not enough time to read some fill in the blank answers?
I care less about us making mistakes that lead to degenerate environments than I am when we don’t push ourselves and make something that’s boring to play. - MaRo
Dude, nobody read those essays until they pared the contestants down to 101. They just checked them for word-count, I'm sure.
So they had time to read 1010 250 word essay answers?
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I care less about us making mistakes that lead to degenerate environments than I am when we don’t push ourselves and make something that’s boring to play. - MaRo
Oh my goddd, first Loucks' article on ChannelFireball, now this? I am so tired of people complaining about the multiple choice test, seriously. What a waste of time.
I have not actually heard any argument for why the final three are not good candidates for an internship at R&D. I have only heard grumbling and generalizations.
I think the main problem is that so many people look at the submissions and think, "Are these cards I want to play?" and then use that to determine whether or not the designers are any good. MaRo has stated that "The best designer will win GDS2, not the best design." In other words, the GDS2 is all about demonstrating your skill as a designer, not designing the best possible set.
That's why Shawn is in the final three. Blight is not really a good enough mechanic to carry a set. But it was a very interesting and innovative solution to the constraints that MaRo set and it demonstrates Shawn's ability to meet the challenges put forth by MaRo. The truth is that as a set concept "a world crumbling to dust" probably just doesn't make very good mechanics, or at least not ones that are readily apparent.
Some people ignore the process of GDS2 and focus on the products. They compare the end designs to final sets. They do ridiculous things like judge the contestants based on some niche aspect of their submissions (their white cards? what the heck?). They are unwilling to see the big picture, in other words. They are too focused on what they themselves enjoy to notice when the contestants are creating something that other people will enjoy.
Ultimately, I haven't seen a single person who has claimed, "All the contestants are terrible" produce submissions even remotely approaching the quality of the work from the final 3.
I think it all goes back to vision. Those without vision aren't going to be able to notice others with vision. That's just the nature of it. If your perspective on design is flawed, then good design will seem terrible to you. Or, more generally, you won't have the capacity to see the underlying value hidden in an idea, a design, a mechanic. Because even now all that these contestants have created after the entire course of GDS2 is the bud of a new set, a roughly sketched set concept converted into one possible mechanic.
Like I said, I'm less concerned when green is on the producing end of the gold. It's the desire to acquire it for themselves, as hirelings do, that feels much more out of place. A creature with hireling isn't just trying to get along in the world around it, it deliberately wants to be paid as much as it can be, and won't use its full potential otherwise. That seems the most inconsistent with the very core of green's worldview. It's one thing to dabble in things that the color doesn't normally care about, but it's another to make use of a mechanic that is in outright opposition of what the color cares about, from a flavor point of view. It's like a blue berserker.
(I'll premise this by stating that I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here.)
You said it before though when you compared Utopia to Ravnica. Devon was billing his set as urban-focused, that means that in the context of that plane monetary transactions are natural. One of green's core values is to be opposed to artifice, but on Mirrodin it dips a bit.
Furthermore, the whole concept of laissez-faire economics was based on the theory that the flow of commerce had a natural-ness to it (that governments harm by regulating).
I can agree that hireling shouldn't show up on a lot of green creatures (I'd probably save it for the hydra and maybe one or two others), but I don't think it's impossible given the setting background that Devon gave us.
Also, I wonder if I can sig that entire post by unbrokencircle above mine ;).
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Listen to my M:tG flavor Podcast: Story Circle! (Newest episode is all about Innistrad previews.)
What makes monetary transactions in an urban setting more natural than, say, bartering? Why use these little metal pieces as a mediator when you can just trade one thing for another, as needed?
While I didn't care for the deck as a whole, I found the spider to be a very creative way to make a valid green Gold card. It's not a hireling, it doesn't care about money; but it's a LUSTERSILK spider, implying the web it weaves to catch Snapping Drakes also happens to be used to make the golden silk trim the nobles of this City World are wearing!
Same way Hunted Wumpus isn't magically summoning enemy dragons and giants onto the table, it's just a walking bag of tasty meat (as is Brindle Boar in a slighlty different...flavor of tastiness). And Ursapine happily loans extra quills from its back to teammates.
This spider happens to provide a natural resource that citydwellers can sell to pay for mercenaries. Makes way more sense than Rental Hydra lol.
Edit: using this card in the booster pack challenge would have conveyed the flavor much better with an art description; "A nobleman riding on a leotau/dromad/horse looks over his shoulder at a spider nesting between two towers; his clothes are obviously made from the same silk" or "while one poor mercenary is getting wrapped up by a hungry spider, his greedy companions are cutting apart the rest of the golden web and running off with it"
I also really liked blight though, so it seems my tastes don't really align with many in this thread.
Speaking of tastes, so much bitterness in here.
--
Winner of the 2nd Design Survivor Contest
Creator of the Vorthos Card Contest
Winner of 12th and the 18th Short Story Contests
Creator of the Vs. Tournament.
--Runner of the Superhero Vs. Tounrament
--Runner of the Villian Vs. Tournament.
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
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Winner of the 2nd Design Survivor Contest
Creator of the Vorthos Card Contest
Winner of 12th and the 18th Short Story Contests
Creator of the Vs. Tournament.
--Runner of the Superhero Vs. Tounrament
--Runner of the Villian Vs. Tournament.
That's where the issue of mechanics versus flavor come up. Flavorfully, green using gold makes no sense. Mechanically, green producing mana makes perfect sense. Which one wins out in this situation? I'd prefer keeping green out of this particular flavor of mana production, if it means compromising the color's philosophical tenets.
Green isn't just "cares about nature," though. Green is about primal instinct, and the overarching web of life and accepting one's place in it. Trading one's strength, abilities, and goods in return for material wealth is a betrayal of those parts of green's philosophy. Money, economics, and the like are not part of any natural system, they are entirely artificial. Gold has no value to green outside of its use as a material. The only way connecting gold and green makes sense is if some non-green agent is taking advantage of green-produced resources for profit. Using the spider's silk, for example. But it makes no sense for green creatures to desire that wealth for themselves. Gold might work in green, but hireling certainly doesn't.
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
Speaking as somebody who has actually graded a thing, ever
No
Multiple choice test is something that is feasible for thousands OR MORE to do because each one can be graded pretty much instantaneously by a computer.
Grading a single vertical cycle fairly would take longer than grading a million multiple choice tests.
BBB Mono-Black Vat BBB
GGG Mono-Green Infect GGG
I think that you aren't looking at gold from green's perspective. The point of gold (for green, anyway) isn't to have a bunch of dead-metal treasure. Gold is CURRENCY. It's value is SYMBOLIC. It's merely a medium of exchange. Obviously if you're in the wilderness gold is pointless, but in an urban context currency is worth using, for any color.
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)
*Things like food, silk, hell, knowledge. Hireling would still work as written even.
Huh?
Irrelevant. They didn't need to grade millions OR MORE. A vertical cycle can be graded pretty much instantaneously by an experienced designer. You can argue all you want. The test was stupid, period.
When you're multiplying something by 900, the difference between "pretty much instantaneously" and "thirty seconds or so, if you're willing to be incredibly slapdash and grade cards mostly on the first impression they make on you" starts to add up. That's 2700 cards. That's equivalent to evaluating every creature printed since Kamigawa, and that's a misleading comparison since you know you're going to see way more random individual mechanics, innovative stuff, and stuff that's never been done before than you see on a random card. It also introduces a significant element of human error, since someone's snap judgments of a card may not be the same after they've spent seven hours going through them. Sure, there's going to be a lot of "obviously bad, question missed" in there, but there's going to be a lot of close ones because - and this is key - for the question to be useful, you have to put the bar high enough that people are going to miss the question. Yeah, you could mark anyone who submits a legendary creature with ten abilities half of which don't work "wrong" and mark everyone who submits something printable "right", but the guy who's submitting the first card isn't going to pass the test anyway. Anybody who's going to do at least good-ish on the rest of the test is going to have something reasonable (or unreasonable, but interesting and gutsy) for their cards. For the question to be meaningful, they need to be able to take a huge pool of decent-to-great designs and very rapidly split them into buckets. That's hard.
Here's something they could have done however - they could have not looked at the card designs for every single test-taker, and instead only looked at the ones that did well enough on the rest of the test. That way they wouldn't have needed to evaluate as many cards; they could even afford to have everyone do more than three that way. And HOLY COW that's exactly what they effectively did by cutting off everyone who didn't do decent on the questions, then having the rest design a world and ten faux-preview cards. If you don't like the idea that the test culled people without having those people do any design, think of it as though the multiple-choice and world-design preview-card portions were a single test, and they only looked at the world-design preview-card portions for the people that did well enough on the rest of the test. That's basically equivalent, except that they didn't make people who bombed the multiple-choice portion have to waste their time on the preview card portion.
1120 people submitted an essay
790 people took the multiple-choice exam
101 people passed the multiple-choice exam
People can read at about 300 words per minute.
790 people * (X words/person) * (minute/300 words) = 2.6 * X minutes.
So if each of the 790 people wrote about 50 words, then it would take a bit over 2 hours to go over the entire thing.
Mark Rosewater also acknowledged that people can slip through the cracks through the multiple-choice test, in this Magic Show epsiode (skip to ~18:30). Mark defends the multiple-choice test as a fast, objective way to cut the number of applicants down.
So are you saying that you think the process would have missed fewer capable designers if instead the cut to the top 100 had involved Mark Rosewater spending 10 seconds, while reading, to decide if a given person should be in the 1/8 that made it to the next round? That sounds almost random, especially after he'd read the first few hundred and his brain had gone numb. I bet the standards would be way stricter for the last 740 than for the first fifty.
I was curious how much time was needed to process written responses instead of a computer scanning a multiple-choice exam, so I calculated it out. I thought the result was moderately interesting, and decided to share it in a forum post.
I thought 50 words would be a suitable length for a short written answer. I provided a number just so I could give a numeric example, rather than just give the algebraic formula. The number 50 is pretty arbitrary. I'm not advocating it to be an ideal length for any judging purposes.
I don't think reading something for 10 seconds and making a judgment would have improved the pool of designers in any noticeable fashion. I'm fine with how Rosewater did the culling.
I already did just that, which is why I included the vertical cycle portion in my test - the competition was short no less than one early design step. Originally I was going to suggest it as another stage of the competition but realized it could fit it into my version of the test and that it would have been appropriate had the test actually been about design rather than development. There should have been another minor step or substep rather in the whole of the competition that revealed basic DESIGN skills in a vacuum preceding the set design aspect.
And I'm confused, R&D had time to read 11,200 250 word essay answers but not enough time to read some fill in the blank answers?
Dude, nobody read those essays until they pared the contestants down to 101. They just checked them for word-count, I'm sure.
So they had time to read 1010 250 word essay answers?
I have not actually heard any argument for why the final three are not good candidates for an internship at R&D. I have only heard grumbling and generalizations.
I think the main problem is that so many people look at the submissions and think, "Are these cards I want to play?" and then use that to determine whether or not the designers are any good. MaRo has stated that "The best designer will win GDS2, not the best design." In other words, the GDS2 is all about demonstrating your skill as a designer, not designing the best possible set.
That's why Shawn is in the final three. Blight is not really a good enough mechanic to carry a set. But it was a very interesting and innovative solution to the constraints that MaRo set and it demonstrates Shawn's ability to meet the challenges put forth by MaRo. The truth is that as a set concept "a world crumbling to dust" probably just doesn't make very good mechanics, or at least not ones that are readily apparent.
Some people ignore the process of GDS2 and focus on the products. They compare the end designs to final sets. They do ridiculous things like judge the contestants based on some niche aspect of their submissions (their white cards? what the heck?). They are unwilling to see the big picture, in other words. They are too focused on what they themselves enjoy to notice when the contestants are creating something that other people will enjoy.
Ultimately, I haven't seen a single person who has claimed, "All the contestants are terrible" produce submissions even remotely approaching the quality of the work from the final 3.
I think it all goes back to vision. Those without vision aren't going to be able to notice others with vision. That's just the nature of it. If your perspective on design is flawed, then good design will seem terrible to you. Or, more generally, you won't have the capacity to see the underlying value hidden in an idea, a design, a mechanic. Because even now all that these contestants have created after the entire course of GDS2 is the bud of a new set, a roughly sketched set concept converted into one possible mechanic.
(I'll premise this by stating that I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here.)
You said it before though when you compared Utopia to Ravnica. Devon was billing his set as urban-focused, that means that in the context of that plane monetary transactions are natural. One of green's core values is to be opposed to artifice, but on Mirrodin it dips a bit.
Furthermore, the whole concept of laissez-faire economics was based on the theory that the flow of commerce had a natural-ness to it (that governments harm by regulating).
I can agree that hireling shouldn't show up on a lot of green creatures (I'd probably save it for the hydra and maybe one or two others), but I don't think it's impossible given the setting background that Devon gave us.
Also, I wonder if I can sig that entire post by unbrokencircle above mine ;).
--
Winner of the 2nd Design Survivor Contest
Creator of the Vorthos Card Contest
Winner of 12th and the 18th Short Story Contests
Creator of the Vs. Tournament.
--Runner of the Superhero Vs. Tounrament
--Runner of the Villian Vs. Tournament.
R Citizen Cane (Feldon of the Third Path)